-in particular, preservation of naval aviation and the Marine. Corps. Beyond these issues, however, jurisdictional boundaries remained blurred. In essence, the Key West Agreement "called for the Services, under the guidance of the Joint Chiefs, to coordinate their efforts closely, avoid duplication, and work toward 'maximum practicable' integration of policies and procedures." (The Formative Years, page 396) Given the environment of extensive suspicion and rivalry among the Services, effective coordination did not result. As Steven L. Rearden noted in The Formative Years:

...Until the actual cooperation matched the resourcefulness of the semantic compromises [of the Key West Agreement], there could be no genuine harmony or teamwork, and no true resolution of the more troublesome roles and missions questions. (page 397)

In Organizing for Defense, Paul Hammond also concludes that the Key West Agreement had limited utility in solving the issues of Service jurisdiction:

...Its delineation of service functions has endured, though only because there is little of a general character which can be said about service functions, not because it settled anything.

...[Secretary of Defense] Forrestal found little immediate comfort in the agreement. Before he could publish it, Generals Spaatz and Norstad of the Air Force had qualified their approval by indicating that they accepted it as an interpretation of the National Security Act, but disagreed with it in principle. Since a major purpose of the agreement was to circumscribe the behavior of the Chiefs and their services with the public and Congress, the practical effect of such a qualification was to nullify the agreement, for the major roles and missions dispute in the military establishment, between the Navy and the Air Force over naval aviation, had never turned on the interpretation of the statute, but always on the contended merits of the roles and missions issue. (pages 237 and 238)

John C. Ries in The Management of Defense reached similar conclusions:

...The product of this meeting, the Key West Agreement, failed completely as a basis for service agreement. In fact, the services disagreed about correct interpretation even before publication.

As in any attempt to state policy separate from the specific means of implementation, the Key West Agreement did not contain clear criteria for choosing one particular set of means over another. The agreement could not substitute for a final choice or negotiation among specific service proposals. And in spite of the agreement, the JCS, a committee of equals, could not do more than endorse the proposals of each individual service. (page 126)

In The Uncertain Trumpet, written in 1959, General Maxwell D. Taylor, USA (Retired) cited the need to rewrite the assignment of Services roles and missions in light of the limited utility of the Key West Agreement:

This housecleaning should start with a rewriting of the roles and missions of the three services. The present roles and missions were promulgated in 1947 at the time of the famous Key West conference and have not been changed in any significant way since then. In their initial form, their statement was little more than a description of the capabilities of the services at the time of the promulgation of the Key West Agreement. Since that time, weapons systems, tactics, and strategy have changed, and with them the capabilities of the services. (page 165)

(2) Clarifications of the Key West Agreement

There have been ten clarifications (of varying degrees of significance) of the Key West Agreement over a 37-year period. Six of these clarifications involved only the Army and the Air Force and were usually focused on aviation support for Army combat forces. The first clarification, resulting from the Newport Conference, sought to end a dispute between the Navy and Air Force over access to atomic weapons. The eighth clarification was made necessary by military use of space and involved all four Services. The remaining two clarifications, involving the Navy and Air Force, were focused on Air Force collateral functions in sea control operations.

The first seven chronological clarifications sought to resolve specific disputes and did not reflect an approach by the Services in Reardon's words "to coordinate their efforts closely, avoid duplication, and work toward 'maximum practicable' integration of policies and procedures." In his book, The Department of Defense, Carl W. Borklund characterized the nature of inter-Service conflict and controversies, of which these seven clarifications were a part, as follows:

In general terms, during all these squabbles, where separate service functions and combat capabilities supposedly interlocked, the tendency was to neglect those links. Where the weapon system had glamour and could command or attract large amounts of budget appropriations, each service concentrated on it, especially if the weapon function was to deliver an atomic warhead. The emphasis was on competition, rather than on complementary effort toward a common combat capability goal. (page 271)

While a more cooperative approach began to emerge in the minor Navy-Air Force agreements of 1974 and 1975, it was not until the Army-Air Force Memorandum of Agreement in 1984 that this approach was clearly evident. It is particularly notable that the 1984 agreement not only proposed to resolve numerous specific issues, but also sought to institutionalize a process by which Army/Air Force cooperation and coordination could be maximized. In the press conference, General Gabriel noted the significance of the agreement:

What we have come up with, I think, is a very historic thing. It's kind of a revolutionary approach... Pentagon News Briefing, May 22, 1984, page 2).

c. Reasons for Concern

Underlying concerns about the adequacy of Service roles and missions assignments are three facts: (1) the Key West Agreement of 1948 made only general assignments of areas of jurisdiction; (2) no major changes to the Key West Agreement have been made; and (3) despite the Army Air Force agreement of 1984, there do not appear to be effective mechanisms for considering necessary revisions to roles and missions assignments. The second and third facts may be more significant. The agreement negotiated in 1948 may have gone as far as the Services could go during the immediate post-war period which was characterized by substantial bureaucratic turmoil. Samuel P. Huntington describes this environment as follows:

...In the immediate postwar period, fundamental issues of service existence and strategy were at stake. After a major war, military policy is in a state of flux. The cake of custom, bureaucratic routine, and sustained habits of behavior-executive, congressional, and popular-are broken. Change is not only possible, but expected. In such periods, existing organizational units have the most to fear from major threats to their existence, and new organizational units have the best prospects for an easy birth or growth. ("Inter-Service Competition and the Political Roles of the Armed Services", Problems of National Strategy, page 469)

In such an environment with many important issues of strategy and concepts still evolving, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach wide agreement on the jurisdiction of each Service. Huntington cast Service activity during the immediate, post-war period in the following terms:

