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

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

What were the underlying problems? No existing joint organization was capable of conducting such a raid. There was no useful contingency plan, no planning staff with the required expertise, no joint doctrine or procedures, and no relevant cross-service experience. The joint task force commander, Major General James Vaught, an Army Ranger, was a distinguished combat veteran, but he had no experience in operations with other services. The participating service units trained separately; they met for the first time in the desert in Iran, at Desert One. Even there, they did not establish command and control procedures or clear lines of authority. Colonel James Kyle, U.S. Air Force, who was the senior commander at Desert One, would recall that there were "four commanders at the scene without visible identification, incompatible radios, and no agreed-upon plan, not even a designated location for the commander." (7) How could this state of affairs have possibly arisen? It happened because the services were so separat e and so determined to remain separate.

The Department of Defense--which in this period made no effort to reorganize itself fundamentally--was also suffering all manner of administrative problems. The nation was formulating security strategy unconstrained by realistic estimates of available fiscal resources, because the services could never agree on a fiscally constrained strategy and the allocation of resources to support it. Communications, refueling, and other vital systems and devices were not interoperable across the services. There were modernization/readiness imbalances, because the all-powerful services were pushing for more modernization, while the readiness needs of the weak unified commanders were underrepresented.

There were numerous procurement and spare-parts horror stories during this period. A memorable one involved the coffeepots the Air Force bought for its C-5A Galaxy aircraft at a price of seven thousand dollars each. The pots were so advanced that they could keep brewing in conditions that would kill the crews.

"The System Is Broken"

The process that led to Goldwater-Nichols began when General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went before the House Armed Services Committee in a closed session on 3 February 1982, about five months before he was to retire, and said, essentially, "The system is broken. I have tried to reform it from inside, but I cannot. Congress is going to have to mandate necessary reforms." General Jones was the catalyst, the most important factor in ultimately bringing about the Goldwater-Nichols Act; the four-year, 241-day battle had begun.

Shortly after General Jones's call for reform, General Edward "Shy" Meyer, the Army chief of staff, urged fundamental reorganization of the Joint Chiefs. During congressional testimony, a third sitting JCS member, General Lew Allen, the Air Force chief of staff, also voiced support for reorganization. The naval service's JCS members--Admiral Thomas Hayward, Chief of Naval Operations, and General Robert Barrow, Commandant of the Marine Corps--vigorously opposed reform efforts. The 1982 debate--bitterly pitting the Army and Air Force against the Navy and Marine Corps--reenacted the postwar disputes over unification.