Unwieldy and irrelevant: why is the military clinging to outdated and ineffective command structures?

When a truck bomb exploded outside the Khobar Towers military complex in Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, killing 19 American airmen and injuring hundreds more, it seemed like the nd of external threat that even a superpower cannot prepare for. But after more than a year of investigation and acrimony, the moral of Khobar Towers has been reversed so that it now seems to stand for the internal threat of turmoil and confusion in the armed services.

The immediate problem, according to the Defense Department report filed by retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing, was local Air Force commander Terryl Schwalier's failure to take proper anti-terrorism precautions, such as installing a Mylar shield on the front of the compound. But Downing also found that the chain of command at Khobar Towers had gone haywire. He concluded that "the Department of Defense must clarify command relationships ... to ensure that all commanders have the requisite authority to accomplish their assigned responsibilities." The commander in chief of CentCom (the regional command for the Middle East) rarely spent time in the field, and he chose to let the services wield the authority instead of exercising command from his headquarters in Riyadh. As a result, CentCom regressed into the same state of bureaucratic torpor that left it wide open to terrorist attack in 1983, when another truck bomb killed 241 Marines sleeping in their Beirut barracks.

So far, Secretary of Defense William Cohen's only response to Downing's findings has been to block Terryl Schwalier's promotion (which provoked Air Force Chief of Staff Ronald Fogleman to resign in anger). But a number of defense analysts and top brass believe that Knobar Towers is a warning sign that should not be ignored. They see it, not as an isolated event, but as an inevitable result of the military's failure to adapt its top-heavy command structure to the post-Cold War world.

Like all U.S. military compounds on foreign soil, Khobar Towers falls under the authority of a regional "unified" (multi-service) command. These commands reflect the Pentagon's view of the world as divided into "spheres of influence" -- regional aspects of the global struggle to contain communism. Known as the Unified Command Plan, the system is a legacy of the 1947 National Security Act. There are commands corresponding to Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific and Asia, South America, the continental U.S., and the Middle East/Africa, in addition to commands in charge of space, transportation, special operations, and nuclear weapons. Each of these commands has its own elaborate structure, known derisively to Pentagon officials as "Christmas trees," on which each service hangs its own confusing array of officers and units -- despite the fact that several of these commands may be unnecessary.

All Chiefs and No Indians

The breakdown in accountability at Khobar Towers is just the latest tragic chapter in the U.S. military's fine history of bureaucratic dysfunction. Whatever its benefits, our multi-branched armed forces, each service with its own complex chain of command, often makes for less-than-efficient military operations (not to mention military spending as each branch vies for the biggest chunk of the funding pie). Periodic attempts have been made over the years to reduce the confusion and interservice rivalry among the groups -- with limited success. The very formation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the wake of World War II was aimed at transcending service politics by imposing a central authority. During the war, Eisenhower and other top generals had seen how vital it was to maintain a clear and coordinated chain of command over the services. Yet, only a year after the National Security Act of 1947 established the JCS, Eisenhower warned his fellow four-stars that the Act provided little more than "a weak confederation of sovereign military units" Sadly, history has proven him right. Some of the most notorious military disasters of the post-WWII years -- including countless episodes in Vietnam and the failed Desert One Iranian hostage rescue of 1980 -- were direct effects of service infighting.

Another major attempt to address the problem, this time by Congress, resulted in the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of 1986. Ironically, these down the confusion during wartime by circumventing the JCS, stripping the service chiefs of all battle authority and clarifying the power of the secretary of defense to direct war efforts. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was also granted power to independently advise the president and defense secretary, rather than simply reporting the "consensus" view of the chiefs (which had often proved useless in the past). These changes, forced by Congress on a kicking, screaming Pentagon, played a major role in U.S. success during the Gulf WAR. JCS Chairman Colin Powell could brief President Bush and Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney independently from the other service chiefs. And the chain of command for operations ran cleanly and directly from Cheney to Powell to the regional commander in charge of Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. As such, the Gulf War marked the first time that a regional commander could plan his attacks without worrying about "service equity" on the battlefield.

What General Schwarzkopf also learned from the Gulf War, however, is that the military still has a long way to go. While the chain of command had been smoothed out at the upper-most levels, Schwarzkopf was still dealing with service chiefs unaccustomed to thinking and operating as a unified force. Before the fighting started in January 1991, Schwarzkopf was forced to spend several months untangling the knot of service relationships at CentCom. According to one defense official, "Schwarzkopf had to individually negotiate with the service chiefs for his forces. What he told Powell afterwards was, `This [system] doesn't work. It's broken."'

