TOWARD A U.S. GENERAL STAFF?

New Weapons & Technology Prompt a New Look

THE launching of the Russian Sputniks riddled many a cherished U.S. concept, including what was left of a tidy but fallacious military notion: that the Army commands the ground, the Navy rules the waves, and the Air Force controls the air. The post-Sputnik clamor for "leadership" can have few positive results unless the U.S. moves toward some system of military organization that makes effective leadership possible. The pressures of missile technology and loose handling of missile problems by the Pentagon have given new currency to an old idea, most recently and vigorously expressed by the Air Force's retired Lieut. General James H. Doolittle and the Army's research and development chief, Lieut. General James Gavin (TIME, Dec. 23). Both point to the weakness of the present organization of the Defense Department, which in effect sets U.S. military policy by compromise, and ends up letting each separate service go pretty much its own way. Doolittle and Gavin suggest that an integrated staff of military careermen standing above service rivalries could develop an overall U.S. war plan and parcel out service responsibilities within the framework of that plan. Jimmy Doolittle used the classical description of such an organization: "general staff."

Reconciling the Irreconcilable

The U.S. came out of World War II with its tradition of separate services intact, but the war's major lesson was the need for some measure of armed forces unification. The Army generally supported the unification idea--especially the Army Air Force, because in working out unification, the Army Air Force was to become the separate U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Navy, fearing that it would be swallowed up by amalgamation, launched a campaign of massive resistance.

The National Security Act of 1947 was aimed at reconciling irreconcilable views, and the result was admittedly a compromise. The act tried for unification, yet it required that the services--three instead of the wartime two--be "administered as individual executive departments." The Department of Defense was created, with a Defense Secretary given broad, general powers--but since prohibited by law from tampering with the functions of the separate Army, Navy and Air Force. Each service got its own Secretary, and each Secretary had the right of appeal over the head of the Secretary of Defense to the President of the U.S. and the Budget Director. The National Security Act, amended in 1949, expressly forbids "a single Chief of Staff over the armed forces [or] an armed forces general staff." Instead, it requires that the individual service chiefs of staff double in brass as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which functions under a nonvoting chairman as a sort of advisory committee seeking unified military policy.

The flaws in such a military structure showed up almost immediately, and the Pentagon has undergone a bewildering succession of committee surveys, reorganization plans, and legislative attempts to plug up the holes in the system. But all the efforts to strengthen Defense Department control over the separate services have, in fact, served mostly to make the office of the Secretary of Defense itself an unwieldy, sprawling compromise of an organization, with nine assistant secretaries, about 300 committees and 2,151 staffers. Far from working toward unification of forces, the Defense Secretary's office has virtually become a fourth service. It sits uneasily atop the civilian hierarchies of the Army, Navy and Air Force, with the power of military decision farther and farther removed from trained military men. Results: wasted money, duplicated effort, lost time and, above all, chronic indecision.

Two Hats for One Head

The J.C.S. system, its critics say, only contributes to the confusion. Except for the chairman, each member of the J.C.S. wears two hats--one as chief of his own service and the other as a joint chief. General Thomas White, as an example (which applies equally to the other service heads), spends most of his week as Air Force Chief of Staff, working on Air Force problems, expounding Air Force doctrine, fighting Air Force battles. But then comes the moment when he walks into a secret Pentagon room, sits down at a table with the three other members of the J.C.S., and puts on his other hat. As a member of the Joint Chiefs, he is expected to help in taking collective action toward a U.S. war plan that can stand as a guide to budgeting, priorities and weapons systems.

As a practical matter, any service chief must win a fair share of the J.C.S. decisions for his own force; if he does not, he will be considered an inadequate service chief. Too often the J.C.S. result is a standoff, with decisions deferred or compromised. For example. Air Force doctrine holds that any aircraft carrier would be a sitting duck in a war of missiles and thermonuclear bombs. U.S. Navy doctrine holds that the mobility of aircraft carriers gives them an advantage over land air bases. Result: billions are committed to both systems, even though Navy bombers and Air Force bombers are both ways of waging similar sorts of strategic nuclear war--each requiring distinct and gigantic support systems. So far, the J.C.S. have been unable to come to any kind of decision to prevent such overlapping effort.

