Songun Staff System

The Songun Staff System (commonly known as a Military Staff), is used by most Occidental countries and modern militaries for structuring their staff officers and administrative functions. The system, which is based on one originally created by Arcer officers during the Third Bush War, denotes each staff position within a headquarters or command element with a designated letter or numeric prefix denoting the level, type, and function of an element or for a specific role.

The numbers are assigned for their intended purpose, and do not have any relation to a formation's hierarchy, and are as follows:

• 1, for manpower or personnel
• 2, for intelligence and security
• 3, for operations
• 4, for logistics
• 5, for plans
• 6, for signals (i.e., communications or IT)
• 7, for military education and training (also the joint engineer)
• 8, for finance and contracts. Also known as resource management.
• 9, for Civil-Military Co-operation (CIMIC) or civil affairs.

In modern practice, the latter numbers (seven through nine) have been used for a variety of other roles, and it is not uncommon to see them given different meanings or grouped under existing numbers as part of a larger department or organization.

Derived from the Arcer General Staff during the First Great War, traditionally these staff functions were prefixed by the simple G, which is retained in place for modern army usage. But the increasing complexity of modern armies, not to speak of the spread of the staff concept to naval, air and other elements, has demanded the addition of new prefixes. These element prefixes are:

• A, for air force headquarters;
• C, for combined headquarters (multiple nations) headquarters;
• F, for certain forward or deployable headquarters;
• G, for army or marine general staff sections within headquarters of organizations commanded by a general officer and having a chief of staff to coordinate the actions of the general staff, such as divisions or equivalent organizations and separate (i.e., non-divisional) brigade level and above;
• J, for joint (multiple services) headquarters, including the Arcer General Staff);
• N, for navy headquarters;
• S, for army or marines executive staff sections within headquarters of organizations commanded by a field grade officer (i.e., major through colonel) and having an executive officer to coordinate the actions of the executive staff (e.g., divisional brigades, regiments, groups, battalions, and squadrons; not used by all countries);
• L, is used for League of Nations military operations mission headquarters.