Congressional
hearings on the provisions of the thirty year old Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986
have the potential to substantially improve defense decision-making and move
the nation toward a 21st century defense organization. They have
also allowed old, discredited concepts to surface in a time where not all
recognize their potential for harm. One of these is the idea of an American
“General Staff” that would supposedly be an improvement over the current Joint
Chiefs of Staff system. Historically, the General Staff has been a product of
continental, authoritarian regimes focused on operational and tactical land
warfare, and not one of democratic nations with global interests. A U.S.
version of this organization has been proposed in similar forms since 1941, and
has not improved with age. In the post World War 2 period, the idea of an
American General Staff has been used as a means of ensuring or usurping
military control within the U.S. military and U.S. civilian government
organization. Centralization of military decision-making has never yielded good
results and even the relatively modest Goldwater Nichols reforms have led to several
significant poor outcomes since 1986. A plurality of inputs in defense
decision-making, as practiced by the Allied powers during the Second World War,
and in the early and middle Cold War, is well proven as a system to ensure
maximum review and vetting of strategic defense decisions. As the nation looks
to get more out of its shrinking defense establishment, the implementation of a
General Staff represents a retrograde movement toward increased despotism in
defense organization.
The concept of a single chief-general
staff is the product of the military times and operational geography of
Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632) and Frederick the Great of Prussia
(1712-1786). It achieved its high water mark in the Wars of German Unification
from 1864 to 1870 when the Prussian Army and troops of allied German states
defeated the armies of Denmark, the Austrian Empire and the French Empire of
Napoleon III in a series of short wars. Over the course of these conflicts the Prussian
Army “Great General Staff” became both a planning staff for the Prussian Army,
but also a clearinghouse for best practices in operational and tactical
warfare. General Staff officers alternated between staff and operational
assignments in order to maintain their currency in the state of ground warfare.
The Prussian General Staff became a German one after unification in 1871 and
continued to improve upon its proven methods. Under the influence of the
General Staff the German Army achieved arguably the best operational and
tactical performance of all combatant armies in the World Wars.
Despite this achievement, the General
Staff concept contained significant flaws that manifested themselves as early as
the German unification wars. After defeating the Austrians in the major battle
of Koinggratz, the Prussian Chief of Staff von Moltke and the King Wilhelm
wanted to march on and capture the Austrian capital of Vienna. Prussian
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who did not want a wider war, narrowly persuaded
the King and his generals to avoid making Austria a permanent enemy with such a
step. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian War Bismarck was unsuccessful in convincing
the King and his generals to not lay siege to and bombard Paris, or demand reparations
in the form of territory submission. The Prussian siege caused the collapse of
the French government and the taking of Alsace Lorraine a semi-permanent
condition of hostility between the two states that contributed to war in 1914.
The German General Staff was an Army
organization and even as Germany’s strategic horizon’s expanded in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, it made no attempt to expand its
geographic or operational concepts beyond its central European origins. It did
not foster the same cooperation with the new Imperial German Navy that it
demanded from Army commanders and political leaders. Its Nazi-era joint
doppleganger, the Obercommando der Wehmacht (OKW), was organized in an equally
rigid manner as its Army predecessor. It was supposed to duplicate the Army
general staff on a joint level, but it remained more a facilitating vehicle for
Hitler’s own ideas instead of an independent planning organization. Its one
possibility to shine was in the 1940 Norway campaign, but inter-service
bickering in the planning process caused Hitler to assume overall command and
micromanage the nominal joint and ground force commander, General von
Falkenhorst though the OKW Operations staff in Berlin.[1]
The Allied combined Chiefs of Staff, by contrast, operated by discussion and
consensus building rather than command fiat and were able to orchestrate truly
joint operations through more informal channels of cooperation.
The idea of an American “General Staff”
began with a proposal by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy for such an
organization in June 1941. It was
unanimously opposed by the service chiefs and service secretaries. The most
significant support came from Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, then
servings as Army Wars Plans Division Director. Eisenhower claimed that, “the
principles of strategy and employment of forces were the same for all services.”[2]
Eisenhower’s statements seem to harden the stance of the Navy, who
fundamentally disagreed with this assertion. Army Chief of Staff George C.
