The question is, can we, as a country, any longer afford a 207-year-old concept that in military matters the civilian is supreme? Now, I realize the sanctity of the idea of the civilian being supreme. It is a beautiful thing to think about. The question in my mind is, can we any longer afford to allow the expertise of men and women trained, at terrific expense . . . to be set aside for the decisions of the civilians whose decisions have not been wrapped in war[?] We lost in Korea, no question about that, because we did not let the military leadership exercise military judgment. We lost in Vietnam. . . . If that is the way we are going to do it in the future, I think we are in trouble.(Note 1)

The question should give officers pauseCit stands the common perception of civil-military relations on its head. With that Senator Goldwater set the tone of the debate. Many did not recognize it at the time, but the act that bears his name would fundamentally alter civil-military relations. Goldwater-Nichols overcompensates for the aftereffects of previous defense reorganization efforts, invests inordinate authority in a single military officer and staff, and, by reducing the checks and balances within and between the executive and legislative branches of government, weakens civilian control of the military.

In practical terms, Goldwater-Nichols empowered the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to become the de facto equal of the politically accountable Secretary of Defense; it empowered the Chairman to become the de facto commander of the armed forces; it empowered military officers to formulate and influence policy far outside their proper sphere; and while expressly stating its intent to the contrary, it took a long step toward creating an overall Armed Forces General Staff. Intending to improve efficiency, but failing to fully comprehend the complex interrelationships that affect civilian control, Congress failed in its responsibility to provide for the common defense with an establishment that reflects the values of American government.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass the White Queen, when asked the meaning of a word, replied, "Mean? It means what I mean it to mean; no more and no less." And that is the way it has been with "Civilian Control" of the U.S. military.(Note 2)

The phrase "civilian control of the military" is very much used, but it is not very well defined and is even less understood. With a rare lack of foresight, the framers of the Constitution failed to directly address the issue. That oversight becomes understandable when one considers that in their day the army was composed primarily of civilians pressed into militia service for a particular emergency. Each of the framers fully expected to don an officer's uniform and lead that army, should the need arise, intending to return to their civilian pursuits once the emergency had passed. Indeed, many of them had done just that during the Revolution. So, for them the issue of civilian control was moot; the military was all civilian.

Endeavoring to avoid the despotism prevalent in Europe, the Founding Fathers' main concern was to ensure a separation and wide dispersal of powers. In that vein, they designated the President the "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States," but retained for the Congress the authority: "To declare War . . . ; To raise and support Armies . . . ; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;. . . To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers."

The framers granted the President the office of Commander in Chief rather than the function of commander, allowing that he could command those forces provided by Congress in war, but could not determine the size or composition of those forces. They clearly intended that the President would not enjoy the royal prerogative of total political and military power like that exercised by the monarchs of Europe, and held true to George Mason's dictum, , "The purse and the sword ought never to get into the same hands." By that, however, they ensured a continuing controversy concerning civilian control. The Constitution effectively precludes the polar extremes of a government where no civilian control exists-as in a military dictatorship, and where total civilian control exists-as in Stalinist Russia, but it fails to define precisely where the authority of the office of Commander in Chief ends and where the authority of the Congress begins. The President and the Congress have struggled since the beginning of the Republic over the limits of their authority.

So, civilian control as it is understood by the Executive and the Legislature "means what they mean it to mean; no more and no less." To the President, civilian control often means control by him (either directly, or through his executive agent) as the civilian leader of the country. Congress, on the other hand, considers that the office of Commander in Chief makes the President the Nation's "first soldier" and maintains that civilian control means control by the people's representatives. Sometimes more power accrues to one branch, sometimes less, depending on personalities, politics, and the national security situation. Our type of government ensures that the balance never comes to rest. The Joint Chiefs of Staff has been enmeshed in this controversy since its inception.

To better understand the dynamics involved at the critical interface between soldiers and civilians, one must further define the concept of civilian control. Samuel Huntington identifies two types of civilian control: subjective and objective. Under subjective control, the military becomes the tool of a particular civilian group (or groups). Subjective control assumes military participation in institutional, class, and constitutional politics. The military becomes part of the political system, and civilian groups seek control of the military as a means to increase their power relative to other groups and thereby increase their influence over national strategy. In 18th-century England, for example, the Crown controlled the military. Parliament argued for "civilian control" as a means of increasing its power and influence relative to the Crown. Similarly, in 19th-century Europe the aristocracy and bourgeoisie struggled for control of military forces. As just discussed, the constant ebb and flow of control of the military between the Congress and the President represent a struggle over subjective control.(Note 3)

Objective control, on the other hand, seeks to maximize the professionalism of the military and became possible in the United States only with the advent of the standing professional army that came into existence after the Civil War. According to Huntington,

Civilian control in the objective sense is the maximizing of military professionalism. More precisely, it is that distribution of political power between military and civilian groups which is most conducive to the emergence of professional attitudes and behavior among the members of the officer corps. Objective civilian control is thus directly opposed to subjective civilian control. Subjective civilian control achieves its end by civilianizing the military, making them the mirror of the state. Objective civilian control achieves its end by militarizing the military, making them the tool of the state. . . . The antithesis of objective civilian control is military participation in politics: civilian control decreases as the military become progressively involved in institutional, class, and constitutional politics [emphasis added].(Note 4)

Civilian control as it pertains to the United States is not generally concerned with a potential military coup. While not absolutely ruled out, that possibility is unlikely in the foreseeable future given the long and deeply held tradition of subordination to civilian authority among officers. The issue is more subtle: on one hand, one of the fundamental principles of the American form of government is the separation of powers, which demands a wide dispersal of powers between and within the branches of government. However, the separation of powers results in inefficiencies within decisionmaking bodies. The trick here is to balance the constitutional requirement for a separation of powers with a managerial desire for efficient decisionmaking.

At the same time, the hybrid form of civilian control that has developed in the United States causes a constant dynamic tension between the two elected branches of the government and between civilian and military leadership. Those dynamic relationships can be represented by the intersection of two polar contests. The first pits the Executive and its definition of the limits of its authority over the policies that govern the military against the Legislature and its conception of the responsibilities inherent in its constitutional duty "To raise and support Armies" and "To provide and maintain a Navy." The second is a contest between the resultant civilian decisionmaking structure and the uniformed military leadership.

Though bound by a strong tradition of subordination to civilian authority and a desire to remain neutral in the struggle between the civilian branches of government, the senior military leadership nonetheless attempts to define a military sphere of decisionmaking and to limit civilian policy direction within that sphere. Key to understanding the importance of the second contest is the realization that the American concept of civilian control of the military is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, nor is it explicitly codified in law (though it can be derived from the command relationships set by Title 10). It began with the citizens turned soldiers turned citizens again who founded our government and is maintained by the complex confluence of the separation of powers and the tradition of military subordination to civilian authority.