After World War II, each service and hoped-for service was anxious to carve out a role for itself suitable to its ambitions and self-conceptions before a postwar equilibrium was established and the patterns of organization and behavior jelled into enduring form. The unification battle involved the general pattern of postwar organizational relationships for all the services and, specifically, the formal recognition of the separate existence of the Air Force. Closely linked with this were the legitimate fears of the Navy and Marine Corps for their future being. "Why should we have a Navy at all?" asked the commanding general of the Army Air Forces, and answered himself by declaring that, "There are no enemies for it to fight except apparently the Army Air Force." Similarly, the then Chief of Staff of the Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made it quite clear that the Marines ought to be maintained as only a minor landing force. The uneasiness these views inspired in the sea-going services was not allayed until their functions were carefully defined in the National Security Act and the Key West roles-and-missions paper, the Forrestals [a 4-ship class of aircraft carriers] floated forth on the flood of Korean War appropriations, and the Marine position was sanctified in the Marine Corps Act of 1952. By 1952, the United States had four recognized services instead of the two it had had in 1940.

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After 1952, whatever the vicissitudes of budgets and strategy, the existence of no service was in serious danger from another. An equilibrium had been reached. (pages 469 and 470)

Once this equilibrium had been reached, there was greater potential for more specificity in the assignment of Service roles and missions. This potential has never been realized (for reasons explained later in this subsection).

The failure to more adequately and continuously address Service roles and missions is of concern for three basic reasons: (1) the Key West Agreement permitted duplication of effort among the Services in many areas; (2) the advance of technology posed many new jurisdictional issues not anticipated at the time of the Key West Agreement; and (3) the Key West Agreement may have artificially constrained the development of force capabilities necessary to meet the changing needs of warfare.

(1) duplication of effort

Duplication of effort is a topic that needs to be addressed carefully. Duplication is normally viewed as unnecessary and, therefore, wasteful. However, for the Department of Defense, duplication may provide a degree of insurance against unforeseen changes in the threat or evolution of warfare and against the pursuit of a single solution to a complex military requirement. In The Management of Defense, John C. Ries articulates this point:

...The greatest threat to adequate defense comes from gaps in defense capabilities, not from duplication. The existence of several agencies [the Military Departments] with overlapping missions encourages competition in determining alternative ways of doing the same job and provides the incentive to find gaps that need filling. Competition, far from being extravagant, is probably the surest and cheapest insurance that can be purchased against a fatal gap in defense capabilities. Even if gaps do not occur, the single way is often the most expensive way. The costs are the undiscovered cheaper ways of developing the same capability. (page 207)

In The Pentagon and the Art of War, Edward N. Luttwak discusses the benefits of duplication, or diversity, in conflict. Luttwak argues that efforts to standardize and avoid duplication are focused on business efficiency whereas military effectiveness in combat demands diversity. He argues that

...less standardized military forces are more resilient. (page 135)

Luttwak uses the following among many examples to explain this point:

...If, for example, our forces use a single, standardized type of antiaircraft missile for the sake of efficiency, enemy pilots will be able to underfly its minimum operating altitude or overfly its maximum ceiling, and the enemy's electronic wizards can devote all their efforts to countering its specific detection and guidance systems. If efficiency is sacrificed and a second, different type of missile is added with higher or lower altitude

limits, or merely different electronic specifications, the enemy's pilots will find it that much more difficult to avoid both missiles, while the enemy's electronic countermeasures must cope with two different challenges. (page 135)

While the points made by Ries and Luttwak have merit, unconstrained duplicative activities are not the answer. Just as an excessive focus on business efficiency can lead to the pursuit of single, high-risk solutions and vulnerable forces, duplication can be unnecessary and wasteful of scare defense resources. This is of particular concern because the costs of unnecessary duplication in DoD are greater than for other organizations, particularly those in private business. This is so because of the separateness of the Services. Once unnecessary duplication has been determined to exist, it is much more difficult to eliminate. In The Organizational Politics of Defense, William A. Lucas and Raymond H. Dawson explain these points:

If the central management can cut through the debate and make a firm conclusion that an activity is wasteful duplication, that does not mean the activity is necessarily closed down. A weakness of using the budget as an instrument of control is that by the time an activity is recognized as duplicative, it may be too late to do much about it. "Sunk costs" and organizational barriers to transferring activities often make it simpler to accept the duplication.

...A commercial firm might firmly consolidate activities by transferring personnel, assigning the responsibility to one of the competitors. This step can be difficult for a business firm, but transferring defense activities can be extraordinarily difficult because of the powerful traditions surrounding the military services. Consider the consequences should the Secretary of Defense choose to transfer a group of career Air Force officers doing meterological work to the Navy. While it would be a technically feasible task, although administratively horrendous, such a step is especially difficult because the services are indeed separate. This special uniqueness of the military services is reinforced by the support offered the services by constituencies outside the Department of Defense. Foremost among these is Congress, which includes many partisans of the different services. In addition, for each military uniform, there are reserve organizations, National Guard components, veterans and all of their formidable political allies ready to leap to the defense of the sanctity of service traditions.

If conflict over jurisdiction does develop in the military establishment, it thus has to center around the transfer of jurisdictions alone. But it is difficult to close down an on-going activity in any business, and doubly so in the Defense Department. To establish a program, to buy the material necessary, and to train the personnel is often a major investment. Once in operation, the costs of the activity are relatively small. If faced with the prospect of having to close one program and expand the same activity in another department, the central management of any company or bureaucracy is likely to leave well enough alone. The major investment in expertise from training