Mr. NICHOLS. Mr. Barrett, do you have any questions?

Mr. BARRETT. General Jones, returning to the discussion of the joint subspecialty a while ago, I have a couple of things. One, I think the impression could be left that these joint subspecialists are going to be staff officers for the rest of their lives. The intent of the bill is that the officers, who would spend half of their time on staffs anyway after the 8 or 9 year level, would serve on the joint side in their staff specialty. But they would go right back out to their services. Second, if we do not do something like this, how do we develop the overall strategists that we need later on, as junior officers progress in their career life?

General JONES. I agree, and I do not think 5-percent is magic. I would be happy with one third of their time. What I am concerned about is having only 2 percent repeats. You can afford a fairly rapid turnover if the people who come in have had previous Joint Staff experience. But it is the people who come in who have not had joint duty who cause difficulty. So I would endorse that a substantial time be in the joint system. Fifty percent maybe, maybe a third would be a right number. But a substantial time beyond the initial duty once you have identified the officer. But most of the time should be spent in the service in the field, rather than in the joint system.

Mr. CARNEY. Let me ask this question of you then, General. If we were to have that type of mix, 40 or 50 or 60 percent, depending upon the individuals, would you suggest that those who serve in the upper echelon of the joint activity be exclusive to those who have had that experience?

General JONES. No; but I would try the best I could to work the system where most of them would have that experience. But I would not exclude anybody. I do not like arbitrariness in the personnel business. So, I would not be absolute. I would give the Secretary of Defense a lot of authority in this regard. But I would set as a basic criteria that you have to have had extensive joint experience to be the Chairman or the CINC, with a waiver authority by the Secretary of Defense.

Mr. CARNEY. Thank you.

Mr. NICHOLS. General Jones, we appreciate your testimony very much sir. You have been very helpful to us on former occasions as well as this morning. We appreciate your being with us.

The Chair will announce that at 1 p.m. this afternoon we resume our hearings on the crash of the Arrow Airlines. At that time we will hear from former Arrow Airlines pilot Michael Sanjenis, and former aircraft mechanic for Arrow Airlines, Mr. Randy Stirm, both of whom have been subpoenaed by the committee. And we will have Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Maurice Shriber, who will be with us to speak for the Defense Department as well.

At 3 p.m. this afternoon we resume our hearings on the DOD reform. Witnesses will be General John Cushman, U.S. Army, retired, with Professor Anthony Oettinger, and Gen. John Vogt, U.S. Air Force, retired, former Commander of Allied Air Forces in Europe.

The committee stands in recess until 1 p.m.

[Whereupon, at 10 a.m., the subcommittee recessed, to reconvene at 1 p.m., the same day.]

AFTERNOON SESSION

STATEMENT OF HON. BILL NICHOLS, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ALABAMA, CHAIRMAN, INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. NICHOLS. The subcommittee will come to order.

After considerable delay and with my apologies, we will get started on our afternoon session in which we are going to continue looking into reorganization problems of the Department of Defense. Our witnesses this afternoon are, first, Gen. John Cushman, U.S. Army [Retired], who is a distinguished author of "Command and Control of Theater Forces: Adequacy." With him is Professor Anthony G. Oettinger, with Harvard University.

General, you have a prepared statement, I believe, sir. Without objection we will put that in the record and we will recognize you for any statement you care to make, sir.

STATEMENT OF GEN. JOHN H. CUSHMAN, U.S. ARMY (RETIRED), AUTHOR OF "COMMAND AND CONTROL OF THEATER FORCES: ADEQUACY"

General CUSHMAN. I would like to make a condensation of my statement for about 10 minutes.

Mr. NICHOLS. Yes, sir.

General CUSHMAN. Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me to testify.

General CUSHMAN. My expertise is that of a researcher and former practitioner in the field of command and control of military forces. In two books I have described, No. 1, "How the Authorities of Commanders of Unified Commands Fall Short of Their Responsibilities," and No. 2, "Weaknesses of the Present JCS System." With me is Professor Oettinger, chairman of the Harvard University's Program on Information and Resources Policy, where these books were written.

I have a statement for the record which I have given to the clerk. I will read about a 10- or 12-minute condensation. Professor Oettinger has a statement. We will then be available for questions. Mr. Chairman, our 1983 study said this:

Theater forces' command and control systems are not well tied together. They are not being tested under the conditions of war. Great sections of them will probably not survive. They represent the largley unplanned splicing together of illfiting components, and they do not exploit technology.

We described the basic cause of this alarming condition; namely, that the Chariman of the JCS and senior officers in the operational chain of command have not been given the means, including the necessary authority, to meet their responsibilities and accountability. We have just completed our 1986 study. I have it here. Preliminary copies have been made available to your subcommittee. This study concludes that the 1983 findings remain true. It says that the basic reason for this mismatch of responsibility and authority is the service-dominated culture of U.S. multiservice operational command.

In his 1958 message to Congress, President Eisenhower said that "each unified commander must have unquestioned authority over all units of his command." He recommended that "present law

be so amended as to remove any possible obstacles to full unity of our commands and the full command over them by unified commanders."

