Almost two decades ago the U.S. armed l services were “unified but not merged” and formally integrated in the newly-established Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff system. Over the succeeding years, gradual headway was gained toward the visionary goal of true unification. Crises external sped the process; crises internal slowed it. Lacking an external war more serious than Korea or an internal one more serious than the B-36 controversy—or “revolt of the Admirals,” depending on which side one is unified—progress has been observable if not notable. But for one totally unexpected comet entering our placid firmament, the military would have continued on its leisurely way and in a few decades, or an eon or two, could have expected to achieve the Utopia of true unification sought by many for untold years.
The new comet, of course, was a Secretary of Defense more brilliant and aggressive than all the rest, and the McNamara nucleus with its nova of scintillating young intellectuals soon cast penetrating rays of inquisitiveness into nebulous depths of military organization never before bared to civilian scrutiny. The military, traditionally resistant to change, had either outlasted or outflanked previous civilian superiors who tried to look past the arbitrary line of civilian authority or who attempted major reforms by means other than osmotic. Our semantic discussions probed old chestnuts like the single chief of staff and civilian control of the military. Yet, in our hearts we knew of no real problem in either. Congress and the American system of government control both the civilian and the military; the balance cannot be upset as long as the power remains ultimately with the people. No military man remotely dreams of a real possibility for a military takeover in America. But the McNamara era broke into our soliloquy to pose an entirely unanticipated problem. The situation is now reversed. Deeply entrenched and supported by the Commander-in-Chief, the Congress, and the people, the military itself is in danger of being outflanked. We who lamented idly the threat of the military man on horseback now face a new twist, the civilian on horseback. We who placidly mused on a military takeover which could not happen suddenly face a civilian authority which may reduce the military influence to the impotency of a latter-day General Board.
The issue is clear. With an able and strong Secretary, willing to use all the power of his office to exert his authority over the Defense Establishment, the military is too fragmented into service and specialty loyalties to express itself clearly even on military questions of organization, strategy, research, shipbuilding, budget, operations, and whatnot. The McNamara era obviously has shattered the past balance between civilian and military. Neither the Secretary nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff is infallible, yet if we are to believe the press reports, the number of times the President has sustained the Secretary against the opinion of the Joint Chiefs argues for omniscience in the one and serious fallibility in the other. Neither is accurate, nor are the press reports. The important consideration is that Mr. McNamara has rarely overruled a unanimous decision by the Joint Chiefs. The Chiefs have little difficulty on issues in which they present a unified voice to the front office. But the same cannot be said on the controversial issues of strategic concepts, and the size and composition of forces and budgets.
Unable to get around a lack of agreement in the Joint Chiefs on a particular issue, one may expect that the Services would take the natural alternate path by sending such problems through the Service Secretary to the Defense Secretary, rather than through the JCS. Yet, such papers can have little hope for success, and from the Defense Secretary’s viewpoint, this is necessarily so. With his office having somewhat the power of a double negative over the Services individually and collectively, therefore, the question becomes: Is the historic check and balance preserved if the Secretary prevails only over a fragmented military on the divisive issues? Congress has indicated quite clearly since 1947 that the answer must come from the JCS organization. How, then, can the Joint Chiefs of Staff be strengthened to insure that the advice from the military to the Commander-in-Chief is the best we can possibly produce?
There are at least five more-or-less clear-cut actions which can be taken to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization: the Joint Staff must first develop a professional body of accepted joint doctrine; the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Chief of Staff, Army, and the Chief of Staff, Air Force, should use the Joint Staff as their primary planning body; administrative streamlining is necessary to reduce reaction time and increase productivity of staff work; the prestige of professional military opinion must be restored; and lastly, we must retain the ability for self-analysis and constructive self-criticism.
The development of a body of accepted professional doctrine is by far the most important. The advice the Secretary or President must have is in fields requiring truly joint professional military opinion. Colonel W. R. Kintner, U. S. Army, says, “If one were to isolate the single organizational deficiency within the DOD which encourages the expansion of civilian operational control into the professional military field, it would be the failure of the Armed Services to foster a joint professional military officer corps with an integrated doctrine and a determination to develop a tradition of joint professionalism. In the absence of such a corps, the civilian side of the DOD is forced to develop its own basis for decisions. . . . ”1
Both the Navy and Marine Corps have such a doctrine, Colonel Kintner observes. Their officer corps, through long training and adherence to an accepted body of naval doctrine, has achieved a unity and consistency of view and a duality of professionalism which encourages the business or civilian side of the Navy to search for and honor their advice.
