December 14, 2015
Congressional hearings on the provisions of the thirty year old Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986 have the potential to substantially improve defense decision-making and move the nation toward a 21st century defense organization. They have also allowed old, discredited concepts to surface in a time where not all recognize their potential for harm. One of these is the idea of an American “General Staff” that would supposedly be an improvement over the current Joint Chiefs of Staff system. Historically, the General Staff has been a product of continental, authoritarian regimes focused on operational and tactical land warfare, and not one of democratic nations with global interests. A U.S. version of this organization has been proposed in similar forms since 1941, and has not improved with age. In the post World War 2 period, the idea of an American General Staff has been used as a means of ensuring or usurping military control within the U.S. military and U.S. civilian government organization. Centralization of military decision-making has never yielded good results and even the relatively modest Goldwater Nichols reforms have led to several significant poor outcomes since 1986. A plurality of inputs in defense decision-making, as practiced by the Allied powers during the Second World War, and in the early and middle Cold War, is well proven as a system to ensure maximum review and vetting of strategic defense decisions. As the nation looks to get more out of its shrinking defense establishment, the implementation of a General Staff represents a retrograde movement toward increased despotism in defense organization.
The concept of a single chief-general staff is the product of the military times and operational geography of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632) and Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712-1786). It achieved its high water mark in the Wars of German Unification from 1864 to 1870 when the Prussian Army and troops of allied German states defeated the armies of Denmark, the Austrian Empire and the French Empire of Napoleon III in a series of short wars. Over the course of these conflicts the Prussian Army “Great General Staff” became both a planning staff for the Prussian Army, but also a clearinghouse for best practices in operational and tactical warfare. General Staff officers alternated between staff and operational assignments in order to maintain their currency in the state of ground warfare. The Prussian General Staff became a German one after unification in 1871 and continued to improve upon its proven methods. Under the influence of the General Staff the German Army achieved arguably the best operational and tactical performance of all combatant armies in the World Wars.
Despite this achievement, the General Staff concept contained significant flaws that manifested themselves as early as the German unification wars. After defeating the Austrians in the major battle of Koinggratz, the Prussian Chief of Staff von Moltke and the King Wilhelm wanted to march on and capture the Austrian capital of Vienna. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who did not want a wider war, narrowly persuaded the King and his generals to avoid making Austria a permanent enemy with such a step. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian War Bismarck was unsuccessful in convincing the King and his generals to not lay siege to and bombard Paris, or demand reparations in the form of territory submission. The Prussian siege caused the collapse of the French government and the taking of Alsace Lorraine a semi-permanent condition of hostility between the two states that contributed to war in 1914.
The German General Staff was an Army organization and even as Germany’s strategic horizon’s expanded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it made no attempt to expand its geographic or operational concepts beyond its central European origins. It did not foster the same cooperation with the new Imperial German Navy that it demanded from Army commanders and political leaders. Its Nazi-era joint doppleganger, the Obercommando der Wehmacht (OKW), was organized in an equally rigid manner as its Army predecessor. It was supposed to duplicate the Army general staff on a joint level, but it remained more a facilitating vehicle for Hitler’s own ideas instead of an independent planning organization. Its one possibility to shine was in the 1940 Norway campaign, but inter-service bickering in the planning process caused Hitler to assume overall command and micromanage the nominal joint and ground force commander, General von Falkenhorst though the OKW Operations staff in Berlin.[1] The Allied combined Chiefs of Staff, by contrast, operated by discussion and consensus building rather than command fiat and were able to orchestrate truly joint operations through more informal channels of cooperation.
The idea of an American “General Staff” began with a proposal by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy for such an organization in June 1941. It was unanimously opposed by the service chiefs and service secretaries. The most significant support came from Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, then servings as Army Wars Plans Division Director. Eisenhower claimed that, “the principles of strategy and employment of forces were the same for all services.”[2] Eisenhower’s statements seem to harden the stance of the Navy, who fundamentally disagreed with this assertion. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall agreed with the Navy that any “functions of the Chief of a Joint General Staff,” would, “deal with assembling, coordinating and briefing military information to the President” rather than supreme command.[3]
After the war the services resumed their usual competition for scare resources. The Army chose this moment to re-introduce the general staff concept for consideration. Army leadership was especially concerned that their service would lose out in postwar budget battles to the “more glamorous Air Force and Navy if a single military department headed by an overall Chief of Staff was not in place.”[4] Other factors alongside budget battles had also emerged to perhaps favor the general staff concept. There was great pressure on the U.S. military services to integrate their command and control functions after several investigative committees blamed the surprise Pearl Harbor attack on failures in Army and Navy cooperation. The prevention of an atomic surprise attack was also a significant concern in the general public.[5] The Army, notably Generals Marshall in public and Eisenhower in private, recommended a unified national military structure with the military service departments much reduced in authority. The Army’s most “radical” element was the introduction of a Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, now styled as the “Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces” who would act as the overall commander of the nation’s military forces. That officer would be provided with a full General Staff to carry out his responsibilities. Overall, it appeared that the Army scheme, known as the Collins Plan by its designated presenter General J. Lawton Collins, would, “would remove the civilian secretary from any significant influence not only on matters concerning appropriations, but on those concerning military strategy.”[6] Eisenhower to his credit later recommended removing the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces from the chain of command and making him instead the President’s principal military adviser as a compromise in the maintenance of overall armed forces harmony.[7]
There was also support for a General Staff based on the statements of the surviving German military leadership.While the Nazi system was universally despised, the surviving German Generals were able to create a myth that they were operational geniuses who if not controlled by Hitler could have won the war with meager resources. The emerging Cold War restricted access to the Soviet view which suggested German incompetence at all levels of warfare, and in its absence the idea of a general staff on perhaps the German model gained currency in the West.
