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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
Goldwater-Nichols addressed the lack of emphasis on high-level planning by requiring the president to submit annually a national security strategy, on the basis of which the chairman was to prepare fiscally constrained strategic plans. (The Pentagon at first had major objections here, but a year's experience with the new process put them to rest.) The secretary of defense was to provide--with the assistance of the under secretary of defense for policy--guidance to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and unified commanders for the preparation and review of contingency plans. Goldwater-Nichols also prescribed a role for the under secretary in assisting the secretary's review of the plans. (These were major advances. Lacking policy and political guidance, the military drafters of contingency plans had been forced to formulate their own assumptions. Also, until then the JCS had jealously guarded contingency plans, permitting only the secretary--and no other civilian--to see them in completed form.)
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In the resource area, the act called upon the secretary to provide policy guidance for the effective use of resources. He was to address objectives and policies, mission priorities, and resource constraints. Interestingly, Goidwater-Nichol told the military departments, in effect, that their collective role, their entire raison d'etre, was now to fulfill as far as practicable the current and future requirements of unified commanders in chief. To the same end, the act strengthened the supervision, budget review, and combat readiness of the growing defense agencies. Congress also assigned ten new resource-related duties to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the search for the independent joint budget perspective that had been missing.
Many of the above initiatives, taken together, constituted Congress's effort to improve the effectiveness of military operations. That left a final goal, improved management and administration--and here Congress's concerns included excessive spans of control. The Office of the Secretary of Defense and the service headquarters staffs had grown very large, and organizationally "excessively flat" --forty-two people reported directly to the secretary of defense, and some service chiefs directly supervised more than fifty. The Goldwater-Nichols drafters moved to reduce these spans of control. Believing that Pentagon headquarters were too large, they mandated personnel reductions in them. Addressing unnecessary duplication between service secretariats and military headquarters staffs, Goldwater-Nichols consolidated seven functions in the secretariats. Last, the act sought to promote a mission orientation in the Pentagon and overcome the excessive focus on functional activities--manpower, research and development, h ealth affairs, and so on.
RESULTS
How well have the objectives that Goldwater-Nichols set been achieved? Have those objectives been met in terms of the Defense Department's performance?
Some commentators believe they have. Congressman (later secretary of defense) Les Aspin immediately called Goldwater-Nichols "one of the landmark laws of American history ... probably the greatest sea change in the history of the American military since the Continental Congress created the Continental Army in 1775." (17) Admiral William Owens believes it was "the watershed event for the military since the Second World War." (18) William J. Perry, secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, considers Goldwater-Nichols "perhaps the most important defense legislation since World War II." (19)
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