National Affairs: TOWARD A U.S. GENERAL STAFF?

• Share

New Weapons & Technology Prompt a New Look

THE launching of the Russian Sputniks riddled many a cherished U.S. concept, including what was left of a tidy but fallacious military notion: that the Army commands the ground, the Navy rules the waves, and the Air Force controls the air. The post-Sputnik clamor for "leadership" can have few positive results unless the U.S. moves toward some system of military organization that makes effective leadership possible. The pressures of missile technology and loose handling of missile problems by the Pentagon have given new currency to an old idea, most recently and vigorously expressed by the Air Force's retired Lieut. General James H. Doolittle and the Army's research and development chief, Lieut. General James Gavin (TIME, Dec. 23). Both point to the weakness of the present organization of the Defense Department, which in effect sets U.S. military policy by compromise, and ends up letting each separate service go pretty much its own way. Doolittle and Gavin suggest that an integrated staff of military careermen standing above service rivalries could develop an overall U.S. war plan and parcel out service responsibilities within the framework of that plan. Jimmy Doolittle used the classical description of such an organization: "general staff."

Reconciling the Irreconcilable

The U.S. came out of World War II with its tradition of separate services intact, but the war's major lesson was the need for some measure of armed forces unification. The Army generally supported the unification idea—especially the Army Air Force, because in working out unification, the Army Air Force was to become the separate U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Navy, fearing that it would be swallowed up by amalgamation, launched a campaign of massive resistance.

The National Security Act of 1947 was aimed at reconciling irreconcilable views, and the result was admittedly a compromise. The act tried for unification, yet it required that the services—three instead of the wartime two—be "administered as individual executive departments." The Department of Defense was created, with a Defense Secretary given broad, general powers—but since prohibited by law from tampering with the functions of the separate Army, Navy and Air Force. Each service got its own Secretary, and each Secretary had the right of appeal over the head of the Secretary of Defense to the President of the U.S. and the Budget Director. The National Security Act, amended in 1949, expressly forbids "a single Chief of Staff over the armed forces [or] an armed forces general staff." Instead, it requires that the individual service chiefs of staff double in brass as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which functions under a nonvoting chairman as a sort of advisory committee seeking unified military policy.