Each of the reorganizations of the Department of Defense has had civilian control of the military as subtext. As represented in figure 1, the National Security Act of 1947 shifted relative power away from the President toward the Congress (movement along the horizontal axis), while the advent of the JCS as a separate locus of power capable of influencing political decisions shifted the military toward more subjective control (movement along the vertical axis). The amendments to the National Security Act in 1949, 1953, and 1958 gradually shifted the balance to the Executive Branch by empowering the Secretary of Defense while the military, through the growing influence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, continued to accrue political power, and moved farther away from objective control. The latest reform, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, was intended to shift the balance away from the Executive, hence Senator Goldwater's line of questioning. However, in the process it made inordinate political power available to the military itself by elevating the Chairman nearly to the level of his nominal superior, the Secretary of Defense. That unintended consequence of Goldwater-Nichols jeopardizes civilian control of the military.

Late in the Second World War, Congress became concerned that it had abdicated some of its responsibility in granting the President near total control of the Armed Forces and moved to correct the imbalance. The solution Congress began to consider in the spring of 1944 would, in its estimation, address two issues that loomed on the horizon. The first arose with the advent of the airplane and the understanding that the air had become a third environment in which war could be conducted. Prodded by President Truman, Congress recognized a need to unify the War and Navy Departments and to provide a separate department for the air forces. Underlying that ostensible motivation for unifying the departments was the second issue: Congress' concern with the immense power the President wielded as Commander in Chief, and its determination to check and balance that power by establishing a separate, civilian department head confirmed by and dually responsible to the Congress.

The most visible and easily understood issue, of course, was that of unifying the War and Navy Departments. Presaging by 40 years and with almost eerie accuracy the issues that would ultimately lead to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, Truman argued in his 19 December 1945 Message to the Congress that the defense establishment should:

1. Have integrated strategic plans and a unified military program and budget
2. Realize the economies that can be achieved through unified control of supply and service functions
3. Adopt the organizational structure best suited to fostering coordination between the military and the remainder of the Government
4. Provide the strongest means for civilian control of the military
5. Organize to provide parity for air power
6. Establish the most advantageous framework for a unified system of training for combined operations of land, sea and air
7. Allocate systematically our limited resources for scientific research
8. Have unity of command in outlying bases
9. Have consistent and equitable personnel policies.

Truman's primary dissatisfaction with the existing structure was that it forced upon the President the "whole job of reconciling the divergent claims of the Departments"(Note 5) with regard to strategic plans and budgeting. With the ascendance of the Air Force as a separate arm, Truman felt that he could not and should not personally coordinate the services. He had little desire to be the Nation's "first general and admiral" in the manner of his predecessor.

The National Security Act of 1947 interposed a relatively weak Secretary of Defense between the President and the armed forces, diluting executive authority. Truman incorrectly thought that interposing a civilian Secretary subject to the President and Congress would increase civilian control. In fact, the establishment of a Secretary of Defense neither added to nor detracted from civilian control overall. In keeping with the principle of separation of powers, it merely divided the power that had formerly reposed in one politically accountable civilian official between two, and thereby tipped the relative balance of civilian control in favor of the Congress.

The Secretary of Defense was designated the principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to national security, but could only establish "general" policies and programs and exercise "general" direction, authority, and control of the separately administered services.(Note 6) The Act established the Department of the Air Force and preserved the executive level status of the service Secretaries, and formalized the previously ad hoc Joint Chiefs of Staff, designating it, as a corporate body, the principal military advisor to the President. Though unrecognized at the time, by formalizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff the Act established a potential third locus of power and influence in the civilian control arena.

On the recommendation of the sitting Secretaries, in 1949 and again in 1953 the President proposed and the Congress agreed to strengthen the office of the Secretary of Defense by granting the office more autonomy and by subordinating the military departments to the Department of Defense. The 1949 amendments also began the process of unifying the uniformed leadership of the military by establishing the Chairman as "first among equals" within the corporate Joint Chiefs of Staff. Additionally, increasing the power of the Secretary of Defense while simultaneously reducing the service Secretaries from Executive Department status to military department status caused the powers formerly dispersed among three cabinet level officials to coalesce into a single office.

So, whereas Executive Branch authority over the defense establishment had formerly been exercised with more widely separated powers (conforming to the constitutional principle), coalescing those powers into one office increased the coherence of Executive Branch authority, and hence increased the power of the Executive Branch relative to the more dispersed power and authority of the Legislative Branch. In the interim between the 1949 amendments and the 1953 amendments, the United States again went to war, and during the course of that conflict experienced what is widely perceived as a serious challenge to civilian control.

Most historians have tended to view President Truman's relief of General MacArthur in rather simplistic terms: the General would not submit to civilian authority, so the President relieved him. On the surface, that is what happened. However, on closer examination a subplot emerges, on which rested the credibility of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the key interface between the nation's civilian leadership and its commanders in the field. Throughout the war, MacArthur routinely challenged or ignored the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was senior to each of the members in rank (except that after the Inchon landing General Bradley was promoted to five stars), his personality and experience predisposed him to expect more autonomy and direct contact with the Commander in Chief, and he was leery of a committee of his juniors giving him orders. As a newly formalized entity within the national command structure, the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (hereafter referred to as the JCS), on the other hand, sought to assert its authority and practically define its limits.

The corporate Joint Chiefs of Staff (hereafter referred to as the Joint Chiefs) were responsible for translating President Truman's strategic direction into operational orders for the combatant command in Korea. The crucial limitation was Truman's desire to avoid war with China. For his part, MacArthur understood the Joint Chiefs' role as the translator and transmitter of the President's direction, but he habitually tried to circumvent the orders they conveyed. Finally, after MacArthur made public statements contrary to United States policy, the White House instructed the Joint Chiefs to issue a warning. The Joint Chiefs cautioned MacArthur against making public statements and ordered him to clear future statements through them. The cable was a direct order, and MacArthur disobeyed it. He openly criticized administration policy in a letter to a member of Congress, and on 6 April 1951, the Joint Chiefs met to review MacArthur's actions. After deliberating for 2 hours, they agreed to recommend to the President that MacArthur be dismissed.(Note 7)

The role of the Joint Chiefs in MacArthur's dismissal is often ignored. It marked a turning point in the evolution of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from an ad hoc committee to a formal element of the national military command structure that stood between the Commander in Chief and the combatant commanders. The issue in question in early 1951 was not whether the Joint Chiefs would act to assure civilian control of the military (which was never in much doubt), but whether subject to the President's direction they would assert their own authority. The JCS had been formed in 1947, but on 6 April 1951 it began to realize the full potential of its power and established itself in the chain of command, its members exercising an informal form of command authority related to and derived from the statutory authority of the President.

