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Has it worked?: The Goldwater-Nichols reorganization act - Dept of Defense re-organization
Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2001 by James R. Locher, III
Organization has traditionally been a weak element of the American system of national defense. For the nation's first 150 years, the public actually favored a fractured military; so inattention to organizational issues has historical roots. The United States entered World War II with Departments of War and the Navy that were organizationally backward and "virtually autonomous." (1) Observing American inexperience and lack of multiservice coordination at the war's start, a British general wrote to London, "The whole organization belongs to the days of George Washington." (2) Army-Navy disputes complicated finding more appropriate wartime arrangements. The Navy entered the war embracing its cherished concepts of independent command at sea and decentralized organizations relying on cooperation and coordination. The Army's shortcomings in the Spanish-American War and its mobilization challenges during World War I had pushed that service in the direction of centralized authority and control.
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The Army and the Navy were not able to solve their differences during World War II. Afterward, Congress settled the dispute in terms broadly favorable to the Navy's concepts--ones that preserved Navy and Marine Corps independence more than they met the requirements of modern warfare. Despite repeated operational setbacks over the next forty years, subsequent reorganization efforts offered only slight improvements. Such was the setting for the mid-1980s battle that produced the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. That bitter battle lasted for four years and 241 days--a period longer than U.S. involvement in World War II--and it pitted two former allies, Congress and the services, against each other.
In this article we will examine the changes mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols Act and assess whether they have worked. We will begin by reviewing briefly the history of defense organization and then, with that as background, outline the organization problems of the mid-1980s. Then we will turn our attention to Goldwater-Nichols itself--first outlining its key objectives and various provisions, and then assessing its effectiveness and results. Finally--as if the first four headings will not be controversial enough--we will address the unfinished business of Goldwater-Nichols and organizational steps for the future.
DEFENSE ORGANIZATION
Many of the problems of defense organization the United States experienced in 1986 had their origins early in the nation's history, at the beginning of the republic. It would be possible, however, to begin an analysis at the Spanish-American War, when Americans first realized that they needed centralized authority in both the War and Navy Departments and also some mechanism for cooperation between those two departments. But for our purposes, we need go back only to World War II.
The United States entered the Second World War with an archaic organization that was incapable of coordinating land, sea, and air activities across the two military departments, or even of harmonizing business (procurement, logistics, construction, transportation, etc.) efforts within the departments themselves. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created by executive direction the Joint Chiefs of Staff (or JCS), primarily to work with the British, who had a combined chiefs of staff organization. The Joint Chiefs of Staff assumed an enormous role. Next to the president, they were the most powerful Americans in the war effort. They not only had major military responsibilities but also collectively played crucial roles in political, intelligence, and even economic decisions. The American public's outcry over Pearl Harbor prompted the creation of unified theater commanders, like General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe. Service politics and jealousies prevented unifying the Pacific theater; it was di vided into two commands-one led by General Douglas MacArthur, the other by Admiral Chester Nimitz.
This joint centralization was paralleled by the creation of effective central authority within the War and Navy Departments, necessitated by the war effort, especially the enormous logistical tasks involved.
However, the contributions of the JCS were lessened by its adoption on its own of the principle of reaching unanimous agreement before speaking excathedra. Accordingly, the wartime Joint Chiefs--General Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the Army Air Forces; General George Marshall, the chief of staff of the Army; Admiral William Leahy, the chief of staff to the commander in chief (that is, President Roosevelt); and Admiral Ernest King, the Chief of Naval Operations--had essentially to operate by cooperation.
A vivid example of the limitations on the ability of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do their work arose in connection with materiel allocations. The British had recommended that steel be diverted from the construction of battleships and heavy cruisers to convoy escorts and landing craft. Admiral Leahy, who had just joined the JCS, "remarked that it looked to him as though 'the vote is three to one.' [Admiral] King replied coldly that as far as he was concerned, the Joint Chiefs was not a voting organization on any matter in which the interests of the Navy were involved." (3) Essentially, he demanded veto power. For the most part, the Joint Chiefs operated upon that principle throughout the war (and in fact until 1986). Things would proceed when the chiefs could come to unanimous agreement--which often required watering down their collective advice.
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