the Navy. Integration of the military and civilian staffs may be somewhat more difficult there. But I think a lot of it can be done anyway. Three or four different studies have recommended that. To some degree, of course, it can be done by a good relationship between the military department secretary and the service staff. But the bureaucracies below them, even when they get along well, tend to have a life and a goal of their own. So, again, I would endorse the general idea without saying that I agree with every sentence in the draft.

Let me finally say that I think this committee is doing very important work by trying to move these defense organizational changes forward. I hope something gets done this year because the Nation needs to have an improvement in the way it operates its defense organization. Although legislation won't do it, it certainly can help. It can help the senior people in the Department of Defense do a better job, assuming that they want to. I am sure that they all do.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. NICHOLS. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.

You have been before this subcommittee a number of times on this very same issue. We feel perhaps this is the year that we are going to put something into law on this.

Do you have any further suggestions beyond those that we have incorporated in our legislation to strengthen the staff, to make it more attractive, to not make it appear to a bright young officer that it is the kiss of death, and so forth?

Mr. BROWN. I think that you are moving in the right direction. I am not certain how far it is sensible to move in each step. I believe that overall, over the long term, a combined military staff, which you can call a general staff, is a good idea. What I am less clear on is how the career pattern should work. You may recall that in my book I point out that there are disadvantages to having a too eliteappearing group, a group that is self-contained. Yet, movement back and forth is not going to be so easy. I think it makes sense to have movement back and forth from a service to a general staff early in a career, beginning, say, at 0-3. But by the time you get up to 0-6, it seems to me that those who have gotten that far are likely thereafter, with rare exceptions-there may be some exceptions-to serve in joint billets, either in the combined military staff or in unified and specified commands.

Your draft legislation tries to ensure that there will be incentives to serve in joint posts by saying that CINC and chairmen have to have joint specialties. I think that makes sense. What I am not quite so clear on in my own mind-I haven't thought it through-is how somebody at the O-7 level, the O-8 level, brigadier, major general, rear admiral, upper half or lower half, can serve in a joint billet and then in a service billet and then in a joint billet. I think it can be done, but I would like to hear from people who have been in such spots a little more before I prescribe exactly how it's to be done.

I don't believe that there should be a distinctive uniform, such as a red stripe for a British staff officer, because I think what you really want is people in different uniforms sitting around together working for a joint goal. I think there's going to be a problem in

working out a career pattern that works one way and another way. There are lots of examples of people who have served largely joint careers. General Goodpaster, who will be testifying after me, is a very good example. He has some wisdom on this.

Mr. NICHOLS. Would you support putting into law a proposition that would require service on a joint staff as a requisite for an O-7 billet?

Mr. BROWN. I think that that is something that I failed to do with the regulation, the directive to which I reformed earlier. A law may be indicated which allows, as I think this draft legislation allows, exceptions to be made, but only by the Secretary of Defense and then require that there be joint service afterward. I am not sure whether 0-7 or 0-8 is the place, but somewhere in there I think something like this is required. Having failed to do it by regulation, I think legislation may be desirable.

Mr. NICHOLS. Would you support a similar provision that would mandate a service chief having served in a CINC slot?

Mr. BROWN. It seems to me that that's harder, at least it's harder for me to be sure that makes sense, because it is not clear to me which is a more senior job. In other words, if one is a qualification for the other, that implies that the second is the one to which you are promoted. In the kind of arrangement that you are envisaging and that I envisage, I think a CINC's job, at least some CINCs' jobs, are more senior.

At one time I tried to examine the question of whether the CINC's shouldn't rank the Chiefs. That did not get very far, and one of the reasons is that the CINCs' jobs are very different. They vary a lot. There is very little doubt in my mind that CINCEUR is a more responsible and a more senior job than the chief of service job. Indeed, General Rogers had been chief of service first and General Lemnitzer had been not only a chief of service but a chairman before he became CINCEUR. So, at that level I have more questions in my mind as to making that particular level of joint service, that is a unified or specified commander, a prerequisite.

