National Affairs: Break up the Joint Chiefs

As Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (1945-48), five-star General Dwight Eisenhower was one of the chief architects of the National Security Act of 1947, which set up the separate U.S. Air Force and was also designed—though with numerous compromises—to “unify” the armed services. As President of the U.S., Dwight Eisenhower has a better basic knowledge of how the services work than any President in modern history. Yet, paradoxically, one of the soft spots of his Administration record is that, during the regime of Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson, Ike let Pentagon administration get out of hand.

At his conference with legislative leaders last fortnight the President sat fuming while Congressmen asked sharp questions—and got limp answers from Pentagon officials—about interservice rivalries, overlapping missile programs and the whole organizational foul-up that makes it almost impossible to trace responsibility for any kind of failure in U.S. defense. No sooner had the congressional leaders left the White House than President Eisenhower called Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, into his office. His orders: find the right answers to the Pentagon’s problems and put them into effect. Said the President: “You have a free hand.”

More & Better. It was not all that simple: before Neil McElroy could attack the Pentagon’s problems he had first to know and understand them himself. And the same organizational tangle that brought on Ike’s order is still working against McElroy—or his three subordinate service secretaries, or the 30 assistant and deputy secretaries—achieving the required knowledge and understanding. Never has that fact been more bluntly put than last week, when the Army’s tough, brainy research and development chief, Lieut. General James M. Gavin, appeared before the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee.

Neil McElroy, said Paratrooper Gavin pointedly, is “the most able man who has come to that office [Secretary of Defense].” But McElroy needs more and better “professional military advice” than he has been able to get under the Pentagon system from the Joint Chiefs of Staff —or from assistant secretaries whose regimes, said Gavin, have lasted “somewhat on the order of a year and a half.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff is a sort of command-by-committee system (Gavin later emphasized that he was not talking about the individual competence of the present chiefs) and is not enough. Said Jim Gavin: “He [McElroy] needs more advice than the Joint Chiefs of Staff give him. I think really what is needed now is a competent military staff of senior military people working directly for the Secretary of Defense. I would have them take over the functions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I would have the military staff organized to handle operations, plans, intelligence, and in fact break up the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Such a career staff, said General Gavin, should be drawn from all services, but should be “completely integrated across the board.” Said Gavin: “The thing that disturbs a number of people, and I am included, is that there is no operational staff within the Department of Defense, and in the event of war it would have to be reorganized.”

First Things First. At no point did Gavin actually advocate a “general staff system”—which conjures up images of Prussianism to many a skittish Congressman—and to all devout Navymen. But that was precisely what he was urging, just as retired Air Force General James Doolittle had urged a fortnight before when appearing before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. In the minds of Jim Gavin and Jimmy Doolittle, and in the opinion of others among the nation’s best military thinkers, Neil McElroy cannot even begin to solve the Pentagon’s problems until he has a general staff, whatever it may be called. Their argument: only a general staff, standing above violent service loyalties and ambitions, can work out a single, integrated, sensible U.S. defense plan. And only within the context of a single, integrated, sensible defense plan can Neil McElroy start using his free hand to tackle the subsidiary problems. Among them:

ROLES & MISSIONS. If he is to head off an interservice blow-up that will make past squabbles seem like mere brush fires, McElroy must redefine obsolescent service roles and missions assignments (air to the Air Force, sea control to the Navy, land to the Army) in the light of missile strategy, to which old geographic concepts no longer apply. Outer space, by present definitions, belongs to no single service; neither does defense against enemy space missiles. Neither, for that matter, does the missile itself. All the services are rushing in with proposals, claims, bids.

ADMINISTRATION. The Defense Department must find a way to become an operational as well as a policymaking body in such grey areas as missile development. McElroy has promised a single manager for new space programs. Another critical problem is the increasing demand for an effective missile “czar,” since neither Missile Director William Holaday nor Presidential Science Adviser James Killian has yet fulfilled that role.

EXPENDITURES. McElroy’s predecessor, Charlie Wilson, let costs get so far out of hand that he was forced to call an abrupt halt to military procurement before the end of fiscal 1957. He also had to reduce procurement programs for 1958 to an extent that caused havoc in the airframe industry. McElroy will probably have about $2 billion more than Wilson to spend, will have that much bigger a problem in trying to control the spending.

LIMITED WAR v. GENERAL WAR. During Wilson’s regime, big-war thinking dominated U.S. military policy and procurements. But there is a rising clamor for the U.S. to prepare itself equally for small, limited wars; the Army especially is driving hard for the men and equipment, including airplanes; is already on the way to having an air force of its own.

In his brief time in office, Neil McElroy has indicated that he may be a strong Defense Secretary. He will have to be: his is the awesome job of making up for past mistakes while presiding over the orderly and economical phasing-in of an entire new military technology, without weakening U.S. forces in being.