The idea of an Army-organized and operated General Staff was anathema to senior naval officers for many of the same reasons it had been in 1941. Army officers did not fundamentally understand the nuances of naval warfare. Furthermore, the leadership of the services that emerged in 1945 had fought two very different wars. Army leaders such as Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley had fought a primarily land campaign in Europe long after the German Navy or Air Force had much influence on their operations. Navy leaders like Admirals Chester Nimitz and future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (CJCS) Admiral Arthur Radford had fought a primarily sea and air war in the Pacific that was briefly punctuated with ground force operations much smaller in comparison with those of Europe. Neither group had fought a truly joint war, although the Army leadership vehemently maintained that they had and that the Navy had not done so in the Pacific.
Navy Secretary James Forrestal feared the consequences of unification for both the Navy and for the “national security” of the United States in general.[8] In cooperation with his long time friend and business partner Ferdinand Eberstadt, he recommended a postwar concept of defense organization that maintained unified command in geographic operational environments while preserving a corporate, decentralized authority in Washington. Eberstadt argued that, “separate organizations engendered healthy competition and high morale.”[9] Navy leadership agreed and believed that, “A Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Committee system, in which decisions about how best to allocate military forces to accomplish national goals would be made through compromise following a thorough airing of competing service viewpoints, which would provide the most realistic solution.”[10] President Truman supported the Army’s plan and was very unhappy that his Navy Secretary was advancing an alternate organization concept.[11] The Army plan at first had significantly more support than the Navy’s, but despite strong testimony in its favor by Marshall and Eisenhower, the Navy’s concept won the day and the National Security Act of 1947 largely reflected the Eberstadt report’s recommendations.
Eisenhower remained dissatisfied by the corporate military organization he inherited in 1952 and again set about creating a general staff system. Unlike 1947, however, Ike envisioned a Chairman and JCS that responded to his direction much as his Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces Europe (SHAEF) and later NATO staffs did when the President was still in uniform. His 1953 Reorganization Plan 6, which survived a significant challenge in the House of Representatives, further increased the power of the Chairman by authorizing him to manage the Joint Staff. It also increased the size of the Defense Department and added a number of new Deputy Secretaries. When this system did not prove strong enough for Eisenhower’s liking, he began a second round of reform that resulted in the landmark 1958 reform package that effectively removed the JCS from the chain of command altogether, and further strengthened the Joint Unified and Specified Commanders. Eisenhower failed to get his desired increase in the size of the Joint Staff and Congress still inserted into the legislation a clause that stated, “The joint staff shall not be operated or be organized as an overall Armed Forces General Staff and shall have no executive authority.”[12]
While Eisenhower was not able to impose a general staff system, his efforts essentially created one where the President could serve as his own supreme commander with direct access to combatant forces through the Unified Commanders. Eisenhower brooked no dissent from his service chiefs once he made a decision and imposed loyalty tests on his JCS appointees, notably General Maxwell Taylor and Admiral Arleigh Burke.[13] While Ike’s goal remained “unity of command”, he set a precedent where the JCS began an essentially military relationship with the President, as opposed to one of military officer and civilian leader. Admiral Burke later regretted this change and suggested that had the service chiefs been more forceful and “pounded the table aggressively” when they disagreed with the President, poor national security outcomes like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 could have been prevented.[14] Eisenhower’s system may have been ideal for a former 5 star coalition military commander, but his successors were not so eminently qualified to operate his system of unified command.
