A recent Defense News opinion piece suggests that the only way to achieve joint force design is to move force acquisition out of the hands of the military services and instead, “structuring the budget around the joint force design rather than just service-specific priorities.”
This is not a new concept and has been around since the 1960s when Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara sought to base force design around a common set of joint missions rather than the armed services. McNamara’s proposal at least accepted the idea that different geographies, adversaries and missions around the world should govern force design.
Taken at face value, that line of thinking would turn force design over to regional, competing combatant commanders (COCOMs), each with different requirements.
Regional commanders were once components in global deterrence and potential conflict with the Soviet Union, but after the Cold War became competing, regional proconsuls for power and military assets. Only centralized authority in the form of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the service chiefs and secretaries have the global view necessary to make force design choices suitable to the entire force and not just one geographic area.
McNamara’s missions-based approach did not survive his secretariat, and the services have continued as the primary force supply and design agents for the past half century.
The authority given the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Defense civilian officials by the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act provided the “joint” oversight and mission focus that McNamara wanted, but without taking the role of acquisition away from the services.
Acquisition has been a joint process for more than 30 years, with tighter controls implemented by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in response to the 2003 Aldridge report.
How would defense acquisition be improved by turning the process of force design over to a geographically limited COCOM, or a joint staff lacking in service-specific experience? The history of the last thirty-five years suggests this is not a good idea. The post-1991 balkanization of U.S. defense strategy and operations turned the regional commanders from components of a global system to one of Roman-like regional, proconsular authorities, overly focused on their own regions at the expense of global U.S. national security concerns. A weapon system that is particularly useful in one theater might be utterly unsuited to others.
The Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) of War on Terror fame, was well-suited to counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East and was rightfully produced in large numbers for the conflict but is otherwise largely unsuitable for potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Any “joint” force design will still need to be tailored by a central authority expert in those capabilities needed in multiple theaters.
Only the services can really do that.
While “Jointness” has been successful in the post-1990 operational employment of forces, the administrative and especially the acquisition elements of joint processes have been much less productive than before the Goldwater Nichols legislation.
The much-maligned pre-1986 acquisition system produced some of the most effective weapons ever fielded by the United States armed forces to include the M1A1 Abrams tank, the Bradley armored fighting vehicle, the F-15 and F-16 jets, the Navy AEGIS warships, Los Angeles-class nuclear submarines and aircraft like the F-14.
Joint force design since 1986 has not been nearly as successful with numerous, troubled, and cancelled programs to include the Army Future Combat system, the Navy CGX cruiser, DDG-1000, and littoral combat ships, the multi-service F-35 cost issues, and the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.
After Goldwater Nichols, dedicated organizations including the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC,) and Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) were designed to provide a joint perspective on acquisition. They have not, however, been able to drive down the costs of individual programs or increase the speed at which these systems can be deployed. How then can operational joint commands with real world missions and responsibilities also take on acquisition responsibilities?
The service-based force design process is without doubt a messy process, but it has produced successful weapon systems that can be adapted across multiple geographic and combat domains.
Joint force design however has been time consuming, costly and led to increasingly long timelines to field systems. The real “joint” decider in military service acquisition are the civilian leaders in Congress and the presidential administration that must take and live with the force design choices they make.
Steven Wills is the navalist at the Center for Maritime Strategy (CMS) at the Navy League of the United States in Washington D.C.
