Congress the responsibility for the organization of the national defense establishment, and because the Investigations Subcommittee has jurisdiction over organizational matters, he realized that he was responsible in the first instance to the House for carrying out this constitutional mandate.

Chairman White proceeded to hold an historic series of hearings, receiving testimony from more than 40 witnesses. The witness list included names like Curtis LeMay, Stuart Symington, Thomas Moorer, David Packard, Brent Scowcroft, Harold Brown, Maxwell Taylor, and John Vessey. Somewhere during the testimony that consumed over 1,000 pages, Chairman White decided that the allegations were true; that is, that there are serious structural problems in the Joint Chiefs of Staff as organized, and that something must be done. He wrote a bill-the Joint Chiefs of Staff Reorganization Act of 1982-and shepherded it through the House. It died in the Senate at the end of the 97th Congress.

Although Dick White did not run for reelection in 1982, I believe it is fitting today that he should be remembered as the first Member of the Congress to recognize the significance of the issue we address today and the first to take action to correct Joint Chiefs of Staff problems.

It is also fitting to call members' attention to the fact that this committee was the first governmental body to recognize and call attention to defense organization problems and to support reform. That is the second reason I am taking the time of the committee to discuss the history of the legislation before us. I want to remind members of the constructive and farsighted role played by the committee on this issue.

More than any other legislation in my memory, this bill is the progeny of this committee. Since the 1930's the executive branch has become the initiator, drafter, and chief proponent of legislation. The Congress adds, subtracts, edits, approves or disapproves. Not so in the case of Joint Chiefs of Staff reorganization legislation. In this area, the Congress seized the legislative initiative. This committee is the author and principal proponent of Joint Chiefs of Staff legislation.

When I became Investigations Subcommittee chairman in 1983, I realized that Joint Chiefs of Staff reorganization was unfinished business. The Honorable Larry Hopkins, the ranking minority member of the subcommittee, agreed. The members of the subcommittee supported both of us. We held hearings in 1983 and the subcommittee reported the 98th Congress Joint Chiefs of Staff bill. It differed in particulars, but was entirely consistent with the previous Joint Chiefs of Staff bill. Once again, this committee gave its full support to the legislation and the House approved it.

For the second time, the other body proved to be the stumbling block. Consequently, I added the Joint Chiefs of Staff bill as a rider to the Defense authorization bill in 1984. Thanks to strong, determined support from the senior members of this committee from both parties-and especially Representative Ike Skelton-several modest, though not inconsequential provisions of the 1983 legislation were accepted in conference in 1984. Such is the strength of the opposition to reform that those were the first meaningful

changes in Joint Chiefs of Staff organization in a quarter of a century.

This year the climate has changed. Reorganizing the joint structure, and indeed the entire national defense establishment, has recently become a national issue. Suddenly, there is concern on all sides-and support for change. After crying in the wilderness, so to speak, for two Congresses, members of this committee should be proud of the part we have played in placing this issue on the national agenda.

We have sometimes been criticized, justly or not, for failure to recognize and take action to correct problems relating to the Department of Defense. That is not the case with regard to the Joint Chiefs of Staff issue. This committee has been the leader in sounding the alarm that serious flaws exist and something must be done. In my view, it is our finest hour in the years I have been privileged to serve on this committee. I congratulate each and every one of you who has had the foresight to assist in correcting the problems that plague our senior military structure.

Now let me turn to an explanation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reorganization issue and then to the legislation before you.

Why is it necessary to alter the structure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Why does the Investigations Subcommittee repeatedly report legislation to change it? What, in short, is the problem?

First, let me state what is not the problem. The problem is not with the individual service chiefs themselves. Witnesses uniformly distinguished between the performance of individual service chiefs, whose personal advice was given high marks by civilians they had served, and the performance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a group of advisors acting as a corporate body.

