Air University Review, September-October 1985
ONE of the most important requirements for victory in combat is a competent high command. History is replete with examples of good armies being defeated because of bad leadership at the highest level, from Carthage in the Second Punic War through the British in the American Revolution and the Confederacy in the Civil War to the Germans in World War II.
Do we have highly competent military leadership today from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), our most senior military council? Many observers think we do not. The last really brilliant American military action was the Inchon landing during the Korean War. The JCS opposed it. During the Vietnam War, the JCS consistently failed to provide good advice. In his autobiography, General William C. Westmoreland said that "no commander could ever hope for greater support than I received from ... General Wheeler and the other members of the Joint Chiefs." The support was, of course, for a strategy that failed. The JCS blessed the plan for the Iran raid, a plan so complex that failure was inevitable. The hallmark of JCS action has become, not competent planning, but "pie dividing"––ensuring that each service gets a piece of the action. Grenada was the most recent case. The original plan called for just the Navy and the Marines to participate. But the JCS insisted that the Army and Air Force be brought in also, so they could get their share of the glory.
The root problem is that not only the JCS but virtually all the upper echelons of our military structure have become bureaucracies. In a bureaucratic organization, the overall goals and purposes of the institution––what it is supposed to accomplish in the outside world––are broken down into ever-smaller units until they constitute something one person can do, a job. The job is precisely defined and in most cases narrowly circumscribed. A variety of formal and (usually more powerful) informal sanctions work to keep the individual's effort focused within the "box" that is his job.
In theory, all the boxes are linked in a great chain which ensures that every job supports the institution's external goals and purposes. But, in fact, something different usually happens. The people in the institution must have some set of values in order, if nothing else, to prioritize their time and effort. They cannot focus on the institution's external goals and purposes; if they do, they quickly find themselves overstepping the bounds of their job description and getting slapped down. Faced with this unpleasant prospect, they tend to adopt two basic values. The first is personal career success. The second is a tendency to see as most important those things which take most of their time.
What is the effect of these two values on the way an institution functions? The decision making process comes to be dominated not by questions relating to effectiveness in the external, competitive world but by intra-institutional considerations.
Why is this so? Because intra-institutional issues––the office upstairs, the office downstairs, the competing program, branch, or service, etc.––take most of most people's time. As people come (usually unconsciously) to identify as most important the things that take most of their time, these issues, not the external world, become the bases of their decisions. And since internal matters are also the most important concerns of their superiors, they can best advance their personal careers by putting these matters first and working hardest on them. Ultimately, they become accustomed to subordinating external effectiveness to pleasing their superiors with reference to internal matters. Those who don't do so pay the price in terms of career failure.
Both tendencies––careerism and seeing as most important the matters that take the most time––are accentuated in institutions where there is no lateral entry (i.e., where the people at the top have spent three or four decades behaving this way) and where there is no regular calling to account by an annual balance sheet. Both characteristics typify military services.
The JCS is a microcosm of the overall military bureaucracy, but it is a very intense microcosm. It is specifically designed to be an arena where the services log-roll their parochial interests. The dual-hatting of service chiefs as members of the Joint Chiefs, the requirement for unanimous decisions, a joint staff made of officers who must return to their parent services––all these things not only perpetuate but intensify bureaucratic behavior. That the decisions and recommendations from such a body are frequently of little use in the outside world should not be surprising. The focus on intra-institutional concerns is built into the system.
JCS reform is now being discussed both in Congress and in the press. Two of the most important reasons are the disquiet of some members of Congress with deficiencies in recent military operations and calls for reform from two former JCS members, former Chairman of the JCS, Air Force General David Jones, and former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Edward "Shy" Meyer. Within the last several years, these two officers have made some sharp, public criticisms of the way the JCS functions. General Jones has said:
The corporate advice provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not crisp, timely, very useful, or very influential. And that advice is often watered down and issues are papered over in the interest of achieving unanimity.... Individual service interests too often dominate JCS recommendations and actions at the expense of broader defense interests.
What must be done to give reasonable assurance of a competent high command? The only adequate step is the replacement of the entire Joint Staff system with a Prussian-model general staff.
Some have attempted to portray a general staff as a system that vests all power in one individual. But that is not what the Prussian general staff was all about. That did occur under General Erich von Ludendorff in the 1916-18 period, but it was a result of a vacuum at the top caused by the personal weakness of Kaiser Wilhelm II (it has well been said that Hitler listened to his generals too little; the Kaiser to his too much).
To understand the essence of the Prussian general staff, it is necessary to look at its origin in the Scharnhorst reforms that followed Prussia's disastrous defeat by Napoleon in 1806. Scharnhorst and his fellow military reformers––who were political liberals, not reactionary Junkers––were faced with the task of creating enduring military excellence within the framework of civilian control of the military, in the person of the King of Prussia. They attempted to create, not a new command structure for the Prussian army, but a system to provide the best possible military advice to commanders at all levels. The general staff was an advisory system, not a command system. That is, of course, exactly what we need from any replacement for the Joint Staff system: the best possible advice to the civilians who hold the ultimate military authority, the President and the Secretary of Defense.
The Prussian general staff was what is called a "socialized," rather than a bureaucratic, organization. Its socialization centered on three characteristics. The first was very careful selection and education of staff officers. General staff officers were selected young, usually at the rank of captain, before the bureaucratic mindset had time to develop. The selection process was extremely rigorous, with only about 1 percent of those who attempted to become general staff officers finally making the grade. The general staff was kept very small to ensure quality and prevent bureaucracy: even at the Wehrmacht's peak strength in World War II, there were fewer than 1000 general staff officers. The education process was long and thorough, with emphasis on how to think, not what to think, and on the military art, not management and formats. General staff officers also periodically returned to field units to ensure that they did not forget the realities of the field.
The second major characteristic of the Prussian general staff was that once an officer was accepted by the general staff, he was a general staff officer for life. His promotion was controlled by the general staff, not by the branch from which he came. This situation gave him license to be objective. It contrasts strongly with the JCS system, where the officer must return from Joint Staff duty to his service and branch, which has ample opportunity to destroy his career if he was not perceived as a faithful "water carrier" in his Joint Staff job. Only permanent general staff status can protect the officer who dares to cross the service's parochial interests.
The third major characteristic of the general staff was an internal atmosphere that stressed frankness, imagination, and innovation. Prussian general staff officers were generally men of strong character, and if this meant that a good number of them were also somewhat eccentric, that was no handicap. At one point, General Helmuth von Moltke actually directed recruitment of eccentrics and oddballs on the grounds that they usually came up with the best ideas. The emphasis on frankness was very strong. A general staff officer had not only a right but a duty to be direct with his superiors. He was expected to give them his full and honest opinions and advice, whether they asked for them or not. In a bureaucratic system such as JCS, frankness is frowned on, because it reveals all the comfortable intra-institutional tradeoffs for what they usually are: detriments to national security.
It is these three characteristics that made the Prussian general staff so effective, and they are what those who want a general staff here seek to emulate. Naturally, an American general staff would not be an exact copy of the Prussian. The Prussian/German general staff was exclusively an army staff, and, at least in World War II, did not extend to the highest command level. An American general staff would be all-service and would extend to the highest level. The German general staff was oriented exclusively toward tactics and operations, leaving German strategy and grand strategy disastrously adrift in both world wars. Our general staff would also have responsibilities at the strategic and grand strategic levels.
What are the chances of replacing the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a general staff? The administration has shown no interest in JCS reform, so if anything is to be done, it will have to done by Congress. Last year the House passed a JCS reform bill, but unfortunately it focused on changing the relationships among the Chairman, the other members of the JCS, and the Secretary of Defense, not on improving the quality of decisions and advice from the JCS. However, the Senate Armed Services Committee is currently doing a major study of JCS reform, and it appears as if that study will address the deficiencies within the JCS itself and suggest possible remedies, to include consideration of a general staff system. Despite major behind-the-scenes efforts by the Navy to derail the study, both the committee chairman, Senator Barry Goldwater, and the ranking Democrat, Senator Sam Nunn, appear determined to do a thorough job. If the Senate study presents an accurate picture of a general staff system and its potential advantages, it may at least lift the debate over a general staff out of the mythology of "Prussian militarism" in which it was imbedded by Allied propaganda during the world wars.
On the tactical and operational levels where it operated, the Prussian general staff did a remarkable job of producing military excellence for almost 150 years. If we are to break the pattern of failure that has characterized our military actions for the last thirty years, we need to do what the Prussians did: institutionalize military excellence. That can only be done by adopting a structure for our high command that reflects the basic characteristics of the Prussian general staff. It is time to give a general staff system the serious and objective consideration it merits.
Alexandria, Virginia
Note
1. See William S. Lind, "Report to the Congressional Military Reform Caucus: The Grenada Operation," 5 April 1984.
William S. Lind (A.B., Dartmouth College; M.A., Princeton University) is an advisor to Senator Gary Hart, the president of the Military Reform Institute, and Resident Scholar at the Institute for Government and Politics of the Free Congress Foundation. He previously served as legislative assistant to Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio. Lind has been a frequent contributor to the Marine Corps Gazette, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and the Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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