Shortly after he took office, Eisenhower submitted his "Reorganization Plan No. 6 of 1953" to the Congress. It further unified the civilian leadership of the defense establishment by consolidating the functions of three separate agencies (the Munitions Board, the Research and Development Board, and the Defense Supply Management Agency) under the Secretary of Defense, and provided six additional assistant secretaries (raising the total to ten). The Plan also strengthened the authority of the Secretary of Defense over the service Secretaries. Finally, the Plan authorized the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to approve officers selected to serve on the Joint Staff and transferred the "functions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with respect to managing the Joint Staff and the Director thereof"(Note 8) to the Chairman. The plan went into effect on 30 June 1953. On 3 April 1958, President Eisenhower submitted further recommendations for the reform of the Department of Defense, telling Congress:

1. We must organize our fighting forces into operational commands that are truly unified, each assigned a mission in full accord with our over-all military objectives.
2. We must clear command channels so that orders will proceed directly to the unified commands from the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense.
3. We must strengthen the military staff in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in order to provide the Commander in Chief and the Secretary of Defense with the professional assistance they need for strategic planning and for operational direction of the unified commands.
4. We must continue the three military departments as agencies within the Department of Defense to administer a wide range of functions.
5. We must reorganize the research and development functions of the Department in order to make the best use of our scientific and technological resources.
6. We must remove all doubts as to the full authority of the Secretary of Defense.(Note 9)

Two weeks later, he submitted draft legislation to carry out his recommendations, and through the summer Congress conducted hearings on the issue. Failing to comprehend the synergistic effect that would result when this latest legislation combined with the earlier reforms, Congress passed it with only slight modification, and Eisenhower signed the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 into law on 6 August.

So, in little over a decade, the Department of Defense had been formed and subsequently reformed three times. For an organization that large and complex, the tempo of change was dizzying. The effects of one reform could barely be measured before the next round of reform began. Taken together, the reforms completely upended the delicate balance the National Security Act had achieved between the unified command of the armed forces required for military success, the unified direction of the Department necessary for budgetary efficiency, and the separation of powers demanded by the Constitution.

Through it all though, Congress had been wary of "the man on horseback"Cthe powerful military leader who might take over the government. It had ensured that the uniformed side of the Department of Defense did not become strong enough to present a threat to civilian control. For that reason, it had specifically disallowed the formation of a national general staff and ensured that the Chairman remained weak relative to the Secretary of Defense. However, it failed to recognize that, should he appear, the man on horseback might wear a suit rather than a uniform. The rapid-fire succession of short-tenure Secretaries during the period ensured that none of them could begin to grasp fullythe significance of what they and Congress had wrought. It would take a man with a genius for organization and process and a contempt for the judgment of senior military officers to wield fully the awesome power that had accrued to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It did not take long for that man to step forward.

By the time Robert Strange McNamara was sworn in as Secretary of Defense, the power of that office had grown immensely. In contrast to his predecessors, McNamara was responsible by law for the nation's strategic planning and the operational direction of its forces in the field. Soon after taking office, President Kennedy had assured the Joint Chiefs that he desired their advice to reach him "direct and undiluted," but in practical terms, under the amended National Security Act the Joint Chiefs of Staff became an advisory body for the Secretary of Defense. As amended, the National Security Act provided few checks against the possibility that a strong-willed Secretary might ignore or suppress advice from the Nation's senior military leadership.

The first consequence of the amended National Security Act occurred almost immediately after Kennedy's inauguration. The Bay of Pigs operation had been conceived during the last year of the Eisenhower administration, and Eisenhower had approved the plan in March 1960. The CIA conducted its initial preparations throughout that year in complete isolation, but by late 1960 the operation came to the attention of General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lemnitzer immediately ordered an investigation of the proposed operation, which concluded in January 1961 that without the full support of the Cuban people and the promise of American military intervention, the likelihood of the operation's success was very slim.

Lemnitzer presented the report and his pessimistic opinion to President Kennedy and the National Security Council on 22 January 1961. The President directed Lemnitzer to reevaluate the plan, but this time the CIA was supposed to cooperate with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in its analysis. The CIA refused to provide more than a broad outline of its plan, however, and based on the incomplete analysis that resulted, the Chairman issued the Joint Chiefs' findings that the operation might succeed if it had air and naval gunfire support, and then only if it was accompanied by an internal uprising against Castro. Kennedy clung to the advice of the more "can-do" members of the NSC, including Secretary McNamara, who discredited the Joint Chiefs' opinion. The NSC asserted that the United States could maintain the appearance of noninvolvement only if the military did not participate, and that the operation would succeed as the CIA had planned it.

As a complex amphibious operation planned and conducted by civilians, the Bay of Pigs invasion was doomed to fail from the start, but the Joint Chiefs had been prevented from participating in the planning process and effectively precluded from providing constructive advice. In the words of Admiral Arleigh Burke,

At every meeting of the National Security Council and every meeting the President had with the Joint Chiefs, he emphasized that the Cuban affair was not a military operation and the Chiefs were not permitted to do anything other than give their personal advice as to its feasibility, and this without the benefit of ever having the details.(Note 10)

Afterward, the Joint Chiefs received more than their share of blame for the failure, and President Kennedy became convinced that he could not get useful advice from the Joint Chiefs. He then further marginalized the Joint Chiefs by recalling General Maxwell Taylor from retirement and installing him in the White House, first to head the investigation of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and subsequently to provide advice as the President's Military Representative.

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred 6 months after the Bay of Pigs operation. By then, President Kennedy had appointed General Taylor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretary McNamara continued to exercise his authority under the revised National Security Act to provide operational direction. On one occasion he entered the Navy Operations Center, and after a cursory look at the situation, gave detailed instructions to reposition a particular picket ship. On another occasion he gave commands to a single destroyer and demanded to speak to its commander by telephone.(Note 11) Early on, McNamara developed in himself and his civilian subordinates the habit of providing detailed operational instructions while ignoring or overriding the advice of uniformed officers. The trend was to continue with tragic results during the Vietnam War.

Secretary McNamara's disregard for military advice and excessively close direction of U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia are now well known. The Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed vehemently with McNamara's operational direction of the war. However, the amended National Security Act made it possible for a Secretary of McNamara's ilk to prevent JCS advice from reaching the President. On those occasions when JCS advice did reach President Johnson, McNamara took pains to align enough senior civilian opinion on his side to ensure that Johnson, who had a penchant for ignoring the Joint Chiefs anyway, discounted the military advice.

Nevertheless, in 1967, Congress became aware of the divergent civilian and military opinion on the conduct of the air offensive, and held hearings that August. The Joint Chiefs finally had an opportunity to present their views. Their testimony led the Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee to conclude that

the civilian authority consistently overruled the unanimous recommendations of military commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a systematic, timely, and hard-hitting integrated air campaign against the vital North Vietnam targets. Instead, for policy reasons, we have employed military aviation in a carefully controlled, restricted and graduated buildup of bombing pressure which discounted the professional judgment of our best military experts, and substituted civilian judgment in the details of target selection and the timing of strikes.

As between these diametrically opposed views of the The Secretary of Defense and the military experts and in view of the unsatisfactory progress of the war, logic and prudence require that the decision be with the unanimous weight of professional military judgment.

It is high time, we believe, to allow the military voice to be heard in connection with the tactical details of military operations.(Note 12)

The committee failed to note that the 1958 amendments to the National Security Act had granted the Secretary of Defense the authority to substitute "civilian judgment" for the "professional judgment of our best military experts" in the "tactical details of military operations." It failed therefore to take meaningful action on its findings or to recommend a systemic solution, but it had at least identified the problem.

