A. BACKGROUND CHAPTER 1 In June 1983, Senator John Tower, then the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and the late Senator Henry M. Jackson, the Ranking Minority Member, initiated a comprehensive review of the organizational relationships and decision-making procedures of the Department of Defense (DoD). As part of this project, the Committee held a series of 12 hearings in which it took testimony from 31 witnesses. In addition, Senators Tower and Jackson directed the staff to prepare an objective evaluation of the structure and functions of the Department of Defense. In writing this study, the staff has relied on a variety of sources for information: a 40-year record of testimony before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees; interviews of current and former DoD civilian and military officials; reports done for and by the Executive Branch; and studies prepared by research institutions. Under the direction of the Committee's current Chairman and Ranking Minority Member, Senators Barry Goldwater and Sam Nunn, and the Committee's Task Force on Defense Organization, the staff has now completed its work on this evaluation. The authority for congressional review of the organization and procedures of the Department of Defense derives from specific Constitutional powers. Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution provides that: The Congress shall have Power... To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces: (clause 14) To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. (clause 18) The specific responsibilities of the Committee on Armed Services are enumerated in Rule XXV (section 1(c)) of the Standing Rules of the Senate. The authority for the Committee's review is found in subsection (2): Such committee shall also study and review, on a comprehensive basis, matters relating to the common defense policy of the United States, and report thereon from time to time. B. KEY CONSIDERATIONS In evaluating this study's accuracy and utility, two important considerations should be kept in mind. First, the task of providing for the national defense is enormously complicated and demanding, and the organizations that have been created to carry out this responsibility are extremely large and complex. As former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown has noted in his book, Thinking About National Security: But the overall size and expenditures of the Department of Defense continue to dwarf most individual business enterprises. Even Exxon, number one in the Fortune 500, has annual sales that are only about half the annual expenditures of the DoD. In personnel, the differences with the private sector are more obvious: The DoD has more than 2 million uniformed personnel and about 1 million civilian employees and in fiscal year 1982 supported about 3 million workers in defense industries. By contrast, Exxon has about 139,000 employees, and AT&T, the single largest private employer, has just over 1 million. (pages 216-217) The Department of Defense is clearly the largest and most complex organization in the Free World. For this reason, it is critically important that if changes are to be made to DoD organizational arrangements or decision-making procedures, the temptation to adopt simplistic, yet attractive, options must be avoided. Change just for the sake of change would be a critical mistake. Peter F. Drucker has observed that businesses sometimes suffer from this problem: "Companies are resorting to reorganization as a kind of miracle drug in lieu of diagnosing their ailments." (Harvard Business Review on Management, page 623) Reorganization of the Department of Defense is too important an issue to be determined without comprehensive and deliberate study and deserves the time and careful thought of the most experienced and learned people. The second important consideration is that a partisan critique of the present organizational structure must be avoided. Problems reflected in this review have confounded some of the most thoughtful, decisive, and experienced Secretaries of Defense, Deputy Secretaries of Defense, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and the like in both Republican and Democratic Administrations. The organizational structure which now exists, the good and the bad, is the genius and the failure of well-intentioned individuals in both Republican and Democratic Administrations. Any changes which the Administration and the Congress choose to make will have to work under both Republican and Democratic Administrations in the future. Because both Republicans and Democrats will have to live with changes that are made, it is imperative that proposed solutions have the fullest possible bipartisan support. C. REASONS FOR THE STUDY A growing number of responsible and knowledgeable observers of the U.S. military establishment, many of whom have served in senior positions in DoD, have voiced serious concerns over organizational and procedural deficiencies in the Department of Defense. They firmly believe that the current organizational structure is an obstacle to performance of the national security mission. Though they do not agree on the steps that need to be taken to correct organizational weaknesses, they are quite clear about their dissatisfaction with current organizational arrangements. Their concern is too deeply felt to be ignored. Adding to this weight of expert opinion is the recognition that the Congress has not undertaken a comprehensive review of the organization and decision-making procedures of the Department of Defense since 1958 -more than 25 years ago. During this period of more than two decades, the international security environment has become much more complex and troubling. In response, the missions currently assigned to the Department of Defense are more varied and demanding. Given these changes and increased complexity, a comprehensive review of organizational structure and relationships appears warranted. More specific indicators of organizational deficiencies have also been apparent. Key among these are the following: • operational failures and deficiencies -poor inter-Service coordination during the Vietnam conflict, the Iranian hostage rescue mission, and even the intervention in Grenada suggest deficiencies in the planning and preparation for employment of U.S. military forces in times of crisis; • acquisition process deficiencies -cost overruns, stretched-out development and delivery schedules, and unsatisfactory weapons performance have been frequent criticisms of the acquisition process; • lack of strategic direction -the strategies and long-range policies of the Department of Defense do not appear to be well formulated and are apparently only loosely connected to subsequent resource allocations; and • poor inter-Service coordination -the programs of the individual military Services do not appear to be well integrated around a common purpose