of this Nation that the function of decision on matters of important military policy and strategy rested with representatives of the military forces.

The operation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the past 18 months has been the subject of much discussion. The President has expressed the view that the Joint Chiefs of Staff can more effectively fulfill their role as military advisers and assistants to the Secretary of Defense and the President if a chairman of the Joint Chiefs is provided. Provision for a chairman does not mean relegation of other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to an inconsequential position. It means rather than an individual can be charged with responsibility for improving the methods of conducting business and taking action to see that the work of the Joint Chiefs is performed in the manner which will most effectively serve the needs of the Secretary of Defense and the President.

The recent reports of the Commission on Organization have recognized the need for and recommended that there be a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Certain of these reports recommended that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be one of the Chiefs of Staff of the three services. The President did not adopt this position, believing that it would be impossible for the same man to serve as Chief of Staff of his particular service and at the same time devote sufficient attention and acquire the orientation needed to serve the needs of the Secretary and the President.

I should like to say one final word about the issue of the establishment of a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff creating a military figure of such strength and prestige that the Secretary of Defense would, in effect, be dominated by him.

The basic answer to that criticism is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are but advisers, and not the sole advisers, to the President and the Secretary of Defense. They are not individuals exercising the statutory power of decision in certain assigned areas.

Further, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will have no military command. He will have no duties to perform other than those which may be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and which may be withdrawn from them, by the Secretary of Defense or the President. As Mr. Forrestal stated in his testimony, there are numerous checks and balances in our American system outside these major organizational arrangements within the Department of Defense itself which would prevent the emergence of a military figure so dominant as to threaten the maintenance of our traditional civilian control.

The opportunity for civilian control of the military is only as strong as are the facilities available to the civilians in top positions to acquire information upon which informed decisions may be taken. It is believed that experience has demonstrated-and indeed the various groups who have studied this problem have agreed-that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be a more effective body if a chairman were at its head. The President has suggested meeting this problem in a forthright way, yet with a sense of balance in our military organization. He does not suggest giving the title of chairman to an official who would, in effect, be a go-between between the Secretary of Defense and the three chiefs of the services. He proposes the creation of a chairman who will be the principal military representative of the President

and the Secretary of Defense and who will have sufficient status to enable him to perform effectively, in company with the chiefs of the services, the important tasks assigned.

Although the changes in the three main areas I have covered are substantial, they reflect a careful attention to the notion of orderly evolution in improving the organization of the armed forces. The Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, while no longer individual executive departments, would be administered by their respective Secretaries, under the direction of the Secretary of Defense. The service Secretaries, each of whom has an immense job, would retain their present complement of Under and Assistant Secretaries and military assistants, headed by the respective Chiefs of Staff. The substantive statutes applicable to the services-particularly those defining the roles and missions of the combat forces-would remain unchanged with the exception of those matters of department-wide application which would become the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense.

The Boards and Joint Chiefs of Staff, created by the National Security Act, would be retained but with a change in their relationship to the Secretary of Defense.

Three reports on the National Military Establishment have been prepared recently: The first report of the Secretary of Defense, the report of the Hoover Commission task force on national security organization, and the report of the Commission on Organization of the executive branch itself. The organizational problems which each of these reports identified were essentially the same. They adopted, however, a number of different approaches to their solutions.

It is my understanding that the committee has been furnished with a memorandum detailing these various proposals, so I will do no more than attempt a summary comparison of them in conclusion.

While neither the report of the Hoover Commission nor of its task force recommended changing the designation of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, they both proposed changes in the relations among the Secretary of Defense, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the Boards and Joint Chiefs of Staff similar in many respects to those outlined above. The Commission report would have gone far beyond the proposal of the President by transferring all of the statutory authority of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to the Secretary of Defense.

Further, the Commission would have designated the present Secretaries of Army, Navy, and Air Force as Under Secretaries of Defense for these three positions.

The task force report would have placed the Secretaries of Army, Navy, and Air Force under the authority and direction of the Secretary of Defense in the performance of their functions and, in addition, would have broadened and strengthened the responsibility of the Secretary so that again the legal framework which would result from their recommendations would be roughly comparable to that of existing departments, that is the staff changes of which Mr. Eberstadt spoke.

With respect to the additional authority of the Secretary of Defense, the report of the Hoover Commission recommended placing all the statutory authority of the Departments of Army, Navy, and

Air Force in the hands of the Secretary of Defense. The report of the Hoover Commission task force, and the bill before you, would both place additional authority in the Secretary of Defense. That is additional as opposed to total. The task force report adopted more of a pin-point approach to changes in language while the bill before you attempts to give the Secretary the broad authority of a normal department head.

With respect to the staff assistance available to the Secretary, again, the report of the Hoover Commission would make the Munitions Board, the Research and Development Board, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff purely staff agencies of the Secretary by assigning all of their functions to him; the bill before you makes the existing functions of these boards and agencies the functions of the Secretary, but provides that the boards shall assist him in their performance. The recommendations of the Hoover Commission task force provided that, subject to the direction of the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Research and Development Board and Munitions Board should have greater authority.

With respect to the provision of Assistant Secretaries, the report of the Hoover Commission and the bill before you are in exact accord. The report of the Hoover Commission task force did not recommend Assistant Secretaries of Defense.

I have already indicated the positions of the three with respect to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Finally, I should like to say that this bill represents a most careful consideration of the various proposals and the recommendation by the President of those steps which he feels at this time would be most likely to continue and accelerate the improvements in our defense organization which were begun under the National Security Act of 1947.

I appreciate the opportunity to make this statement.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Pace, I am sure all of us are indebted to you for a most comprehensive review and analysis of this problem, and it is going to be very helpful to us in arriving at a final decision.

Now, there may be some members of the committee who would like to interrogate you.

Senator Byrd?

Senator BYRD. No questions.

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Saltonstall?

Senator SALTONSTALL. I would like to ask the same question which I asked of Mr. Forrestal and Mr. Eberstadt.

If we established the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shouldn't there be a limitation on his term of either 2 years or 4 years?

Mr. PACE. That is a most difficult question for me to answer. The reason that I say that, Senator, is that from an organizational point of view, it would appear wise to permit the Secretary of Defense to make such a determination because if a man of extreme competence and broad knowledge in this field were appointed and had to have his period of service terminated at the end of 2 years or 4 years, it might cause some difficulty.

On the other hand, I assume your question is addressed to the danger that such a man might grow by reason of tenure in office to exercise too great control.

Under the system that currently exists whereby he operates only as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff where he must report to a Secre

tary of Defense and to a President and where ultimately the final report must come to the Congress, I do not have too great concern in that area.

However, I have not lived with that situation, and that is the reason that I was careful in qualifying my answer.

Senator SALTONSTALL. You wouldn't be afraid of one man getting too much power?

Mr. PACE. I would not under the system as I have seen it operate over approximately a year and a half.

Senator SALTONSTALL. Let me ask one further question as to the conception of the responsibilities of this man as adviser to the President and Secretary of Defense.

If my memory is right, Mr. Eberstadt brought out the thought that if you had this man as one adviser, he might carry a different point of view from the point of view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He would not be responsible for carrying out the policy that he recommended. They would be.

They might have to carry out a policy that they did not approve in the first instance, but that he did approve. In other words, take the extreme case: Three of them voted against a proposition of strategy. The Chairman of the Board took the contrary point of view and carried it to the President and to the Secretary of Defense.

He would have no responsibility, but his advice might carry weight and the President would say, "We will do it this way."

What is your conception?

Mr. PACE. That is not my conception. In the first place, I think I should point out that the wording of the bill is not the "sole adviser" but the "principal adviser." In other words, he is not the one adviser, he is only designated as the principal adviser.

Having discussed this situation over a long period of time with Secretary Forrestal, since certain of the responsibilities that arose in connection with the 1950 budget, my conception of the situation is that this man is an organizer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is charged with coming up with a decision which can be brought to the Secretary.

I would not conceive that he could avoid expressing the point of view that existed in the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I would think, certainly, a Secretary of Defense would want to know what the position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was. The reason for designating him as the principal and not as the sole military adviser to the President and to the Secretary of Defense was so that some administrative order could be determined in this field; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, each representing a separate department, sometimes find it extremely difficult by reason both of background and the nature of their responsibilities to express points of view that represent the point of view of the Secretary of Defense. It is no fault of their own, but obviously an organizational difficulty.

By designating this man in this capacity, he can organize that group, he can convey to the Secretary of Defense and the President the decision that is reached, and he can implement it by advising the Secretary of Defense and the President as to what he himself thinks should be done in the light of that action. He is a member of that body and as such is indistinguishable from it.

Senator BALDWIN. May I ask a question there?

On page 8, beginning at line 3 of the bill, there is this language: It is hereby established within the Department of Defense the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which will consist of the Chairman, who shall be the head thereofThen you go over to page 9 in line 17 and describe what the Chairman shall be, as follows:

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall act as the principal military adviser to the President and the Secretary of Defense and shall perform such other duties

et cetera. Now, in the light of what you have just said, wouldn't it be possible to accomplish all that you have said is desirable under this situation by eliminating that subsection (d) altogether and leaving the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be the Chairman, who "shall be the head thereof"?

In other words, it seems to me what you get here is this: You get the three Secretaries and the three Chiefs of Staff of the services. Then you have got the Secretary of Defense, who is a civilian officer, and then over here you have the President, who is a civilian officer, and then working with them the Congress. But here by defining such broad powers as appear to be given in this subsection (d), you superimpose over the whole Military Establishment, parallel with the higher echelon of the civilian establishment, a military officer, who it does seem to me in time might become a very potent and very powerful figures.

There is a man, he might be a naval officer, he might be an air officer, he might be a ground officer, and, being such, he would have all of the policies and beliefs and traditions of that particular service along with him as part of his make-up, and in that way might completely sway and defeat the great service and advice that could come from these specialists in these particular fields.

It seems to me the Joint Chiefs of Staff destroy the effectiveness of the Secretaries of the three branches and of the three Chiefs of Staff of those three branches.

Mr. PACE. My reply would be twofold:

First. I recognize the impossibility that you express in terms of concern that this man might achieve such a posture that he would fail to express the point of view of the services in general, and might express either a point of view of one service or his point of view. There is always the possibility that under the present situation a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might by reason of his position or posture influence decisions of a Secretary of Defense over and beyond his relative stature as one member because the Secretary of Defense uses the Joint Chiefs solely as advisers. The reason for putting in this phrase, "principal military adviser" was because over the period of 18 months of the operation of this act, it had been most difficult to obtain specific and immediate and rapid decisions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, unless a man were designated as the principal military adviser. It eliminated the type of direct information that a Secretary of Defense needed to get results.

Secretary Forrestal conceived of this principal adviser as a man who would both organize and direct and speed up the operation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and bring to him a coordinated point of view. I have no strong brief for the term "principal adviser" or its inclusion.