Mr. NICHOLS. I can understand why that trial balloon might not have gotten very far.

You introduced a new face card, I think, in our discussion when you mentioned the possibility of CINC's-it would be desirable, you said-each having an office of the CINC's here in Washington. Would you explain the necessity of that, the benefits that you see to be derived?

Mr. BROWN. Yes; necessity is perhaps too strong a word. But it's clear that resource decisions are going to keep being made in Washington. If you're not on the scene, you don't have nearly as much influence; in fact, often you don't even find out what's going

on.

When we first established the rapid deployment joint task force with General Kelley as head, he was down at MacDill in Tampa. He was the new boy on the block-and he wasn't a CINC, since it was a task force. It wasn't a unified command. In order to make sure that that got going with access to information and ability to input right at the top, a Washington liaison office was established with, if I remember correctly, an O-7, a brigadier as its head. And that was extremely useful.

When that organization became the Central Command [CENT COM], when it became a CINC, my understanding is that the Washington liaison office was abolished, perhaps with the thought that, well now that he's a CINC, if he has one, they'll all want one. You can't have that.

And I gather that that was a loss. Now, I think both CENTCOM and some of the other unified commands, other CINC's have tried to establish, with varying degrees of success, informal arrangements of the same kind. I don't think you need anything like this in legislation, but I think it does make sense to do it. Particularly if you're going to make the CINC's, as the draft legislation suggests, bigger players in the resource allocation process. You'd better have somebody in Washington because that's where the resource allocation comes in and takes place.

Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Skelton.

Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First let me apologize to you and to the Secretary, General Goodpaster and General Meyer. I find myself having conflict in committees today. I would like to take this opportunity to ask the Secretary a few questions before I do leave.

First I might say that I think we should emblazon in gold your comment on the front of our bill or bills that the pole star of this whole purpose is to change the balance of influence from military services to the joint activities. I think that is so terribly important for all of us to keep in mind where we are headed. I appreciate your articulating that.

Also, your comments, which I heard you so eloquently espouse, deserve reiteration, that a CINC, a commander-in-chief, has, and must have, a short range. I think you used the term "short horizon of 1-year, 2-year, get-ready-to-fight-the-war-right-away" point of view, as opposed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their environs which, of course, must understand the short view but must have as its goal the long range, 10, 15 years: Where are we going to be in the year 2000, 2010, et cetera? So, I think, as we do our work, we should keep those in mind. Thank you for mentioning them.

I have three things I would like to touch on very briefly. First, I would like to have your opinion on the Defense agencies. I have legislation I am wrestling with which I have not introduced. I have, as you know, cosponsored the package with this chairman, and with Mr. Aspin, on the Defense agencies, which is not as strong as I have been advocating personally. If you had your druthers and you could wave the magic wand, what would you do with the Defense agencies?

Mr. BROWN. Mr. Skelton, they are a very disparate group. There are lots. They are different activities. Each of them was established at different times and for different purposes. DNA, for example, the Defense Nuclear Agency, grew out of an organization that predates the Department of Defense, the Armed Forces special weapons project, in 1946 and 1947. It does research. It also handles stockpiles. It does some things that are clearly military operational functions. But it also has some long-range functions.

DCA was an attempt to make sure that the services communicate with each other and that the President and the Secretary of

Defense, and the headquarters authorities could communicate down to the field.

It hasn't worked too well in the first goal. It worked pretty well in the second. It has improved communication down. It has not done very well in lateral communication.

Defense Logistics Agency was set up by Mr. McNamara because the services were all buying their raincoats differently. It sure makes sense to buy commodities that way——

Mr. SKELTON. As I understand, they've gone well beyond their charter, though. I think in the Army they are buying some 500,000 Army-peculiar items-

Mr. BROWN. I agree. It makes sense to buy commodities that way. It doesn't make sense to buy service-unique items that way. But you know, that problem does not end at the Defense level. You have an attempt by GSA to buy all computers, helped by certain elements in the Congress whose view is that they have influence over GSA; therefore, GSA ought to have more influence. And that's at the congressional level.

