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for a little bit more money in that area, and I think a little bit more money at the CINC's discretion in that area would be very useful.

There has been a proposal for sort of a CINC's readiness fund, something to help facilitate some joint training activities. I think on a limited basis that is carefully capped and with proper coordination procedures with the service departments, those kinds of resource management initiatives can be helpful and useful. But to really get the CINC's in the resource management business I think is a mistake.

What you can do to help me as a CINC, and I am sure it applies to all the other CINC's-because I have had an opportunity as a commander in chief to watch this for about a year and a half now, and watch their activities. as well-is institute a 2-year budget cycle. What the 2-year budget cycle does for me is it gives me more time to review the service actions, to review the issues that are being developed in OSD and the issue papers and to develop my positions, and to ferret out all the arguments and prepare myself to deal with the Defense Resources Board and to work with the component commands and the service staffs in getting a program that best supports my needs.

If you go beyond the two things that I have just mentioned in giving the CINC's resource management responsibilities, you also run the danger of doing something else that I mentioned in my paper. If you allow each of the CINC's to exert excessive influence on how the Air Force is structured you are going to end up with several different Air Forces. The Air Force that CINCPAC would like to see and the Air Force that CINCEUR would like to see are bound to be different. Their needs are different, their commitments are different. What the Department of the Air Force does for you is it leavens that with the influence of the Joint Staff and the joint arena and OSD and provides you the best combination of capabilities in that service department to support all of the CINC's. We cannot afford different air forces for every CINC's needs, and different navies and different armies, as well.

Now, to the extent it is affordable, the military departments try-I really think they honestly try-to accommodate to the unique commitments and the uniqueness of the CINC's missions and their environments. But a line has to be drawn and compromise has to be made between the one extreme of having an Air Force that is tailored specifically and only to meet CINCPAC's needs and an Air Force that is tailored only to meet CINCEUR's needs, because you are going to have several different kinds of F15's and F-16's, and bombers, and so on; so I think that is another consideration.

But I come back to the main point: The one thing that you can do for me as a unified commander that would help the most is institute a 2-year budget cycle to give us more time to develop a good POM and to get more CINC participation in a timely fashion in that POM-Program Objective Memorandum-development.

As it works today, the window of time for my staff and I to review the services' POM submission to OSD is very, very narrow. And to widen it out is virtually an impossibility because you push the submission upstream too much. If you have to submit the POM

too early, it is unrealistic, because the lead time from submission to execution just gets wider and wider. It is already too wide.

If you push it downstream, then, of course, OSD and OMB do not have time to prepare the budget for it to come over here. And so you are kind of squeezed on both ends of this. A 2-year cycle will relieve an awful lot of that.

The initiative that involves the CINC's in the resource management process through DRB deliberations, I think is working well, and I am very grateful for that. And I think the extent to which that facilitates jointness and activates resource management involvement of CINC's is not really recognized. Keep in mind that that process is not all so old that it is, you know, that institutionalized. It improves each time it takes place and it expands.

I might also add that at deliberations of the DRB where the CINC's cannot be present or where they are not intended to be present, a strong Chairman with a strong staff to support him can be a stronger spokesman than has been the case in the past. And I think it is another manifestation of how just that one action can solve a lot of the problems we have discussed.

With regard to people and joint specialties-involvement in the joint world-of people in the joint world-in the personnel management business, I urge extreme caution. The personnel management business is very delicate; also, it is very complex. The commandersin-chief and the directors on the Joint Staff do play, I think, a much larger role than has been made known to you all.

When I was on the Joint Staff, after General Dalton as the director was promoted and left the Joint Staff, I was the senior Air Force member of the Joint Staff. I approved, acted on, every single Air Force nomination to the Joint Staff to assure the quality of the people who were assigned to the Joint Staff. And the directors to whom those people were to be assigned, all went over the records of each and every individual who was to be assigned to them.

The Chairman and the Chiefs also review the senior assignments-as I think you all realize to all the key joint positions, not just in joint commands but also in the DOD. I think there is a lot more influence in the so-called purple-suited world on who gets assigned than is realized.

In my current position, the services who nominate individuals have run those names by me before they have made the nominations to the Joint Staff in each case. If I had wanted to change an assignment of any senior officer from one of the other services that has been assigned to me as the unified commander, I could have weighed in with that service. I was given an opportunity by the service chiefs in each case, the Army and the Navy, to weigh in. With regard to a joint specialty, I think that again is a serious mistake. What these joint staffs need is people with the experience that is identified by the specialties that they do have. We build our manning documents based on the need for certain kinds of specialties, with recognition and an understanding of what kind of background that particular specialty will bring to a staff.

Now, joint operational planning is a complicated business, very complicated. Unfortunately, it requires the knowledge about a lot of technical things that are involved in the disciplines of activities of all the services. There may be some justification in creating new

specialties within the services such as a joint operational planning specialty. I think you could probably go a long way toward solving the problem that concerns people if certain positions were identified as requiring the kind of background or training that such a joint operational specialty might demand. But I think the Air Force, and the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps, each ought to be allowed to establish that as a separate military occupational specialty, or Air Force specialty code as we call it in the Air Force, or what have you, rather than to create some kind of joint corps, or some other, similar concept. I just think that would be a mistake.

You cannot make all of the joint positions fit that mold, or all fit the same mold. Not all of the people in joint assignments and positions need to be operational planners; that is, one kind of specialty. Many of them need to be communications planners. Many of them need to be logistics planners, and medical support planners and so on. And, so, some broad brush of paint across a problem somebody regards as a joint specialty I think is really a cosmetic solution to a problem that requires much closer examination.

The two specialties that I do not think should be legislated, but I think it would be useful if the Department of Defense looks atand that the Chiefs should be given an opportunity to work-are joint operational planning and joint communications planning. Those are two specialties that could be institutionalized within the services. There are fundamental structures already in existence. Some modifications to them might be appropriate with which to train people for the skills necessary to execute those kinds of responsibilities.

But I disagree strongly with the sort of broad joint operational specialty that I have heard discussed. And I think tinkering with the services' personnel policies and management procedures would be a very serious mistake. The services are different. That's why we have three military departments. They operate in different environments, require different kinds of training. The management of people and the grooming of people for high responsibilities is something that you just cannot legislate with broad, generalized legislation. I think the service departments do a pretty good job.

I would just like to close all those arguments out by making one point. In the 20 months that I served on the Joint Staff, five other general officers who served with me-four others and myself in just 20 months that served on Joint Staff-became four star generals. One naval officer, Admiral Moreau; an army officer, General Merritt; a marine, General Crist; and two air force officers, General Dalton and myself. That's pretty remarkable. If that isn't a good benchmark for how well we are making progress with regard to assigning quality people to joint assignments, I really do not know what is. I think that is pretty remarkable.

Defense agencies. I've worked with five defense agencies fairly extensively, some more than others, throughout my career-particularly as a senior officer: DCA, DIA, NSA, DNA, and DMA. I can tell you that any idea that we ought to do away with joint agencies is a bad idea. It just would be a serious mistake.

Now, one can argue that they could be operated more efficiently, just like one can argue that any bureaucratic organization could be

operated more efficiently. But there are ample tools available to work that problem. There is the Defense Audit Agency. There is the DOD IG, and there is the GAO. And if there is some feeling that maybe they have stepped a little bit further beyond the turf that was originally intended when they were institutionalized— those things can be fixed and very easily fixed.

But the idea that we can do away with a joint agency-that is really going to create some chaos. Things like DCA and DNA and DMA-all five that I mentioned-we just cannot afford to do without them.

I guess the last point I would like to make is that as this pendulum swings-and it looks like from what I read in the newspaper and hear, the pendulum is going to swing, I think we ought to be careful about emasculating the military departments. Just as the operational chain of command is important and the strengthening of the chiefs' roles and their capabilities to carry out their operational roles and responsibilities-just as that is important, we have got to be careful that that pendulum does not swing too far and we emasculate the military departments.

