By specifying that nothing about the General of the Armies would be changed by the law that created the five-star grades, Congress intended Pershing to remain the highest-ranking officer in the Army. This sparked a long-running debate over whether Pershing was now a six-star general; the senior five-star general; or even just a four-star general, as later argued by an influential pair of articles by Frederick Bernays Wiener, who pointed out that the 1919 law that revived his office did not actually say that the General of the Armies outranked all other Army officers, but merely repealed a 1917 law that would have let the Army chief of staff outrank him.