October will mark the 25 year anniversary of the Goldwater Nichols Act, the most important DoD reorganization in the lifetimes of most of us. To mark the anniversary I would like to encourage our many readers to contribute articles regarding their thoughts of Goldwater-Nichols. I am under the firm belief that a review of Goldwater-Nichols at this point in time could in fact be useful both for the Congressional audience of this blog as well as the military leadership audience of this blog as both struggle with the current fiscal challenges facing the United States.With the intent and genuine desire to get folks motivated to give an opinion on Goldwater-Nichols 25 years later, I figured I would start by giving some of my own thoughts on the subject.
I believe a brief history of Goldwater-Nichols can be given by noting there are three phases of Goldwater-Nichols as they have influenced modern American military history: the first five, the next ten, and the last ten.
The First Five refers to the first five years from 1986-1991. In 1987-1988 the major military operation at the time was Operation Earnest Will from July 24, 2024 through September 26, 2024 which also overlapped with Operation Prime Chance. While these operations were mostly naval centric with the protection of tankers, Operation Prime Chance also focused on preventing Iran from disrupting shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. The use of Army special operations helicopters and special forces from USSOCOM was only a small part of the operation, but nonetheless led to several integration activities so that Army aviation elements of the 160th SOAR could operate from and communicate with Navy ships. While this may seem like a seemingly trivial event, it was an early important first step for interoperability between the two military services following the Joint services mandates of Goldwater-Nichols.
In December of 1989 President George Bush ordered Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama where dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed. Operation Just Cause marked another significant Joint services operation that included elements of the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, and US Marine Corps. A lot of operational lessons were learned in Operation Just Cause regarding the logistics requirements for the Air Force in supporting both Army and Marine units, not to mention several early lessons in joint operations between the services, particularly in regards to communications. A lot of those lessons came in handy only 8 months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
With the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 through mid-March of 1991 the United States and coalition partners put on one of the most impressive displays of military power the world had ever seen by completely crushing what was at the time an Iraqi Army rated fourth in size in the world. While mostly an American military operation, the size of the operation with over half a million people involved in the coalition combined with the scope of the destruction rained upon Iraqi military forces was stunning and solidified positive views in Washington related to the merits of Goldwater-Nichols. In the end, more Americans had died from friendly fire in the first Gulf War than by enemy fire, and that drove the necessity for the US military to fully integrate joint service commands towards interoperability and Jointness. The changes made under Goldwater-Nichols specific to the COCOMs was also validated and solidified as a result of the first Gulf War largely thanks to the CENTCOM commander at the time - Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. The key point as it relates to Goldwater-Nichols is that General Schwarzkopf was able to develop a strategy from policy, call up forced from the individual services, and develop and execute a campaign plan under a Joint forces with a high degree of success.
Two large Joint services campaigns in five years, both with a high degree of military success, had proven Goldwater-Nichols a success.
The Next Ten years from 1992-2001 was spent better integrating the military services under what some now refer to as Jointness. The United States military, under rules for a Joint construct set forth by Goldwater-Nichols, became the most lethal operational military force in the history of human conflict. While political talking heads ran around in the 1990s discussing questionable theories like The End of History following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States failed to recognize that significant national security threats posed by those who were losers in the emerging geopolitical global order still existed, and the United States did not plan properly for the global economic shift from Europe to Asia that would occur only a decade later. During the 1990s under Goldwater-Nichols, two simultaneous events occurred that were thought exclusive to the Act: budget cuts to defense and strategic drift in defense policy.
When seen through the eyes of Goldwater-Nichols, the use of American aircraft carriers to provide naval aviation for operations in Kosovo was an excellent example where duplicate capacity was leveraged in the interest of sharing roles and missions under a Joint construct, rather than streamlining roles and missions between the services during a period of budget cuts. Ultimately, each individual military service sacrificed many capabilities in the 1990s during budget cuts that had to be rebuilt later primarily because the individual military services felt entitled for inclusion in military activities under the Joint construct of Goldwater-Nichols as a way to justify their budgets. The reduction in capabilities of each service and the entitlement expressed by the individual services to be included in military operations should have been a red flag there was a flaw in Goldwater-Nichols, but the operational success credited to Goldwater-Nichols continued to provide spectacular results that served as a rationale for dismissing any criticism.
Throughout the 1990s leading into the 21st century, the United States failed to formulate a national defense strategy that tied COCOM strategic requirements for protecting national interests to the individual military services budget requirements strained under the politics of a world absent major nation conflicts. It wasn't until North Korea, Pakistan, and India started testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles did the US shake the malaise of a future without war between nation states, but by then it was too late - September 11, 2024 arrived.
The Last Ten years began ten years ago from this Sunday, on September 11, 2001. This Sunday will mark the ten year anniversary of many things, but from the perspective of Goldwater-Nichols, 9/11 marks the ten year anniversary of our ongoing land wars in Asia and air wars throughout Asia and Africa. Without a strategic vision of national defense articulated by both the political leaders of the nation since the Cold War, but also because the military services were never organized around a strategic vision for the defense of the nation, the United States responded to the attacks on 9/11 by 19 terrorists with the longest running military campaign in our nations history.
Obviously the strategic threat to the United States is bigger than the 19 individuals directly involved in 9/11, but it is noteworthy that the government of Afghanistan was toppled without any primary forces of the US Army. It wasn't until after the Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan that the US Army showed up, but we all knew they had to eventually show up - after all, Goldwater-Nichols insures that each service gets a piece of the action.
