the military retained confidence in the security of the contingency plans. The responsibility for review, however, should not be confused with the responsibility for authorship. Authorship would continue to rest with the unified and specified commands and the OJCS. If it were not to become a nuisance and were not to lose the confidence of the JCS, the office would have to exert authority to mandate changes in contingency plans only when an overriding policy consideration suggested the necessity. The office would lose all credibility if it started to rewrite contingency plans or to insist that minor changes be made for no clearly overriding reason. • Option 6B -create a joint OSD/OJCS office to review contingency plans. The same general criteria would apply to this option as to Option 6A. Precisely where the review office is based may be less important than how it is organized and how it functions, but only if its findings were clearly made part of the iterative strategy-policy-resources decision process. This option, through its joint OSD/OJCS nature, does offer the potential for much greater interplay of civilian and military officials. If this office ever lost the confidence of the JCS, great pressures to abolish it would result. On the other hand, OSD review of contingency plans would be very different than that of OJCS. OSD reviewers would focus on ensuring that political assumptions of the contingency plans are consistent with national security policy and that the options presented in such plans are politically realistic. In contrast, OJCS would focus on the quality of the military strategy of the contingency plans. Given the different scope of these reviews, it does not appear that it would be useful to attempt to combine them. G. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS This section presents the conclusions and recommendations of this chapter concerning the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The conclusions result from the analyses presented in Section D (Problem Areas and Causes). The recommendations are based upon Section F (Evaluation of Alternative Solutions). Excluded from this list are recommendations that are more appropriately presented in subsequent chapters. Conclusions 1. Mission integration is the principal organizational goal of the Department of Defense. Recommendations |