Such a basis for teamwork, either civilian- military or within the military itself, has never existed in the Department of Defense. A reasonably bright Marine Corps or submarine officer on a joint staff, for instance, can make a fair case for the strategic appraisal of a nuclear- powered aircraft carrier; his Army or Air Force counterpart is much less convincing. None of the Services, as a matter of fact, specifically develops an officer to be persuasive as a strategist. The career pattern generally produces a spokesman for the service rather than the strategy. But any officer should be able to give an effective national strategic appraisal into which he can fit the Strategic Air Command or the nuclear carrier; until he can, we do not have an accepted or acceptable joint doctrine.
This is not to say, of course, that the able, dedicated, and conscientious members of the Joint Staff recognize only their parent service interests. Quite the contrary. Most members of the Joint Staff do not lose their service loyalty, but they quickly submerge service identities in sincere desires to reach an agreed position. Staffing procedures require concurrence of both the Joint Staff and the individual services on action issues. Service action officers have a built-in partisan view. This is legitimately so. The Air Force action officer represents the views of the U. S. Air Force; the Air Force view may well diverge from that of the Joint Staff. Compromise of these varied interests is necessary to reach a jointly acceptable paper at each level of staffing. The group effort is considerably weakened when there is no accepted joint doctrine upon which to draw. Compromise, therefore, produces committee agreement as a substitute for clear-cut persuasive argument; words are compromised, however, not issues. The result is an agreed staff position presented to the Joint Chiefs for concurrence, too often backed by carefully worded but “waffled” argument which the record indicates is less and less convincing in top level decision-making.
One other major difficulty impedes development of joint professional doctrine. This is the absence of clear agreement on national strategy within the top echelons of the military. We have always had divergencies of thought between the continental and maritime strategists, for example. World War II has been called the war in which the American Joint Chiefs of Staff made not a single strategic blunder. Yet, the strategy we pursued for the defeat of Japan was not unified but dual. The strategic air war upon Japan utterly destroyed the Japanese industrial complex and made it impossible for Japan to pursue a major war. But the strategic air war was wreaked upon an industry already strangled by maritime attrition and blockade. The success of either strategy made the other unnecessary. This does not mean that one or the other was superfluous. War requires maximum flexibility of strategy and maximum pressure on the enemy with one’s full offensive capability. Both strategies could have been integrated toward a unified goal rather than pursued toward separate ones.
When Hiroshima disappeared in a blinding flash in 1945, modern weapons became too terrible and warfare too costly to allow the Services to pursue independent strategies. Yet in almost two decades since that date, the military has not yet produced a persuasive, rational strategy for nuclear war. By and large, the military gradually has abdicated its responsibility for the development of nuclear strategy to the academicians. Wars are fought by generals, but strategy has become the captive of contract groups and the scholars. Almost to a man they lament the vacuum in military thinking which forces them to fill the academic void. Development of a unified strategy by the military for rational use of power to achieve national goals is not yet forthcoming. We lack not only sufficient attention to national strategy but to agreed principles founded in experience through which our objectives and courses of action can be pursued. The body of professional doctrine in the Joint Staff may develop in time, but hardly with the present ineffective staffing procedures in the Joint Staffs and the staffs of the Services. This brings us to the next point.
Service chiefs should use the Joint Staff rather than the service staff as their planning body, and they should do so under procedures allowing more effective resolution of divergent views.
By existing practice, Joint Staff officers coordinate action within the Joint Staff and with their opposite numbers in each of the military services. Yet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff usually are not briefed on agenda items by Joint Staff action officers, nor even on divergencies existing between the service and joint views. Joint Staff action officers generally brief only the Chairman. The Service Chiefs are briefed by their own staffs. If all members of the JCS were briefed by objective Joint Staff officers, some of the disagreements could be avoided or minimized and the possibility of lopsided analysis could be reduced. Perhaps Congress actually intended that the Joint Staff serve all the members of the JCS. Certainly, the Eisenhower Reorganization, designed to end inter-service disputes without going so far as unification, increased the powers of the Joint Chiefs as well as their Chairman. The Joint Chiefs specifically were to delegate their service responsibilities to their respective Vice Chiefs, and it seems axiomatic that, with less direct control over the Services than in the past, their primary staff support should emanate from the Joint Staff. In practice it is not so.
