Thirty years ago, the Goldwater-Nichols Act restructured the Defense Department by giving greater authority to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and changing the chain of command in a way that allowed combatant commanders report directly to the defense secretary. However, experts told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the law may have had unintended consequences that contributed to the Pentagon becoming more top heavy and slow to react.
After the hearing, SASC Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Defense Daily that his committee’s second round of defense reforms could involve revisions to the Goldwater-Nichols Act that incorporate suggestions from the panel.
At the time Goldwater-Nichols was passed, the military believed it would fight wars through regional combatant commands, however those commands have taken a supporting role to the joint task forces that actually wage war, said John Hamre, one of the original architects of the law and currently the president and chief executive officer of the Center For Strategic And International Studies.
“I still think we need those unified commands very much because they do strategic engagement with our partners…But we don’t need the J4…or a J6 or a J2,” he said, referencing three of the joint staff directorates. “What we really need to do is we really need to redefine those commands so that they are streamlined and they’re doing the strategic role.”
Jim Thomas, vice president and director of studies for the Center For Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, agreed that the role of the combatant commands needs to be reexamined.
“The reality is that combatant commanders often make only cameo appearances in actual wars before DoD establishes new ad hoc commands and joint task forces devoted to warfighting, as was done in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
Thomas believes Congress should go a step further than reevaluating the mission of the commands—it should consider whether to consolidate them and to replace the service component commands with joint task forces, which would expressly focus on planning and fighting wars, he said.
James Locher, a distinguished senior fellow at Joint Special Operations University who also helped helm Goldwater-Nichols, said that consolidating the combatant commands would be a step too far.
“This is an age of specialization in which we need people that can get focused either on region or a particular topic like cyber,” he said. If the commands are consolidated, “we dilute that specialization, but we also begin to layer” capability, creating even more bureaucracy.
The role of the joint staff also needs a second look, Thomas said.
It might be time to place the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who currently serves as the president’s principal military adviser, into the chain of command, he said. “He should have greater authority to decide between the competing demands of the regional commands and to develop global strategy,”
Another issue is that the boundaries between the different Defense Department organizations and military commands are too rigid, Locher said.
“There’s no place in the headquarters of the Department of Defense where the secretary and the deputy secretary could go and have all of that functional expertise integrated into a mission team,” he said. The Pentagon needs to have the ability to create teams that can focus on a particular mission.
After the hearing, McCain indicated his openness to scaling back the power of component commands and giving more authorities to the joint task forces that have taken on a more important role in combat operations. He also questioned whether there was a need for all of the current joint staff directorates.
Combatant commands are still relevant “to a degree,” he said. “They can play a role, but I think it will be dramatically diminished.”