Marshall agreed with the Navy that any “functions of the Chief of a Joint
General Staff,” would, “deal with assembling, coordinating and briefing
military information to the President” rather than supreme command.[3]
After the war the services resumed their
usual competition for scare resources. The Army chose this moment to
re-introduce the general staff concept for consideration. Army leadership was
especially concerned that their service would lose out in postwar budget
battles to the “more glamorous Air Force and Navy if a single military department
headed by an overall Chief of Staff was not in place.”[4] Other
factors alongside budget battles had also emerged to perhaps favor the general
staff concept. There was great pressure on the U.S. military services to
integrate their command and control functions after several investigative
committees blamed the surprise Pearl Harbor attack on failures in Army and Navy
cooperation. The prevention of an atomic surprise attack was also a significant
concern in the general public.[5] The
Army, notably Generals Marshall in public and Eisenhower in private,
recommended a unified national military structure with the military service departments
much reduced in authority. The Army’s most “radical” element was the
introduction of a Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, now styled as the
“Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces” who would act as the overall commander of
the nation’s military forces. That officer would be provided with a full
General Staff to carry out his responsibilities. Overall, it appeared that the
Army scheme, known as the Collins Plan by its designated presenter General J.
Lawton Collins, would, “would remove the civilian secretary from any
significant influence not only on matters concerning appropriations, but on
those concerning military strategy.”[6] Eisenhower
to his credit later recommended removing the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces
from the chain of command and making him instead the President’s principal
military adviser as a compromise in the maintenance of overall armed forces
harmony.[7]
There was also support for a General Staff
based on the statements of the surviving German military leadership.While the
Nazi system was universally despised, the surviving German Generals were able
to create a myth that they were operational geniuses who if not controlled by
Hitler could have won the war with meager resources. The emerging Cold War
restricted access to the Soviet view which suggested German incompetence at all
levels of warfare, and in its absence the idea of a general staff on perhaps
the German model gained currency in the West.
The idea of an Army-organized and operated
General Staff was anathema to senior naval officers for many of the same
reasons it had been in 1941. Army officers did not fundamentally understand the
nuances of naval warfare. Furthermore, the leadership of the services that
emerged in 1945 had fought two very different wars. Army leaders such as
Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley had fought a primarily land campaign in
Europe long after the German Navy or Air Force had much influence on their operations.
Navy leaders like Admirals Chester Nimitz and future Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs (CJCS) Admiral Arthur Radford had fought a primarily sea and air war in
the Pacific that was briefly punctuated with ground force operations much
smaller in comparison with those of Europe. Neither group had fought a truly
joint war, although the Army leadership vehemently maintained that they had and
that the Navy had not done so in the Pacific.
Navy Secretary James Forrestal feared the
consequences of unification for both the Navy and for the “national security” of
the United States in general.[8] In
cooperation with his long time friend and business partner Ferdinand Eberstadt,
he recommended a postwar concept of defense organization that maintained
unified command in geographic operational environments while preserving a
corporate, decentralized authority in Washington. Eberstadt argued that,
“separate organizations engendered healthy competition and high morale.”[9] Navy
leadership agreed and believed that, “A Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Committee
system, in which decisions about how best to allocate military forces to
accomplish national goals would be made through compromise following a thorough
airing of competing service viewpoints, which would provide the most realistic
solution.”[10] President Truman
supported the Army’s plan and was very unhappy that his Navy Secretary was
advancing an alternate organization concept.[11] The
Army plan at first had significantly more support than the Navy’s, but despite
strong testimony in its favor by Marshall and Eisenhower, the Navy’s concept
won the day and the National Security Act of 1947 largely reflected the
Eberstadt report’s recommendations.
