Once again the Joint Chiefs of Staff have become whipping boys for an influential section of the opinion-molding elite. Unlike similar flagellations, the apparent causes are neither a dramatic technological breakthrough nor a crushing setback to the nation’s security. Because the Korean War generated such bitter criticism of our military policy, it led understandably to the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1953. Likewise, Sputnik and the Soviet ICBM triggered the Reorganization Act of 1958. The McNamara administrative revolution, unlike the previous Eisenhower attempts at reorganization, is taking place without benefit of Congressional legislation, since, thanks to the Reorganization Acts of 1953 and 1958, the Secretary of Defense already has more than sufficient administrative power to make the necessary management changes. These latest reorganizations and others contemplated but never initiated, the Symington Reorganization Plan of 1960, and the Air University Black Book of Reorganization Papers, are ultimately concerned with abolishing the corporate structure known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But this is not a new or surprising phenomenon. Representative Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, once remarked:
One of the greatest services to the strengthening of our nation would be to stop tinkering with the statutory organization of our Defense Department.
Ever since we won World War II, we have been constantly urged to junk our war-proven Joint Chiefs of Staff system, and to replace it with the super high command which our enemies used, and which, because of its inflexibility, actually contributed to their own defeat.
Every additional step that we take toward a single general staff is a move closer to military and political disaster.
Since 1945, every time Congress’ opinion has been asked on reorganization matters, it has answered as Anglo-Saxon parliaments have since Cromwell’s days: it intends to keep as much control as possible over the armed forces. This is not the result of some senior chairman’s whim as is often alleged by those wishing to institute the single Chief of Staff system, but it is a Constitutional requirement. Article I, Section 8 states:
The Congress shall have the power,—To. . . provide for the common defence . . . To raise and support armies, ... To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulations of the land and naval forces; . . .
The power of Congress, like that of all Anglo-Saxon parliaments, is based on control of the purse strings; through annual appropriations Congress controls the ebb and flow of spending for the armed services. The English fought a revolution over this principle in the 17th century. The American Revolution and the resulting Constitution benefited from the English experience, as the founding fathers separated and fragmented control of the armed forces between the President and Congress. It may have been less efficient than Napoleonic, Prussian, Communist, or Nazi solutions to the eternal problem of the place of the military in society, but it has been much safer for democratic- republican institutions.
In the first National Security Act of 1947 as in the last one of 1958, Congress specifically and unequivocably noted that “in enacting this legislation, it is the intent of Congress . . . not to merge [these departments or services] . . . not to establish a single Chief of Staff over the armed forces nor an armed forces general staff ...” The public is aware of some of the substantive issues involved in the continuing controversy over Department of Defense organization, but it is still in the dark as to the nature, history, function, and advantages of the Joint Chiefs of Staff system, the real target of Pentagon critics.
Unfortunately, the public level of appreciation of Pentagon politics is similar to peeling an onion—the nearer one gets to the core, the stronger the controversy. A number of very complex issues are entangled in the current squabble, and all are ultimately related to the continued existence of the JCS as a corporate body. But what is the JCS? The Joint Chiefs of Staff as defined by law are to serve as military advisors to the President, Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. Except for the chairman, they are also the top officers of their respective services; therefore, they bring the experience and point of view of those responsible for providing the forces needed for a united effort. The chairman’s job is to preside at meetings, provide agenda, relieve other members of administrative matters including the administration of the Joint Staff, and to keep the Secretary of Defense informed on major issues under consideration. The Joint Staff, which was expanded to four hundred officers in 1958 in order to meet the new operational responsibilities of the JCS, shifted from a committee system to a staff system and is now organized into seven directorates.
The recent replacement of Admiral George W. Anderson, Jr., as Chief of Naval Operations and the appointment of General Curtis LeMay for an additional year only reflect the fact that the Joint Chiefs are appointed by the President and subject to his removal. Indeed, it should be noted that President Kennedy appointed both Anderson and LeMay in 1961. The TFX controversy, besides being an acid test of McNamara’s Pentagon management, also concerned the military competence of professional officers and the investigative powers of Congress. The debate over the future of the U. S. Strike Command ultimately involves the continued existence of the four military services, for the present organization law requires that the forces assigned to unified and specified commands be provided, administered, and supported by the three military departments. It is entirely conceivable that STRICOM, in its search for new missions, will be tempted and encouraged to absorb the traditional amphibious warfare functions of the Navy- Marine battle-tested team or attempt to carry out the traditional diplomatic functions of a “blue water” Fleet. North American-based jet transports and Composite Air Strike Forces would substitute for the global striking fleets. STRICOM then would be, in effect, the Kissinger-suggested limited war command (or U. S. mobile strike force) and the activation of similar commands, like the U. S. Strategic Command, Unified Logistics Command, Research and Development Command, and others, would follow as a matter of course. Fortress America would become a reality, as all oceanic-based usable force is withdrawn gradually to the North American continent. The traditional armed services would soon be gutted shells; the Pentagon would be completely reorganized; and Congress and the Constitution would be successfully flaunted and outflanked. Then a single Chief of Staff would willingly (or eagerly) take orders from the Secretary of Defense; life and death decisions would be based on intelligence information supplied by a single, integrated, intelligence network; and Congress and the people would be powerless to prevent the new totalitarianism from enveloping the land.
