Lecture
Seminar
As set forth in the National Security Act of 1947, and by virtue of the Department's high stakes in the resulting policies, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman are major participants in the national security process. Their respective staffs at OSD and JCS are designed to interact effectively with those of the NSC and the State Department. As bureaucratic players, they are practically self-sufficient with independent organizational sources of diplomatic, intelligence, and economic expertise.
The military departments are also integral, since they supply the personnel and procure the hardware. The Framers of the Constitution envisioned a military structure in which the armed forces would be subordinate to civilian authority and would be dependent on an annual funding cycle. These factors, particularly the latter, have resulted in the perpetual involvement of military personnel in the process of national security. This, in turn, has resulted in the politicization of military officers as they become integral to the process and actually advocate policies.
The U.S. military has undergone a series of reforms, some self-generated and others imposed by external regulations or statutes. The most recent significant change was the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. This statute imposed jointness on the military services and greatly strengthened the position of the Chairman in the decision process. Issues raised by such changes pertain to whether the Chairman and the Joint Staff have become too powerful, whether jointness has gone too far, and the quality of civilian-military relations. In some respects, the U.S. military has become an interest group, advocating what it perceives to be its role and requirements.
Topic Objectives
- To understand the role of the Department of Defense and the U.S. military in the national security process.
- To assess the impact of the Chairman and the Joint Staff on policy choices of the President and the Secretary of Defense.
- To assess whether civilian control of the U.S. military is eroding and if the military as an institution is becoming more isolated from U.S. society.
Questions for Consideration
- Is there potential for DoD participants to dominate the process due to their power base, their independent sources of information and expertise, and their bureaucratic effectiveness?
- Many observers have noted that the most successful Secretaries of Defense have had few but very clear priorities. What would be a short list of priorities for a Secretary?
- Should the Secretary or other senior DoD civilians have prior military service?
- Have the Chairman and the Joint Staff become too powerful? Has jointness been taken to extremes?
- What does civilian control mean? What are the legal and cultural bases for it? Is it eroding? If so, whose fault is that? What remedies, if any, are called for? Who is the military ultimately responsible to: the Constitution, the President, Congress, or the people?
- Is the all-volunteer force too separated and insulated from civilian society? Is the civilian community trying to social engineer military culture in damaging ways?
Required Readings
* Charles A. Stevenson, The Secretary of Defense and the Policy Process (September 1998), APSA paper. (Reprint)
* James R. Locher, "Taking Stock of Goldwater-Nichols" in Joint Force Quarterly (Washington, DC: NDU Press, Autumn 1996), pp. 10-16. (Reprint)
* A. J. Bacevich, "Tradition Abandoned," The National Interest (Summer 1997), pp. 16-25. (Reprint)
* Eliot A. Cohen, "The Civil-Military Balance," in The Demilitarization of the Military (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, March 1997), pp. 31- 38. (Reprint)
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