As I have said in my statement, I think it would be a serious mistake to provide through legislation an opportunity for Services and agencies outside the military departments to be given the responsibility and the authority to support and maintain forces for the commanders in chief.

In my view, the military departments-the three military departments-exist to provide support, maintain, train, equip, organize, and administer forces and provide them to the commanders in chief for employment. To allow other agencies and departments to do that as well, I think would be a serious emasculation of the system, and as I said in my statement, that would open up Pandora's box. There is no way to put a cap on that once it gets started. Every agency and department in town is going to want to have some piece of a military department in his own little empire. If you think you have parochialism with three military departments, if you open up that Pandora's box, not tomorrow or next year or 2 years from now, but in time you are going to have more military departments in this chain of command-some of them masquerading under other names-than you can handle or manage. And you are going to have parochialism the likes of which you have never seen before.

I have seen that clause; it is a fairly obscure clause in one of the drafts of the legislation, and I urge that you limit the authority and responsibility to train, equip, organize, administer, and provide forces to the unified and specified commands to the three military departments. In fact, I think that is absolutely essential. It is a keystone with regard to the principle that I urge that you adhere to, and that is, to make those two chains of command distinct and not blur the distinctions.

In conclusion, as I have suggested, we have a large and a complicated military establishment. We have a very wide and diverse range of commitments. It is easy to use comparisons with other countries who have a much narrower range of military commitments-to say, well country X can do so and so, why can't we do it as well as they do, and so on.

I think those kinds of comparisons are specious and not very productive. What the people of this country need to recognize is that the military establishment, the Department of Defense is overextended. We have really got a lot of commitments. We have got a lot of commitments from the lowest possible intensity warfare through to the exotic world in which I work-in that of space-in activities in space to support the other CINC's, and my own missions.

We carry out that wide range of commitments, a deverse range of commitments, in a fish bowl. Not only do we have to worry about criticism from our own body politic, but from the body politic worldwide, because we have people serving worldwide and things that we do affect people worldwide.

We also have a very powerful military establishment. The fact that we are able to manage all of that and preserve the sanctity of our democratic system and to be responsive to political direction and authority and to make the transition from one political administration to another as smoothly as we do, says a whole lot for how well organized our establishment really is today. There is not any military force in the world that is asked to do as much as yours is, and there has to be a lot of good in a system that has been so able to deter conflict.

Deterrence, of course, does not light up the scoreboard because it is a constant thing; it goes on all the time. It is our business, and we deter activity in ways that people never realize, all the way from the lowest level of conflict up to the worst kind. We do not deter it all certainly, but we deter a lot more than people realize. And there has to be a lot of good in a system that can deter as much conflict as our Military Establishment does in so many places.

I think the judgments that you all make will be better judgments if you keep all that in mind when you make your difficult decisions.

That summarizes what I have to say, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF GEN. ROBERT T. HERRES, U.S.A.F.

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, it is a privilege to appear today as you review Department of Defense management and organization. In my prepared remarks I would like to expand on a few of the themes that have been considered in earlier deliberations of this and other bodies that are addressing the reorganization question.

During his statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee on this matter, Admiral Crowe, noted that evolutionary steps are preferable to sharp and dramatic reform; I could not agree more with that statement. All of my experience as a senior officer in the Air Force Staff, the Joint Staff, and as a field commander tells me that too much change in such a complex organization, brought about too quickly, will result in painful chaos. I must also agree with the number of witnesses who have pointed out the significant progress made by Secretary Weinberger and General Vessey in increasing the efficiency of our existing structure. I know from my own experiences in the Joint Staff, and working with the Joint Chiefs, that steps have already been taken to strengthen the role of the Chairman-and those steps have been helpful. A clear historical pattern in that regard has evolved since the Department of Defense was established in 1947. The positions of the Secretary of Defense and Chairman have gained considerable strength over the years and are certainly stronger now than ever before; that evolution, by all indications is moving in the very same direction as the changes being proposed. It would be most unfortunate if that hard won change were to escape us. Therefore, I must echo the witnesses who have urged a balanced approach and counseled that every change made will have

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