ational capabilities. A General Staff would be able to review, compare, and suggest changes in the plans of commanders with different geographical or functional responsibilities and to decide among their competing demands for limited combat resources. Decisions would be less likely to be influenced by (or go unmade because of) questions of whether individual unified and specified commanders are from one service or another, whether the functions are oriented toward one service or another, or how the decisions would affect service roles, missions, opportunities, futures, and personalities. The President, the Secretary of Defense, and Congress would be able to get much clearer and more accountable military advice than they get now if they want it. U.S. military planning and strategy would become more responsive to the changed needs of military operations and to complex political-military situations. (page 210)

Numerous arguments have been raised against the General Staff concept. These criticisms have focused upon the Prussian-German General Staffs of the period of 1807-1945. Missing from this debate is the recognition that a number of other nations, including the United States, France, and Soviet Union have employed the General Staff concept. Another critical point relating to the German General Staff of World War II was that it was not an Armed Forces General Staff, but only served as the central staff for the German Army. This is an important distinction, as subsequent discussion will reveal. Despite these critical omissions, this evaluation will focus on the criticisms of the German General Staff. As a starting point, the concerns expressed by the Congress are presented and are followed by other criticisms.

Congressional hostility to a General Staff is a principal reason why this concept has not been seriously considered for application in the U.S. military establishment. Given the central role of congressional opposition, Appendix A of this chapter presents a paper (specifically prepared for this study) on "The Evolution of Congressional Attitudes Toward a General Staff in the 20th Century" by Robert L. Goldich, Specialist in National Defense, Congressional Research Service. Goldich determined that World War II and Service unification were watershed events influencing congressional attitudes toward the General Staff concept. Prior to World War II, congressional discussions of a General Staff "reflected more positive than negative views of the institution.'

In the immediate postwar period, the experiences of the war against Germany and its famous Army General Staff and the disputes over Service unification proposals combined to radically alter congressional attitudes. Goldich summarizes this finding:

After World War II, congressional discussion of general staffs arose in the context of proposals to provide stronger organizational coordination and management of the four military services through creation of a central Department of Defense and a Joint Chiefs of Staff organization. Opponents of unification of the Armed Forces under a central Department of Defense, or equivalent organization, argued that a joint, or interservice staff structure in a more unified military establishment

would represent an undesirable step toward the German General Staff system. These opponents of service unification were principally partisans of the Navy and Marine Corps, who felt that naval and amphibious interests and identities would be dominated by the Army and Air Force in a unified Department of Defense.

Great confusion about the nature of the German General Staff was generated by the resulting debate. There was vehement discussion and uncertainty about the extent to which the German General Staff created, as opposed to reflected, militarism and authoritarianism in pre-1945 Germany. Modern scholarship inclines to the latter view. There was also a blurring in the minds of many congressional commentators between a general staff as (1) an organization charged with assisting a nation's military high command in the planning and execution of military operations (which is found in the military services of all nations) and (2) an elite branch of the career officer corps whose members monopolized high-level positions in the national military headquarters and in field commands (which was unique to pre-1945 Germany).

Those Members of Congress, and others who were opposed to service unification thus may have reflected a distaste for German military institutions, opposition to service unification, and/or unclear comprehension of the varying ways in which a general staff could be defined. The result was an equation of increased centralized control of the separate military services with German General Staff methods and organization, hence with pre-1945 German militarism, and an extension of opposition to the German General Staff to opposition to any General Staff. The wars and upheavals which led to the crystallization of these beliefs in the minds of Members of Congress 40 years ago were cataclysmic in nature. Given the evidence of the persistence of these attitudes until well after the end of World War II, it is likely that they linger yet.

Congress' deep concern over the nature of a General Staff was reflected in the 1958 Defense Reorganization Act which expressly prohibited the Joint Staff from operating or being organized "as an overall Armed Forces General Staff..." In its report accompanying the 1958 Act, the House Committee on Armed Services emphasized its reasons for finding a General Staff "dangerous":

Such an organization [a General Staff] is clearly desirable in battle, where time is everything. At the top levels of government, where planning precedes, or should precede, action by a considerable period of time, a deliberate decision is infinitely preferable to a bad decision. Likewise, the weighing of legitimately opposed alternative courses of action is one of the main processes of free government. Thus a general staff organization -which is unswervingly oriented to quick decision and obliteration of alternative courses is a fundamentally fallible, and thus dangerous, instrument for determination of national policy.

As a corollary, it is the nature of a general staff at national level to plan along rigid lines for the future. This creates rigid

ity of military operations and organization and historically has led general staffs to attempt to control all national policies involved in war -notably foreign and economic policy, both of which lie far beyond the proper sphere of military planners.

Moreover, when structurally placed over all the armed services and military departments, an overall Armed Forces general staff serves to isolate the politically responsible civilian official from all points of view but its own, so that, while he, in theory at least, retains all power, this power becomes increasingly captive to the recommendations of the general staff.

It has, parenthetically, been a concern of the committee, in considering the proposed legislation, lest a defense organization be ultimately created in which power is totally concentrated in the Secretary of Defense only so that it may be wielded and controlled more effectively by a military tier (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Joint Staff) immediately below him.

For these and for other reasons, Congress has historically rejected an Armed Forces general staff and single Chief of Staff. This rejection was exhaustively debated in 1947 when Congress shaped the top organization of the services along representative lines (Joint Chiefs of Staff supported by service committees) and rejected the authoritarian concept advanced in the so-called Collins plan for a single Chief of Staff and a national general staff.

