President Clinton's proposed defense budget for 1999 says the Defense Department will "streamline its business practices and organizational structure" to make the nation's armed forces more effective and less costly. Yet neither the budget proposal nor several reviews of the defense establishment over the past five years have envisioned the bold changes that would make the bloated, top-heavy, bureaucratic Pentagon a leaner, more responsive headquarters in an era of uncertainty. Three such changes would be:
The need to make more potent use of increasingly tight defense dollars is evident in the $257.3 billion defense budget. It proposes military spending that would consume the smallest portion of the nation's wealth, 3 percent, since the isolationist days before World War II, when the nation spent less than 2 percent of gross domestic product on military power. In constant dollars, with inflation squeezed out, defense budgets under President Clinton have dropped to the level of those in President Carter's Administration during the drawdown in the 1970's following the war in Vietnam and before the buildup in the 1980's in the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush. In unveiling the 1999 budget proposal, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said he had drawn on last November's Defense Reform Initiative to recommend closing more unneeded bases, revising business practices, and consolidating several agencies within the Pentagon. Those changes, however, would not affect core problems. Potential Savings Effecting the three fundamental changes to streamline in the department's operations could free up an estimated $30 billion that could go into better equipment for the present force and to developing modern weapons for the 21st Century. That sum could be even more if Congress could be dissuaded from adding unwanted expenditures or preventing the closure of unnecessary bases. Despite changes in recent years as military spending has dropped, the Pentagon remains bloated. The armed forces under President Clinton have been trimmed by 33 percent, from 2.1 million men and women to 1.4 million. The Defense Department, however, has been shaved only 8 percent, from 25,000 to 23,000 civilian and military officials. Moreover, the Defense Department is top-heavy. The Pentagon telephone book shows 260 senior officials with the designation "secretary" or the equivalent in their titles, from the Secretary of Defense to the official with the cumbersome title of Principal Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Industrial Affairs/Installations. Further, the department is hampered by overlapping bureaucracies. For instance, a dozen senior civilian executives or generals or admirals, most with a legion of subordinates, are responsible for personnel; they range from the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and the JCS's Director for Manpower & Personnel to a senior civilian official and a senior military officer in the Departments of the Army, Navy (of which the Marine Corps is part), and Air Force. The Navy's Bureau of Personnel alone takes up eight pages of small type in the Pentagon phone book. This is not the way it was supposed to be. When the Defense Department was set up in 1947, it was intended to unite the armed forces into a integrated team. From the beginning, however, the Pentagon has been riven by competing clans clawing for greater shares of budgets, roles, and missions at the expense of other clans. Each department has wanted its own weapons, supply service, medical corps, and intelligence operations. Each has often operated in secret and mounted stealthy raids on other departments. Over the years, remedial laws have eased bureaucratic squabbles but the quarreling today in Washington has intensified as each department and service, abetted by its allies in Congress and the defense industry, has scrambled for funds coming from a smaller reservoir. Abolish the Departments To reduce that sparring, the anachronistic Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force should be abolished and the unification process begun in 1947 carried to its logical conclusion. The military departments would be replaced by four Under Secretaries responsible for:
Abolish the JCS On the military side, the United States may have the only armed force in history to be run by committee, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JCS was intended to bring together the thinking of the top military officers in the four services. Instead, it has become a bickering council in which advice to the President and Secretary of Defense has often been diluted to the lowest common denominator and quarrels over budgets, roles, and missions have been pervasive. The low point for the JCS may have been Vietnam when rivalry among the chiefs precluded them from devising a winning strategy. An Army officer, H.R. McMaster, says in his well-researched book, "Dereliction of Duty," that "this unhealthy competition often took on the character of an argument between selfish children and undercut further the credibility of the Joint Chiefs." Legislation to redefine the responsibilities of the JCS and particularly to designate the chairman as the principal military advisor to the Secretary and the President reduced some of the squabbling. Even so, when it came time to cut back after the Cold War, General Colin Powell, then Chairman, wrote that each service chief would have to be "mugged to prove to their institution that they had fought the good fight before the budget ax fell." To establish a streamlined chain of command, the Defense Department should revert to the time-honored military practice of putting one officer in charge and holding him accountable for everything on his watch. That should be a Chief of Military Staff, a general or admiral who would wear five stars instead of the four of the other chiefs and who would be plainly recognized as the nation's top officer. The Chief of Military Staff would supervise war plans, joint training, and peacetime operations and would be supported by a staff drawn from all services. He would also be responsible for political-military tasks as the forces sustain the nation's foreign policy. In wartime, the Chief of Military Staff would command the forces. Critics have argued that centralizing authority in one officer would jeopardize civilian control of the military. Not so, as the President, Secretary of Defense, and their senior civilian subordinates would retain legal and moral authority over the armed forces. Equally effective, they and the Congress would control the all-important budget. Coupled with revisions in Washington would be changes to enhance the authority of the Commanders-in-Chief of the combat commands in the Pacific, Atlantic, Europe, and elsewhere. Today, those admirals and generals, each known as a CINC (pronounced sink), have sometimes conflicting loyalties as do commanders of Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force units under them. One loyalty is to the Secretary of Defense, their legal boss. Another is to the Chairman of the JCS, who is not officially in the chain of command but who often has operational control delegated to him by the Secretary of Defense. A third is to the service to which he has given a career of allegiance. Similarly, the component commanders have split loyalties to the CINC and their service chiefs. By cleaning up the chains of command that run from the Secretary of Defense to the Chief of Military Staff to the CINCs to the component commanders, the leaders of the armed forces would be better disciplined and more effective. These ideas have been bandied about before but have so far been met with fierce resistance by entrenched bureaucracies, civilian and military. Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine strategist, wrote in 1513: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." That remains true today, especially in the Pentagon.
*Richard Halloran, a military correspondent for The New York Times in Washington for ten years, writes from Honolulu. He is a consultant to the Global Reporting Network and a regular contributor to the Global Beat. For reprint rights, please contact him at tel: 808-395-0511, fax 808-396-4095, or e-mail: oranhall@compuserve.com Return to Global Beat Home Page Nuclear Watch | East Asian Security | Economic & Monetary Union | NATO Expansion | Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation | U.S. Defense Policy | Publications | Events | |
