Has it worked?: The Goldwater-Nichols reorganization act - Dept of Defense re-organization

Naval War College Review,  Autumn, 2001  by James R. Locher, III

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, assessing the compromises the original act reflected between Truman and Congress and between the Army and the Navy, said: "In that battle the lessons were lost, tradition won. The three services were but loosely joined. The entire structure... was little more than a weak confederation of sovereign military units." (5) It has been charitably said (by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office) that the National Security Act of 1947 "confirmed the principle of unification by cooperation and mutual consent." (6)

Truman and Eisenhower spent much of their energies trying to strengthen the National Security Act. There were revisions in 1949, 1953, and 1958--the latter two under Eisenhower. The 1949 legislation created the Department of Defense. All three sought to strengthen the secretary of defense. The 1949 revision established the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (In the beginning, however, the chairman was not given a vote. Interestingly, some of Truman's early correspondence on the subject spoke of creating a chairman as principal military adviser, specifically to get away from the idea of JCS operation by consensus.) The military departments were downgraded in the various revisions; the secretaries were removed from the cabinet and from the National Security Council. The 1958 legislation removed the service secretaries and chiefs from the operational chain of command, in order to strengthen civilian control, as Eisenhower wished. It also gave the unified commanders full operational command of ass igned forces. However, those provisions were not effectively implemented. The military departments retained a de facto role in the operational chain of command and never complied with the provision strengthening the unified commanders.

THE EIGHTIES

From 1958 to 1983, there were no major changes to defense organization; the alliance between Congress and the services was too powerful. Even Eisenhower, a war hero, was unable to overcome this alliance, and that was a salient lesson for subsequent presidents and secretaries of defense. There were continuing calls for reform--the Symington report for John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon's Blue Ribbon Defense Panel, and the Defense Organization Studies for Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

During this period, the military suffered several operational setbacks: the Vietnam War, the seizure of the USS Pueblo, the seizure of the Mayaguez, the failed Iranian rescue mission, the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, and the Grenada incursion. These failures had a number of common denominators--poor military advice to political leaders, lack of unity of command, and inability to operate jointly. The failed Iranian rescue mission exemplified these shortcomings.

Desert One

In April 1980, the United States conducted a raid to rescue fifty-three Americans held hostage in Tehran. The military had six months to organize, plan, and train as well as fairly recent experience in conducting such a mission--the Son Tay raid about ten years before. Nonetheless, only six of the eight helicopters involved arrived at the rendezvous point, known as "Desert One," in the middle of Iran; one of the six that got that far suffered mechanical problems and could not proceed. That did not leave enough helicopter capacity to carry out the mission, and it was aborted. As the rescue force was departing, a helicopter collided with one of the C-130s that were carrying commandos and helicopter fuel; eight servicemen died. The helicopters, with valuable secret documents, weapons, and communications gear on board, were hastily abandoned.