President Johnson and Secretary McNamara failed in their duties as the National Command Authorities by confusing "their ultimate responsibility for our military direction with who should be doing it."(Note 13) They ignored the advice of the institution responsible for translating their political decisions into military objectives. Under the amended National Security Act, however, the Secretary of Defense was authorized to provide operational direction for the armed forces. McNamara was acting in full accordance with the law when he substituted his own judgment for the expertise of the nation's senior military leadership. His willfulness, combined with President Johnson's lack of strategic vision, led to our worst military failure.

Despite the findings of the 1967 hearings, the tendency for civilian policy makers to substitute their judgment for that of military officers persisted throughout the Vietnam War and for many years afterward. During the abortive attempt to rescue the Americans held hostage in Tehran, for example, operational decisions down to the detail of the number of helicopters to be employed were made in the White House. Likewise in Beirut, over the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Marines were assigned the ambiguous mission of "presence" and placed in a militarily untenable location with unrealistic rules of engagement established by the President and members of the National Security Council and acquiesced in by Congress.

So, the result of the whirlwind reorganization of the Department of Defense from 1947 to 1958 was a command structure that marginalized the professional judgment of senior military officers and contributed to the string of military failures from the Bay of Pigs Invasion to the Vietnam War and on to Beirut. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower thought that their amendments to the National Security Act would improve civilian control by granting vast powers to their appointed Secretaries of Defense. That is how it appeared in the legislation and the resultant organizational charts, but the unintended consequence of the amendments was a grossly distorted civilian control. To return to Huntington, after 1958 the amended National Security Act resulted in near total subjective control by the executive branch (figure 1). In that light, it is easy to understand Senator Goldwater's question, Acan we, as a country, any longer afford a 207-year-old concept that in military matters the civilian is supreme?"

In the early 1980s, hoping to mitigate the unintended consequences of the amended National Security Act, but failing to fully comprehend the root cause of those consequences, certain members of Congress began to press for change. They were backed by reformers from academia and the military who likewise misunderstood the problem but who seized upon high visibility anecdotal "evidence" (much of it ultimately untrue or unrelated to the central issues), from contemporary military debacles in the Iranian Desert, Grenada, and Beirut as well as widely publicized acquisition scandals. They were determined to fundamentally alter the authority of the Secretary and the manner in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff operated.

The United States has enjoyed a string of military successes, both in operations other than war and in combat operations, since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Beginning with Operation Just Cause, the first operation after Goldwater-Nichols, the U.S. Armed Forces have demonstrated impressive operational capabilities. Service interoperability and cooperation have improved, and at last a truly "joint" perspective is beginning to be imbued in the officers of each of the services. However, the Goldwater-Nichols reforms were implemented during a period of unprecedented peacetime military spending, and it is not at all clear whether America's decade of military success was due more to organization or to modernization.

However, the Goldwater-Nichols Act has failed in its objectives of strengthening civilian authority and improving military advice to the President. First, how an organization looks on paper does not always coincide with how it functions in practice, and under Goldwater-Nichols the civilian side of the Department of Defense is demonstrably weaker than the military side. Second, criticism that the most significant military advice provided to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of DefenseCthat involving the actual use of forceCwas of poor quality or late is not wholly supported by the facts. As discussed in the preceding section, the history of America's use of military force from the Bay of Pigs to Beirut shows that often JCS advice did not support the course of action the President favored and was simply ignored. While it is certainly the President's prerogative to accept or reject any advice the Joint Chiefs of Staff provide, the indictment against the quality of their advice was "in many cases a euphemism for 'news [he] didn't want to hear'."(Note 14)

The fundamental changes in the relationships between the key players in the national military command structure caused by the Goldwater-Nichols Act have had a profound effect on civilian control. The national security related duties and responsibilities of the President and Congress assigned by the Constitution, and their derivatives in the U.S. Code, are purposely broad and unrestrictive. The people of the United States should not want it any other way, in the execution of his duties as Commander in Chief, the President should be able to use any legal means and any legal organizational scheme he deems necessary. Likewise, the Congress, in the execution of its responsibilities to "raise and support Armies" and "provide and maintain a Navy" should be bound only by the requirement that its actions be legal. The U.S. Constitution has stood the test of two centuries precisely because it flexibly applies a few simple concepts such as the separation of powers and pluralism to the complex problem of government.

As the Commander in Chief responsible to the people for the security of the nation, the President must not be unnecessarily bound by legislation that intrudes on his constitutional responsibilities. The Goldwater-Nichols Act, however, does just that. It prescribes how the Commander in Chief shall organize his command; how the Commander in Chief shall communicate with his subordinate commanders; with whom the Commander in Chief must consult in the development and implementation of his orders and directives; and whom the Commander in Chief may appoint as his subordinate commanders. A military commander similarly restricted would be a commander in name only.

The Act's defenders will argue that it gives the President a great deal of flexibility in areas such as the establishment of command relationships. They are correct; in prescribing the chain of command, the Act says this:

Unless otherwise directed by the President, the chain of command to a unified or specified combatant command runsC(1) from the President to the Secretary of Defense; and (2) from the Secretary of Defense to the commander of the combatant command. [10 USC, Sect. 162(b)] [emphasis added].

It adds that,

the President mayC(1) direct that communications between the President or the Secretary of Defense and the commanders of the . . . combatant commands be transmitted through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and (2) assign duties to the Chairman to assist the President and the Secretary of Defense in performing their command function [10 USC, Sect. 163(a)] [mphasis added].

So, Congress has allowed that the Commander in Chief may establish any chain of command he sees fit, communicate within that chain of command any way he might like, and assign such duties to his principal military subordinate as he desires. Of course, the President always possessed that authority.

Similar dubious passages occur throughout the Act, begging the question, "Why did Congress bother?" One answer is that the Congress recognized a President could simply ignore stronger provisions and would be on firm constitutional ground in doing so. An alternative is that Congress was attempting to legislate competence in national security decision-making. But a President worth the title Commander in Chief would, as a matter of course, organize his command rationally, transmit his orders coherently, and use the best and most experienced people to implement his national security policies. The legislative passages above show that with Goldwater-Nichols, Congress was attempting to correctCdecades too lateCwhat it had failed to correct during the Vietnam War.

By establishing the Chairman as the principal military advisor to the President, and by giving the Chairman control of the Joint Staff , Goldwater-Nichols established a de facto national general staff. The effect of such a structure on politically responsible civilian authority is dangerous. The scope of responsibilities of the Commander in Chief require that he be presented a full range of alternatives when confronted with national security issues. While a corporate body is designed to generate and consider diverse viewpoints fully, the purpose of a general staff is to weed out alternatives ruthlessly. Limiting the diversity of advice to responsible civilian authority streamlines the decisionmaking process, but it also reduces the practical exercise of civilian control of the military and threatens to make civilian authority a "meaningless formalism, with little function beyond rubber-stamping the action of the military."(Note 15)

The provisions concerning the relative authority of the Secretary, the Chairman, and the Joint Staff are equally damaging. The Secretary's overall charge has essentially remained unchanged since the inception of the office in 1947, but Goldwater-Nichols reduced the Secretariat dramatically, and transferred several key functions to the Chairman. The Secretary is now essentially limited to formulating general defense policy. The Department of Defense Organization and Functions Guidebook lists the Secretary's duties as "the formulation of general defense policy and policy related to all matters of direct and primary concern to the DOD, and . . . the execution of approved policy."(Note 16)

At the same time, the Act gave the Chairman control of the Joint Staff and made him responsible for key strategic functions, including: 1) strategic direction; 2) strategic planning; 3) contingency planning; 4) requirements, programs, and budget; 5) doctrine, training, and education; and 6) roles and missions[10 USC, Sect. 153]. In other words, with a strong and focused staff organized on military staff lines and answering to him, the Chairman is responsible for the most salient decisions relating to national security.