The opposition to the General Staff concept articulated by the House Committee on Armed Services in 1958 can be summarized as follows. It found that the General Staff concept had the following deficiencies: (1) a failure to systematically consider the full range of alternatives; (2) rigidity of thought; (3) an attempt to control national policies that are beyond military affairs; (4) isolation of civilian officials from other points of view; and (5) erosion of civilian control of the military by concentrating too much power in the hands of the military officers immediately below the senior civilian official.

These congressional criticisms are highly inaccurate and cannot be supported by historical analysis of the work of General Staffs, particularly those of Prussia and Germany. In fact, these criticisms more accurately reflect the actual deficiencies of the current Joint Staff than they do the imagined shortcomings of the General Staff concept. Each of these criticisms is evaluated below.

a. Failure to consider alternatives

First, General Staffs have traditionally provided objective consideration of all valid alternatives, to a much greater extent than is now done by the Joint Staff. In A Genius for War, Colonel T. N. Dupuy, USA (Retired) discusses the objectivity of German General Staff work:

Anyone who has reviewed German staff documents cannot fail to marvel at the objectivity of their staff analyses and estimates. This was true not only when they attempted to analyze the causes of defeat or failure, but also in their evaluation of technical or tactical performance of other nationalities, in

peace and war. There was no NIH -"not invented here" syndrome in the German General Staff. (pages 304 and 305)

b. Rigidity of thought

Second, rigidity of thought or inflexibility have never been identified as deficiencies of General Staffs. Such staffs have been highly innovative and have quickly and objectively recognized previous failures. Dupuy discusses the encouragement of initiative and imagination in German General Staffs:

There is no direct evidence that German military emphasis on imagination and initiative has been due to a conscious effort to offset any traditional German cultural trait of regimentation. If not conscious, however, this may well have been an unconscious motivation of German General Staff theorists. That these efforts to encourage initiative and imagination were successful is evident from the fact that it was in this area, probably more than any other, that the German, at all levels, excelled in both world wars. (page 304)

Dupuy also comments favorably on the German General Staff's attitude toward intellectual individuality:

In most armies, intellectual individuality is viewed with some suspicion and even hostility; it is an automatic challenge to authority and the Party Line. In the German Army this natural human reaction also existed but was offset by the General Staff's deliberate efforts to encourage and reward intellectual individualists. (page 306)

Max Hastings also discounts the argument of rigidity of thought:

...One of the more absurd propaganda cliches of the war was the image of the Nazi soldier as an inflexible squarehead. In reality, the German soldier almost invariably showed far greater flexibility on the battlefield than his Allied counterpart. ("Their Wehrmacht Was Better Than Our Army", The Washington Post, May 5, 1985, page C4)

c. Attempt to control national policies

As to attempts to control national policies, there appears to be some evidence to support this assertion in the actions of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff of the German General Staff during World War I. Dupuy comments as follows:

...By this time [July 1917] the real leaders of Germany, with power unchallenged, were Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The Field Marshall and the General had not seized power; Germany's political leaders, pale imitations of Bismarck, had abdicated power to them. (page 167)

However, these events occurred in a government where the Army was under the effective control of only the monarch -Kaiser William II and not the parliament -the Reichstag. Despite this occurrence, it has little to do with the system of government in the United States in which civilian control of the military by the President and the Congress is well established.

In World War II, the German General Staff did not attempt to control national policies. The General Staff was absolutely controlled by Adolf Hitler and its influence even over military matters began to decline in 1938 and continued to erode during the war. As Colonel Dupuy notes:

The decline of the General Staff as the key military institution in Germany had begun when Hitler assumed the position of Defense Minister and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in early 1938. (page 276)

d. Isolation of civilian officials and erosion of civilian control

As to its relations with civilian officials, there is nothing inherent in the General Staff concept that would either isolate civilian officials from other sources of advice and influence or dominate them and, thereby, erode civilian control of the military. In an editorial page article in The Washington Post on June 9, 1984, Colonel Dupuy emphasizes this point:

...there is absolutely no evidence that general staffs have in any way eroded civilian control of the armed forces in any nation. They have been subservient to autocrats when they have been created in autocratic societies; they have ably defended liberty when they have been implanted in democracies. The general staff most noted of all, that of Germany, twice attempted to substitute democracy for autocracy in an autocratic society, but failed on both occasions because the autocracy was too entrenched. ("Military Reform: The Case for a Centralized Command", page 19)

Similarly, Captain John M. Nolen, USA, in his article, “JCS Reform and the Lessons of German History," writes:

Those who claim that JCS reform might threaten civilian control cannot make their case using Hitler's Germany as an example. Granted, the German generals are not guiltless figures in the rise of Hitler and subsequent Nazi aggression. But one of the clear lessons of the Hitler era is that civilian control was never jeopardized. Hitler, the Nazi politician, insured his lasting control over the generals. (Parameters, Volume XIV, No. 3, page 19)

In addition to these weak and inaccurate congressional criticisms, there are other arguments in opposition to the General Staff concept which merit consideration. These include: (1) the loss of World Wars I and II is itself an indictment against the General Staff concept; (2) a General Staff would become a dangerous elite; (3) a General Staff would promote militarism; (4) a General Staff is alien to democratic societies; (5) the very nature of General Staff would result in officers too far removed from the field to be realistic planners; and (6) the German General Staff was incompetent in formulating strategy.

e. Loss of World Wars I and II

In A Genius for War, Colonel Dupuy summarizes (but does not endorse) the first negative argument as follows: