Did the Goldwater Nichols Act cripple the art of strategy?

Senator Barry M. Goldwater and
General David C. Jones

James Locher's
Victory on the Potomac

 The recent debate over potential U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific region is a welcome change from the past 25 years of crisis management and technological solutions. The U.S. never really created a grand strategy to replace the varieties of Containment employed throughout the Cold War. From 1991 until 2008 the U.S. pursued a variety of policies without regard for geography and in many cases without financial restraint. Each new strategic crisis was met with an emergency expenditure in the U.S. military budget and new weapons and systems such as smart weapons and "network-centric warfare". Operational art and stage-managing a strategic operation along a specific timeline replaced strategic thinking and analysis. The benefits of being a "hyperpower" are many, but some sort of strategic planning is required to avoid overstretch and prepare for the emergence of the next peer/near-peer competitor.
     The Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986 was intended to refine President Reagan's early "rollback" version of containment strategy by streamlining the chain of command in order to fight a potential global war against the Soviet Union. Created and backed by an impressive array of civilian and military leaders including Senator Barry Goldwater (R/Az) and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) General David C. Jones, who passed away this month, the legislation was heralded as a great victory over so-called "parochial" service bickering in favor of a more organized "joint" force. The Senate Armed Services Committee staffer James Locher, who played a key role in crafting the Senate version of the legislation wrote a book in 2002 hailing it as the "Victory on the Potomac". Despite these claims however, the Goldwater Nichols Act has instead done significant harm to the nation's long range military planning process by tying it to political and budgetary cycles even more tightly than in the 1980's and by further excluding the uniformed military from the business of grand strategy.
     To begin, the Goldwater Nichols Act was not a decisive victory, but in fact a draw between two competing systems of national security planning. The proponents of Goldwater Nichols wanted a much different military leadership system than what was finally agreed upon by Congress and the Reagan administration. In their initial scheme the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) would be replaced by a board of retired officers and the CJCS would effectively become the senior commander of the nation's armed forces. The only uniformed member directly involved in the strategic decision-making process was the CJCS. Service Chiefs were excluded. They also desired the JCS to assume the role of a general staff that would conduct centralized strategic planning to be executed by the deployed Combatant Commanders (COCOM's).
    The opposition, led by Navy Secretary John Lehman, his deputy Seth Cropsey and many senior Navy and Marine Corps officers supported a more traditional, decentralized approach. In their view, the military services should support the COCOMs with strategic concepts and a mixed civil-military team was responsible for strategic military decisions. The result of the battle between these systems was a tie. Reform advocates got an empowered CJCS and pushed the individual military services out of what strategic planning work they retained. On the other hand, the JCS was not replaced by retired officers, the CJCS did not become a "generalissimo" and most importantly, the Joint Staff did not get the "red Prussian uniform stripe" of a full-fledged general staff.
     Where has that left the nation for the last 25+ years? Without a coalition of services or a supreme general staff to conduct strategic planning, political appointees and career Department of Defense employees have assumed more of the strategic planning work originally done by uniformed military officers. This process had been underway throughout the Cold War but accelerated after Goldwater Nichols. The process of creating strategy was once more flexible and only was put to the test of budget limitations after it was created and refined. Now strategy is so tightly linked to the political and budgetary cycle that it is frequently changed before its impact can be adequately assessed. Before 1986 the military services had produced such well-received strategic concepts as the Navy's 1980s version of the Maritime Strategy and the combined Army/Air Force "Air Land Battle".  Since then the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) and the more recent Joint Capabilities Integration System (JCIDS) have constrained the strategic thinking of the individual services by demanding each weapon, tactic and budget plan support all of the services. This equal division of resources was a problem Goldwater Nichols advocates sought to eliminate. Instead it has become even more institutionalized. If a pivot to the Pacific demands a preponderance in naval and air power, as opposed to ground forces, why is the Department of Defense threatening to cut the number of Navy carriers instead of further reducing the size of the Army?
     The advocates of Goldwater Nichols sought to make the military work better by relieving it of a broken "parochial" system of service competition for scant resources. They hoped that an empowered CJCS would restore order and that the Joint Staff would make unbiased strategic and financial decisions. The compromise political agreement however removed the bulk of the remaining uniformed military from strategic decision-making, leaving it more firmly in the hands of budgeteers and political appointees. Even now much of the current strategic discussion comes from quasi-govt. and private institutions such as RAND, CNA, and various think tanks. Politicians and budget analysts should be in the business of shaping and providing realism to military strategy. They should not be left to create it. Congress should seriously consider a long-overdue review of the Goldwater Nichols Act, whose provisions have remained largely unchanged since 1986.  It should fully restore the services' ability to create operational strategy, and with it the flexibility the nation needs to provide sound strategic concepts in a financially challenging environment.