At the executive branch level, you have the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, which deals mostly with the Department of Defense. You get a situation where people say: Well, all the aircraft carriers, no matter what part of the Government buys them, need to be bought the same way; and therefore, we'll have another layer that sees that all the aircraft carriers are bought the same way, or all the computers are bought the same way.

So, you've got to balance here. Where should you cut off? And I think maybe the Defense Logistics Agency needs to be looked at again to see that it deals with joint matters. And the same thing goes with Defense Communications Agency. Defense Mapping Agency is pretty specialized.

Defense Intelligence Agency is a special and difficult case because it certainly makes sense to have an overall Defense look at intelligence. That was the intention when DIA was set up in 1961, or whenever it was.

At the same time, there is service-unique intelligence. It is another form of the argument that takes place between the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, or at least on certain occasions it does, as to what is national intelligence. It is largely in the eye of the beholder.

I believe that you need a DIA to produce a less service-biased set of estimates. And I think on occasion it has done that. I think it has taken a certain amount of courage, but I can recall at least some occasions in which the Defense Intelligence Agency, because there was some particularly astute analyst supported by a brave Director, who came in with an estimate that was completely contrary to what a particular service-and in this case it happened to be the same service as the service of which the Director of DIA was a member-wanted the intelligence estimate to be, because they had a particular weapons system that depended on the intelligence estimate coming out a different way.

So, I think there's a real function there. The question is: How much should you take away from the services? And I think that in this particular case perhaps not enough has been taken away from the services-

Mr. SKELTON. There are some areas such as the procurement of small ammunition that the Army does for everybody, which doesn't go through the DLA, for instance.

Let me ask you another question, a question dealing with the chain of command. The Packard Commission will recommend the chain of command going from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, to the CINC. We have in our legislation that has passed, the President, the Secretary of Defense, and then at the President's discretion, through the chairman, the CINC. And now I understand it goes through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we're not sure how it gets massaged over there. Would you comment on the Packard recommendation please?

Mr. BROWN. The Packard Commission recommendation, as you describe it, continues what the law now says.

Mr. SKELTON. Yes.

Mr. BROWN. My understanding is that that law was written very deliberately by the then congressional leadership of the respective Armed Service Committee and the President, President Eisenhower. Again, General Goodpaster, I think, can illuminate this matter more than I; he was there.

It was subsequently done by directive prescribing that the orders are issued through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In effect, the way the situation works is as follows. (I think it works that way now. I know it worked that way when I was Secretary.) The Chairman essentially, but the Chairman acting for the Chiefs, acts as the agent of the Secretary of Defense in transmitting orders. He doesn't do it on his own. And I think that's probably the way it ought to be. It seems to me that that is what civilian control means.

The word is "through" the Chiefs now in the directive. The law says the command line runs from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, to the CINC's. The directive says it runs through the Chiefs. That certainly should be changed to say it runs through the Chairman. But I think what it means, and the way it has always been operated is, the Chairman is the agent of the Secretary. There is not an independent command level there, and I don't think

Mr. SKELTON. You don't think he ought to massage the message? Mr. BROWN. I don't think he ought to massage the message. I mean, he gets a crack at it. If the Secretary has any sense, he will discuss such matters with the Chairman before he sends it. But it ought to go in the Secretary's name. In my day-and I think it may still be that way-any such message, any command message says "by order of the Secretary of Defense." It may be signed by the Chairman, but if it says "by order of the Secretary of Defense, it is clear where the command lies.

Mr. SKELTON. The last question I have is that relating to the Deputy Chairman. And I appreciate your comments immensely. I feel so strongly about this, to free up your Chairman so that he can go to Holy Loch, Scotland, so he can really see things and go places, he has to have someone he can trust full time. There is, I know, a great deal of prestige, whether it be the opportunity to go to the White House, or whatever it may be, in the rotating-I am being a little facetious there-the rotating chairmanship.

I have some problem with that because the other chiefs are four individuals. They do things differently. Should you be in the middle