Earlier it was suggested that divergencies should not be obscured by compromise language but should be passed more readily to the Chief/Vice Chief level when a legitimate compromise cannot be reached at a lower level. One may claim that this theme, with variations, is existing practice. It is not so; the key word is legitimate compromise. Overeagerness to reach agreement, to cloud issues with language which covers but does not convince, should not be the goal. Divergencies frequently, even normally, should be kicked upstairs to be threshed out by the Vice Chief presenting the service position on one hand and the service Chief presenting the Joint Staff position on the other. More of the difficult problems would be presented for resolution at this level, but, with a proper body of doctrine in the Joint Staff and appropriate delegation of authority by the Chiefs, fewer items would appear on JCS agendas. President John F. Kennedy and President Dwight D. Eisenhower both noted on occasion that no easy problem is ever presented to the Chief Executive for resolution, only those difficult issues which cannot be resolved at a lower level. The same should hold true in the JCS. This is a sound principle of effective staffing.
The suggested procedure is no guarantee that military judgments will be infallible, but the work of the Joint Chiefs would become more deliberative, more substantive. While service views would be given a full hearing, the development of true professionalism in the staffs would be stimulated. Parochialism tends to be perpetuated by the existing practice. The desired type of joint planning is already observable to some degree, as Kintner noted, in the Navy. Here, concepts of tactical and strategic air, submarine and antisubmarine warfare, amphibious, counter-insurgency and ground operations involving Navy and Marine Corps surface, subsurface and air units are developed with co-ordination of all—with ofttimes keen rivalry between each—but a threat to the existence of none.
Such planning and development of concepts could in time be achieved in our joint staffing. Rut it will take a far more dynamic approach by the Navy to help make it so. Since the early days of unification, we in the Navy have been too content with a policy of trying to preserve what we have instead of trying to expand our product into new lines. We resisted unification instead of fighting for the Navy method of unification based on the experience since 1916 which produced the Office of the CNO. In the years following 1947, we cheerfully withdrew from the political arena whenever we were not actually under fire, only to have to improvise a quick fire brigade when the going got rough again. If the Navy were to provide continuing paternal guidance in this arena, it might go a long way toward achieving effective joint planning on a tried and tested base.
Administrative streamlining is also necessary to reduce reaction time and to increase productivity of staff work. Improvements in staffing are under constant study. The creation of an Assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a move toward administrative streamlining at the top. The administrative burden on the Chiefs can be further reduced by allowing some of our bright flag and general officers individually to sign off issues within existing guidelines which do not involve policy decisions. Encouraging initiatives have recently been taken in this respect. But we still make a fetish of calling the Joint Chiefs a “corporate body”; this anachronism merely reflects the fact that the quadripartite union is legal but not doctrinal.
Lacking a basic doctrine, imaginative and clear-cut staff action is the exception rather than the rule. The tendency to negativism in the Joint Staff is a palsied hand on progress. Only reluctantly do we seem to be getting away from the habit of reaffirming old judgments merely because the issue has once been judged. With ourservices and various branches of the Joint Staff once having agreed on a paper, repetition is too often easier than reappraisal. The responsiveness of the system to external change is lethargic. For example, the military view may legitimately differ from the political in an issue coming before top governmental policy groups such as the Committee of Principals. If the President ultimately favors the political view, the policy issue is clear. But if the issue is again raised for decision, under similar or new circumstances, it is not adequate for the military merely to restate the former opposition. Either they must abandon the previous stand and accept Presidential decision or come up with clear and convincing argument to counterbalance the weight of evidence in their favor and reverse the Presidential decision. Restating a position in the same terms merely because it is —or was—the JCS position is not providing proper counsel to the Commander-in-Chief.