that clearly ties means to goals. Individually, each of these problems is of great concern. In combination, they suggest the need for a comprehensive review of DoD organizational structure and procedures. One question dominated consideration of this review of the organizational structure and decision-making procedures of the Defense Department: how would one know whether or not the Department of Defense should change its current organization and procedures? There is, after all, no financial bottom line for the Department linking benefits to costs that makes deteriorating performance clear in the sense that ineffective performance becomes unmistakable to a business enterprise. The output of the U.S. military establishment cannot be measured in the same financial terms used to calculate its input or costs. In this regard, defense experts have strongly disagreed about the performance of the Department of Defense. While many prominent observers have argued for organizational reform in DoD, others have defended the status quo. In the end, a judgment on organizational performance has to be made between competing views. In addition to criticism of the Department of Defense, there is increasing concern over the inability of the Congress to effectively discharge its responsibility to review DoD policies and programs. Many believe that congressional deficiencies have seriously hampered the performance of the Department of Defense. D. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY The most fundamental and important principle governing the organization and operation of the U.S. military establishment is civilian control of the military. Chapter 2 of the study addresses this principle in detail in order to establish the foundation for formulating and evaluating necessary reforms in DoD. To provide a comprehensive review of organizational and procedural problems in the Defense Department, this study addresses four principal DoD organizations: the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (OJCS), the Military Departments, and the unified and specified commands. Focusing on these four organizations also permits consideration of two distinct levels of DoD activity: the first three organizations combine to form the policymaking level of DoD; the unified and specified commands represent the operational level. To ensure consideration of the unique responsibilities of these organizations, a separate chapter (Chapters 3-6) is devoted to each. To complement these organization-oriented analyses, reviews of the two major DoD decision-making processes-the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System and the Acquisition Processwere undertaken. These reviews are presented in Chapters 7 and 8. Although these internal processes are designed to support current organizational arrangements, problems within these processes might be a product of structural deficiencies. Furthermore, an understanding of these processes is important in comprehending the full range of DoD organizational relationships. Although this report is focused primarily on the internal DoD organization and procedures, two important portions of the external environment were initially included in the effort: the national security interagency process and congressional review and oversight. After studying the interagency process, however, it was determined that organizational and procedural issues in that process had a minimal effect on internal DoD issues. Therefore, to narrow the scope of this effort, a decision was made to curtail further analysis of the interagency process. A brief description of this process, however, is presented in the following section of this chapter. With regard to congressional review and oversight, an initial investigation revealed an extensive interrelationship with DoD problem areas. For this reason, a separate chapter (Chapter 9) is devoted to congressional review and oversight. The seven chapters of the report (Chapters 3-9) that address specific organizations and procedures are organized in a consistent manner and include the following sections: 。 historical evolution of the organization or decision-making procedure; • analysis of key organizational or procedural trends; • description of the current organization or procedure; • identification of problem areas and causes; Chapter 10 analyzes in broad terms the effectiveness of the structure and decision-making procedures of the Department of Defense. It places into an overall defense perspective the more specific analyses presented in Chapters 3-9. E. THE NATIONAL SECURITY INTERAGENCY PROCESS Before beginning this overview of the national security interagency process, it might be useful to define the term "national security policy." In the context of the National Security Council (NSC) interagency system, national security policy is a combination of foreign policy, defense policy, intelligence concerns, international economic policy, and information programs, with the internal mix changing over the years. This fluid combination of factors is important to keep in mind, because of the tendency of many observers to assume that national security policy and foreign policy have so much in common that they are almost the same thing. This study is most interested in the national defense aspect of national security policy and the NSC system, the defense-related components, and the roles played by Department of Defense personnel, from the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down. (This section on the national security interagency process is largely based on a paper prepared for this study by the Congressional Research Service.) 1. The National Security Council System The National Security Council was established as a congressional initiative through passage of the National Security Act of 1947 (Public Law 80-253). It was not created independently, but as part of a complete restructuring of the entire U.S. national security apparatus, civilian and military, including intelligence. One of the major issues related to the NSC was the assurance that it would be a civilian organization and would not be dominated by the new Secretary of Defense. Nonetheless, the creation of the NSC was one of the least controversial aspects of the National Security Act, compared with the concept of a unified defense department around which most of the congressional debate centered. By statute, the NSC is chaired by the President, and its members are the Vice President and the Secretaries of State and Defense. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the statutory military advisor to the NSC, and the Director of Central Intelligence is the statutory intelligence advisor. The NSC's statutory function is: to advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of the Government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving the national security. (Section 101(a) of the National Security Act of 1947) |