Defenders will assert that in carrying out those functions, the Chairman is "subject to the authority, direction, and control of the President and the Secretary of Defense," [10 USC, Sect. 153] and that the Chairman only makes recommendations to the Secretary and the President. They are correct, of course, but those familiar with bureaucratic processes will recognize that, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, "whenever you have a decision to make in the government, the side capable of making the best arguments will normally prevail."(Note 17) And those even remotely familiar with bureaucratic decision making will also admit that the "best arguments" are not always correct.

Compared to its civilian counterparts within the Department of Defense and to the various congressional committees charged with overseeing the Department, the Joint Staff is supremely capable of "making the best arguments." Though comprising officers from each of the services, as Congress intended, it operates in accordance with the military principle of "unity of command" under the direction of a single officer. It is ideally suited to provide unified, coherent proposals in response to particular issues, while on the civilian side the various secretariats and congressional committees are more fractured. As in combat, the side capable of coherent, unified effort will almost invariably succeed over a disjointed opponent.

The Commission on Roles and Missions, examining the issue of quality on the civilian side of the Department of Defense concluded that "political appointees in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and in the Military Department staffs often lack the experience and expertise in national security and military strategy, operations, budgeting, etc. required by the positions they fill."(Note 18) The Joint Staff's relative effectiveness may be exacerbated by the short tenure of political appointees and a side effect of the ethics reforms Congress has implemented to prevent Defense Department officials from profiting from their contacts once they move into the private sector. The ethics regulations may have had the effect of discouraging top quality candidates for civilian posts within DOD. According to Secretary Aspin,

There's been a shift in the quality of people working on the military versus the civilian side. Because of Goldwater-Nichols, the quality on the military side has gone up tremendously, where the reverse has happened on the civilian side. Revolving-door restrictions have made government service so unattractive that the pool from which you can pick political appointees is not as rich as it once was.(Note 19)

The result of the above is a system in which the Chairman is responsible for establishing policies concerning the most important national security issues, and has sole authority over a military staff that is more effective than its civilian counterparts.

Compounding the above, the Act has effectively cut the service Chiefs out of the decisionmaking process. Goldwater-Nichols makes the Chairman alone the "principal military advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense"[10 USC, Sect. 151]; in the past, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a corporate body, performed that function. To allow divergent views to be heard, the Act permits a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who disagrees with the Chairman's position to submit separate advice, and allows that the President, the National Security Council, or The Secretary of Defense may request that a dissenting member of the Joint Chiefs provide alternate advice. Once again, however, those familiar with bureaucratic processes and organizational dynamics will understand that a dissenting member of the Joint Chiefs could present a divergent position to the NCA (either on his own initiative or on request) perhaps once or twice during his tenure and still remain effective within the organization. In that regard, the Act has had a "chilling effect" on dissent and has undercut the philosophy of multiple sources of advice to politically responsible authority.

Moreover, the Act has reinforced that "chilling effect" by granting the Chairman control of the agenda of Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings, thereby making it possible for him to control the issues the Joint Chiefs can consider. The Joint Chiefs now primarily deal with the routine and mundane. An examination of agenda items reveals that during the operation to evacuate U.N. forces from Somalia, for example, the Joint Chiefs spent most of their time in the "Tank" discussing matters of such importance as commissaries and child care. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently remarked that to wean the Joint Chiefs from involvement in meaningful issues, the Chairman "very cleverly quit having substantive Tank sessions" and that, "the construct that says a lot of major decisions get made in the Tank is starting to break down" [emphasis added].(Note 20)

In addition to allowing the Chairman to exclude the other members of the Joint Chiefs from the consideration of meaningful issues, the Act has also allowed the Chairman, singularly, to become more ensconced in the chain of command. As quoted above, the Act states that the chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary and thence to the commanders in chief. The Act goes on to state that the NCA may communicate through the Chairman, and also states that the Chairman outranks all other officers of the armed forces. Moreover, it also established a Vice Chairman, and gave him seniority over the other Joint Chiefs, second only to the Chairman. Literalists will disagree, but the result of the above places the Chairman in the chain of command and gives him great authority over the combatant commands, diminishing significantly the impact and authority of the other Chiefs.

The Chairman's authority in the chain of command derives from the statutory authority of the National Command Authorities. As the first military officer below the NCA, the Chairman receives their political directives, translates them to operational orders, and transmits those orders to the combatant commanders. Those functions impart a degree of command authority, whichis informal rather than statutory but it is no less real. If the Chairman is to have any credibility, that authority must exist, otherwise combatant commanders could circumvent orders they disagreed with and appeal directly to the NCA as General MacArthur attempted in 1951. The Joint Chiefs' role in General MacArthur's relief is one example of that informal or residual command authority, and now the Chairman alone exercises that authority. Likewise, assertions that the Joint Staff is not a national general staff are gossamer thin. In its essence, a general staff is characterized by

a single national chief of staff with command authority over the military forces of the nation, as well as personal control over an independent general staff . . . comprised of elite career staff officers possessing intermittent experience with the operational aspects of military endeavor. Their influence and authority supersede the services as well as the field commands, and provide the principal source of recommendations and advice to the national chief of staff as principal advisor to politically responsible authority.(Note 21)

Despite congressional intent that it "not operate or be organized as an overall Armed Forces General Staff"[10 USC, Sect. 155], the Joint Staff has gradually come to resemble one, which was inevitable, given that the Act reduced the Secretary of Defense's staff without abolishing corresponding functions. Wherever a vacuum has occurred, the Joint Staff has stepped in. The Joint Staff has even come to influence resource decisions, like its prohibited progenitor the German General Staff.

Taken together, the effects of the Goldwater-Nichols Act on the powers and functions of the Secretary and the Chairman have resulted in a decisionmaking structure that mirrors that which existed during the Vietnam War, with one difference. During that conflict, the Secretary and his assistants and staff were empowered by the amended National Security Act to exclude the expertise of the nation's senior military leadership. Under Goldwater-Nichols, the Chairman has been similarly empowered to minimize participation in the deliberative decisionmaking process at the national level. The root problem is the same, only the attire of the key players has changed. Combining the power of the Chairman with the relative effectiveness of the Joint Staff versus its civilian counterparts sets all the necessary conditions for military usurpation of civilian decisionmaking authority.