None of these dire changes will be foisted on the American defense establishment as long as the JCS exist in their present corporate structure with the Chiefs also the heads of their individual service, simply because the Chiefs can make their fears and recommendations known to the President, Secretary of Defense, or Congress. A national debate thus can be triggered, and in the course of this debate, pertinent issues can be raised so that the silent centralizers will not be able to carry out their schemes in the endless and anonymous Pentagon corridors. Although the JCS represent our professional military at their finest, their very existence is at stake.
What has happened to create the crisis of confidence between the soldier and civilian is that well-meaning but short-sighted technocrats, often infected with the liberal’s instinctive distrust of the military and discipline it entails, have attempted to impose their theories and will on institutions that are nearly two centuries old. This imposition is done in the sacred name of civilian control, cost effectiveness, and modernization. Thus the real issue, the place of the professional military in a democratic-republican society in 1964, is side-stepped. But before these new radicals throw out the baby with the bathwater, it is perhaps useful to look at the historical record.
Two months after Pearl Harbor, the U. S. JCS organization was set up by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to guide and direct American military participation in the conduct of the greatest war in history. The magnitude of the tasks they faced was tremendous. The United States had been catapulted by the Japanese attack into a war against fully mobilized enemies. The Joint Chiefs were faced with the immediate formulation and supervision of military operations and campaigns. They had to mobilize 13 million men to carry out these operations all over the world and to guide the productive efforts of many millions of others in the United States in equipping those military forces as well as those of our allies. These unprecedented tasks could be accomplished only by a multiple leadership of men trained to make decisions in many different fields of action. Success was possible because American institutions had provided a reservoir of a million leaders for use in various levels of our military and productive effort, from private to general, coxswain to admiral, and foreman to general manager. These were the leaders produced by the preceding generation of American free enterprise institutions. They were compatible with the requirement of a free nation waging war against collectivized totalitarianism. The JCS were then and remain today in harmony with this open society, a cardinal feature of which is the fragmentation of political and military power and the joining of responsibility and authority.
One of the main functions of the JCS during World War II was the “preparation of strategic plans and providing for the strategic direction of the military force.” Mistakes in strategy are made in every war, and, as Samuel Eliot Morison observed in Strategy and Compromise, “it may be said that, other things being equal, the side that makes the fewer strategic errors wins the war.” B. H. Liddell Hart, one of the foremost military theorists of our time, analyzed the strategic decisions of World War II and came to the conclusion that “no great military errors were made on the Allied side in the years from 1942 to 1945, following America’s entry into the war.” Admiral Morison further stated in Strategy and Compromise that the three major decisions resulting in victory in Europe and the Pacific were the correct ones and were American-inspired: the agreement emanating from the top secret Anglo-American ABC-1 conference of 27 March 1941, which called for “beating Hitler first”; the European theater decision for a cross-channel invasion in 1944; and the imaginative plan by which the campaign against the Japanese Empire was carried out.
In the final analysis, the lasting and authoritative proof of our military, or any military, is produced by the critical challenge of war or conflict. The only true test of the JCS organization is the success achieved in World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. This does not mean that there is no room for improvement in the defense organization. Changes will be required from time to time, but the guiding principles of change must insure that future employment of men and material is not hampered by overcentralization.
James Reston of the New York Times recently attempted to separate “legitimate” from illegitimate criticism of the reorganization changes taking place in the Pentagon. Reston wrote:
Having raised some fundamental issues about the military services, McNamara and Gilpatric are being challenged directly, which is fair enough. But they are also being attacked personally and obliquely, [alleged conflict of interest in the TFX] which is not fair and merely blurs the great questions of policy control which have divided Washington since the turn of the century.
