Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

goals that can be accomplished only with the use of military force. We have no life in and of ourselves, so our purpose is to serve the political leadership of the United States.

The war-fighting commanders, that is the unified and specified commanders, are the points on that spear. Therefore, the line between the National Command Authority and the war-fighting commanders or the unified and specified commanders is one of the most important lines for command chains in our entire governmental structure. And it is necessary that that line be as crisp and clear as possible so there can be no misunderstanding because the penalty for misunderstandings is too great.

It is essential that there be a clear blend of accountability and authority on the part of the unified commanders, the war-fighting commanders, and I would suggest that there is a possibility that today there is not a full match between accountability and authority vested in the unified commanders. They have enormous accountability, but they do not have authority commensurate with that accountability.

I can cite one example. During the period that I served as the commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, one of the most pressing requirements for which I was accountable was to ensure that Iceland remained secure in the event of conflict. Now, when you look at the defenses of Iceland that existed at that time, you had to conclude that the poor radar coverage, with stone-age radars, insufficient in number, and the F-4 fighter aircraft maintained there by the Air Force were not adequate in the event of conflict to ensure that you could hold Iceland. Without Iceland, there is no way you can conduct an antisubmarine warfare campaign in the North Atlantic.

For the entire period I served as commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, I tried to persuade another service, the U.S. Air Force, to place in their budget the funds to upgrade the radar and the command and control on Iceland and to replace the F-4's with F-15's, and I was unsuccessful. In retrospect, I believe I was unsuccessful because I was trying to persuade another service to help support a Navy commander. There was no system that enabled me to place that requirement in an overall resource context.

I, indeed was offered the opportunity, when the Defense Resources Board was established, to make the case before the Defense Resources Board, but there is very little you can do in a 10-minute window or 10-minute opportunity every year.

My overall view of the JCS organization probably is that we have four problems that we are dealing with. The first is the authority of the chairman, the second is the staff's support for the Chairman, the third is the resource authority of the unified commanders, and fourth is the issue of the Deputy Chairman.

Of those four problems, the one that I have the strongest personal feeling about is that of the deputy chairman. In my 2 years as Director of the Joint Staff and the 4 years I served as commander in chief of the Atlantic Command, one of the most persistent problems that I encountered was the problem of the acting chairman and the continuity that was lost when an acting chairman filled in for the Chairman during his many absences.

At that time, both when I was Director of the Joint Staff and when I was commander in chief of the Atlantic Command, we had a system whereby the senior service chief in town became the acting chairman in the Chairman's absence. It has happened historically that in the course of a single crisis, we could have four separate acting chairmen serving in that capacity.

When General Vessey became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he changed that system and established a system that rotated an acting chairman every 3 months and kept one service chief in town for a 3-month period, so he could get up to speed on JCS matters and functions as the only acting chairman during that 3-month window of time. That was a considerable improvement and created a situation where we would only encounter four different acting chairmen over the course of a year.

But that is clearly not sufficient in this unforgiving game that we are engaged in in the use of the Armed Forces of the United States in support of our political leadership. I am convinced that one of the most serious needs is to create the position of Deputy Chairman and make that Deputy Chairman the No. 2 ranking officer in the U.S. military and that that Deputy Chairman should be the one that functions as the alter ego to the chairman in the chairman's absence. There is a principle of leadership that says that an effective leader is a known personality and has predictable behavior. It is relatively impossible to achieve the qualities of a known personality and predictable behavior if you are changing the personality every three months, or as we used to in the past, change the personality four times in the course of one crisis.

There is another aspect of JCS organization that bears some examination, and that is the natural tensions that exist between the resource authorities, the service Chiefs and the Service Secretaries on the one hand, and the war-fighting authorities, the unified and specified commanders on the other. This natural tension results from the fact that the war-fighting commander is charged with and held accountable for carrying out today's missions, achieving today's objectives with the capability available to him today. The service chiefs and the resource authorities are responsible for and are held accountable for, providing ships, weapon systems, aircraft and trained personnel to the war-fighting commanders.