Whenever there are strong differences of opinion or difficult problems, there is a human tendency to seek the one-man solution. Our generation has had painful opportunity to observe the dangers of this course.(Note 22)

With those simple sentences, Mr. Ferdinand Eberstadt, Chairman of the Hoover Commission Task Force on National Security, which studied defense reorganization in the late 1940s, summed up the motivation for unifying the Joint Chiefs of Staff (as Goldwater-Nichols has done) and its inherent dangers. The military decisions that must be made at the seat of government are manifestly different from those that are made at lower levels. The primary danger to which Eberstadt alluded was the tendency of general staff organizations to turn inward, stifle debate, and make erroneous strategic decisions. The challenge is in establishing a structure that can weigh the complex issues of the American security problem and arrive at decisions in a manner consistent with the American traditions of governance.

The arguments in favor of unifying the Joint Chiefs under a powerful Chairman are many, but in essence they boil down to military efficiency. The desire in the early 1980s, and indeed in some quarters since 1947, has been to organize the entire military command structure along the lines of a combat command. Reformers who argued for and won a simplified command structure, organized on military staff lines, fail to understand the fundamental difference between decisionmaking at the operational and tactical levels, and decisionmaking at the strategic level. A military staff organization is designed for the express purpose of allowing a commander to reach a decision and act quickly. Its "principal faculty is the swift suppression, at each level of consideration, of alternative courses of action, so that the man at the top has only to approve or disapprove-but not to weigh alternatives."(Note 23) It works extremely well on the battlefield, but is altogether inappropriate at higher levels.

Mistakes at the tactical and operational levels can usually be corrected before they do serious damage to a particular campaign or the outcome of a war. On the other hand, strategic level errors-fundamental mistakes in force structure and the objectives of national policy-are usually irretrievable and often fatal. Mistakes at the strategic level impact millions of people for generations; consider the aftereffects of the Vietnam War. Those responsible for decisions at the seat of government must carefully consider all issues, and the only way that can happen is if those most familiar with them are allowed a voice in the debate. At the critical interface between national policy and military action that is the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dissent born of honest judgment must be considered. Deliberative decisionmaking is frustrating for those who miscomprehend the complexity of strategic issues and prefer simple and clear-cut answers, but strategic level questions offer no such easy answers. Rather, "at the top levels of government, where planning precedes, or should precede, action by a considerable period of time, a deliberate decision is infinitely preferable to a bad decision."(Note 24)

Some decry the potential for JCS deliberation to result in "split decisions," but a split decision should serve as a signal that the issue in question should be decided by a politically responsible civilian. Returning to Mr. Eberstadt's findings, a split decision "would normally imply that the issue is beyond solution by the resources of military technology and experience, and is, therefore, within the competence of civilian judgment and authority."(Note 25) Though it may rankle some military officers, when the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs diverge, particularly when the issue in question is one upon which the future of the Nation may hang, then it is clearly the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense or the President, as politically responsible authorities, to adjudicate the issue.

Finally, proponents of Goldwater-Nichols argued that it was necessary to eliminate interservice rivalry and to force interservice cooperation. They point to failures in the Iranian desert and in Beirut and operational difficulties in Grenada as evidence of a need for unification. They make great use of Eisenhower's assertion that "separate ground, sea, and air warfare is gone forever."(Note 26) But the idea that unifying the efforts of all arms is a key ingredient for success has been a guiding principle (and a major challenge) for commanders since the Peloponnesian War, when "thens waged a joint naval and land campaign against Sparta. It is also irrelevant to the issue of military decisionmaking at the seat of government. Joint interoperability and the deliberative direction of national strategy are not even remotely related.

Given the above, it is clear that arguments in favor of unifying the Joint Chiefs of Staff as necessary for "military efficiency" are a red herring. At no time in our history, before or after Goldwater-Nichols, have the Joint Chiefs been responsible for split-second, life-or-death decisionmaking. That argument was fallaciously raised during the height of the Cold War, but even then the United States had a combatant commander responsible for those decisions. Taken to its logical conclusion, that argument would "justify the elimination of Congress and the Supreme Court in order to achieve more direct and rapid governmental processes under direction of the executive branch."(Note 27)

The Persian Gulf War was seen by some as a vindication of the reforms instituted by Goldwater-Nichols. On the contrary, rather than vindicating the reform effort, the Gulf War illuminated serious flaws in the national military command structure. First, as discussed earlier, the stellar tactical and operational performance of U.S. forces in Southwest Asia can more likely be attributed to the Reagan era buildup, which thoroughly modernized the operating forces, made possible a complete revamping of doctrine, and improved the quality and training of personnel at every level. Second, the Act would have precluded civilian authorities from playing a part in military decisionmaking and shielded the theater commander from the inputs of meddlesome Department of Defense officials and Pentagon staff officers. But the idea for the brilliant operational maneuver to envelop the Republican Guard was originally conceived by an assistant to the Secretary, a civilian who in an earlier era might have been derided as a "whiz kid" or a meddlesome DOD official.

Third, throughout the war, the theater commander failed to fully grasp the political significance of the Iraqi SCUD attacks on Israel as opposed to their military significanceCor more accurately, insignificance. Accordingly, he was loath to allocate scarce assets to help the Israelis defend against them, an objective of dubious military utility given the technology available and the fact that even a damaged SCUD must eventually fall to earth. The Chairman, nominally precluded from anything but the transmission of NCA approved orders to the theater commander, intervened and sent Patriot missile batteries to Israel. Finally, early in the conflict the theater commander's staff proved incapable of developing a plan for an air offensive that capitalized on the overwhelming strength of the American (and later coalition) air forces. The plan that finally emerged was developed not by the combatant commander's staff nor by the Joint Staff, as Goldwater-Nichols would have it, but by the group of officers most expert in the employment of air power, the Air Staff- a Service Staff under the cognizance of the nation's most experienced military aviator, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force.(Note 28)

The above examples are not intended as criticisms. Rather, they illustrate what thoughtful observers intuitively understand-that warfare in general, and in particular as it is waged by the United States, is a vast and complex undertaking, the direction of which is beyond the abilities of any individual or small group. Desert Shield and Desert Storm succeeded partly because the NCA and the Department of Defense ignored the constrained operational command structure established by Goldwater-Nichols.

Fortunately for the outcome of the Persian Gulf War, the NCA could disregard the operational command relationships dictated by Goldwater-Nichols. As a brief crisis in which decision cycles were relatively short, it was a simple matter to recognize the shortcomings of the system and to take steps to avoid them. In the strategic questions that the same insular system addresses, decision cycles are much longer, and a conceptual failure similar to those averted in Desert Storm by involving diverse expertise and ideas will take longer to become apparent. During the Persian Gulf War, it was relatively easy for the Secretary and the Chairman to see where the combatant commander was going wrong and to make necessary corrections; in strategic matters, the NCA and the American people might not realize that a particular policy is misguided until it is too late.

One of the central purposes of Goldwater-Nichols was to ensure that those responsible for aspects of national security at the strategic and operational levels have commensurate authority to implement their decisions, thus the furor over ensuring that the regional CINCs had sufficient command authority over the forces assigned to them to carry out their responsibilities. The service Chiefs similarly struggle to balance their Title 10 responsibilities to raise and equip their services, and to provide ultimately properly organized and trained forces to the CINCs, with the authority granted by law to determine how those forces will be organized, trained, and equipped. Clearly, a mismatch between responsibility and authority, at either the CINC or ervice Chief level, degrades the outcome of their respective efforts.