It is also incorrect to claim that the problem is that this Nation erred in creating the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To the contrary, while recognizing the existence of defects in the Joint Chiefs of Staff as structured, this committee has consistently recognized and affirmed the validity of the principle established by the framers of the National Security Act that the President, National Security Council, and Secretary of Defense should have available a body composed of the chiefs of the military services to render military advice on national security issues when needed.

Former Air Force Chief of Staff Lew Allen testified that the Joint Chiefs of Staff "provide the essential linkage between joint strategic planning and the resultant force programming, equipping, and training performed by the Services." The existing joint military framework is the right one. I do not want to get into an argument over whether it is broke or not broke. It has defects that need correcting.

Now, having got that off my chest, let me attempt to answer the question concerning Joint Chiefs of Staff problems. In doing so, I want to caution members that I am answering based on the testimony and other documents pertaining to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Neither you nor I, not having been there, understand through firsthand experience the workings of our senior military structure. That is one reason the Investigations Subcommittee has done its homework. We have gone to great lengths to hear from all sides on this issue.

The problem then, based on the testimony, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff-by law the principal military advisers to the President, National Security Council, and Secretary of Defense-is a committee composed of co-equal individuals, four of whom represent strong, often conflicting service interests. There is considerable testimony indicting a built-in contradiction between the responsibilities of an individual as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as chief of his service. As a Joint Chiefs of Staff member, a chief is called upon to transcend service interests and to participate in developing advice from a joint, unified military perspective-a national viewpoint. Yet, as a chief of service, the same individual is looked upon as the principal advocate of the service.

Former Secrtary of Defense Melvin Laird pointed out the contradiction in testimony earlier this year:

A chief cannot be expected to argue for additional aircraft carriers, army divisions, or air force wings when constructing a service budget and then agree in the joint forum that such programs should be dropped in favor of another service's programs.

The result is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff frequently acts as a negotiating forum in which each service seeks to maximize its position through bargaining.

What is wrong with such a system? We all know how a committee system based on bargaining works. The question is whether that is the way we want military advice to be formulated. I believe there are two things wrong with the bargaining approach.

First, Joint Chiefs of Staff bargaining produces military advice fundamentally different from what was intended by the legislators who created the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, more important, of less value, because it is bartered, to the President and the Secretary of Defense.

Does anyone here believe that the Iran hostage rescue attempt would have been planned and executed as it was, with all four services involved, if the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not structured as a committee of five co-equal members?

Rather than bargaining in the best interests of the services, the framers of the National Security Act sought in the Joint Chiefs of Staff an organization composed of the highest military leaders that would deliberate and render advice from a national perspective detached from, but cognizant of, service interests. Instead, because the framers of the Act created a committee of equals, with no mechanism for enforcing a joint military perspective, the JCS is a group that arrives at its positions either by dividing along the lines of competing interests or negotiating a mutually acceptable consensus in which each member supports the claims of the others.

The second reason I believe that the Nation can ill afford a barter system in achieving military advice is that bargaining cannot produce compromises acceptable to the services in a number of contentious areas. As a result, the Joint Chiefs of Staff does not adequately address a broad range of fundamental issues that shape the very core of the U.S. defense posture. These issues include advice on programs and budgets that determine the composition and structure of U.S. Armed Forces, roles and missions of the services, joint military doctrine, the composition, geographical

assignments and missions of our combat commands around the world, and joint military training.

Members should take note of the implication of what I just said: the principal military advisers in this country cannot deal effectively with fundamental military issues. Thus, these issues are dealt with elsewhere, either by the services or by civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

For example, civilian officials, who are by law the individuals the Joint Chiefs of Staff advises, are critical of that advice, to the point of almost holding it in contempt in some cases. Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown testified that recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff during his tenure were "almost without exception either not useful or the reverse of being helpful. That is, worse than nothing." Former Secretary James Schlesinger said that "the preferred advice is generally irrelevant, normally unread, and most always disregarded." Henry Kissinger said that "the . . . concern of the service chiefs . . . in the future of their services their incentive is more to enhance the weapons they have under their exclusive control than to plan overall defense policy."

General David Jones testified that the Joint Chiefs of Staff spent hours debating which service would fill the top U.S. advisory position in Egypt. General Lyman Lemnitzer, another former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, testified that he had "always felt that many of the previous shortcomings in the Joint Chiefs of Staff resulted from issues remaining undecided for far longer periods than they should by engaging in endless and useless arguments in order to get unanimous agreement."

The Joint Staff labors under a set of procedures imposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that requires staff papers to advance through five levels of bureaucracy before they reach civilian officials. The procedures give each service a veto over each sentence, phrase, or word. The result is the watered down advice that former officials criticized so strongly.

The commanders of the joint combatant arms-the CINC's-do not have influence commensurate with their responsibilities. Joint directives drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff severely limit their authority. Moreover, the unified commanders do not exercise sufficient control over their subordinate service-oriented component commands. A CINC, for example, can neither select nor dismiss his subordinate commanders. He cannot communicate with the service chiefs directly; he must communicate through his subordinate commanders.

The Steadman report found that:

The CINCs' forces are trained and equipped by their parent services who control the flow of men, money, and materiel to the CINCs' components. The services and the components thus have the major influence on both the structure and the readiness of the forces for which the CINC is responsible.

The chain of command to the Marines at the Beirut Airport where 241 young men died in a terrorist bombing extended through seven intermediate military levels. Despite the obvious need to streamline the chain, it was not done until a few days before the Marines were withdrawn. Each of the four services was represented in that chain of command in Lebanon.

The United States has a Strategic Air Command, but no strategic command. The Air Force and Navy cannot agree on the arrangements for such a unified command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff is structurally unable to address the issue authoritatively. By the same token, there is a Military Airlift Command but no unified lift, or transportation, command encompassing air, land and sea transport. Nor is there an adequate joint service command to deal with low intensity warfare, as our Special Operations Panel has pointed out repeatedly. It has been more than half a decade since the Iranian hostage rescue attempt graphically pointed to the need to improve special operations command arrangements.

No one can be sure that the United States should have new or reorganized joint commands. But I am sure that we need a joint structure that can examine the questions objectively, and we do not have it today.

The joint structure has repeatedly failed to ensure that the basic requirements of joint military operations are fulfilled. Grenada after action reports cited "poor interservice cooperation as a primary cause of major foul-ups." Army helicopters with wounded aboard were waved away from Navy carriers that could have provided medical assistance because the Army pilots were not trained in joint operations with the Navy. Air Force, Army, Marine, and Navy units could not communicate with each other. This possibly contributed to deaths from friendly fire and prohibited the Army from calling for naval gunfire.

Military intelligence, supposedly under the overall supervision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been faulted as a key component of operational shortcomings in the Pueblo incident, the Sontay raid, the Mayaguez incident, the Iranian hostage rescue attempt, the Beirut Marine bombing, and the Grenada invasion.

Many missions that are important from a joint warfare perspective are slighted by the services. These include airlift and sealift. Though these missions are not "glamorous," inadequate Air Force and Navy support for them may mean that the United States has an Army that stays home and does not show up in time to fight a future war. Similarly slighted has been Army support for its mission of providing air defense of air bases. Also, the Navy until recent years has discouraged Air Force pursuit of its mission to assist in sea control. Finally, the Air Force has historically slighted its mission of close air support of Army troops in combat. In fact, earlier this year the Air Force Secretary reportedly held the advanced tactical fighter, prized by the Air Force, hostage in an attempt to force the Air Force to make progress on a follow-on close air support aircraft.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman testified that it was not the job of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to advise either the President or the Congress on where to make cuts to meet the defense budget ceilings approved by Congress. That, he said, is the job of the service chiefs looking at the individual budgets. That is, on one of the most fundamental military issues-allocation of resources to buy guns, tanks, airplanes, and ships, and to support military personnel-the Joint Chiefs of Staff passes, its chairman declaring that it is not a Joint Chiefs of Staff responsibility.