Again, negativism appears because justification of a course of action too often hangs on utterly unconvincing, pious, pontificated Pentagonese without really closing on the facts. There was a time in the past when the judgment of a major staff could support a recommendation largely on experience alone. That time is no more. There is no question of the great value of experience during a lifetime in the service, coupled with judgment developed under stress of great responsibility. But we military officers must be more explicit and articulate in translating experience into relevant evidence. The intricately woven and vastly complex techno-politico-military issues of the space-atomic era are in a field in which none of us is expert and where previous experience is only a crutch. A position taken essentially because experience says a thing is so is no longer convincing to top-level decision-makers, civilian or military. We could afford, and often needed, duplicate weaponry, duplicate research, and dual strategies in the past. We can no longer. National security is so costly in wisdom as well as weaponry, in time as well as treasure, that military judgment must also be colored by cost analysis and hard compromise. Far too often in recent years it has been the success of analytical methods rather than differing military methods, which has found and eliminated a wrong turning. In problems which are neither purely business nor purely military, the past experience of “big business” looms as important as past military experience.
Lastly, negativism appears because committee action in the Joint Staff downgrades individual initiative. At the risk of over-repetition, the lack of agreed dogma forces action officers to compromise to the lowest common denominator of accepted expression and not to the highest challenge of a new idea. Issues are fought on semantics and not on substance. Because there is no doctrine, the staff is unnecessarily large; because it is too large it is infected with non-productive effort and dead- wood. From Parkinson’s law, contrary to the ancient wisdom acquired by the military when it first hollowed out a stone to use as a waste basket, one infers that the Joint Staff— and most military staffs—would function more efficiently if smaller. The Services simply cannot produce enough brilliant, high- caliber officers to man a 400-man—or an 800- man—staff. Moreover, the Services, at least until recently, did not seem prone to send their best officers to the Joint Staff in preference to service staffs. Nor has assignment to the Joint Staff always seemed as conducive to career opportunities, even when, in the narrow view, the service interest is best served by putting the brain power in the Joint Staff. The Joint Staff is in the process of gradual evolution through better officers to better production. But without brilliant staff officers, the staffing cannot be expected to be brilliant. Even with the brain power available, the Services cannot produce the desired level of experience in oversize staffs which rotate assignments on two or three-year tours. It takes at least six months to produce an effective staff officer. Increasing the minimum tour from two to three years, as was accomplished recently in the Joint Staff, technically increased the productive time of each officer’s services, by simple arithmetic, by 8.33 per cent. Theoretically this should allow an 8.33 per cent reduction in personnel. On four-year tours, the reduction would be 12.50 per cent. With this and other changes to give greater responsibility to staff officers and greater productivity to staff effort, there is little reason to believe that the Pentagon staff requirements could not be reduced by 20 per cent.
Unfortunately, the Navy in particular seems deficient in qualified, top notch “staffies.” Although better rounded in their profession, the Navy’s staff officers are less well trained in staff mechanics. Bred in a service which accepts as axiomatic that command is the ultimate and staff duty secondary, it is difficult to imbue officers with “staffman-ship” as a worthy and challenging goal. As a result, and despite our high level of professionalism, we rarely hold our own on interservice or international staffs. With our philosophy of the supreme importance of command, it is understandable that the Navy has the least effective educational plan for training top-notch staff officers. We send our best officers to junior and senior war colleges —but rarely to both. This is equivalent to sending our youngsters to high school or college but not both. We do not ordinarily seek out at junior officer level those outstanding officers who are most “educable” and progressively educate them for top staff assignments. Senior war colleges which require staff college as a preparatory course must often admit naval officers who have never prepared a staff study nor an operation order, never attended a staff college nor any other service school in the 20 years following their commissioning. They are superior officers all, but they won their spurs at sea in command or executive posts. It is obvious that they fall behind their better prepared contemporaries in the infighting. In comparison with more specialized staffs of the other services, Admiral Arleigh Burke once said pungently, “The Navy is being eaten alive.”
We must attach far-reaching significance to the recent Nitze directive to the selection board stressing the intellectual qualities of flag selectees. The Secretary of the Navy is looking for “Flexibility of mind, analytical thought processes, creativity and imagination which will best qualify them with the increasingly professional and intellectual civilian leadership.” These admirable qualities will not be found in flag selectees if we wait until the grade of commander or captain to nourish the seed. The clear inference is that no longer can an officer merely “polish up the handle on the big front door” and expect some day to be “ruler of the Queen’s Nyvee.”
The Marine Corps, by comparison, appears to have the best staffing and probably the best staff preparation in all the Services. The secret is, first, an integrated educational plan with selective weeding out at each level of those with least potential, and second, in staff assignments, giving far broader responsibilities to fewer officers in a particular field. The problems in this phase of the Navy’s educational plan-—so superior in so many other respects—are not unknown. They have not really been faced.
