unusual or controversial talent. It would force an officer to punch all the tickets and "go through the chairs" before he can get to the top. Such a prescription can cause organizational anemia. The results would not be what you want. I can recall, for example, hearing arguments that no officer should be Chief of Staff of the Army unless he had first commanded a corps. Fortunately, President Carter refused to be bulldozed, and selected General Meyer for that position anyway, The nation's an officer who subsequently vitalized the Army. highest military office is simply too important to set narrow restrictions on the field of candidates available. If we limited the choice of our Presidents based on that kind of rigid credentials, Abraham Lincoln never would have made it. - Section 3 of the bill is a creative but rather complex effort to tie promotions to the joint subspecialty and joint service, and to give the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff some say in Service promotions. The bill's approach may be a good one almost certainly it would help. There is more than one possible way to achieve the end sought. I personally think it would be simpler, and I have long advocated, giving the Chairman and Secretary of Defense authority to convene a separate promotion board to dispose of, say, 10% of the promotions from grades 0-5 to 0-8, without regard to Service distribution. That would send the necessary message. To order that officers in the joint specialty be promoted faster than their peers, as $ 3(a) does, I think goes too far. Also, S 4(c)'s rigid rules on length of assignments are in my view unwise. The crucial point, I believe, is that this bill is absolutely on the mark in trying to protect the promotions of joint-service officers. Without giving the Chairman meaningful influence over promotions and assignments, much else you do to improve the Joint Staff is meaningless. With such control, many other changes will not be necessary. H.R. 4236 - The Military Department Secretariats I am very much in accord with most of H.R. 4326, which would streamline the three military departments and their secretariats. When I served in a Service civilian secretariat, I could observe frequent duplication of functions of these organizations, sandwiched in as they are between the uniformed service staffs and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. later when I worked at the Defense level, I can testify to how The bill would redundant the Service secretariat layers seemed. And effectively reduce the number of headquarters staffs in the Pentagon from nine to six. That would be a great achievement, and you should pursue it in spite of all the bureaucratic clamor that you surely will hear. At the same time, I believe it is absolutely essential to retain the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, assisted by a few noncareer civilian assistants as well as a military staff. The military departments are just too enormous and varied to be managed out of the Secretary of Defense's office. And the three secretaries are essential to provide dayto-day civilian control, interaction with the political process and the business world, and some sense of Service identity and tradition. Their staffs can be smaller about four assistant - secretaries per service is about right; three probably is enough. A total civilian complement of thirty as set in the bill is too small, if that counts clerical support. Fifty might be a better figure. It is a healthy cut from the hundreds in place today. Forcing the civilian secretaries closer to their uniformed staffs is long overdue. And it is no departure from tradition. The Chief of Staff of a Service is, as his title says, supposed to be just that: the chief of the secretary's staff, not of his own. Abundance of personnel has made it possible for the service secretary and his chief of staff to enjoy the luxury of two big staffs, one for each. In the process this has caused them to work separately more than they should. I do question section 2(b)(3) of H.R. 4236. I do not see any reason, other than some obsessive sense of neatness, to require that the Services adopt uniform internal organizations. Why not instead let the top managers organize as they see fit? Similarities of the Services are such that their organizations are not likely to vary widely, anyway. But some harmless individuality would reflect the fact that the needs and focus of each service are slightly different. In particular, I would not attempt, as § 3(b)(1) does, to prescribe by law the functions of the assistant secretaries. Let the Service secretary decide. He might, for example, want to have his under secretary rather than an assistant secretary handle the sensitive subject of acquisition and procurement. I would delete section 2(d), which would ban future reorganizations. It is seldom wise to try to bind the future. I particularly applaud the provision in section 3(d) that cuts 15% from the combined Service staffs. The number would be better at 25%. To make cuts work, however, the bill should also provide relief from civil service rules, which I can tell you from experience play havoc with orderly and speedy reductions of staff. The civil service laws, frankly, are designed to make the kind of reductions the bill contemplates as difficult as possible. Your bill could also require that reductions take place promptly by a fixed deadline and that they not be carried out by attrition the bureaucracy's favorite method, which tends to keep the senior people in place while temporarily firing their secretaries until the heat is off. The Congress will have to use its oversight powers to police the reductions carefully, and watch out for phony reductions that are simply organizational sleight of hand. Nothing in this government is harder to do than to cut staffs. The fourth bill, I am sorry to say, troubles me. H.R. 4237 seeks to address a very real concern: the proliferation and expansion of the defense-wide agencies that began under Secretary McNamara. Now, many years later, these agencies go merrily along with no one in the central headquarters clearly in charge of them, except the Secretary of Defense, who has other things to do. When I was in the Department, then Secretary of Defense Harold Brown tried to help the situation by placing each of the defense agencies under the supervision of either an assistant secretary of defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I am not sure that there is a better organizational solution. Certainly having them run by committees would not be an obvious improvement. Right now the law treats the Defense agencies in a single sentence. Section 125(d) of Title 10, after referring to supply or service activities common to more than one military service, says: "The Secretary of Defense shall, whenever he determines it will be more effecative, economical, or efficient, provide for the performance of such an activity by one agency or such other agency or such other organizations as he considers appropriate." That, in my view, is enough said legislatively on the subject. Yet H.R. 4237 goes on, for eleven pages in the typed version, adding section after section to the United States Code. It creates new councils, with their accompanying bureauacracies. It adds still more new reviews, studies, and Congressionally mandated reports the very sort of paperwork requirements that are one of the greatest stumbling blocks to efficiency in the Defense Department today. And it would lengthen the statutes with new laws that tell the Secretary of Defense to do - what he should be doing already. The bill's intentions are good. But in my view its Leave that approach is exactly the one the Congress should stay away from. If the Defense agencies are a problem, call oversight hearings and hold the Secretary of Defense's feet to the fire. simple statutory sentence just as it is, and please think long and hard before writing any additional study and reporting requirements into law. Conclusion I am very conscious, as I said at the beginning, that there there is room for honest disagreement on defense organization. The people you are listening to in these hearings all want a strong defense. The only issue is how how best to protect - the country at the lowest safe price. No one is likely to be absolutely right or totally wrong, because there is no single correct answer. That is one reason to proceed slowly and sparingly in as in the case of the enacting statutes, except where many years. - the shortcomings of existing arrange - ments have become so obvious to so many informed observers for so For the same reason, you can never realistically expect to get total agreement from everyone on these issues a fact which makes the wide consensus on the need for JCS reform all the more impressive. If you wait for unanimity, change will never come. This Subcommittee can be proud of the serious work that the members and your distinguished staff have done to address these fundamental issues that go to the heart of how well the United States is defended. I thank you for your attention and shall be happy to respond to any questions you may have. |