Eisenhower remained dissatisfied by the
corporate military organization he inherited in 1952 and again set about
creating a general staff system. Unlike 1947, however, Ike envisioned a
Chairman and JCS that responded to his direction much as his Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces Europe (SHAEF) and later NATO staffs
did when the President was still in uniform. His 1953 Reorganization Plan 6,
which survived a significant challenge in the House of Representatives, further
increased the power of the Chairman by authorizing him to manage the Joint
Staff. It also increased the size of the Defense Department and added a number
of new Deputy Secretaries. When this system did not prove strong enough for
Eisenhower’s liking, he began a second round of reform that resulted in the
landmark 1958 reform package that effectively removed the JCS from the chain of
command altogether, and further strengthened the Joint Unified and Specified Commanders.
Eisenhower failed to get his desired increase in the size of the Joint Staff
and Congress still inserted into the legislation a clause that stated, “The
joint staff shall not be operated or be organized as an overall Armed Forces
General Staff and shall have no executive authority.”[12]
While Eisenhower was not able to impose a
general staff system, his efforts essentially created one where the President
could serve as his own supreme commander with direct access to combatant forces
through the Unified Commanders. Eisenhower brooked no dissent from his service
chiefs once he made a decision and imposed loyalty tests on his JCS appointees,
notably General Maxwell Taylor and Admiral Arleigh Burke.[13]
While Ike’s goal remained “unity of command”, he set a precedent where the JCS
began an essentially military relationship with the President, as opposed to
one of military officer and civilian leader. Admiral Burke later regretted this
change and suggested that had the service chiefs been more forceful and
“pounded the table aggressively” when they disagreed with the President, poor
national security outcomes like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 could
have been prevented.[14]
Eisenhower’s system may have been ideal for a former 5 star coalition military
commander, but his successors were not so eminently qualified to operate his
system of unified command.
The succeeding Kennedy administration
began its relationship with the Joint Chiefs on a sour note as a result of what
Burke described as a failure to “pound the table.” Kennedy was later quoted after
the Bay of Pigs disaster as saying to one author, “The first advice I am going
to give my successor is to watch the generals and avoid feeling that just because
they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”[15]
This feeling of distrust continued over the course of the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations. Secretary of Defense McNamara and his systems analyst acolytes
sought to organize the military around operational missions rather than by
service or geographic area.[16] Conflict over entry into and conduct of the
Vietnam War further divided successive Presidents and civilian defense leaders
from the uniformed leadership of the armed forces. These conflicts continued
through the 1970’s. The period of 1945-1986 was one of continual battle over
which branch of government; Congress or the President would exercise the most
control over the uniformed military.
A much modified version of the General
Staff concept returned with the 1980’s defense reform movement that culminated
in the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986. In this reform effort, members of
Congress unhappy with the outcome of the Vietnam War, and failures in special
operations missions from 1975-1983, supported by Congressional staffers that
had been McNamara-trained analysts combined forces against the post 1958 JCS
system. These reformers argued for a powerful, “non parochial” uniformed
military leadership, a military organized around missions as recommended by Mr.
McNamara in the 1960’s and an enlarged and empowered Department of Defense to
again combat the supposed threat of “lack of civilian control.” As in 1958, the
reform movement that led to the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986 achieved some
noteworthy success, but failed to attain its long sought desire for a supreme
military commander leading a mission-focused force. The 1985 “Defense
Organization, The Need for Change” report to the Senate Armed Services
Committee details these goals. This report, named for its principle author (and
former Program Analysis and Evaluation (PAE) analyst James Locher), recommended
12 specific changes to DoD organization including the disestablishment of the
JCS and its replacement with a council of retired four star officers, as well
as organization of the armed forces along mission lines.[17]
Locher would later characterize the more modest reforms of Goldwater Nichols as
the true and only aims of the Goldwater-based reorganization effort, but curiously
Senator Goldwater never said as much in any of the biographical efforts he
supported or in his own autobiography.