The succeeding Kennedy administration began its relationship with the Joint Chiefs on a sour note as a result of what Burke described as a failure to “pound the table.” Kennedy was later quoted after the Bay of Pigs disaster as saying to one author, “The first advice I am going to give my successor is to watch the generals and avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”[15] This feeling of distrust continued over the course of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Secretary of Defense McNamara and his systems analyst acolytes sought to organize the military around operational missions rather than by service or geographic area.[16] Conflict over entry into and conduct of the Vietnam War further divided successive Presidents and civilian defense leaders from the uniformed leadership of the armed forces. These conflicts continued through the 1970’s. The period of 1945-1986 was one of continual battle over which branch of government; Congress or the President would exercise the most control over the uniformed military.
A much modified version of the General Staff concept returned with the 1980’s defense reform movement that culminated in the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986. In this reform effort, members of Congress unhappy with the outcome of the Vietnam War, and failures in special operations missions from 1975-1983, supported by Congressional staffers that had been McNamara-trained analysts combined forces against the post 1958 JCS system. These reformers argued for a powerful, “non parochial” uniformed military leadership, a military organized around missions as recommended by Mr. McNamara in the 1960’s and an enlarged and empowered Department of Defense to again combat the supposed threat of “lack of civilian control.” As in 1958, the reform movement that led to the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986 achieved some noteworthy success, but failed to attain its long sought desire for a supreme military commander leading a mission-focused force. The 1985 “Defense Organization, The Need for Change” report to the Senate Armed Services Committee details these goals. This report, named for its principle author (and former Program Analysis and Evaluation (PAE) analyst James Locher), recommended 12 specific changes to DoD organization including the disestablishment of the JCS and its replacement with a council of retired four star officers, as well as organization of the armed forces along mission lines.[17] Locher would later characterize the more modest reforms of Goldwater Nichols as the true and only aims of the Goldwater-based reorganization effort, but curiously Senator Goldwater never said as much in any of the biographical efforts he supported or in his own autobiography.
Reformers gained much ground, but were again defeated in their attempt to achieve overwhelming victory by another Navy-led opposition effort. Navy Secretary John Lehman mounted an aggressive campaign within both the Reagan administration and Congress against the legislation on constitutional and historical grounds. Supported by the Navy and Marine Corps service chiefs as well as the other service secretaries and Chiefs of Staff, Lehman condemned the general staff concept, whether active duty or retired officer in membership as against the very successful Anglo-American concepts of cooperative joint leadership that had been successful since the Second World War. Although he failed to deter Congress from reform measures, his opposition effort prevented any of Locher’s proposals from actually entering law.
Although Congress supported the Goldwater Nichols Act with overwhelming support more characteristic of a resolution honoring someone’s birthday rather than a major policy decision, the legislative branch ended up as a loser in terms of which civilian authority would effectively control the nation’s defense establishment. While Congress retained control of budgetary affairs, its decision to expand both the powers of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Department of Defense put more overall control in the hands of the executive branch.
There was some buyer’s remorse after 1986 over the creation of a powerful Chairman. Fears that a powerful Chairman could become a “man on horseback” capable of threatening the democratic process first appeared during the chairmanship of General Colin Powell. General Powell, however, merely made full use of the new powers granted his office, and as someone who observed this period once told the author, “if General Powell was attempting to operate beyond the authority of his office, he would have been immediately fired by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.” Successive Presidents have appointed Chairmen with less desire than General Powell to carve out independent military opinions. Clearly a powerful military figure and presumably a general staff serve at the pleasure of the President and are not likely to emerge as an independent center of power without the authorization of the political branches.
While the Goldwater Nichols Act did not result in a General Staff, it has been responsible for several poor outcomes in national security decision-making since 1986. Acting on his expanded powers as a combatant commander, Central Command commander General Norman Schwartzkopf signed an armistice with the Iraqi regime following the success of Operation Desert Storm. As part of this agreement he allowed the Iraqi regime to operate helicopters that later successfully put down a Shiite revolt the U.S. had encouraged.[18] Had the revolt been successful the U.S. might have obviated the need for a Second Gulf War in 2003. That conflict featured a much smaller and less diverse coalition force for the mission of ending the regime of Saddam Hussein than that of Gulf War 1. Comparisons between the allied forces arrayed for each Iraq operation were inevitable. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki and former CJCS (then Secretary of State) Colin Powell both questioned the intentional reduced size of the coalition entry force. Shinseki suggested a much larger force would be needed to, “maintain safety in a country with "ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."[19] Powell was also concerned about the smaller size of the coalition force and that its supply lines would be excessively long.[20] Both however were successfully rebuffed thanks to the command arrangements instituted by the Goldwater Nichols Act whereby service chiefs and even cabinet officials have no official authority over operational military commanders. When the Iraqi counter-insurgency war began to founder in mid to late 2006, President Bush sought ways to improve U.S. military performance in the war torn nation. The eventual U.S. troop surge was not a product of the Joint Staff, U.S. Central Command, or the myriad of Department of Defense offices assigned to the Iraq war effort, but instead one produced by retired officers, academics and think tank analysts. Furthermore, it was planned by an ad hoc group of Army and Marine Corps colonels rather than the Joint or CENTOM staff. A diversity of choice in the marketplace of defense ideas still seems to produce the best decisions.
