Rescuing the military

National Review, Feb 14, 1986 by Richard Brookhiser

Spinney's solution was a macro-planning office, attached to the Secretary of Defense, "consisting of no more than twenty people.' (If Spinney can find me a Washington office with no more than twenty people, I'll take more interest in the solution.) But the real fault is as much Congress's as the Pentagon's. Reformers rarely criticized Congress in the early years (they knew who their target audience was). One of the few who does so now is Representative Jim Courter (R., N.J.), who argues that Congress's item-by-item oversight of individual Defense Department projects itself promotes waste and discourages strategic planning. Congressioanl micro-management has, ironically, increased as military reform has acquired political cachet; in 1983, the Pentagon answered half a million phone calls from Capitol Hill. Courter and others propose, as legislative remedies for the legislative tangle, mission budgeting and two-year budgets. Mission budgeting, instead of passing on weapons one by one, would appropriate sums for the accomplishment of military goals, to be allocated among the weapons that prove to be most effective. Under two-year budgeting, Congress would vote money in the first year and consider broader questions of doctrine and strategy--now scanted--in the second.

The issue the shufflers of organization charts have fastened on is reform of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1982, General David Jones, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, scored its "cumbersome committee processes.' Luttwak has called it "a weekly gathering of gentlemen' with "procedures appropriate' to the "management of a municipal gas company.' The Joint Chiefs, a postwar creation, was designed to give the President a source of common counsel. But the services, jealous of their independence, insisted that it be a virtually powerless body, a kind of Polish Senate. As a result, responsibility and authority get bucked back and forth between the Chiefs and the services; decisions are controlled by a pallid, bureaucratic consensus. The solution offered by Luttwak, Lind, and others is a General Staff of planners and strategists, controlling its own promotions and taking up the bulk of its officers' careers. There are tactical reasons why such a system is thought to be necessary, which I will mention later. The responsibility problem is real, though creating a General Staff seems to be a rather mechanical, on-paper way of dealing with it. As a solution to the surplus of do-nothing officers--also a very real problem--it is incredible. Centralization would breed more of them, not winnow them out.

To the extent that misspending and flabbiness in the high command are diagnosed as exclusively bureaucratic problems, they will be given bureaucratic solutions, which amount to no solution at all: tinkering here and there, or more of the same. Things go wrong on ledgers or in the chain of command because they have first gone wrong in men's minds, and looking only at the ledgers and the chain of command does not address the problem. The proponents of stricter congressional oversight or a General Staff would drain a swamp by flooding the roads.