Reformers gained much ground, but were
again defeated in their attempt to achieve overwhelming victory by another Navy-led
opposition effort. Navy Secretary John Lehman mounted an aggressive campaign
within both the Reagan administration and Congress against the legislation on
constitutional and historical grounds. Supported by the Navy and Marine Corps
service chiefs as well as the other service secretaries and Chiefs of Staff, Lehman condemned the general
staff concept, whether active duty or retired officer in membership as against
the very successful Anglo-American concepts of cooperative joint leadership
that had been successful since the Second World War. Although he failed to
deter Congress from reform measures, his opposition effort prevented any of
Locher’s proposals from actually entering law.
Although Congress supported the Goldwater
Nichols Act with overwhelming support more characteristic of a resolution
honoring someone’s birthday rather than a major policy decision, the
legislative branch ended up as a loser in terms of which civilian authority
would effectively control the nation’s defense establishment. While Congress
retained control of budgetary affairs, its decision to expand both the powers
of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Department of Defense put more overall
control in the hands of the executive branch.
There was some buyer’s remorse after 1986
over the creation of a powerful Chairman. Fears that a powerful Chairman could
become a “man on horseback” capable of threatening the democratic process first
appeared during the chairmanship of General Colin Powell. General Powell,
however, merely made full use of the new powers granted his office, and as
someone who observed this period once told the author, “if General Powell was
attempting to operate beyond the authority of his office, he would have been
immediately fired by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.” Successive Presidents
have appointed Chairmen with less desire than General Powell to carve out
independent military opinions. Clearly a powerful military figure and
presumably a general staff serve at the pleasure of the President and are not
likely to emerge as an independent center of power without the authorization of
the political branches.
While the Goldwater Nichols Act did not
result in a General Staff, it has been responsible for several poor outcomes in
national security decision-making since 1986. Acting on his expanded powers as
a combatant commander, Central Command commander General Norman Schwartzkopf
signed an armistice with the Iraqi regime following the success of Operation
Desert Storm. As part of this agreement he allowed the Iraqi regime to operate
helicopters that later successfully put down a Shiite revolt the U.S. had
encouraged.[18] Had the revolt been
successful the U.S. might have obviated the need for a Second Gulf War in 2003.
That conflict featured a much smaller and less diverse coalition force for the
mission of ending the regime of Saddam Hussein than that of Gulf War 1.
Comparisons between the allied forces arrayed for each Iraq operation were
inevitable. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki and former CJCS (then
Secretary of State) Colin Powell both questioned the intentional reduced size
of the coalition entry force. Shinseki suggested a much larger force would be
needed to, “maintain safety in a country with "ethnic tensions that could
lead to other problems."[19] Powell was also concerned about
the smaller size of the coalition force and that its supply lines would be
excessively long.[20] Both
however were successfully rebuffed thanks to the command arrangements
instituted by the Goldwater Nichols Act whereby service chiefs and even cabinet
officials have no official authority over operational military commanders. When
the Iraqi counter-insurgency war began to founder in mid to late 2006,
President Bush sought ways to improve U.S. military performance in the war torn
nation. The eventual U.S. troop surge was not a product of the Joint Staff,
U.S. Central Command, or the myriad of Department of Defense offices assigned to the Iraq war
effort, but instead one produced by retired officers, academics and think tank
analysts. Furthermore, it was planned by an ad hoc group of Army and Marine
Corps colonels rather than the Joint or CENTOM staff. A diversity of choice in
the marketplace of defense ideas still seems to produce the best decisions.
Defense reforms from those of Eisenhower’s
through the Goldwater Nichols Act have created a widening chasm between
military leaders focused on increasingly operational solutions and political
leaders cut off from the realities of military efforts. Unity of command at the
tactical and operational level has been a hallmark of Western military effort
since the days of the Roman Legions. That unity of effort, however, is not desired
at the summit of strategic thinking. The marketplace of defense ideas as
described by Forrestal and Eberstadt must be in place to ensure optimum best
military solutions to strategic concerns.