It may be argued that the real reasons for the alleged assault on the “civilian” leader ship in the Pentagon have not been properly understood nor have the reasons for the legitimate criticisms of the “centralizers’” policies been advanced. There have been four classes of McNamara defenders, three of which have been quite vocal: first, the well-intentioned but relatively naive “liberal” defender of a simplistic concept of civilian control; second, the average cost-conscious citizen, who is happy to have someone knock military heads together and save money in the process; and third, the Brutus who on the surface comes to the Secretary’s defense while privately deploring his strategic views; biding his time, he hopes that a change in the administration or in world conditions will impose the single Chief of Staff and pre-emptive war concepts on the Pentagon.
On the other hand, McNamara’s traditionalist defenders—liberals and conservatives—hope that in the Secretary’s passion for efficiency he will not uproot age-old institutions in a frantic search for a panacea on the Potomac. In other words, these supporters hope that the necessary professionalism of our armed services will be allowed and, indeed, encouraged to flourish and that the ever-present temptation to mix soldier and politician will be resisted. For the alternative to this necessary military professionalism is a heavy and overwhelming military intrusion into the political process.
Let the battle be joined then on the actual issues created by McNamara’s mastery of the Pentagon. Civilian control is not one of them nor is military insubordination. Congressional participation in control of the armed services is an issue, however, as is the legal right of the professional military to express their military views to Congress or the White House, without fear of retaliation by the Secretary of Defense.
The New York Times noted that one cornerstone of our governmental system is that the military are under civilian control and that as part of our system the professional heads of the armed forces should “be as free as possible from political pressure. Both the Executive and Legislative branches must be able to count on honest and detached military opinions. No Chief of Staff can become a political cat’s- paw without forfeiting his usefulness.”
Secretary McNamara has remarked, and all professionals would agree with him, that once a decision is made “by God, I expect everyone to fall in line. You can’t run a military organization with divided authority.” But this observation on civilian control of the military does not apply to testimony before the legally constituted committees of the House and Senate. For, under the Constitution, the power to create the armed forces resides solely in Congress. The legislative branch has the power to raise and support armies and to provide a Navy. Therefore, it is impossible for the military to become a state within a state with the power to reproduce itself. The Constitution further reinforced this principle by providing that no appropriation to raise or support armies would be for a longer term than two years, thereby making the army subject to biennial review. In addition, Congress has the power to declare war and “to make rules for the government and the regulation of the land and naval forces.”
The time-honored and only effective way that Congress can secure the necessary information for legislation and appropriations is to call the various military representatives up to the Hill, listen to their presentations, and question them on the adequacy or inadequacy of the Executive Budget formulation request. But this process imposes a difficult, if not impossible, task on military officers. At this time the service chief often is torn between his duty to defend the essentially politically motivated budget of the Executive branch and the national security as seen through the unique eyes of the testifying chief. Often as not, especially if the issue is crucial enough, Congress draws from the chief some criticism of current administration defense policy. This has happened frequently in the past as the congressional testimony of these leaders reveals: General Billy Mitchell, General Douglas MacArthur, Admiral Louis Denfeld, General Matthew D. Ridgway, General James M. Gavin, General Maxwell D. Taylor, General Thomas S. Power, General LeMay and Admiral Anderson. Past conflicts have involved the role of the airplane in war, the future of amphibious warfare, the roles of the battleship and aircraft carrier, the usefulness of strategic or area bombing, the concept of limited war, the limits or potentialities of massive retaliation, the usefulness of tactical atomic weapons, the need for a counterforce strategy; the possibility of controlled thermonuclear war, and the desirability of an American-directed “controlled peace.”
Professional military intellectuals, university intellectuals, and “defense intellectuals” (springing for the most part from the Air Force-supported Rand Corporation) have helped explain, or formulate, these crucial issues. It should be noted that contrary to General Thomas D. White’s allegations (Saturday Evening Post, 4 May 1963), there has been no unanimity among these defense specialists on strategic and tactical concepts. Many of them, in fact, criticize each other as much as they do General White and Secretary McNamara.
No matter how impressive a man is, he is not indispensable. By and large, after some false starts, Secretary McNamara’s basic strategic decisions have been essentially sound; he has attempted to make U. S. military power more responsive to national security and foreign policy objectives while rejecting pre-emptive war or a first strike counterforce strategy. We should not be misled by a virtuoso performance, however, for let us recall the old adage that institutions are older and far wiser than men. What will happen after McNamara? The magazine Missiles and Rockets, a long time advocate of “centralization,” has cautiously and surprisingly remarked:
Will successors to Mr. McNamara and Mr. Gilpatric, who perhaps will lack their tireless attention to detail, be able to handle such a formidable task? . . . When the centralization policy is fully implemented, when many thousands of decisions now made at lower levels are passed up, can even Mr. McNamara and Mr. Gilpatric handle the job?
