A Confusing Mess, The DoD in the post T2K period

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Primary source material from the 18th Edition of the Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet by Norman Polmar as well as the Congressional Records.


Defense Organization

The USA has a unified defense establishment that is responsible for the conduct of military operations, in support of the National Security Strategy. The basic structure was organized in 1947 and has several major modifications during and subsequently to the Cold War and into the current war against terrorism.

Under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution, the president is the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. The president’s primary advisers in this daunting role, are the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In addition (by federal law), the president is also assisted by the National Security Council which provides advise on a wide range of intelligence and national security matters. The permanent chair is the President and includes the Vice President, the Secretaries of Defense, State and Treasury, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The individual who coordinates NSC activities and directs its staff is the president’s National Security Advisor.

Traditionally, the National Command Authorities are the ‘terms’ for the President and the Secretary of Defense, as well as their deputized alternates and successors. The NCA has the constitutional authority to direct the armed forces and to order the release of nuclear weapons. NO ONE ELSE in the U.S. chain of command has the responsibility and the authority to order the launch of these weapons.

The principal components of the defense establishment are:
1) The Department of Defense
2) The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff
3) The military departments and their subordinate services
4) The unified combatant commands

Four of the U.S. military services are within the Department of Defense. The fifth, the U.S. Coast Guard, is currently part of the Department of Homeland Security and has responsibilities to both departments.

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This department is headed by the Secretary of Defense who is a civilian appointee and a member of the president’s cabinet as well as the National Secretary Council. This appointee is always a civilian.

The principal deputies under the Secretary of Defense are the Deputy Secretary and the four Under Secretaries. There are eight Assistant Secretaries of Defense and other civilian officials at this level who also report the Secretary and Deputy Secretary. The four Under Secretaries are supported by twenty-three Deputy Under Secretaries.

Supporting this collection is the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) with approximately 465 military personnel and 1,560 civilians assigned. In addition, there are 15 separate agencies under the Secretary of Defense that support the Department of Defense and the military services. These agencies perform the general functions that affect all U.S. military activities. Of these agencies, eight are headed by military officers (indicated by asterisks) and seven by civilians:

1) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
2) Defense Commissary Agency*
3) Defense Contract Audit Agency
4) Defense Contract Management Agency
5) Defense Finance and Accounting Agency
6) Defense Information Systems Agency*
7) Defense Intelligence Agency*
8) Defense Legal Services Agency
9) Defense Logistics Agency*
10) Defense Security Cooperation Agency*
11) Defense Threat Reduction Agency*
12) Missile Defense Agency* (formerly the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization)
13) National Imagery and Mapping Agency* (formerly the Defense Mapping Organization)
14) National Security Agency*
15) National Security Service

In addition to performing intelligence analysis for the OSD, the Defense Intelligence Agency also serves as the intelligence staff for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (equivalent of a J-2 staff). The National Security Agency (NSA) performs electronic intercept and cryptological activaties in support of the U.S. intelligence community, as well as the defense establishment. This agency also supervises the cryptologic activities of the Army, Navy. Marine Corps and Air Force.

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Congress established the War Department (1789) and the Navy Department (1798). These two departments administered the U.S. armed forces with their secretaries reporting directly to the president and were members of the president’s cabinet.

The 1947 National Security Act, created the National Military Establishment, the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Departments of the Army, Navy (and Marine Corps) and Air Force were established as cabinet-level departments, with the newly created Secretary of Defense acting as coordinator of these military departments.

Amendments to the National Security Act in 1949 established the Secretary of Defense as the principal assistant to the president in defense affairs and changed the National Military Establishment into the Department of Defense (DoD). These amendments also made the three military departments subordinate to DoD and removed their secretaries from cabinet level. Latter amendments have taken away many of the decision making prerogatives of the military departments and reassigned them to OSD and to various defense agencies.

The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 established a new chain of command from the President and Secretary of Defense to the unified and specified commanders-in-chief, who were given full operational control over the forces assigned to them. However, the Secretary of Defense can delegate operational command over forces to the Joint Chiefs of Staff when deemed appropriate.

While there are five military services, there are seven reserve components: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard Reserve organizations and the Army and Air National Guard. The National Guard organization are under state control during peacetime but can be called into federal service at the direction of the President.

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The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) consists of the Chairman, Vice Chairman, and the military chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. All are four-star officers (general or admiral).

The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1968, reduced the role of the members of the JCS, but increased the authority of the Chairman as the senior U.S. military officer. The Chairman of the JCS became the principal military adviser to the president and the Secretary of Defense heads the Joint Staff. Significantly, under the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the Chairman of the JCS is in the chain of command between the President and the Secretary of Defense and the unified commanders.
The Joint Staff consists of seven directorates that perform military staff functions for the Joint Chiefs and to some extent, for the unified commands. These are:

1) J-1 Manpower and Personnel
2) J-2 Intelligence
3) J-3 Operations
4) J-4 Logistics
5) J-5 Strategic Plans and Policy
6) J-6 Command, Control, Communications, and Computer Systems
7) J-7 Operational Plans and Interoperability
8) J-8 Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment

The directors of the JCS staff directorates are three-star officers (lieutenant general and vice admirals). Their staffs are comprised mostly of military officers from all services. There are approximately 1,200 military personal and 185 civilians assigned to the Joint Staff.

