Napoleon ran his wars with a chief clerk instead of a planning staff
Louis Alexandre Berthier served Napoleon as chief of staff for years, yet his job was mostly paperwork: turning orders around fast. Napoleon kept intelligence and operational planning for himself. It worked brilliantly for a while, but in the end the load was too heavy even for him, while Austria and Prussia were building something better.
Before the late eighteenth century, armies had no organised support for intelligence, supply or planning. Commanders did it themselves, with informal help from untrained subordinates. Austria moved first. After defeats including the Battle of Leuthen, Count Leopold von Daun wrote to Empress Maria Theresa in January 1758 urging a bigger role for the chief of staff, since the army plainly lacked a great brain and its commander needed time to think about strategy. By 1769 a permanent staff of 30 officers existed under Franz Moritz von Lacy.
The crucial shift was that the chief of staff stopped being an administrator and began drawing up operational plans. In 1796 Archduke Charles insisted that the officer in this post must weigh every possibility rather than simply carry out instructions. On 20 March 1801 Peter Duka von Kadar became the first peacetime head of such a staff anywhere, and when war broke out in 1809 the Austrian staff numbered over 170. Joseph Radetzky's reforms of 1811 grouped it into departments for political correspondence, operations and services, the seed of a specialist corps for operations, intelligence and logistics. Staff officers came from fighting units and went back to them, so they learned both roles.
France, by contrast, abolished its short-lived staff corps in 1790. Berthier's manual was essentially an office reporting system, and the military writer Jomini summed up his role as chief clerk. Prussia took the Austrian path instead, helped by Gerhard von Scharnhorst, a Hanoverian who had served alongside Austrian staff in the early 1790s. After 1806 its academies trained officers in staff work, and in 1814 a law created the Prussian General Staff, with separate staffs for each division and corps. Many large armies today use descendants of that model.
The underlying idea is a division of labour. A commander commands through personal authority and decisions; the staff handles the control, gathering information, filtering what reaches the top, passing the rest to the right level and turning decisions into orders each subordinate understands. Most NATO countries use a system descended from Napoleon's army, while Commonwealth forces follow a British pattern.
Source: Staff (military)