Proponents claimed that Goldwater-Nichols would resolve the apparent conflict of interest caused by the service Chiefs' simultaneous responsibilities for raising and equipping their services and for joint strategic decision making. As the argument goes, the "dual-hatting" of the service Chiefs made them incapable of honest judgments in the national interest and unable to provide unbiased joint advice when the interests of their particular service were at stake. The idea, then, was that disassociating the service Chiefs from joint decisionmaking would improve strategic advice. But if strategic advice consists of that advice concerning the organizing, training, and equipping of the services combined (and, ideally, matched) with advice concerning the employment of those resultant forces, can disassociating one from the other really improve the overall advice? To answer that question, one must understand the process by which strategic advice is developed.

In its essence, strategic advice to the NCA answers two questions: what to do (or plan to do) and what to buy. The questions are simple, but the answers quite difficult, because of, as discussed earlier, the complexity of national security issues. Ideally, the answers to both questions should match so that the Nation buys no more than it needs and attempts or plans no more than it can afford. The surest way to make the answers match is to have the person or agency responsible for execution also be responsible for advice. That is essentially how the services, organized under the Department of the Navy and the Department of War, operated during World War II. Then there were two theaters, one generally naval, one generally continental, and the Chief of Naval Operations and the Chief of Staff of the Army advised President Roosevelt on what to do (developing that advice within the nascent JCS) and through their respective Secretaries, also advised him on what to buy.

Things are a bit more complex now, and the World War II executive agent system no longer works. Under the amended National Security Act, functional and combatant CINCs employed the forces, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff provided the advice. The Joint Chiefs of Staff was established to synthesize the operational plans developed by the CINCs with the longer term strategic concepts developed by the Joint Chiefs, and from that basis advise the NCA on what to do, while simultaneously consolidating the CINCs' force and material requirements with JCS developed future programs to make recommendations to their respective Service Secretaries on what to buy. The service Secretaries, after receiving guidance from the Secretary of Defense, then submitted their budget recommendations to the Secretary of Defense for inclusion in the President's budget.

The Secretary of Defense was then responsible for ensuring that what the uniformed side planned matched what the civilian side had programmed, and vice versa. One strength of that system was that it observed the key principle of American governance, the separation of powers; it ensured that the hands that wielded the sword, the military, were separate and distinct from the hands closest to the purse, the civilian leadership of the Defense Department. The primary weakness was that the system offered ample opportunity for a mismatch between plans and programs, a real or perceived duplication of programs, or the development of "pet" programs irrelevant to national security needs. These were the chief criticisms of the system when Goldwater-Nichols was being considered, and Congress responded by granting the Chairman more power to influence the programming process.

Under Goldwater-Nichols, the CINCs employ the forces, as before, but now the Joint Staff synthesizes the plans and requirements of the CINCs, and develops the recommendations the Chairman submits to the NCA. Additionally, due to the measures implemented under Goldwater-Nichols that strengthen the power of the Chairman at the expense of the Service Chiefs and the Service Secretaries, the Chairman now enjoys increased influence on decisions concerning what to buy as well. As discussed above, strategic advice consists of plans (what to do) and programs (what to buy). The division of labor in developing that advice has the military -- formerly the corporate Joint Chiefs, but now primarily the Chairman -- responsible for planning, and the civilian leadership of the military departments responsible for programming. The Secretary of Defense guides both efforts by issuing the Defense Planning Guidance for programs and by providing guidance which the Chairman incorporates into the Chairman's Guidance to the Service Chiefs and CINCs for plans. The Service and military department staffs cooperate to develop complementary plans and programs, but in the case of a particular issue the staffs cannot agree upon, then The Secretary of Defense, or depend

So, can disassociating the service Chiefs from joint strategic advice improve that advice? No, it cannot. The reality of the matter is that if the two elements of strategic advice are to be in any way relevant to one another, then someone has to be dual-hatted. Effective strategic advice consists of complementary programs and plans. The CINCs develop requirements for programs and force capabilities and employ joint forces in the execution of operational plans. The capabilities of the forces are developed by the service Chiefs, who organize, train, and equip their respective services and develop service programs. Setting aside the role of the Chairman for a moment, it follows, then, that either the service Chiefs will wear a service hat for their programs and a joint hat as force providers, or the CINCs will wear an operational theater hat and a joint programs hat. However, as the Nation's warfighters, the CINCs should focus on their operational responsibilities. With staffs organized for warfighting, increasing CINC responsibilities in areas outside their primary focus detracts from their operational effectiveness. Additionally, the CINCs' operational responsibilities tend to drive them to a relatively short-term outlook. The development of strategic advice however, is a long term process. "Dual-hatting" the CINCs could result in conflicting short- and long-term interests, not the ideal condition for developing strategic advice that may affect the long-term security of the Nation.

Returning to the role of the Chairman, and the changes under Goldwater-Nichols, the CINCs now submit their requirements to the Chairman (rather than to the corporate JCS). Two CJCS policy memorandums have established procedures to provide opportunity for the incorporation of service views,(Note 29) but as discussed below, Goldwater-Nichols allows the Chairman to develop and submit his own planning and programming advice to the Secretary of Defense, bypassing the service Chiefs and service Secretaries. Setting aside the service roles now, strategic advice can be developed strictly within the joint structure. Again, that approach results in dual-hatting the CINCs, with the same conflicting interests of short-term operational and long-term strategic concerns.

So, the development of joint strategic advice inevitably results in dual-hatting. Rather than eliminating the phenomenon, Goldwater-Nichols has simply spread it into the operational structure. Undeniably, the conflicting interests caused by dual-hatting complicated the decisionmaking processes of the service Chiefs. However, if indeed the service Chiefs were hard pressed to balance their service and joint responsibilities, then it is not unreasonable to assume that the CINCs will have similar difficulty separating the short term operational issues of their theaters from the long term strategic needs of the Nation.

The Act's defenders will downplay the significance of the Chairman's authority to bypass the services and military departments in the development of strategic advice, but Section 153 of the Act makes the Chairman responsible for "Advising the Secretary on the extent to which the program recommendations and budget proposals of the military departments and other components of the Department of Defense . . . conform with the priorities established in strategic plans." Additionally, the Act makes the Chairman responsible for "Submitting to the Secretary alternative program recommendations and budget proposals" [10 USC, Sect. 153].

With those clauses, Congress came close to unifying the planning and programming processes under the Chairman. Section 153 rationalized those processes and improved their overall efficiency, but it has also damaged civilian control. The military side of the Defense Department now develops the plans and their resultant requirements, as before. At the same time, through the Joint Staff and the Joint Requirements Oversight Counsel (JROC), which only began to exploit fully the provision within the last few years, the military side also heavily influences the programming decisions of the civilian side. In fact, the law sets up the questionable situation whereby the work of the service Secretaries, nominally senior to any member of the military, is checked by the Chairman.

