This option would be designed to give military officers a broader vision than just that of their own Service. This would clearly be of value in preparing officers for joint duty. At the same time, crossService experience would also be useful in Service assignments.

The following table shows the current number of cross-Service assignments of military officers.

a

Source is a memorandum for the Secretary of Defense from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dated December 24, 1984, subject: "Study on Improving the Capabilities of Joint-Duty Officers", page F-2.

• Option 2E -establish a personnel management system to ensure that joint college graduates actually serve in joint duty assignments

Currently, there is no personnel management system that ensures that graduates of the three joint colleges of the National Defense University (NDU) -the Armed Forces Staff College (AFSC), National War College (NWC), and Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) -actually serve in joint duty assignments. As these colleges are to be the source of education for joint duty, their utility is diminished if graduates do not enter joint assignments.

Data on assignments of AFSC graduates show the following percentages of officers initially assigned joint duty positions:

1982 .......

36 percent

1983 .....

1984 ...

40 percent
63 percent

This substantial increase is attributed to the attention placed on this issue by the Chairman's Special Study Group. On May 11, 1984, the JCS established a goal of 50 percent of AFSC graduates to receive first assignments in joint duty positions. This goal is to be applied to graduating classes beginning in 1985. In addition, the JCS have encouraged the Services to achieve a goal by 1990 of assigning 75 percent of AFSC graduates to joint duty.

The increase of AFSC graduates assigned to joint duty is not as the above figures indicate. In making these calculations, the definition of joint duty includes in-Service positions that have a "joint interface." For example, in 1984, the Navy met the goal of assigning 50 percent of AFSC graduates to joint duty; however, half of these assignments were joint interface billets within the Department of the Navy. (Letter to Senator Goldwater from Secretary Weinberger, May 16, 1985, page 14) As the following table shows, only 37 percent of AFSC graduates in 1984 received non-Service, joint assignments.

While progress has been made with respect to AFSC graduates, the issue of assignments of graduates of the National War College (NWC) and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) have not been addressed. For 1984, only 17 percent of NWC and 15 percent of ICAF graduates were assigned to joint duty immediately following completion of their education. The following table shows the percentage of NDU graduates in 1984 who received various joint and Service assignments.

a

Does not include civilians, Reserve establishment officers, or Regular officers without an assignment at the time the data were prepared.

Source is letter to Senator Goldwater from Secretary Weinberger, May 16, 1985, page 15.

Less than one percent.

Based upon this situation, Secretary Weinberger has directed that the following actions be taken:

1. Strengthen they policy on assignment of NDU graduates; 2. The basic policy will:

a. Cover all NDU schools;

b. Encourage the Services to plan the selection of students based on the best estimate of joint requirements;

c. Include the idea that the first assignment consideration for a graduate should be joint duty;

d. Not count in-Service assignments as equivalent to a joint tour for reporting purposes;

e. Recognize that it is important to assign NDU graduates to key billets within their own Military Service;

f. Eliminate the percentage goal and substitute a goal of increasing the number of officers going to joint and intergovernmental activities;

g. Require the Services to emphasize the assignment of former NDU graduates to joint activities regardless of whether the officers were previously assigned to a joint activity;

h. Include an adequate system to report information on the first assignment of officers graduating from NDU. (Letter to Senator Goldwater from Secretary Weinberger, May 16, 1985, page 16)

This option proposes that the JCS Chairman would establish a personnel management system to implement Secretary Weinberger's policy decisions which are designed to ensure that the full benefit of education at all three joint colleges is realized. While this

management system would focus on initial assignments, it should also provide a formal procedure for monitoring subsequent assignments of NDU graduates.

• Option 2F -authorize the Secretary of Defense to approve the extension of tours on the Joint Staff beyond the current 4-year limitation

In the Department of Defense Authorization Act, 1985, the length of possible tours of service on the Joint Staff by military officers was increased from 3 years to 4 years. This option proposes that the Secretary of Defense be authorized to extend the tours of Joint Staff officers beyond 4 years. The objectives of this option would be to retain military officers who have substantial joint duty experience and improve continuity within the Joint Staff.

• Option 2G -establish in each Service a joint duty career specialty

In 1982, the Chairman's Special Study Group recommended the establishment in each Service of a joint duty career specialty open to selected officers in the grade of 0-4 (Major or Lieutenant Commander) and above. Such officers would be nominated by the Service Chiefs and approved by the Chairman, both for selection in the specialty and for later assignments to joint duty positions. (page 69) This recommendation was endorsed in the CSIS report, Toward a More Effective Defense. (page 15)

Appendix E of the Chairman's Special Study Group describes this option in detail. Appropriate portions of that appendix are presented here:

...Service officers at the 0-4, 0-5, or even higher level, evidencing a talent and desire for Joint Staff work, would apply for assignment to the Joint-duty specialty. Upon acceptance, their assignments, education, and career patterns would be steered by their Service personnel management systems toward Joint duty, though from time to time they would be assigned to field positions in their parent Services to maintain currency.