Moreover, the time is at hand when each service, with its own missiles, has a global capability, when each has its own missile war plan, when each is building up its own weapons system virtually without regard to the other services (e.g., the Army is building a missile system to protect cities; the Air Force is building one to protect air bases). This not only makes for a cumbersome, inefficient defense system, but it could also bankrupt the U.S., if allowed to continue.

Three Plans for One War

The net result was vividly explained by Dr. Vannevar Bush, former chairman of the Pentagon Research and Development Board, in a recent appearance before the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. Said Bush: "The services themselves, the three services, have prepared war plans, all different, each one of them the best they can produce. From there on, there has been no means by which those could be brought into a unitary plan. And since there has been no such means, the three plans have been advocated by the three services, and the discussion of them has been in the public press and some of the decisions in regard to them have had to be made right here on Capitol Hill.

"That, gentlemen, is not the way to prepare for war. If we had an effective central planning body acting as a staff to our Commander in Chief, digesting all of these things, putting them into their relative framework, and out of it producing a program for the country, that program, when approved by the Commander in Chief, would in my opinion have the loyalty of every service, and the bickering would stop."

In his general ideas. Vannevar Bush has been joined over the years by some of the nation's foremost military thinkers: onetime Army Chief of Staff (1945-48) Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army Generals Joseph Lawton Collins and George C. Marshall. Air Generals Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold and Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, Joseph T. McNarney, former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, former Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter and Los Angeles Industrialist John McCone, who served as special assistant to Defense Secretary Forrestal in 1948 and as Air Force Under Secretary in 1950-51. Although they differ in detail, all have advocated what amounts to some form of a general staff system.

Such a general staff would be composed of the ablest available career officers, freed of obligations to or responsibilities within the separate services. They would work under a Chief of General Staff, who would make out their fitness reports and from whom they would get their promotion recommendations. The general staff would serve as an expert, unified, military planning and advisory board to the Secretary of Defense. A primary responsibility: working out an integrated war plan for all the armed forces of the U.S.

At the same time, to strengthen the lines of civilian control, the Secretary of Defense would be the final Pentagon authority in all matters, especially including administration of the services, which he must now share with the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Those Secretaries would be replaced by Under Secretaries of Defense, one for each service, whose responsibilities would lie within the Department of Defense instead of with the separate branches.

All For One or All For All?

The critics of a general staff system, still led by the Navy and including many a Congressman, can be expected to put up a fight against any such change however labeled. Main lines of their argument: a general staff might 1) drain the separate services of esprit de corps, 2) commit the U.S. to a single, inflexible strategic course that might prove disastrous, and 3) concentrate military power to the extent that a Chief of General Staff could become a man on horseback, riding rough shod over democratic institutions.

The general staff advocates reply that the services could certainly keep their separate identity and esprit de corps under a general staff system. (The high-morale U.S. Marine Corps has been a part of the Navy since its founding in 1775.) While it is true that an oversimplified doctrinaire war plan could be disastrous, the advocates argue that a war plan carefully thought through, carefully approved by civilians both in Pentagon and Congress, would take maximum advantage of the strength of all the services and of the U.S. economy. As for the man on horseback, say general staff advocates, if U.S. institutions are that weak, then the nation is in worse trouble than it ever reckoned. A career Army officer inhabits the White House, with the authority of Commander in Chief, and no President has operated in closer harmony with constitutional concepts. Moreover, all the general staff systems currently contemplated would strengthen, not weaken civilian control of the military.

Any such far-reaching change as a general staff system could and should come only after the fullest possible debate--and that debate is just now starting in earnest. To be carefully weighed is the possibility that the conversion, in Sputnik's day, would be too strong a dose of medicine, might do the patient more harm than good. Yet the proponents of the general staff system argue that the U.S. can afford no less at a time when the technology of war and weapons has so plainly outraced the military organization that supports it.

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