General White, another long time advocate of a single service-single Chief of Staff and past supporter of Rand-type “defense intellectuals,” is likewise confused by recent DOD events and decisions:
It is ironical that the Air Force—the only one of the armed services to back greater centralized authority in the Department of Defense—appears to have suffered most under the tight controls of Secretary of Defense McNamara. Such cherished AF programs as the RS-70 are meeting slow death, the Skybolt has been cancelled, and progress in military space is not apparent.
Suppose McNamara’s not-so-naïve reorganization staff succeed in their administrative revolution in the Pentagon. What would be the result: The dissolution of the JCS? A merger of the services? A single governmentwide intelligence agency? All money power to the Secretary of Defense? Can anyone seriously doubt that this type of massive centralization (carried out in the name of economy and efficiency) by focusing the tremendous economic, political, and military power of the Pentagon in one appointive official will not make a future coup d’état easier or facilitate the creation of a garrison state?
In this connection, let us remember that the original “Collins Plan,” favoring a single Chief of Staff, at first had the approval of President Harry Truman. Later, after giving it more thought, Truman reversed his position completely and opposed the single Chief of Staff because of the “man on horseback1” danger. Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal wrote in his diary on 13May 1946:
The president said that while he would not be too much concerned if the nation could always count on having someone like Admiral Leahy in the position, he felt nevertheless that the idea was a dangerous one, that it was too much along the lines of the “man on horseback” philosophy, and that he had finally made up his own mind against it.
At the very least, the single Chief of Staff would make the possibility of a major strategic mistake much more likely. Admiral Morison recalled that FDR “was apt to entertain extravagant strategical ideas; but unlike the Prime Minister, he could usually be kept on the straight-and-narrow path by General Marshall and Admirals King and Leahy.” One must also caution that the merger of the services and the creation of a single Chief of Staff would choke off strategic dissent. The preservation of the capillary tubes of dissent is of primary importance. The fact that the present administration has moved away from massive retaliation toward flexible response is not new, but the fortunate thing is that there was an alternative strategy toward which to move. This new strategy was hammered out in the Joint Chiefs, outside the JCS by ex-JCS members, and assisted by one faction of the scholarly community of “defense intellectuals.”
Military men have traditionally been able to supply all gradations of power from police action to total war into the hands of politicians and diplomats, provided they were given the necessary men, weapons, supplies, and political backing. Current leadership in Washington is finally recognizing the need for usable power after having been blinded by the atom’s white blaze for 18, long, post-World War II years. Theodore White, in his informed analysis of the Pentagon and Secretary McNamara’s trusteeship, quoted the Secretary on the necessity for usable military power:
Massive retaliation as a form of power just wasn’t credible in response to a situation like the Berlin Wall, or to a situation like Vietnam, or Cuba. Massive retaliation had given us no usable power to prevent the U.S.S.R. from expanding its interests in Cuba. So we had to develop forms of usable power. . . .
But the application of power, how it should be applied, is even more difficult than any concern with the type or quantity of power. . .
At least until the world has developed a workable rule of law in international affairs, the foundation of foreign policy is power—but it has to be usable power, controlled to serve reasonable ends. And that’s the way we’re moving—from unreason to reason.
Another and even more disturbing trend of this creeping centralization is the tremendous potential of the economic control implicit in the 53-billion-dollar defense budget, which represents the greater part of our national budget and reaches into the life of every congressional district, county, and township. It has the greatest economic and political potential for social change in our country. As Representative Clare Hoffman once remarked: “If any single man could control that establishment, he would have the potential control of the U.S.”
It is interesting to note that only one prominent military leader defended the revolutionary thesis of Knebel and Bailey’s Seven Days in May. But that is not surprising, for Admiral Arleigh Burke had courageously warned against this vast political-economic power two years before President Eisenhower’s warning against the “military-industrial complex.” Admiral Burke, in a memorable speech to the National Press Club on 6 January 1958, pointed out that money is the vehicle by which we translate ideas into action:
This is the incredible power of the Pentagon. This power is now held in check and balance in the Pentagon. Upset this balance, transfer this power, directly or indirectly to one military man and you lay the foundation for disaster.
Even held within the present balance—this is an awesome responsibility. It makes me shudder with a cold fear when someone suggests that we suppress our opinions, that we submit to a single wise man in whatever uniform, that we speak with a single subservient voice, the only military advice available to the Secretary of Defense or the President or the Congress or the people.