Not all Joint positions would be filled by such officers. Officers not in the career specialty would continue to serve on the Joint Staff and in the Unified Command headquarters as they do now. The mix would be decided by the Chairman and the Chiefs. If 50% of the officer positions in Joint headquarters eventually were filled by officers in the new specialty, about 2,300 positions would be involved at any given time. If, in turn, officers in the specialty spent about half of their time in Joint assignments, a group of about 5,000 officers in the specialty would be needed in a steady-state situation.

...While this initiative can properly be viewed by the Services as incremental in an organization sense since it would be phased over a period of years, it would be a fundamental change for officers actually selected. The personnel management implications would be far-reaching. Grade structure, career patterns, promotion opportunities, and a host of other issues would have to be planned with care. A personnel management office in the Joint Staff (a true "J-1") would be

needed to work with the Services in handling position management and personnel support. The Chairman would need to have a role in selecting the officers and in helping to assure that officers in the Joint-duty specialty (including those of flag rank) received their fair share of promotions and key assignments. An important step in this regard would be to appoint a senior officer from a Joint headquarters to sit on each Service promotion board involving the selection of officers to the rank of 0-5 or above, and to furnish each such promotion board with clear guidance concerning the need for fair treatment of officers in the Joint-duty specialty. Officers would have to have evidence that if they excelled in the Joint-duty specialty they would have at least as good an opportunity to be promoted as their contemporaries, and indeed could aspire to four-star rank.

Training for the Joint-duty specialty would begin at the Armed Forces Staff College. Its curriculum is designed to provide such training for officers at the 0-3 and 0-4 levels. There is now no systematic means for assuring that AFSC graduates ever get to Joint duty assignments. That would be changed to be consistent with the development of the career field.1

Formal training would continue for selected officers at the 0-5 and Junior 0-6 level at either the National War College or the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. As with the AFSC, priority would be placed on making sure that NWC and ICAF graduates actually serve in Joint duty, and that officers destined for Joint duty, if selected for senior service college, are sent to NWC or ICAF.

The schools themselves would give greater emphasis to preparing officers for Joint duty. The NWC would emphasize preparation for Joint and combined planning and operations. Likewise, the ICAF would emphasize Joint planning and management of mobilization and deployment. Both schools would limit their emphasis on generalized studies of the politico-military environment and instead concentrate on preparing officers for near-term Joint assignments. Because so few officers have professional familiarity with their sister Services, assuring that officers on the Joint Staff and in other Joint headquarters have a broader comprehension of the nation's Armed Services would be an important objective for NDU.

A high percentage of the graduates of the Joint schools would be assigned to Joint duties, either immediately upon graduation or in an early subsequent tour. While the Services would find personnel management difficulties in meeting such goals, there are two important facts to bear in mind: First, effective Joint duty is vital to the nation's security interests, and so the preparation of officers so assigned should be taken as seriously as, say, pilot training; second, because it costs from $25,000 to $75,000 or more to send an officer through AFSC (5month course) or NDU (10-month course), these schools should

1 Consideration might be given to revision of the AFSC curriculum to aim it at slightly more senior officers in order to make it possible for an officer in the Joint-duty specialty to attend both the command and general staff college (or equivalent) of his parent Service and the AFSC.

not be treated simply as alternatives to their Service "equivalent" schools. These are Joint schools; they are costly, and they have little justification if not so used. This is not to say that some graduates should not be assigned to Service staff positions, only that a plan should be developed that explicitly responds to the needs of the Joint community. (pages E-2 through E-5)

• Option 2H-establish a General Staff in place of the current Joint Staff

Section 143(d) of title 10, United States Code, provides in part:

The Joint Staff shall not operate or be organized as an overall Armed Forces General Staff and shall have no executive authority.

A longstanding American aversion to the concept of a General Staff led to the enactment of the above prohibition as part of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958. While American hostility to the General Štaff concept pre-dated World War II, it intensified considerably during the war and the immediate postwar period. It should be noted, however, that the U.S. Army employed a General Staff concept beginning in 1903. The Army's General Staff was authorized by the Congress in the General Staff Act of 1903.

Despite this hostility, a number of former DoD officials have recently spoken out either in favor of a General Staff or in efforts to clarify misconceptions about this staff concept. Among them are two former Secretaries of Defense, Dr. Harold Brown and Dr. James R. Schlesinger. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Secretary Schlesinger sought to counter the American antipathy to the General Staff concept:

...At the close of World War II, we sought, above all, to avoid the creation of a dominating general staff-reflecting a fear of the German General Staff, that revealed both a misreading of history and a susceptibility to our own wartime propaganda. Whatever the paramount position of Ludendorff in Imperial Germany during World War I, the German General Staff in World War II had little power to control or influence Hitler's regime. Moreover, the issue was quite separate from that of unification, for the German General Staff controlled only Germany's ground forces. In any event those concerns, whether real or invented, bear little relevance to the conditions of today and bear all the earmarks of another era. (Part 5, pages 186 and 187)

Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, USA (Retired) defines a General Staff as follows in his book, A Genius for War:

A General Staff is a highly trained, carefully selected group of military generalists whose function in peace or war is to assist the nation's military leadership or a general commanding a field force of combined arms elements in planning, controlling, directing, coordinating, and supervising the activities of all military subordinate elements in the most effective possible, mutually supporting efforts to achieve an assigned goal or objective, or in maximum readiness to under