Much of the problem seems to have been that Goldwater-Nichols clarified wartime relationships without sifting down to the level of training and readiness. During peacetime, the services are quick to reassert themselves, with painfully familiar results: too many overlapping commands and too little coordination. As a result, it takes a while for them to shift gears when going into combat. Schwarzkopf's frustrations were quickly forgotten in the afterglow of the American victory in the Gulf. But we may not have four months to prepare for the next war.

In the meantime, the service continue to fight for their independence. James Locher, one of the architects of the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, concluded in a 1996 article: "To date, parochial attitudes of the services and some geographic [commanders in chief], and weak support by the Joint Staff have hamstrung" efforts to create an integrated fighting force.

Efforts have also been made -- with less than overwhelming success -- to reduce the horrifying expense that interservice rivalry fosters when it comes to defense planning. Each year, the services throw more than a billion dollars at the nation's think tanks, which in turn produce four separate mountains of paper. As former JCS Chairman David C. Jones wrote, "The result of this tedious process is a defense budget derived primarily from the disparate desires of the individual services rather than from a well-integrated plan." In 1994, JCS Vice Chairman William J. Owens tried to streamline the process by investing the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) with centralized power to oversee weapons procurement planning. But the service chiefs dug in, and Joseph Ralston (Owens's successor) crippled JROC by adding another layer of bureaucracy -- the Senior Review Group -- that reinstalls service preferences.

Perhaps a unique shot at reform was missed in the early 1990s. Recognizing both the value and the short-comings of Goldwater-Nichols as illustrated in the Gulf War, Colin Powell, perhaps the most powerful JCS chairman in history, decided that part of the answer lay in a radical simplification of the regional command structure. Planners in the joint Staff office had looked at abolishing Southern, Central, and European commands as early as 1990, and Powell is said to have been with them. "He was about to take that on when he left office in '93," says Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, now a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution. As it happened, politics interfered -- Powell was too busy dealing with Clinton's gays-in-the-military debacle. But he did manage to push through one major change before he retired. He altered one of the existing regional commands, the Atlantic Command, explicitly designating it the engine of progress toward "jointness," or interservice cooperation. It would be responsible for all forces based in the continental United States, and it would train the troops for foreign crises with a newly energized ideal of "synergistic" joint operation. It was designed, in other words, to force a reluctant military to abide by Goldwater-Nichols. But the remodeled Atlantic Command was destined to be a thorn in the side of the services, and it required a strong leader to live up to its mission. A year later, in October 1994, it got one: Gen. John J. Sheehan.

A longtime advocate of greater jointness and efficiency among the services, Sheehan was the obvious choice to head the Atlantic Command. Today, he is the only active four-star calling for reform of the command structure, discussing its problem with an honesty that is unheard-of in the military. This move has not made him popular with the Pentagon. In fact, Sheehan's public insistence on serving the nation rather than the armed services is probably what lost him the chairmanship of the joint Chiefs. Sheehan was a top candidate for the job last spring, until Shalikashvili and the other chiefs reportedly vetoed him. Sheehan "was a threat to all the chiefs," says Lawrence Korb, because he does not tolerate the log-rolling that has dominated JCS policy.

Sheehan claims that the U.S. military today is like the U.S. auto industry of the 1980s: too much overhead, too hierarchical, too much middle management, and too slow. He likes to invoke Northcote Parkinson's celebrated study of the British navy, which found that between 1939 and 1969 the fleet had shrunk by almost two thirds, while the number of desk officers and clerks per ship had risen from 37 to 295. The same thing is happening to the United States today, Sheehan claims. We have many more three-star generals and admirals now than we did at the end of World War II, despite a severely shrunken force.

This glut of officers may have more negative implications than just wasted defense dollars. For instance, the U.S. maintains a Southern Command to cover South America, despite the fact that Latin American history is one long lesson in the folly of applying military solutions to political problems. The Pentagon decided to retain SouthCom after the Cold War ended, according to a 1995 Pentagon document, "so that direct ties could be maintained with military officers who played dominant roles in many Latin American countries." No wonder Chile wants to buy so many F-16s.

The same Pentagon document also freely admits that altering the Unified Command Plan would "cut deeply into what the Services [see] as their traditional prerogatives." The services resist change not just because it would mean losing officers, but because it would pry them open to outside scrutiny and the possibility of further reform. At the very least, it might provoke a broader debate on how to organize a military whose traditional role -- fighting major wars -- is becoming increasingly marginal. As the economy goes global, the definition of security grows broader and less dependent on vast armies. For instance, says Sheehan, "you can put all of NATO into Bosnia and you won't solve the problem. Bosnia is about culture, Bosnia is about economics, Bosnia is about political engagement."

