These are unhappy times. Congress is in revolt over Iraq without fully realizing that there are no good outcomes no matter the strategy. The impact of the 30,000-troop surge will not be adequately measured for months if not years and certainly not in the report due to Congress this month. Meanwhile, reforms in Afghanistan to the legal, judicial, police, and economic sectors fail, while the counter-narcotic efforts only produce greater crops of poppies. Iran continues to be unimpressed by U.S. efforts to limit its nuclear ambitions. And Pakistan lurches toward crisis after the attack on the Red Mosque in July ended any semblance of truce with radical jihadis in the federally administered tribal areas.
The Defense Department is up to its proverbial chin in these and other seemingly intractable issues. The bump up in Army and Marine forces by 92,000 is a case in point. Assuming the Army can meet its goals of recruiting an additional 68,000-which I predict it will not-those troops will not be on line soon enough to relieve the coming personnel crunch of sustaining Army deployments to Iraq through next year without further tour extensions beyond the current 15 months. And the full costs of equipping, training, and basing those additional forces have not been included in future budgets, with obvious consequences for increasing the gap between dollars and programs.
At the same time, the new JCS Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, assumes office amid suspicions that the two prior chairmen were too compliant toward the Bush administration, meaning critics felt military advice had been diluted by politics. But what is new? Very little.
Meanwhile, near consensus exists about the collapse of the interagency process of government in which policy and strategy are supposed to be made but are not. So what can be done to ensure that the best military advice is given at a time when hugely difficult problems and dangers confront the nation, and our system of government has become dysfunctional at best? Here is a suggestion.
It is time to separate the dual roles of the JCS from responsibilities as service chiefs and put the chairman officially in the operational chain of command. Tensions have always existed between the views of the services-understandably parochial-the commanders in the field-understandably focused on operational matters-and (after passage of the 1947 National security Act) the Joint Chiefs, with sometimes competing responsibilities to the President, secretary of Defense, and their respective services. The bet was that all of this would balance out.
That assumption was fine when there was a well-defined adversary like the Soviet Union. But no such well-defined clear and present danger exists today even though the threats are as least as serious. And, as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, military action alone will not win.
But because so much of the current conflict is ideological, cultural, and political, and not all of our government is at war, the military has been forced to expand its reach to areas and problems previously solved by other agencies and policy tools.
Bluntly put, military advice must now transcend service and operational experience and blend into a much wider political-military and even ideological context.
Relieving the JCS of responsibilities as service chiefs would focus these most senior officers entirely on broader defense and national security issues. There would, of course, be downsides that might inadvertently spark greater interservice rivalry because of this separation, as the service chiefs would focus on the interests of their services and not on broader matters under the purview of the JCS.
Putting the chairman in the chain of command would likewise assign to him far greater responsibility and authority than now exists, perhaps prompting crisper advice because of that added responsibility. Resistance to such a step would come from many directions, particularly over giving the chairman too much power. The risk is worth accepting; it could be rectified at a future date.
No system is perfect. But separating the JCS from service chief roles and putting the chairman in the chain can improve the rendering of objective, tough, and useful military advice in the broader context so desperately needed.
Mr. Ullman is the author of numerous books and articles on national security.