Our armed forces are legacies of the
Second World War with a departmental scheme designed in 1947 to obstruct the
emergence of a national unified military command structure. This dysfunctional,
service-centric arrangement is reinforced by a congress without the
understanding or the interest to extract real capability from an overly
expensive military establishment. A strong Chief Executive with an interest in
return on investment (ROI) and an understanding of product innovation could cut
the Gordian Knot in short order, but I don’t see one on the horizon.
For the moment, we have an enormous
Marine Corps determined to replace the US Army and a shrinking US Army
determined to become a second Marine Corps! Carl Forsling did a fine job of
characterizing the problem in his recent article: http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2015/09/25/a_marines_view_of_the_army_vision_108510.html
“The Army Vision, more than the other services’ planning
documents, suffers from a problem the U.S. military has faced many times
before. The services are in competition with each other for slices of a pie in
a zero sum game. What the services choose to focus on competing individually is
much different than would they would each be assigned were the choice made by
someone trying to actually optimize the nation’s defense portfolio. Is
450,000 the proper size for the Army and 182,000 the proper size for the Marine
Corps? I don’t know, and I suspect we really never will, because the
capabilities of our armed forces, as determined in an environment of
internecine competition, are driving the nation’s defense strategy, vice the
other way around. The Army Vision is just the newest example of
this problem. While duplication of effort was tolerable when the Defense
Department was flush with money, in an era of cutbacks, the Defense Department
will find itself foundering budget-wise, and possibly in combat as well.”
No one cares to raise tough
questions about the strategic utility of large airborne or amphibious forces.
No one wants to deal with the multiple air forces inside the US military. In my
new book, I address the issue in the conclusions after demonstrating that every
major scientific-industrial power discovered during the 20th Century
the necessity for a national military “High Command” and supporting GS
system. I hope we don’t have to experience decisive defeat to learn this
“lesson,” but it seems we may.
Thanks
to the 1947 National Security Act, the senior leaders of the armed services
possess the authority and the funding to determine what they will buy and how
they will fight with minimal interference from the president or Congress. The
Goldwater-Nichols Act created unified commands on the strategic level, but left
the money and, ultimately, the power entirely in the hands of the service
chiefs.[i]
The
missing link is the national machinery—an American military high command—to
direct the strategic preparation and conduct of military operations, to
allocate strategic resources, and define strategic military needs. Similar proposals for a unified American military
high command and staff organization were presented on 25 February 1943 by
officers in the War Department. According to the study’s authors, the
recommendations “were based on the acknowledgment that all of our U.S. war
experiences to date (from Pearl Harbor to the present date) point to the
necessity for unity of command on all levels.”[ii]
The
machinery that answers this requirement is a national defense staff with a
defense chief. Together with his staff, the Chief of Defense would answer
directly to the secretary of defense and the president for the day-to-day
administration of the armed forces, as well as for the warfighting readiness
and development of the capabilities residing in all of the services. The Chief
of Defense would exercise operational control over the armed services and issue
directives on behalf of the commander-in-chief, the president, for the strategic
planning and development of the armed forces. The Chief’s directives
would have the effect of binding law.
EXCERPT from the Concluding Chapter: Margin of Victory: 5
Battles that changed the Face of Modern War, (Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press, March 2016).
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