The Congress then wrote into law the concept of unified commands for the preformance of military missions. It said that the unified commander would have full operational command. The law, however, did not define full operational command. But the report of the Armed Services Committee, which accompanied the legislation to the House floor, did. It defined it and it limited the definition of operational command.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff in the UNAAF-JCS Pub 2, Unified Action Armed Forces-limited it further. In some 37 pages, the UNAAF command doctrine sets up a wall. We call this the wall of the service component. The effect of this over the years has been a pervasive and, by now endemic, weakening of the chain of U.S. operational command. This has had grave deleterious effect on the readiness and performance of U.S. multiservice forces, and on their command and control, and this weakening goes all the way to the end of the multiservice operational chain of command.

In last week's hearings by the President's commission on the loss of the shuttle Challenger, we learned how barriers to information flow may have contributed to a faulty decision to launch. The wall of the component in unified command sets up fundamental barriers to information flow with military disaster a certain outcome. There is no more graphic example than the October 1983 catastrophe in Beirut. The investigating commission, under Admiral Long, charged a lack of effective command supervision of the Marines in Beirut. That commission held the operational chain responsible. But the wall of the service component weakened that operational chain's authority.

USCINCEUR had established a Special Assistant with specific responsibility for analyzing security within his command, EUCOM, against terrorist attacks. Six months before the Beirut tragedy, a Special Assistance team had visited the U.S. Office of Military Cooperation in Beirut, a EUCOM agency, and had recommended antiterrorist measures. The Long Commission stated that had the Marines also taken such measures in addition to this Office of Military Cooperation, the likelihood of terrorist success would have been substantially reduced.

Now, why did General Rogers not order the Special Assistance team to survey the Marine dispositions in Beirut? Your own House Investigations Subcommittee report reads to this point: "Earlier in 1982, General Rogers had offered the Marines antiterrorist training, and his offer was turned down." And there it is, the "wall of the component." Written into the UNAAF are the words which your subcommittee in 1985 wrote into its report. Those words are that "Operational control does not include such matters as administration, descipline, internal organization and unit training, except when a subordinate commander requests assistance." In this case the subordinate commander not only did not request assistance, he said he didn't need assistance.

Not only do the words inhibit, but the culture of the system inhibits this exercise of operational command. The same culture was also in part responsible for the 1980 failure of the Iran hostage

rescue mission. That mission failed in large part because of inadequate joint training. A fundamental obstacle to proper joint training was the wall of the component.

The operational chain of command from top to bottom has lived so long with this culture of weak command that all too many of its members have come to accept it. And where has this service-oriented culture come from? It came from this committee in 1958, in its committee report. It has been reinforced by the words of the UNAAF.

The JCS are now revising JCS Pub 2. You have been told that. Mr. Chairman, you may wish to assist the drafters by being explicit in statute about what the Congress means by full operational command, and how far down the operational chain of command this authority extends. In doing so, you can thereby begin a decisive change in the culture of our Armed Forces.

The way the Joint Chiefs of Staff function weakens the authority of the CINC. For example, if the unified commander should make known his intent to organize and employ the assigned forces of a service in a way contrary to that service's thinking, the service component commander could take the issue to this service Chief, who then could raise the matter in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This takes time. This makes trouble.

The CINC's thus operate essentially under an unspoken, possibly even spoken, policy line: don't bring anything minor to the tank. In the light of the way the JCS are currently organized-that is as a committee with a weak charter for its chairman-such instructions might make sense. But who knows when a minor problem might become major. It lies out there waiting to be discovered by events. Minor, and major, problems should be solved out there where the commanders can deal with them.

Command and control systems are far more than simply communication links, command centers, and other material. They include people, commanders, staffs, and their ways of operating and organizing. The combination of weak charters and service-dominated culture has kept unified commanders from the exercise of proper influence over the evolution of the very command and control systems essential to their mission performance.

We have the strengths of the individual services and the institutional mechanisms of the Department of Defense, and especially the service Chiefs as they sit as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, essentially a committee with a Chairman whose authority is weak.

A classic example is the way the JCS went about the creation of the Joint Technical Command, Control and Communications Agency, JTC3A. As to whom that agency should report, as to its jurisdiction, as to who can task the Agency, and as to the resources of the Agency, the Joint Tactical Command, Control and Communication Agency is weak. Why? Because each of these issues, the resources, the tasking, and who they reported to and so on was decided by the JCS as a committee, with a Chairman who had weak authority.

The current JCS setup will not, indeed cannot, lead to the kinds of changes that are required if theater forces command and control

systems are to reach the standard of excellence which they can, and in the national interest, must achieve.

Mr. Chairman, the Program on Information Policy Research, which Professor Oettinger is chairman of, does not make recommendations. Our approach is simply to describe the situation as impartially and as objectively and as completely as we know how to do, and then to present options. Our two books echo in great detail and support the conclusions of many others including the Packard Commission; namely, (1) strengthen the unified commander, and (2) strengthen the authority of the Chairman of the JCS.

In chapter XV of our book that just come out, we present a matrix for decision. We offer the proposition that the unified commander will want to have either authority or influence in how his command is to be organized and employed, how it is to be trained, how it is to be equipped, what resources he is to be provided, how the administrative and logistical support in combat operations is to be provided to his forces, and personnel actions as to key members of his command.

We are prepared to discuss options and their implications in the question period. That is the end of my prepared statement. I believe Professor Oettinger has something to say.