Because that is their role, their primary role, they look out ahead 3, 4, 5 years, and they must do so. So their view of the world is not just what happens today, but what is going to happen downstream. Occasionally that forward look will conflict with something that a unified commander feels he must do today. This is particularly true when you look at the balance between four pillars, what we call the four pillars of defense expenditures, that is forcestructure, modernization, readiness, and sustainability. That unified commander is concerned primarily with readiness, and when he sees readiness traded off to buy forcestructure or modernization for 3, 4, 5 years ahead, it makes him nervous. He doesn't like to mortgage today, because he is accountable for today in order to buy something for tomorrow, although that is necessary.

But what we really see is that there is a cultural gap between the resource authorities and the war-fighting authorities and seldom, if ever, do we find a chairman or a service chief that has

also served as the unified commander. The recommendation that I attempted vigorously to have incorporated in the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies report was a recommendation that would require or establish a procedure that encouraged the assignment of a service chief to the role of a unified commander or the unified commander to the position of service chief and make that a prerequisite for an officer being eligible to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A Chairman who has served as both a unified commander and service chief is well equipped by experience, not just personal talent, but by experience, to serve the country and serve it very well.

Over the years that this discussion on the JCS organization has continued, you have heard Grenada mentioned as an example of supporting the need for JCS reorganization. I would suggest that Grenada is probably not a convincing example of the need, and it troubles me a bit to see Grenada cited as the convincing example of the need for JCS organization. As the Chief of Naval Operations pointed out last week, we indeed won the conflict in Grenada, and we did so with minimal losses, and we did so in a reasonable amount of time. The case could probably be made that we could have handled Grenada with a single service. So to see Grenada cited as the convincing example for JCS organization does trouble

me.

We can make a better case were we to use or cite the Falkland Islands conflict as a classic example for the need of joint organization, pointing out that the Argentine lack of joint organization really crippled them. They developed their joint organization only at the threshold of war, and the joint organization of the British, plus their professionalism, obviously, won the war for them. And the war cabinet functioned well, the chief of defense staff was able to function well, because he didn't have to take all of his colleagues with him to the war cabinet, and the single unified commander in charge of the Falkland Islands crisis for the British, Admiral Moorehouse, functioned well in his role and was well supported.

The House Armed Sevices Committee bill that was passed last November, H.R. 3622, is, in my opinion, a good bill. I have no problems with any part of it. The Senate Armed Services Committee staff report does trouble me, because I think that the staff report, which I understand has not dominated the proceedings, but the staff report suggestions are revolutionary in nature, and I think go much too far when they contemplate such actions as abolishing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and setting up a council to replace them. I do believe that whatever changes we make should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

If some form of Joint Staff subspecialty is mandated, and it is probably a good idea to do so, the procedures that govern the employment of those subspecialists, who are assigned to the Joint Staff duty, must permit their assignment to operational commands and operational jobs periodically, and by periodically, I mean every 3 or 4 years, so that they can hone their war-fighting skills and hone their operational skills. In the absence of that procedure, we may well find that our professional Joint Staff specialists lose touch and contact with the war-fighting forces in the field, which they are very much in the business of supporting.

There should be some form of protection against intimidation on the part of the others assigned by the services to the Joint Staff. I don't know exactly what form that protection can take, but I can tell you that intimidation does occur. Not retribution, but intimidation, and there is an important difference between the words.

There is also the phenomenon of the services being reluctant on occasion to send their best officers to the Joint Staff for fear that those best officers will do the joint job too well, to the detriment of the services' perceived interests. In other words, there is a fear of success on the part of good officers should they be assigned to the Joint Staff; and, in addition, the services correctly feel that they need their good officers on their own staff to fulfill their own interests.