Admiral Burke further suggested that “if we believe that one man, a military Solomon, is necessarily wiser than many men, then why not carry this logic further ... to its almost inevitable conclusion and abolish the Congress, make the people’s elected Chief Executive a figurehead, and place our future in the hands of a single military National Protector?”
Finally, one must consider also that the possibility of a pre-emptive blow “to make the world safe for democracy” is greatly increased by any new Pentagon centralization. For this centralization would reduce such a black decision to four men: the President, the Secretary of Defense, the single Chief of Staff, and the head of the Intelligence Agency. One of the alleged basic reasons for the centralization campaign in the late 1950s and 60s was the need to cut reaction and decision time to the bone, because Russian ballistic missiles could destroy our fixed bomber-based deterrents in less than 30 minutes. This concept was at the heart of the Symington and Air University reorganization proposals of 1960. But the hardened Minuteman and mobile sea-based Polaris have made such centralization unnecessary from a decision making point of view, for our deterrent is now built to survive, retaliate, and inflict unacceptable losses on the aggressor. Secretary McNamara has also strengthened the command and control features of the retaliatory forces so that any response we make will be a measured one.
This attempt to prevent a “spasm war” and insure that a measured amount of usable force will be utilized in any challenged area any place on the globe, is far different but semantically similar to another set of strategies that have been peddled within the defense establishment during the last two years: a set of strategies that ultimately demand a single Chief of Staff. Pre-emptive war’s chameleonic guises have been “exercise of the initiative,” “controlled thermonuclear war,” “controlled peace,” and “exploitation of nuclear escalation.” Its infestation has been in selected “think groups,” quasi-governmental corporations, professional militarists, syndicated columnists, respected senators, but it has not prevailed in the “tank,” or Gold Room, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Thus far, neither the decision for a single Chief of Staff nor for pre-emptive war has ever been made because of our alert presidents, certain vigilant congressmen, and courageous military officers, whose very presence has been a deterrent to such un- American concepts as pre-emptive war. If that decision is to be made some day, it must not be made in secret but with full debate in the Congress, press, and main streets of America. A select or elite Department of Defense faction must not be allowed to make such momentous decisions without enlightened public participation. The new look and massive retaliation of 1953-54 were poorly thought-out strategies based on national faith in gadgetry, easy solutions, the technological superiority of American industry and economy, and a poorly understood limited war in Korea. These, combined with a change of political administration in Washington, produced a new strategic doctrine that was merely a modification of the “instant retaliation” of 1948-49. C. P. Snow, in a warning that has angered technocrats the world over, has stated:
One of the most bizarre features of any advanced industrial society in our time is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men: in secret: and, at least in legal form, by men who cannot have a firsthand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be. . . . When I say “cardinal choices,” I mean those which determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die. For instance, the choice in England and the United States in 1940 and 1941, to go ahead with work on the fission bomb: the choice in 1945 to use that bomb when it was made: the choice in the United States and the Soviet Union, in the late forties, to make the fusion bomb: the choice which led to a different result in the United States and the Soviet Union, about intercontinental missiles.
If there ever comes a day when a totalitarian faction becomes the single American political party, then and only then, will it be logical and necessary to create a single Chief of Staff, buttressed by a single service and single intelligence network. Then there will be a positive need for a completely harmonious and uniform party line. But until that day arrives, the Joint Chiefs must be preserved as the guardians of strategic policy and of strategic dissent as well. Undoubtedly they will continue to suffer from the criticism of misguided professional reorganizers and those who comprehend neither our democratic heritage nor our constitutional government. The existence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff serves as a continuing reminder that the fundamental checks and balances are still in equilibrium, although they are constantly under fire by external and internal enemies to whom the luxury of dissenting military opinion is something which their psychological makeup will not allow them to tolerate.
In late May, 1963, Chairman Vinson introduced a bill to provide standard four-year terms for members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This legislation, if enacted, would strengthen the JCS system by giving the Chiefs
the assurance that an individual appointed to that position will be able to act as the senior military member of his service for a significant length of time in order to become thoroughly familiar with this job.
Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must be free to express their independent judgment on all military matters. They should not be concerned about whether or not they will be reappointed.
Out of the democratic ferment swirling around the place of the JCS in our defense establishment, it now appears possible that a stronger and refurbished Joint Chiefs of Staff system will emerge. Long may they serve.
1. The appearances on horseback of French General Georges Boulanger, whose political activities threatened the French Republic in the 1880’s, gave rise to the phrase.