The J-2 does not have a major staff as the other directorates, rather, the DoD/JCS intelligence function is carried out by the DIA.

Unlike the Former Soviet General Staff and the senior military staffs of other nations, the officers assigned to the Joint Staff are not professional staff officers, but are assigned for 2-3 year assignments from their service, often without any prior staff experience or education.

Historical
At their meeting in Washington D.C. during December 1941-January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to create the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff. The British component already existed as the Chiefs of Staff Committee; there was no comparable U.S. body of senior military officers.

Lacking any specific executive action of congressional legislation, the senior U.S. military officers met as a bod for the first time with their British counterparts on 23 January 1942, to organize the Combined Chiefs of Staff. At the time, the term “Joint Chiefs of Staff” was used for the Americans, although some members were not the chiefs of their services. Initially, the JCS consisted of the Chief of Naval Operations; Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet; Army Chief of Staff; and Chief of the Army Air Forces. The position of Chief of Naval Operations was combined with that of Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet in March 1942, giving the JCS three members. In July 1942, retried Admiral William D. Leahy was recalled to active duty as the Chief of Staff to the President and became the de facto Chairman of the JCS. The JCS membership remained with these four men for the remainder of the war.

The JCS served as both the U.S. component of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the executive body for the direction of U.S. military forces during the war.

The JCS was formally established by the National Security Act of 1947, but the position of chairman was not authorized until the 1949 amendments. At this point, the position of chairman rotated in no specific order between the Army, Navy and Air Force. Some of the chairmen were former chiefs of their branch of service.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps, initially only attended JCS meeting only when specifically invited to discuss Marine issues and had no formal vote. In 1952, the Commandant was authorized to sit with the JCS and to vote on those issues of direct interest to the Marine Corps, in 1979, the Commandant was finally made a full member of the JCS.

The position of Vice Chairman was established in 1987 by the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Previously, this position was filled by the members of the JCS by rotation. Upon the formal creation of the position in 1987, the Vice Chairman became the stand-in for the Chairman as well as chairing the powerful Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), which controls the acquisition of weapon systems for the military services.

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There are three military departments within the Department of Defense, Army, Navy and Air Force. Each is headed by a civilian Secretary, Under Secretary and several Assistant Secretaries. These are all civilian positions, although, occasionally, military officers have been appointed as Assistant Secretaries, and within the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations has served as acting Secretary.

Reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense is the chief of the service, who is the senior military officer of that department (except for the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the JCS, who rank above the service chiefs).

The military departments are responsible for the training, provision of equipment, and the administration of their respective services. They do not direct military operations; that function was removed by the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958. The influence and prerogatives of the military departments have widely varied, depending on the personality, influence, and attitudes of the service secretaries and to a lesser extent, the service chiefs.

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Almost all U.S. operating forces are assigned to unified combat commands, which plan military operations, direct exercises and combat operations, and have operational control of specifically assigned U.S. forces. The reorganization of the Department of Defense in 1958 established the chain of command of the operating forces from the National Command Authority (the President and the Secretary of Defense) directly to the commanders (then called commanders-in-chief), of the unified and specific commands. At that time, unified commands would have components from two or more military services, while specified commands contained forces from a specific service, an example would be the Air Force’s Strategic Aid Command.

The 1986 Goldwater-Nicholas Act dramatically increased the authority of the unified commanders greatly strengthened the role of the Chairman of the JCS and of the field commanders, essentially reducing the fellow members of the JCS to that of onlookers who simply provided the necessary forces. In the Desert Storm campaign, General Schwarzkopf (Commander-in-Chief, Central Command), was literally king of his domain. During the war, no serious attempts were made by any of the services to go around Schwarzkopf. A service chief could not even visit the Gulf without his permission.

Currently, there are nine unified commands. Five of these are responsible for specific geographic areas, and the remaining four have worldwide functional areas of responsibility. The unified commands are not fixed by law or regulation, and the number of commands and their responsibilities vary by the direction of the President and the Secretary of Defense.

The geographic commands currently consist of Northern Command (NORTHCOM); Joint Forces Command (JFCOM); Pacific Command (PACCOM), and European Command (EUCOM) have major forces assigned to them; Central Command (CENTCOM) and Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) consist primarily of planning, command and control elements on a permanent basis, with specific formations reassigned to them from other unified commands during an exercise, a crisis, or in wartime. The most recent example is CENTCOM, which normally has a planning staff of several hundred personnel. When Operational Desert Shield began, CENTCOM assumed command of the buildup with over 500,000 U.S. military personnel with large numbers of ships, aircraft and ground units assigned. CENTCOM, in coordination with the Commander of the Saudi forces, directed Operation Desert Storm. CENTCOM also controlled the buildups, invasions, and follow-up combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002-2004.

“Overall, the unified command structure works well overseas, where CINCs with a geographic area of responsibility effectively direct their assigned forces in accomplishing a wide range of missions… But unification has never been achieved in the United States to the same degree as overseas. While forces based in the United States are assigned by law, to one CINC, many are assigned to overseas CINCs and have limited opportunities to train jointly with the overseas based forces they would join for military operations in crisis or war.” General Colin L. Powell, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.