Consider the above in conjunction with former Secretary Aspin's remarks that the Joint Staff has proven more capable than its civilian counterparts at presenting bureaucratic arguments, and it is clear that Goldwater-Nichols has set the conditions whereby the military can set the terms of the national security debate. With the CINCs increasingly involved in resource issues, and the service Chiefs and service Secretaries increasingly cut out of the loop, Congress, too, has lost some ability to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities- its primary "contact points," the service Secretaries and service Chiefs, no longer control the machinery. Evidence of Congress' difficulty can be seen in the increased incidence of CINC testimony (taking them away from their primary duties); Congress seems to be grasping for control.

For their part, the service Chiefs, still responsible under Title 10 to organize, train, and equip the forces, have responded to their lack of influence within the system by attempting to shape congressional opinion from the outside. Hence the proliferation of articles that are essentially issue papers generated for the press, with the consequence that the services have become more politicized. Additionally, the JROC, intently focused on a few issues, can always beat the Congress to the punch regarding programs, putting Congress in the position of having to oppose a well organized and coordinated campaign in favor of the Chairman's proposals. Finally, while the Secretary can overrule the nominally subordinate Chairman, what political appointee will risk the political fallout of appearing to be consistently at odds with the Nation's senior soldier?

As demonstrated by the recent case of the additional B-2 bombers that Congress favored but the JROC opposed, Congress is now constrained in its ability to affect long term strategic issues. Though criticized by many as simply a "porkbarrel" program designed to spread jobs to the districts of influential members of Congress, it is precisely through programs like the B-2 that Congress influences the long term strategic direction of the defense establishment. During Truman's Presidency, Congress overrode an administration decision to terminate funding for aircraft carriers because, contrary to the Secretary and the civilian and uniformed leadership of the Army and Air Force, it saw a continued need for naval power projection. That, too, was criticized as "porkbarrel politics," but the history of American responses to crises over the last 40 years has proven the soundness of that decision.

In Goldwater-Nichols, critics of the corporate Joint Chiefs of Staff found a deceptively simple answer to a complex problem. The national security problem faced by the United States is vast in scope and complex in detail. It in no way resembles the security problem historically faced by Germany, essentially continental and amenable to a relatively simple solution like the Schleiffen Plan, or Israel, which, like Germany, knows precisely who its potential enemies are and from where they might attack. Each of its major theaters presents the United States with relatively simple security problems like those faced by Germany and Israel, but overall, the problem for the United States combines competing requirements of global complexity with the added challenge of deploying for war to nearly any spot on the planet. The solution to such a complex problem requires careful, balanced deliberation-the strength of the corporate JCS system that Goldwater-Nichols eviscerated.

During the Cold War, the United States focused its efforts on deterring the Soviet Union or defending Europe if deterrence failed. Given that focus, it is understandable that some came to see the American security problem in simplistic, bipolar terms. It is equally unsurprising that the two principal military critics of the corporate JCS system would be two officers (General Edward Meyer and General David Jones), who had spent their careers preparing to fight the Soviets in Europe. In a perfect example of the need for diversity in strategic advice, the critics of the corporate Joint Chiefs of Staff focused on only one aspect of the American security challenge and attempted to solve its perceived problems with a system better suited for simpler national security situations. As a consequence, the current national military command structure has become inordinately focused on the shorter term operational concerns of the combatant CINCs, to the detriment of long-term strategic concerns.

Goldwater-Nichols may have made the system more efficient, but that efficiency has come at the cost of the Secretary's and the Congress's ability to exert civilian control and has dangerously politicized the military. In reference again to Huntington and the model presented in figure 1, Goldwater-Nichols has caused the military to become immersed in politics, making civilian control of the military even more subjective. Like the law it replaced, Goldwater-Nichols has given the United States a national military command structure that violates the constitutional principle of separation of powers. The amended National Security Act consolidated previously dispersed powers into one office, unintentionally setting the conditions where an arrogant and headstrong Secretary of Defense was able to abuse them. As discussed in this paper, the Goldwater-Nichols Act has done essentially the same thing, but it has consolidated formerly dispersed powers into the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a result, the Act has set the conditions whereby the military might usurp some of the authority of its civilian leadership.

By establishing a system whereby military advice at the seat of government is presented as unanimous positions, Goldwater-Nichols offers the illusion that national security decision making can be made easier. However, in practice such advice can amount to de facto decisions by a single officer and could make mere figureheads of responsible civilian authorities. At the same time, Goldwater-Nichols has also allowed civilian authorities to abdicate some of their responsibilities. National security decisionmaking is a complex and difficult business. Long-term strategic decisions are the responsibility of politically accountable civilians, namely, the President, the Secretary, and the Congress. Those decisions are difficult and politically risky, but they are the decisions the Nation's civilian leaders are paid to make.

The military's role is to advise the decisionmakers and to execute their decisions. The military risks its relationship with the American people, one unique in history, when it becomes intimately involved in decisions that fall outside its proper sphere. The United States and its Armed Forces have already experienced the disastrous consequences of allowing excessive power to accrue to the civilian head of the defense establishment, and they can ill afford to suffer the potential consequences of allowing inordinate authority to accrue to the Nation's senior military officer.

Civilian control is an ongoing process rather than an accomplished fact, a work in progress rather than a finished product. As such, it depends very much on the situation and the personalities involved and on the procedures under which they operate. The central issue in civilian control in the United States is the "relative weight or influence of the military in the decisions the government makes, not only in military policy and war, but in foreign, defense, economic, and social policy (for much military policy can have vast implications for various aspects of national life)."(Note 30) Goldwater-Nichols allows the military to have inordinate influence on the decisions the government makes, and contrary to its intent, weakens civilian control.

Finally, those who would argue that the American military's tradition of subordination to civilian authority ensures that the military would never misuse its powers miss the point. The American form of governance is based on the premise that accumulated powers will eventually be misused. The separation of powers, while inherently inefficient, is the only sure defense against their misuse, and Congress must carefully and deliberately evaluate any initiative to consolidate powers and functions in the name of efficiency.

As General George C. Marshall, America's most distinguished soldier-statesman, eloquently illuminated in late 1942, civilian control of the Armed Forces of the United States requires eternal vigilance on the part of both soldiers and civilians. At the time, General Marshall had begun to look forward to the defeat of Germany and Japan, and to contemplate what the reconstruction of those shattered nations would require of the U.S. military. He established a Civil Affairs Division to oversee the training of officers for the task of administering military governments, and in his instructions to its director he provided enduring guidance for soldiers and legislators alike concerning the military's place in American society and the fragility of civilian control:

I'm turning over to you a sacred trust and I want you to bear that in mind every day and every hour that you preside over this civil affairs venture . . . we have a great asset, and that is our people, our countrymen, do not distrust us and do not fear us. Our countrymen, our fellow citizens, are not afraid of us. They don't harbor any ideas that we intend to alter the government of the country or the nature of this government in any way. This is a sacred trust . . . and I don't want you to do anything . . . to damage this high regard in which the professional soldiers in the Army are held by our people, and it could happen, it could happen . . . if you don't understand what you are about.(Note 31)

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Last Update:  October1, 2002