Sheehan's efforts notwithstanding, the tendency toward log-rolling by the JCS is so embedded, say some Pentagon observers, that the impulse for reform will have to come from Congress as it did in die 1980s. Admiral Owens has argued that we need Goldwater-Nichols II, a law that would cutback service priorities and increase jointness and efficiency in defense planning. In the meantime, one thing seems certain: The JCS will not offer any bold new ideas. Ralston's conservatism made him popular with the other chiefs, who picked him unanimously as their next leader last May (before they knew about his adultery problem). When Cohen then asked Sheehan to be vice chairman under Ralston, Sheehan refused and, according to Pentagon rumor, said that he did not respect Ralston and could not work with him. That kind of brashness didn't advance his cause with Cohen, who is not eager to test his credibility with the Pentagon.

Some defense pundits even argue that Clinton simply didn't want another powerful chairman after the example of Colin Powell, whose strong views about U.S. intervention proved an obstacle to Clinton's foreign policy in 1993. His popularity has been better served by the pliant Shalikashvili. "What Clinton really wants out of the military," says Eliot Cohen of the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, "is for it not to make headlines or get him into trouble." In any case, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Henry Shelton, is a "team builder" who will not provoke his fellow chiefs by rocking the well-stocked Pentagon boat, according to a recently-retired four-star who knows him well.

Man With a Mission

Yet Clinton's reluctance to challenge the military could backfire. He has been resting on laurels gained from the Dayton Accords for two years now, but those political gains have become extremely vulnerable. NATO's mission in Bosnia remains distressingly vague, and most observers agree that the scheduled withdrawal of NATO forces in June 1998 is likely to be followed by a relapse into war. Ironically, Clinton might be better served in the long run by Sheehan, who is notoriously blunt about what the military can and cannot achieve. Last summer at a conference on conflict prevention at the Aspen Institute, Sheehan listened to the consensus view -- that America can intervene in foreign crises, but only when it will not cost much in blood or treasure -- then announced: "I am sorry; that can't be done. If you want the U.S. military to go abroad, it will spend your money and it will put your sons and daughters in harm's way." That kind of honesty is precisely what Clinton has not received from the Pentagon, and it could serve him well if things heat up in Bosnia next summer.

Sheehan also believes that tough questions about the use of force cannot be divorced from the larger question that animates his critique of the defense establishment: "Where does the military fit in our concept of the policy process for international affairs?" So far, he says, no one has answered. But Sheehan has some ideas of his own, and they include proposals that might help Clinton to reap the "peace dividend" he promised so long ago. He would begin by cutting down unnecessary commands and reining in the services. Then he'd start in on the hardware reducing army divisions, aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and some of the costly new weapons the services have been clamoring for, including the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter. Like a number of defense analysts and some retired four-stars (including William Owens), Sheehan believes that we should ready ourselves for the small-scale, high-tech conflicts that seem most likely for the next decades, instead of pouring more money into marginal advances on our current Cold War force. He prefers not to talk about budgets, but the Center for Defense Information, a D.C. think tank run by retired military officers that endorses many of Sheehan's ideas, claims that the U.S. could field a leaner, equally effective military for around $200 billion a year, instead of the current $266 billion.

But the Pentagon is singing a very different tune. Its latest manifesto, the Quadrennial Defense Review, steered clear of any serious cuts or changes and maintained all of the services' pet weapons platforms (at slightly reduced levels), projecting an annual budget of $250 billion for the next 20 years. Cohen has appointed a Task Force on Defense Reform, and one of its seven members is James Locher, an architect of Goldwater-Nichols and a strong advocate of further reform. But the task force's proposals, due out in November, may not find any champions. Congress is almost empty of old warriors like Bill Nichols, whose stubborn advocacy of defense reform in the '80s might not have gone anywhere if he hadn't lost a leg in World War II. As for Clinton -- well, draft-dodging, adulterous Democrats don't exactly have a lot of clout with the Pentagon.

As such, defense reform may have to wait another four years. Meanwhile, Khobar Towers will soon be forgotten, but the danger it highlighted will linger. "Don't forget," says Sheehan, "the reason we beat most of our adversaries is because they're stupid and hierarchical. Saddam Hussein is not a genius. ... But one of these days we're going to run across someone who -- from an organizational perspective -- makes decisions faster than we do, and we're going to get our heads handed to us"