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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
To improve military advice, the act transferred all corporate functions of the JCS to the chairman (in which he was to be assisted by a newly created vice chairman). Specifically, it designated the chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff as the principal military adviser, with a mandate to provide that advice on the basis of the broadest military perspective. Further, it made the Joint Staff (which supports the Joint Chiefs) responsible exclusively to the chairman, and it made elaborate provisions to improve the quality of officers assigned to the Joint Staff, as well as to the staffs of the unified commanders in chief.
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It did so by ordering fundamental improvements in joint officer management generally--an arena that became the last battleground in the drafting, passage, and ultimate enactment of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation. The services saw that if they retained absolute control of promotions and assignments, Congress could pass all the laws it wanted--not much was going to change in the Department of Defense. Congress was equally determined to reward officers who accepted and performed well in billets that were outside of their services; to that end it created through Goldwater-Nichols a joint officer management system. Specifically, a joint career specialty was established, and joint education was much more closely regulated--the services, for example, had been sending officers to joint schools but had assigned only a few graduates to joint billets.
As for the unified commanders in chief, the act made them clearly responsible to the president and the secretary of defense--constituted collectively as the "national command authority"--for the performance of missions and the preparedness of their commands. Goldwater-Nichols required the assignment of all combat forces to the unified commanders and removed the JCS from the operational chain of command. No longer could the services move forces in and out of regional commands without the approval, or even the knowledge, of the commanders in chief. (An investigation after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut found that thirty-one units in Beirut had been sent there unbeknownst to Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command.)
To ensure sufficient authority for the unified commanders, the law essentially gave them all the authority that is traditionally given to a military commander. Unified commanders were empowered to issue authoritative direction on all aspects of operations,joint training, and logistics, to prescribe internal chains of command, to organize commands and forces, and to employ forces. A unified commander in chief could now assign command functions to subordinate commanders and approve certain aspects of administration and support. In addition, unified commanders could now exercise personnel authority: they could select their headquarters staffs and subordinate commanders (matters in which they had had almost no say in the past); they could suspend subordinates; and they could convene courts-martial. As might be imagined, all of this caused heartburn among the services. But Congress had decided that unified commanders had to have these kinds of authority if they were to be effective.
