The erosion of civilian control of the military in the United States today

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2002 by Richard H. Kohn

The power of the military within the policy process has been growing steadily since a low point under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 1960s. Under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) has influence that surpasses that of everyone else within the Pentagon except the secretary of defense, and the chairman possesses a more competent, focused, and effective staff than the secretary does, as well as, often, a clearer set of goals, fewer political constraints, and under some circumstances greater credibility with the public. (27) In the glow of success in the Gulf War, efforts to exorcise Vietnam, the high public esteem now enjoyed by the armed forces, and the disgust Americans have felt for politics in general and for partisanship in particular, the stature of the chairman has grown to a magnitude out of proportion to his legal or institutional position.

The Joint Staff is the most powerful organization in the Department of Defense; frequently, by dint of its speed, agility, knowledge, and expertise, the Joint Staff frames the choices. (28) The Joint Requirements Oversight Council (the vice chiefs, convening under the vice chairman to prioritize joint programs in terms of need and cost) has gathered influence and authority over the most basic issues of weapons and force structure. (29) Within the bureaucracy, JCS has a representative in the interagency decision process, giving the uniformed military a voice separate from that of the Department of Defense. Similarly, the armed services maintain their own congressional liaison and public affairs offices, bureaucracies so large that they are impossible to monitor fully. (One officer admitted to me privately that his duty on Capitol Hill was to encourage Congress to restore a billion dollars that the Pentagon's civilian leadership had cut out of his service's budget request.) (30) Moreover, the regional commander s have come to assume such importance in their areas--particularly in the Pacific, the Middle East, and Central Asia--that they have effectively displaced American ambassadors and the State Department as the primary instruments of American foreign policy. (31) In recent reorganizations, these commanders have so increased in stature and influence within the defense establishment that their testimony can sway Congress and embarrass or impede the administration, especially when the civilians in the executive branch are weak and the Congress is dominated by an aggressively led opposition political party.

One knowledgeable commentator put it this way in early 1999: "The dirty little secret of American civil-military relations, by no means unique to this [the Clinton] administration, is that the commander in chief does not command the military establishment; he cajoles it, negotiates with it, and, as necessary, appeases it." (32) A high Pentagon civilian privately substantiates the interpretation: what "weighs heavily... every day" is "the reluctance, indeed refusal, of the political appointees to disagree with the military on any matter, not just operational matters." In fact, so powerful have such institutional forces become, and so intractable the problem of altering the military establishment, that the new Rumsfeld regime in the Pentagon decided to conduct its comprehensive review of national defense in strict secrecy, effectively cutting the regional commanders, the service chiefs, and the Congress out of the process so that resistance could not organize in advance of the intended effort at transformation. (33)