From a Goldwater-Nichols perspective though, the real justification for the Acts success came with the invasion of Iraq. From a purely military perspective, the invasion of Iraq proved that the Joint military approach the United States had perfected for the previous 14+ years was indeed brilliantly lethal and effective as a military force. The United States military today is unmatched in operational capabilities conducting the ugly, messy, and costly business of war. The precision lethality of military capabilities leveraged by the United States is indeed so capable that the United States today conducts six simultaneous wars in four theaters on two continents: Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia, Iraq in Asia, Yemen in Asia and Somalia in east Africa, and Libya in North Africa.
But the strategic drift continues. Because of the hollowing of military force within the individual services in the 1990s, and because today each service must get a piece of the action in each theater of war under the COCOM model for Joint services warfare, the defense budget has skyrocketed over the last ten years to support the various wartime capabilities desired by the individual services despite the wars themselves being paid for through a separate overseas contingency operations budget.
How is it possible that after ten years of war and after already suffering one major defense budget cut in the 1990s the US military is still accused of lacking a policy -> strategy -> tactics/training -> doctrine process by which to guide budget decisions? The answer, in part, is Goldwater-Nichols.
One of the consequences of Goldwater-Nichols, and what I believe to be the flaw of the Act, is that defense strategy was shifted from the services to the COCOMs while budget remained the responsibility of the services. By design Goldwater-Nichols separates defense strategy (COCOMS) from budget (the individual services). This problem is evident by the strategic drift the nation has been suffering for the last 25 years, but because Goldwater-Nichols also was instrumental in bringing together interoperability between the military services, the resulting operational brilliance of the US military as a result from Goldwater-Nichols has masked this rather serious flaw.
Defense policy in Washington drives COCOM strategies, who then must go back to Washington to the individual services for resources. From the services perspective, they do not budget policy or strategy, rather they budget the doctrine and tactics/training that will be developed by the individual services who are deployed in support of COCOM resource requests. Because tactics and training now integrate joint services coordination, by the time the units within the individual services arrive at the COCOM level to be leveraged within the context of a strategy driven by policy, those units from each of the US military services are individually and collectively prepared to be operationally excellent under the Joint model - and have proven it time and time again.
The leaders of the military services continue to say that their primary objective is not to repeat the mistakes of the impending budget cuts to defense that are set to begin in FY 2013, but I honestly don't see a scenario right now where any of the services can avoid repeating those mistakes. From the services perspective of budgeting, their focus is on insuring that the tactical/training/doctrinal aspect of each individual military services budget is protected because in the 1990s, that aspect of the defense budget was shorted, and it led to a hollowing of the force structure. From the services perspective, to handle this emerging budget crisis, each military service will contract itself with the primary intent of retaining that precious tactical/training/doctrinal capacity within each individual services budget. The expectation is that when combined with other elements of national power, the Joint force will be operationally brilliant even though there is no question it will be smaller.
I believe this is the second least efficient approach possible for national defense - second behind the least efficient approach, which is the same approach used today except with the higher budget.
The problem with the simple contraction approach to defense budget cuts is that it in no way aligns the budget for the national defense of the United States with the political policies or even the COCOM strategic execution of defense policy of the United States.
I have been told several times by several people that the sole instruction to OSD to date by the Obama administration regarding defense budget cuts is to prevent the services from competing with each other over defense funding. If that is true, that suggests to me the United States will absolutely repeat the mistakes of the 1990s, when the services were also prevented from competing with one another during budget cuts. By removing the obligation of the services to compete at the policy level for funding, the Obama administration is removing the burden from the services to match budget to policy - and furthermore retains the entitlement felt by the individual services to be included in operations overseas rather than matching the right capabilities to the challenges being addressed.
Goldwater Nichols has created a framework that intentionally separates defense strategy executed by the COCOMs from defense budget managed by the individual military services, and the accepted norms for political processes related to national defense policy exclude the individual military services from the obligations of thinking strategically as a Joint force at the budget planning level. As we move into the defense policy and budgeting process for what some are calling the so-called Sword of Damocles cuts, under Goldwater-Nichols the next ten years are very easy to predict.
The military services will remain operationally brilliant as they have been under Goldwater-Nichols, and at the same time the nation will continue to drift strategically as we have been under Goldwater-Nichols. The only way this changes is if the services are forced by the Obama administration, thus obligated, to compete at the strategic and policy level against each other for funding by making the case for what each service brings to the table for the national defense of the United States of America. Should the Obama administration fail to force that competition between the services, I strongly believe they would be insuring the nation will suffer strategic drift for another decade under a flawed Goldwater-Nichols system that disconnects the national defense policies of the United States from the national defense budget of the United States.
If Admiral Mullen is correct, and the national debt is the top national security threat to the United States, it seems to me that an appropriate political response to that top threat to national security would be to insure that any disconnect between defense budget and defense policy is corrected. In my mind that begins by taking a hard look at how Goldwater-Nichols has divided budget and strategy. How will someone measure success? For the Navy, I'd suggest we know things are changing when N5 is no longer a paper pushing afterthought in OPNAV and N8 isn't a ridiculously powerful authority within OPNAV.
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If you, like me, have strong opinions on the impacts of Goldwater-Nichols towards the national defense of the United States 25 years later, I strongly encourage you to write up and submit to me via email an article on the subject that I can post on the blog during the month of October.
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