Why is congress launching yet another roles-and-missions probe?

Helpless to accomplish any meaningful change in the direction of the war, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee have decided that it's now a good time to review and reappraise the roles and missions of the military services.

Congress may have the power of the purse. But it has been largely powerless in just about every attempt to influence the course of the war in Iraq and to substantially reshape military spending priorities.

The frustration is palpable, especially among the Democratic members of the defense committees that oversee the Pentagon. These lawmakers are generally pro-military, but have turned increasingly angrier at what they believe is a hopeless mission in Iraq.

While Congress is engaged in contentious battles with the Bush administration over the Defense Department's 2008 budget and Gen. David Petraeus' report, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., and ranking member Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., will be joined by other lawmakers in taking yet another stab at investigating what the military services should be doing, and whether they are properly organized to do their jobs.

It is hard to see how a roles-and-missions investigation makes any sense in the context of current events. But it does fit squarely into a

predictable pattern of partisan bickering that everyone knows will not result in any consequential policy change.

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"Congressional Democrats' constant interrogations of Bush administration officials represent just the latest round in an ongoing inter-party struggle to control the machinery of war," University of Chicago professors William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

Skelton, himself, acknowledged that the roles and missions of the military services, while not totally unchangeable, are deeply rooted. "The basic structure of the Defense Department and the division of labor between the military services has not dramatically changed since the late 1940s," he said in a statement as he announced the creation of the panel in late July. Skelton also hinted at the pent-up exasperation caused by lawmakers' inability to exert clout. "Ensuring that the military services are working on the appropriate roles and missions is key to our national security and Congress has an important role to play in this effort."

At this early stage, the specific goals of the roles-and-missions panel seem imprecise. It could attempt to consolidate ostensibly redundant capabilities that are found in more than one service--the obvious ones being unmanned aircraft and tactical aviation. It also can be expected to lecture the Pentagon about the military services in Iraq taking on post-invasion peacekeeping and reconstruction duties that do not clearly belong in the military.

Here's one issue--the division of labor between the Pentagon and State Department--that Congress should probe, because there is a great deal of confusion on what exactly the military's role is in civilian functions such as rebuilding infrastructure or training police forces, said James Dobbins, international security expert at Rand Corp. "The committee structure makes it difficult for Congress to intelligently address these issues such as the dividing lines between civilian and military functions," he added.

When the members of the roles-and-missions panel get under away on their deliberations, they would be wise to revisit the musings of one of its forerunners from more than a decade ago--the "Commission on the Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces," which delivered its final report on May 24, 1995.

The current panel members may find it disconcerting that so much of what was wrong with the military back then has not yet been fixed 12 years later.

The commission then criticized the Defense Department for not having a "unified command for joint training" and for not allowing regional commanders to exert sufficient influence in weapons buying decisions, logistics and intelligence. It also cited inadequate support of Reserve components in how they are equipped and trained. The commission also asked the White House to create an "inter-agency effort" to deal with "peace operations that may deter, stop, or reduce conflict between other nations before they threaten U.S. interests; and a concerted effort to develop information warfare capabilities."

In many areas, evidently, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

But some of the nuisances which lawmakers have confronted in recent months--Pentagon contracting abuses, corruption, troubled acquisition programs and shortages of government procurement managers--can be traced to the 1995 roles-and-mission report.

"The commission calls for eliminating legal and artificial restrictions on outsourcing, and urges the Defense Department to rely on the competitive private sector for support wherever market conditions permit," said the report. "Specifically, the commission recommends that the Defense Department consider using the private sector for depot maintenance, national level materiel supply management, and selected auditing functions."

These should serve as eerie reminders for the members of the 2007 panel that one always must be careful what to wish for.

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