The battle between the U.S. executive and
legislative branches for control of the U.S. military; the issue at the center
of all U.S. defense reorganization reform efforts since 1945 has fundamentally
upset the balance between strategy and operational art. The imposition of a
unitary chain of command beginning at the highest levels of government has
turned the marketplace of defense ideas into a Soviet GOSPLAN style command
economy of thought. In this condition the U.S. military has increasingly turned
to operational art as a substitute for real strategic thinking. An elite U.S.
general staff, disconnected from the wider body of defense intelligentsia would
merely “double down” on the concept of operational art and further limit the
choices of political leaders. If the recent effects of the Goldwater Nichols
Act are any guide, further centralization and contraction in the overall body
of those persons engaged in truly strategic thinking will further impair the
U.S.’s ability to achieve political military success in the increasingly
unstable post-Post Cold War world.
This author has the utmost respect for
those advocating a General Staff as the solution to U.S. military decision
making, but suggests the verdict of history is decidedly against them. Eisenhower
decided to remove the JCS from the chain of command and hobbled their ability
to serve as independent military advisers to the whole of govt. McNamara
(supported by Kennedy and Johnson), further weakened the powers of the chiefs,
set up the organizations that conducted the ultimately unsuccessful Vietnam
effort, and altered the acquisition process to the current, Soviet 5 year plan
system. Senator Goldwater and his fellow 1980’s reformers removed the remaining
influence possessed by the service chiefs in operational affairs, promoted the CJCS to ad hoc member of the
President's cabinet (reducing that officer's "bona fides" as an impartial
military adviser), and further decentralized the business of strategy by
empowering the COCOM's as regional proconsuls. It all leads back to political leadership,
and yet they insist on blaming the service chiefs and other uniformed military,
or the "system"; a product of the last 70 years created by the
political classes.
Instead of a General Staff, Congress
should act to restore a balance to the U.S. defense establishment. It should
return the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a position of “first among
equals” as the billet was before 1986. The JCS as a collective body rather than
a single officer would be best able to present the executive branch with a
truly military viewpoint free of pressure from the politically appointed
Secretary of Defense. It should also return the service secretaries to the
business of strategic military thought; their proper role in the Liberal
Western tradition. The marketplace of defense ideas has increasingly one of
empty shelves. A U.S. General Staff would further attenuate and perhaps close
the market for good.
[1]
Matthew Cooper, The German Army,
1939-1945, Lanham, MD, Scarborough Publishing, 1978, pp. 193, 194.
[2]
Jeffrey Barlow, From Hot War to Cold, The
U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945-1955, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, CA, 2009, p. 64.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Barlow, p. 87.
[5]
David Jablonsky, War by Land Sea and Air,
Dwight Eisenhower and the Concept of Unified Command, New Haven, Con, Yale
University Press, 2010, p. 142.
[6]Jablonsky,
p. 148.
[7]
Jablonsky, pp. 150, 151.
[8]
Jablonsky, p. 143 (Forrestal coined the term “national security” in
Congressional testimony.)
[9]
Jeffrey Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal,
A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949, College Station, TX, Texas
A&M University Press, 1991, p. 107.
[10]
Barlow, p. 87.
[11]
Ibid, pp. 89, 90.
[12]
Jablonsky, p. 297.
[13]
Ibid, pp. 247, 248.
[14]
Arleigh
A . Burke, interview by John T. Mason Jr., February 1973, interview 4,
transcript, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Ks
[16]
Paul Ryan. First Line of Defense, The
U.S. Navy Since 1945, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institute Press, Stanford
University, 1981, p. 31.
[17]
http://digitalndulibrary.ndu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/goldwater/id/2160,
pp. 11, 12, last assessed 11 December 2015.
[18]
Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The
General’s War, The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, Boston, Little
Brown and Company, 1995, pp. 446-450.
[19]
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-02-25-iraq-us_x.htm,
last assessed 11 December 2015.
[20]
Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American
Soldier, New York, Harper Collins, 2004, pp. 394, 395.
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