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PREPARED STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. JOHN H. CUSHMAN

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

In investigating the need for legislation on the authorities of the commanders of unified commands and the organization and ways of operating of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, your subcommittee is looking at a subject of profound importance. Thank you for inviting me to testify.

My expertise is that of a researcher and former practitioner in the field of command and control of military forces. In two books for the Program on Information Policy Research at Harvard University, I have described, from the viewpoint of command and control, (1) how the authorities of commanders of unified commands fall short of their responsibilities and (2) weaknesses of the present Joint Chiefs of Staff system.*

The approach of the Program on Information Resources Policy is to describe, as impartially as possible, the situation that exists -- and then to lay out options, but not to make recommendations. That will be my approach today.

With me is Professor Anthony G. Oettinger, Chairman of Harvard's Program on Information Resources Policy. I have a

*John H. Cushman, Command and Control of Theater Forces: Adequacy. Cambridge, MA: Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, 1983; republished Washington, DC: AFCEA International Press, 1985; and John H. Cushman, Command and Control of Theater Forces: The Korea Command and Other Cases. Cambridge, MA: Program on Information Resources Policy, Harvard University, 1986.

statement for the record, part of which I will read. Professor Oettinger has a brief statement. He and I will then be available for questions.

In our 1983 study we concluded:

Theater forces' command and control systems are not well tied together, top to bottom. They

are not being exercised adequately under the
expected conditions of war. Great sections of
them will probably not survive the attack against
them which is sure to come in war. For the
typical senior commander, allied or U.S., whose
forces must use these systems, they represent the
largely unplanned splicing together of ill-fitting
components which have been delivered to his forces
by relatively independent parties far away who
have coordinated adequately neither with him and
his staff nor with each other. And they neither
exploit the present capabilities of technology nor
does the system for their development adequately
provide that future systems will.

We described in 1983 the basic cause of this alarming condition:

Responsible senior officers who are in the operational chain of command below the President and the Secretary of Defense, and who will surely be held accountable in the event of command and control failure, have not been given the means to meet their responsibility and accountability.

We have just completed our 1986 study.

Preliminary

spiral bound copies of this study have been made available to your Subcommittee.

Our 1986 study concludes that notwithstanding recent progress the 1983 findings remain true. Our 1986 study says that the basic reason for the mismatch of responsibility and authority is the...

Service-dominated culture of U.S. multi-
service operational command. Within this culture
the senior multiservice commanders lack the full
operational command which the Congress in 1958
specified that they will possess. Similarly the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, because of the committee
system under which they operate for command and
control as well as for other matters, are unable
to bring about the standard of excellence which
operational command and control systems can
achieve and which the American people have a right
to expect.

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In 1946, the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack had this to say as one of 25 lessons learned from that catastrophe:

In a well-balanced organization there is close correlation of responsibility and authority.

In 1949, a U.S. Army field manual commented on that

judgment:

..to vest a commander with responsibility and no corresponding authority is eminently unfair.

As a former operational commander, President Eisenhower understood those principles well. In his 1958 message to the Congress he said: "Our unified commands are the cutting edge of our military machine... Our entire defense organization exists to make them effective." He said that "...each unified commander must have unquestioned authority over all units of his command." He recommended to the Congress 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 responsible to the Secretary of Defense and the President for "the performance of military missions." The Congress said that the military departments would assign forces to these unified commands and that these forces would be under the "full operational command" of the unified commander. The law did not define "full operational command." But the House Armed Services Committee report did. It renamed the term "operational control." Then it said:

This operational control is defined as those func-
tions of command involving the composition of sub-
ordinate forces, the assignment of tasks, the
designation of objectives and the authoritative
direction necessary to accomplish the mission.
[Let me call this sentence 1 of the 1958 House
committee report's definition.]' Operational con-
trol should be exercised by the use of the assigned
normal organizational units through their respons-
ible commanders or through the commanders of sub-
ordinate forces established by the commander
exercising operational control. [And let this be
sentence 2.] It does not include such matters as
administration, discipline, internal organization
and unit training, except when a subordinate com-
mander requests assistance. [And this, sentence
3.1

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Unified Action Armed Forces (UNAAF), then defined, and still defines, operational command exactly as did the House committee report, in sentences [1], [2], and [3].

The UNAAF then goes on to limit commanders' authorities, not just symbolically, by changing "command" into "control" and the like, but by writing additional words of restriction. For example, the UNAAF emphasizes the prerogatives of what it calls Service "component" commanders. It says, for instance:

Within unified commands, operational command will be exercised through the Service component commanders....

The law makes no mention of Service "components."

The law only says that each military department is responsible for the administration of the forces which it assigns to unified commands, and that the responsibility for the support of these forces shall be vested in one or more of the military departments as may be directed by the Secretary of Defense.

Our books cite chapter and verse of the UNAAF; will not do so here. Suffice it to say that its effect, and the evident intent of its drafters, was and is to limit the scope of the unified commander's authority. In practice, the JCS-UNAAF command doctrine sets up what our 1986 study calls "the wall of the Service component."

We find that:

"The wall of the Service component" has always inhibited and often prevented command supervision of mission performance and mission readiness by multiservice commanders and has kept them from the exercise of proper influence over the evolution of the command and control systems of their commands.

We summarize the effect:

Over the years, a pervasive and by now endemic weakening of the chain of U.S. operational command has had grave deleterious effect on the readiness and performance of U.S. multiservice forces, and has contributed to recent disasters such as the October 1983 Beirut Marine tragedy.

This pervasive and endemic weakening is not just at the top of the unified command structure. It extends all the way to the end of the operational chain of command.

If there is any single principle which the work of the Program on Information Resources Policy brings out, it is that, not only to be effective but to avoid disaster, organizations must have an open flow of information, uninhibited by barriers. In last week's hearings of the President's Commission investigating the cause of the loss of 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 commands sets up fundamental barriers to information flow, with military disaster in due time the certain outcome.

There is no more graphic example of the way the "wall of the Service component" operates in practice than the October 1983 catastrophe in Beirut, when terrorists destroyed the U.S. Marine Corps barracks and killed 241 American servicemen.

Our 1986 study covers this at length as "Case 2: Beirut Marine Tragedy, 1983." I will only summarize.

The Department of Defense commission that investigated the disaster, its chairman Admiral Robert L. H. Long, U.S. Navy, Retired, concluded that there was "a lack of effective command supervision of the Marines' security posture before the event."

Let us examine the chain of command which the Long Commission found at fault.

The commander of the destroyed barracks, and of most of the personnel billeted there, was the commanding officer of the USMC Battalion Landing Team (BLT), a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel.

See the figure, next page.

O The solid line (

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In that figure:

) describes the situation of "full command. Full command exists only in Service channels.

The dotted line (..... ) describes "operational
control," also called "opcon.

"

The dashed line (-------) describes "full command" minus "operational control."

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