This summer Canada restored the “Royal” prefix to the Canadian navy and air force. That was more than symbolic; it marked a new step away from the earlier vision of a single, unified Canadian military entity, in which navy captains were often formally colonels, and all three services shared a common logistics command. The earlier vision was executed under the leadership of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who wanted to save money by eliminating duplication. It reflected the very common view among civilians interested in national security that the different services are no more than warring tribes, more or less identical in outlook. Forcing them to work together should, many imagine, achieve great economies. Hasn’t interservice rivalry been a major problem? Wouldn’t it be better if everyone were forced to get along?
In the United States, the expression of this view was the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, but it was actually an extension of the service-unification ideas of the late 1940s that created the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force. Now that money is again tightening, perhaps it is time to ask whether unification, or jointness, has done much good.
Goldwater-Nichols was promoted on the grounds that the United States had to match the truly unified Soviet military command, which was modeled on the remarkably successful German general staff. At the time, the Navy resisted, pointing out that among the major “successes” of the German staff were surrenders in both world wars. Those failures could be traced in large part to the inability of the army-dominated general staff to appreciate the impact of resources coming by sea to overwhelm Germany, as it lacked even a remotely maritime view of the world. Perhaps because most military historians concentrate on land warfare, the U.S. Navy of the 1980s was unable to muster enough of them to make the necessary point. Indeed, navies in general find it difficult to explain to civilians that success in war requires something more than brilliant performance in a few land battles.
For example, the traditional view of Britain in 1940 is of a small island heroically standing alone against the might of Germany, which had just conquered most of Europe. What could Prime Minister Winston Churchill have been thinking when he decided not to surrender? Could the British really rely on the Americans to save them? The view changes a bit if you look at a map of the world and reflect that the Royal Navy still existed to guarantee British access to it. The British Empire covered about a quarter of the earth, and contained 500 million subjects. Britain was a global superpower because it had a global navy along with informal commercial and strategic contacts that included the United States.
When Churchill looked across the English Channel, he saw the situation the British had faced when Napoleon conquered Europe early in the 19th century. The British army alone did not defeat Napoleon; the reality of British sea power not only precluded invasion (as it did in 1940) but also made sure that Britain had easy access to the resources that kept it going. Keeping the sea lanes open was not some incidental achievement, it was the key to winning the war—and that was why Churchill always said that the Battle of the Atlantic was the one part of the war that frightened him. The framers of Goldwater-Nichols had no idea of this reality, nor did their supporters. Nor, it might be added, do many right now.
It did not really matter how good the German general staff was at land warfare, because as long as Britain and the United States remained intact, the Germans could never end the war on their terms. It happened that the way the Germans treated their conquered territories considerably reduced their effective value, but even a less insane conqueror, Napoleon, had much the same experience (it took longer in his case). Just how good is a general staff that omits the key factor in winning a war? Just how much is good feeling among the services worth? Armies and air forces share a common culture. Navies emphatically do not. That seems to have been missed by many observers. Note, incidentally, that the unified Soviet staff did not do all that well during the Cold War.
Culture Clash
The larger point is that there is no particular virtue to military consensus. Service rivalry sounds bad and inefficient. Service pluralism, which mirrors American pluralism, sounds better and is much more to the point. If we want everyone to smile all the time, jointness is an excellent idea. If we want to win, pluralism may be a much better idea. The Army and Air Force tend to be very hierarchical, with extreme resistance to anyone who does not follow the mainstream view. There is recent strong evidence that to the extent success was achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan, it came largely from those who bucked the majority and risked their careers (and were very lucky to be backed by a more senior officer).
On a larger scale, the services really are not similar apart from their uniforms—or at least that has been the case in the past. The Navy’s culture is a lot more than that. The reason interservice rivalry is so often decried by senior Army and Air Force officers is that their intellectual tradition is so different from the Navy’s. That was very obvious during World War II, particularly in the Pacific, and many in the Navy saw service unification as a raw power grab. It might be argued that the course of the Korean War showed that what had seemed entirely obvious in a service-unified Washington was a fantasy in real life.
Service consensus matters most when the military establishment is under great pressure to reshape itself. Much of our recent experience suggests that the expectations of the 1990s, as reflected in two Joint Visions, were impossible to realize. Generally, the belief was that the quality of information (about anything of importance) would soon be at a level superior to anything seen previously. The rebels in Libya found it rather difficult to locate (let alone kill) Moammar Gadhafi, yet it is current U.S. policy to invest heavily in a global strike capacity whose only virtue is that it can instantly punish men like him who attack us. Only someone who did not have to defend this kind of idea in front of potentially hostile colleagues could imagine that it made much sense. The effect of jointness is that everyone is forced to be far too polite to point out that the emperor is naked.
Too Many Cooks
The effect of Goldwater-Nichols was to make the military less, rather than more, efficient in two ways. First, in effect it guaranteed that any operation would be joint, whether or not that was warranted. Joint meant, among other things, that the Air Force’s strong belief in centralized control of air power and in strategic attack had to be honored. Jointness is why P-3s are flying over Afghanistan, because the unmanned aerial vehicles that are providing similar sensors report to a centralized command and hence cannot service units on the ground. By way of contrast, the P-3s do not have to support air-power doctrine, and hence can support the ground war instead. Second, Goldwater-Nichols empowered the deployed joint commanders to an extent previously unknown. It must have seemed to Congress that it was an excellent idea to include those commanders in decisions concerning new weapon systems so that their needs could be taken into account.
This latter logic has proven very unfortunate. Expanding the number of decision-makers makes it almost impossible to correct mistakes, because once consensus has been reached, it cannot easily be untangled. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is a case in point. Its problems largely stem from its high speed requirements. Any attempt to scale back that speed is blocked by the simple statement that it is a validated requirement agreed to by the combatant commanders. That sounds very reasonable, but in reality it is not. In fact, most requirements are not hard and fast. In the past, specifics such as speed and endurance were generally traded off against cost, because it was understood that only so much money was available. All choices have their virtues and drawbacks. It is one thing to say that a fast LCS is attractive, and quite another to say that some kind of analysis proves that it has to make at least (for example) 45 knots.
Once that was well understood. The decision-maker, who used to be the CNO, certainly would ask for the opinions of the deployed senior commanders (and many others), but in the end requirements were his to set and, if the ship was unaffordable, his to reduce. Giving numerous senior officers a veto simply makes it impossible to depart from the original choice. It is unlikely that the LCS alone reflects this kind of trouble. However, it is also unfortunate that although the Navy has had a much longer (and quite successful) history of procuring high-technology systems than the other services, current acquisition theory and practice essentially ignore that history. The Navy’s history shows the folly of expecting to validate any specifics in a system at concept time.
Perhaps it is time to rethink Goldwater-Nichols.