I have to confess that the Navy is perceived to be the problem today, but I would point out that part of the Navy's mindset stems from the fact that the Navy is already a joint service, and they have already solved the problem of how to make naval forces work effectively with ground forces and air forces, whether land-based or carrier-based. And the case has been made in the past that if the Navy has proven they know how to do it, why can't the other services use their procedures and their doctrine and their methodology? I am not presenting that as an argument, I am suggesting that that is one of the problems in identifying why the Navy has as much difficulty as they have with the course of these deliberations on JCS organization. They know how to do it.

The memorandum of understanding that various services have signed between themselves is symptomatic of the problem, not the solution to the problem. The fact that two services have to sign a memorandum of understanding or a memorandum of agreement in order to be able to operate together is an indictment of the JCS system as it exists today. Because of this practice, the necessary practice of signing these memoranda of understanding, there is a danger of proliferation of fragmented joint undertakings with the result that no one really understands what the entire structure consists of.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I am sure that you have heard from witnesses at this seat, a number of times, the statement, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it." That has a nice sound, and it smacks of typical American pragmatism, but I would also suggest that those are probably the phrases that were used in the board rooms of the American steel industry when they were addressing the question as to whether or not they should modernize their production facilities in order to compete with Japan.

It may also have been the phrase used in the board rooms of the American automobile industry when they were addressing the question of whether or not they should modify their adherence to large cars and build small cars to compete with the Japanese and the Germans.

What I am saying is that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" does not apply in this case, because the stakes are so high that it is incumbent upon everybody who can influence the decision to make our system as sound and solid and clear and crisp and unequivocal as it is possible to make it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. NICHOLS. Thank you, Admiral. It is always good to hear from people that agree with you.

I wanted to ask you about what you talked about as tension. Now, you served as a CINC, you managed a CINC staff. There is a feeling, I think, a rather strong sentiment, among members of the committee that we need to strengthen the CINC's and yet we run into some opposition to that from individuals whose judgment assures us CINC's don't need to be strengthened.

Your story about the Iceland situation intrigues me. You indicate that you couldn't get the additional radar that you needed, you couldn't get the change in the planes that you needed, because you felt like you were making your request to an individual with the other services whose service responsibilities to his service were not deep enough-were so deep, I guess, that he couldn't look at the broader perspective and see that your needs to take care of Iceland were paramount in the responsibility of your duties.

Would you tell the committee what you feel ought to be put in the bill in order to see that the CINC's get their day in court? Obviously, the responsibilities that you had when you headed the North Atlantic Command, if something had happened up there and radar had failed, you would have had the responsibility, because that is your command, of responding to some Congressman or some Senator who would chew you out about it. What would you suggest as to the language that we could put in the bill that could keep that from happening?

Admiral TRAIN. At the present time the procurement structure, and in that particular case, in the case of Iceland, we were talking about procurement and the allocation of assets. The Air Force leadership felt, and said so, that if they were to take their brand new F-15's before they had completed the upgrade of the Air Force squadrons and assigned F-15's to a Navy commander in Iceland, that the people in the Air Force that looked to that leadership for protecting their interest would not understand.

Therefore, whatever system is established to permit a CINC to cross service lines and obtain support, whether it be in the form of readiness, which has been discussed quite extensively, or whether it be in the form of a procurement program, such as F-15's and radars, to cross service lines without causing the service Chief to believe he is giving something to another service, the service Chief, the procurement authority, or the resource authority, has to be able to play into a hand which he sees as giving something to a joint organization, not to another service.

Now, whatever language would create a mechanism for a unified commander to plead his case, not just for readiness and sustainability, but also to plead the case for resources required to actually carry out his job, that structure is what we really need. And it must not appear that a service chief is giving something to another service, but rather he is giving something to a unified command that is indeed the point on the sphere.

Mr. NICHOLS. That becomes a little difficult to put into law because the judgment on your part is a judgment on the Air Force's, is a subjective judgment of the individual that makes it. In this particular case, did you ever go to the Chief of Naval Operations-

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »