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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES,

INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE,

Washington, DC, Tuesday, March 4, 1986.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:38 a.m., in room 2216, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Bill Nichols (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

STATEMENT OF HON. BILL NICHOLS, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
ALABAMA, CHAIRMAN, INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. NICHOLS. The subcommittee will come to order.

Our first witness this morning is Adm. Tom Moorer, who served as Chairman of the JSC from 1970 to 1974. Prior to that assignment, he served as Chief of Naval Operations, commander in chief of the Atlantic Command, commander in chief of the Pacific Command.

His extensive experience in both joint and service assignments uniquely qualifies him to comment on our proposals. He is the author of numerous studies on policy and strategy. He is active now in the private sector and is associated with the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He brings a very broad perspective to defense organization questions, and, although this does not appear in the prepared introduction, I note that he was born in my congressional district, in Alabama. We are delighted to have you with us this morning, Admiral. I turn the program over to you.

STATEMENT OF ADM. THOMAS H. MOORER, U.S. NAVY, RETIRED, FORMER CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

Admiral MOORER. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, let me say I did not testify on H.R. 3622 and, consequently, I have prepared my comments on that particular bill, which I have right here, which I would like to submit to you for whatever use you and the staff choose to make.

Mr. Nichols. Without objection, it will be included in the record. Admiral MOORER. My general comment about that bill is that it generally tends to codify things that have already happened or are being put into effect, although there are certain parts of it I do not agree with.

Coming to H.R. 4234 and H.R. 4235, let me say, at the outset, that my opinions about many of the things that are listed in these two bills are conditioned by the fact that I have had, as you mentioned, every command. I have been commander of the battle group in the Mediterranean; commander of the 7th fleet in the Western Pacific; commander of the Pacific Fleet; commander of the Atlantic Fleet; commander of the Atlantic Command; Supreme Allied Com

mander, Atlantic; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and chief of my service.

My so-called senior years occurred during that terrible period of the Vietnam war, when there was a period where the country was in a state of near anarchy. We had people here pouring pigs' blood on the Pentagon steps. We were having people lying down and stopping all the traffic on Constitution Avenue, throwing rocks through the Justice Department building, and, then, of course, to just wind that up, we had Watergate.

So, I have had an opportunity to observe_people, both in the White House and the Congress and in the Pentagon, as well as military people under stress in combat, and I think that my views are conditioned very much by the way people behave.

I think we should recognize that the Constitution establishes, in effect, an adversarial relationship between the executive and legislative branches, and, more recently, we have not had a bipartisan foreign policy. We have difficulty always existing between the President and the congressional groups, and I think that that will probably always continue. I accept that as being a characteristic of a democracy, although I am sorry that it reaches the extent it does these days.

Let me also say that I have read your letter to the Secretary of Defense very carefully, and, consequently, I plan to comment on some of the subjects that you brought up in that letter.

But, going on with the general comments, let me say that one thing that has struck me in the times I have testified before the Senate and before the House on this general subject, is that I have never been asked a question yet about morale, pride, dedication, leadership, any of the things that, as you know so well, perhaps better than anybody else in this Congress, impact on combat operations.

I am afraid that because it has been a long time since we had a war, technology is advancing so fast, and international relations have been so mixed, people are just frustrated. Somehow the concern has been passed along and hyped up by the media, working on such things as toilet seats and hammers and whatever, people are just frustrated.

So, the motivation for all these hearings and for the proposals that are made, I think, are conditioned by this media hype: furthermore, I think that the people that write these bills do not live in the real world in the sense that they have not been out and watched how people react, politically and militarily, under different situations.

Every time we have a problem, it appears that the solution is another layer. The Congress, of course, requires the Secretary of Defense to set up a czar for testing. Now, I understand that the Packard Commission report is going to set up a czar for acquisition, and, in this bill, we have a recommendation for a vice chief of staff. Í have sat before this committee many times, and have been chewed out for having too many four-star admirals in Washington. Now, we are going to add another admiral.

So, I think that what is not recognized is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization and the military organization have progressed significantly since the National Security Act of 1947, and, conse

quently, many of the changes that have been recommended, as I have said, have already been put into effect and are already common practice.

I think it is noteworthy that General Lemnitzer and I—and General Vessey and the present Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Crowe-do not agree with these changes that are being proposed because they are familiar with what is going on today.

Surely, there have been mistakes. There have been difficulties. There have been errors throughout the situation that has been prevailing since World War II, and they should be corrected and are being corrected. But I contend that you cannot solve these problems by simply drawing boxes and expect people to stay in them. Let me get more specific, Mr. Chairman, and start with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The proposals in the Senate bill as well as in these two bills, H.R. 4234 and H.R. 4235, certainly must cause great pain, if you can feel such pain, to those who set up the National Security Act of 1947.

They use words such as "anathema" and "repugnant" referring to the very things that are now going to be adopted. So far as the Joint Chiefs of Staff are concerned, I think that it was General Jones that said he did not have enough power. In my view, the Chairman has all the power he is willing to take. Under our system of civilian control, which I support 100 percent, of course, the Chairman cannot tell the Secretary of Defense what to do.

But I have never given an order to a man in uniform any place without him carrying it out, and so far as controlling the personnel in the Joint Staff, I managed that very easily by just vetoing the assignment of any officer I did not want and requesting the chief of the service to send me so-and-so.

Now, so far as participating in promotions, I am going to get to that a little bit later, but if an officer was outstanding in the Joint Staff, from whatever service, I went to the chief of his service and advised him of that and told him I hoped that during the next opportunity, he would, in fact, be promoted.

So, as I say, so many of these things can be done by the people under the present organization.

Now, let me turn a little bit, because I see this as being a reallocation of power: We are going to take power away from the service chiefs. We are going to add more power for the Chairman; and the CINC's, who, for all practical purposes, are being set up, in essence, as small services on their own.

So, let me talk about them a little bit. The duty of the commander in chief of the unified commands is to fight their command. They do not have any responsibility although they make frequent inputs into research and development, into discipline, into recruiting, into training, into dealing with all of the budgetary details that take place here in Washington, attending hearings and so on, except when particularly called, and, consequently, they should devote their time entirely to getting their forces ready to fight.

Now, it is said in this bill that the unified commander should, of course, have his own budget. I think that is a big mistake because, in wartime, the unified commander is not going to fool around with any budget, I can guarantee you, and, consequently, there is not going to be any budget problem for him in wartime.

I do not think people realize that the National Security Act of 1947 and, also, the Reorganization Act of 1958, generally were focused on World War III. In other words, how do we go about fighting the Russians since the whole world is polarized now? The Congress had just come out of World War II and everybody's mind was on how do we provide for the common defense in a world war.

But, subsequent to that time, we have had terrorists, and we have had incidents and so on, all of which generate what I call "horror stories", that are single incidents. I can tell you right now that if World War II had been described in the terms that anything that the military people do today, we would have lost it because many things went on that were far worse than what you have today. The key thing is we won the war, but you are not going to be able to run a war or run an organization in a war like you do a corporation, no matter what you say.

Let me go on to say that much is made in here about the command of the unified commander, and there is a sentence in here I really do not understand. It says that if a unified commander cannot control the forces assigned to his command, he should report to the Secretary of Defense. If I was Secretary of Defense, and a unified commander ever said that to me, I would fire him. Í cannot imagine what you are talking about in this sentence when you say he is supposed to tell the Secretary of Defense. That is like saying, "I am going to tell mama on you if you do not do what I told you to do." That is kind of a mysterious statement. There are several of those in this bill.

Let me go to the service chiefs who also are active members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the first place, several accusations have been made that the service chiefs think more of their service than they do the country. I think that statement is in the Senate study. I consider this an insult, and it is not true or fair to label people that way who work as hard as the service chiefs. I cannot understand it. We talk a lot about interservice rivalry. You are talking about budget competition, but there is no interservice rivalry in wartime.

When we conducted the bombing in 1972 on the Monday following Christmas, we put 100 B-52's and 350 tactical aircraft over Hanoi in less than half an hour. I do not think there is any other military organization in the world that has this capability. The Navy positioned a cruiser up in Haiphong Harbor that warned our Air Force planes that enemy fighters were on their tail.

There was an exchange of electronic jamming capability in time with the strikes. There was also a refueling exchange, and not once did I ever see any effort to either hog the operation or make the other service look bad or any of these other things that people say happen all the time.

Certainly, no chief is going to go up to another chief and say, look, I have got this money in my budget, I really need it, but I think maybe you need it, too. Why don't you take these $400 million? That is never going to happen, and one of the reasons is that the young people that are out in the field have got to believe that the chief of their service is looking out for their interests and is their leader. For the same reason, he, the young officer that is dodging bullets, is not going to be too pleased with an elitist group

making the plans while he is out there fighting when he knows that his chief did not have very much to do with the plans. This business of leadership is very, very important in a military organization, and, so, to build the impression that all of the orders and everything come from some mysterious elitist group in Washington is going to destroy, I think, the whole system.

But the thing in all of these bills, Mr. Chairman, that causes me maximum pain is the proposal that we are going to take young lieutenants in the Navy and captains in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps, that we are going to make them a special group, and that they are going to spend half their time in joint duties. According to this subspecialty idea, they are going to be promoted faster than any of the other officers. On top of that, you cannot be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or unified commander unless you are in this specialty group. Well, I have warned you before and tell you now that this will absolutely disrupt the entire promotion and officer assignment system to a degree that it probably will never recover. What this does is, in effect, to preselect 25 years beforehand an officer who is going to be eligible for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; if the officer is going to get that job this way it rules out about 95 percent of the rest of the officers. That is going to have a very, very serious impact on the whole system. Furthermore, I think these joint subspecialty people will be essentially isolated by the rest of the officers in the service because they are given such opportunity. I happen to know that the man that stood No. 1 in my class at the Naval Academy never got past lieutenant because just when World War II started, he folded up like a tent. To think that you can take somebody-and the Secretary of Defense with the advice from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will have to do it-and to think you can pluck him out of the organization like that, I think, is a very unwise thought. It cannot work, and you are going to destroy the whole selection system, and morale.

The same thing goes for the proposal that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is going to have an opportunity, if he does not like the selection board from each service, to screen it and add 10 percent of his own people and send it back to the service or to the Secretary of the service who, in turn, then, will have to work it out with the Secretary of Defense. It is really an unbelievable proposal. My plea is that you not monkey with the promotion system. I mean, you are getting into almost the social level where, you know, the man says "Do not monkey with my wife." People get embedded with the whole idea of how their career is going to work, and to have certain groups given a running start before they even are dry behind the ears is going to cause a lot of pain in the minds of 95 percent of the people that are not in that group. So, I just think that ought to be thought of very, very carefully.

I will turn for just a minute to acquisitions. It works in several ways. You recall, Mr. Chairman, the TFX [tactical fighter experimental, or F-111]. Mr. Brown, who was Secretary of Defense, at that time was the research and development czar for McNamara. Mr. Brown was an action officer, so to speak, and he sat before this committee and before the Senate committee, and insisted that this was the finest airplane the Navy could get its hands on. Mr. Brown

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