The related problem of actually reducing the size of staffs and increasing the responsibility of officers therein is another matter entirely. Admittedly, the weight of tradition is against progress here; one does not recommend seriously that the size of his staff is excessive. It is mentioned here only as a theoretical concept, for use in analysis rather than practice.
The final area in which to focus the zeal of the reorganizers is to take positive steps to re-establish the prestige of professional military opinion. One can hardly deny that the value of military opinion in government today is ebbing. To quote again from Kintner, “ . . . unless the JCS and the Joint Staff become the focus of military decision, the prospect that the Armed Services will draw to their ranks future Marshalls, Eisenhowers, Nimitzes, Kings, and Arnolds will be slim indeed. For an ultimate reward of the military profession is to participate in the great decisions and actions required to safeguard this nation. If the professional sailor and soldier and airman is excluded from this arena and relegated to the role of a national policeman, the wells of military incentive will dry up and the security of the nation will suffer.” The self-satisfaction gained from participation is one of the great rewards of the military career. Whether a Mahan in time of peace or a Halsey in war, it is this reward in part which offsets the military officer’s financial disadvantage with the civilian counterpart.
Coincidentally, we must maintain the ability to criticize. Wholesome self-criticism, not in public nor primarily in professional journals, is vital to progress. Without professional criticism, professional doctrine dies. President Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “Let it be clear that this Administration recognizes the value of dissent and daring, that we greet healthy controversy as the hallmark of healthy change.” Mr. McNamara has added, “ . . . progress is a function of controversy—or conversely, controversy is a condition necessarily associated with progress.” We must stimulate greater originality, greater depth, greater flexibility and greater coherence in the briefs we prepare. The sterile dogma to “find what the JCS said before and say it again” is the ideal of consistency but the enemy of progress. Emerson said, aptly, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” We cannot skim the cream of the military brainpower to man major staffs and then force them to operate under ground rules downgrading original thought. The ideal staff officer sees the commander’s view of the commander’s problem and devotes his skill to the necessary compromise and co-ordination. But his compromise is on the means and not the end, on the method of execution and not the method of expression. The Secretary of Defense has demonstrated, sometimes painfully in recent months, that the staffing system which has served with too little change since 1902 is often inadequate. In top echelon planning, we are serving neither effectively as separate services nor efficiently as a committee of equal partners. Mr. McNamara, in his reorganization of the Department of Defense over the past four years, has done much which is praiseworthy and much which is to be lamented. A spur to the Services to unify their doctrine, if only in self-defense, would be his greatest single achievement. We criticize overcentralization by civilian authority, but we perpetuate undercentralization in military authority.
Admiral George W. Anderson’s valedictory is applauded as a nostalgic cry to the good old pre-computer days when a hero was a hero, when strategy and tactics were arts and not sciences. Yet the Secretary of Defense, we can be sure, also sees his decision-making as an art and not a science. The Skybolt, TFX, and nuclear carrier issues certainly demonstrated clearly that even with the most skillful use of computers, the very difficult questions of judgment still remain.
At his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs, President Lyndon B. Johnson said that he always believed in getting military opinions before decisions are made in areas of military competence. Yet, a few days later, the military was apparently bypassed in the decision to develop a manned space laboratory, and caught off" guard by announcements of planned military base closings. On the decision by the Secretary not to build a nuclear- powered carrier, one can only speculate on the possible course of action had the justification been generated and presented as a legitimate and major requirement of the Joint Chiefs—not merely of the Navy—in a vital area of war preparedness. As Colonel Gins- burgh noted, “To meet satisfactorily the challenge to its professionalism, the military must first of all become more professionally expert ... by developing an expertise which transcends that of the individual service.”2 Either integrate doctrine and strategy in top echelons of military thought or professional opinion from the man in uniform must certainly wither.
Mr. McNamara has said that both he and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs are conscious of the need to increase the effectiveness of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and “will take whatever action is required to accomplish this.” Much of the action the Services themselves must take, not only for their own good but for the good of the nation.
1. See W. R. Kintner, “The McNamara Era in the Defense Department,” Naval Review 1962-1963, p. 104.
2. See R. N. Ginsburgh, “The Challenge to Military Professionalism,” Foreign Affairs, January 1964.