Defense reforms from those of Eisenhower’s through the Goldwater Nichols Act have created a widening chasm between military leaders focused on increasingly operational solutions and political leaders cut off from the realities of military efforts. Unity of command at the tactical and operational level has been a hallmark of Western military effort since the days of the Roman Legions. That unity of effort, however, is not desired at the summit of strategic thinking. The marketplace of defense ideas as described by Forrestal and Eberstadt must be in place to ensure optimum best military solutions to strategic concerns.
The battle between the U.S. executive and legislative branches for control of the U.S. military; the issue at the center of all U.S. defense reorganization reform efforts since 1945 has fundamentally upset the balance between strategy and operational art. The imposition of a unitary chain of command beginning at the highest levels of government has turned the marketplace of defense ideas into a Soviet GOSPLAN style command economy of thought. In this condition the U.S. military has increasingly turned to operational art as a substitute for real strategic thinking. An elite U.S. general staff, disconnected from the wider body of defense intelligentsia would merely “double down” on the concept of operational art and further limit the choices of political leaders. If the recent effects of the Goldwater Nichols Act are any guide, further centralization and contraction in the overall body of those persons engaged in truly strategic thinking will further impair the U.S.’s ability to achieve political military success in the increasingly unstable post-Post Cold War world.
This author has the utmost respect for those advocating a General Staff as the solution to U.S. military decision making, but suggests the verdict of history is decidedly against them. Eisenhower decided to remove the JCS from the chain of command and hobbled their ability to serve as independent military advisers to the whole of govt. McNamara (supported by Kennedy and Johnson), further weakened the powers of the chiefs, set up the organizations that conducted the ultimately unsuccessful Vietnam effort, and altered the acquisition process to the current, Soviet 5 year plan system. Senator Goldwater and his fellow 1980’s reformers removed the remaining influence possessed by the service chiefs in operational affairs, promoted the CJCS to ad hoc member of the President's cabinet (reducing that officer's "bona fides" as an impartial military adviser), and further decentralized the business of strategy by empowering the COCOM's as regional proconsuls. It all leads back to political leadership, and yet they insist on blaming the service chiefs and other uniformed military, or the "system"; a product of the last 70 years created by the political classes.
Instead of a General Staff, Congress should act to restore a balance to the U.S. defense establishment. It should return the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a position of “first among equals” as the billet was before 1986. The JCS as a collective body rather than a single officer would be best able to present the executive branch with a truly military viewpoint free of pressure from the politically appointed Secretary of Defense. It should also return the service secretaries to the business of strategic military thought; their proper role in the Liberal Western tradition. The marketplace of defense ideas has increasingly one of empty shelves. A U.S. General Staff would further attenuate and perhaps close the market for good.
[1] Matthew Cooper, The German Army, 1939-1945, Lanham, MD, Scarborough Publishing, 1978, pp. 193, 194.
[2] Jeffrey Barlow, From Hot War to Cold, The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945-1955, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2009, p. 64.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Barlow, p. 87.
[5] David Jablonsky, War by Land Sea and Air, Dwight Eisenhower and the Concept of Unified Command, New Haven, Con, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 142.
[6]Jablonsky, p. 148.
[7] Jablonsky, pp. 150, 151.
[8] Jablonsky, p. 143 (Forrestal coined the term “national security” in Congressional testimony.)
[9] Jeffrey Dorwart, Eberstadt and Forrestal, A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949, College Station, TX, Texas A&M University Press, 1991, p. 107.
[10] Barlow, p. 87.
[11] Ibid, pp. 89, 90.
[12] Jablonsky, p. 297.
[13] Ibid, pp. 247, 248.
[14] Arleigh A . Burke, interview by John T. Mason Jr., February 1973, interview 4, transcript, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Ks
[15] Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, p. 524.
[16] Paul Ryan. First Line of Defense, The U.S. Navy Since 1945, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institute Press, Stanford University, 1981, p. 31.
[17] http://digitalndulibrary.ndu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/goldwater/id/2160, pp. 11, 12, last assessed 11 December 2015.
[18] Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The General’s War, The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1995, pp. 446-450.
[19] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-02-25-iraq-us_x.htm, last assessed 11 December 2015.
[20] Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier, New York, Harper Collins, 2004, pp. 394, 395.
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