ORGANIZING FOR NATIONAL SECURITY

Edited by

Douglas T. Stuart

November 2000

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ISBN 1-58487-039-7

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CONTENTS

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

1. Introduction Douglas T. Stuart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. Present at the Legislation: The 1947 National Security Act Douglas T. Stuart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3. Ike and the Birth of the CINCs: The Continuity of Unity of Command David Jablonsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

4. The DoD Reorganization Act of 1986: Improving The Department through Centralization and Integration Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

5. Institutionalizing Defense Reform: The Politics of Transformation in the Root, McNamara, and Cohen Eras Joseph R. Cerami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

6. Time for a Revolution: The Transition from National Defense to International Security Grant T. Hammond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

7. National Security and the Interagency Process: Forward into the 21st Century Gabriel Marcella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

8. Improving National Security Decisionmaking Constantine Menges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

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9. Servants, Supplicants, or Saboteurs: The Role of the Uniformed Officer and The Changing Nature of America’s Civil- Military Relations

John Hillen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

10. DoD in the 21st Century Lawrence J. Korb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

11. The National Security Act of 2002 William A. Navas Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

12. Presidential Leadership and National Security Policy Making Robert D. Steele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

13. Conclusion Douglas T. Stuart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

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FOREWORD

The pace and scope of change over the last decade haveindeed been extraordinary. The United States has beenconfronted with not just the collapse of the Soviet empirebut also with revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, thetransformation of the global economy, and the erosion ofmany of the basic premises of the Westphalian system ofinternational order. The U.S. policy community hasattempted to make sense of these and other changes byrecourse to bodies such as the National Defense Panel andthe U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century(USNCS/21). The USNCS/21 is currently in the third phaseof its mandated activities. At the end of phase three, themembers of the Commission will recommend changes in theinstitutions of the U.S. national security policymakingsystem. Its conclusions are likely to stimulate a lively, andmuch needed, debate.

The U.S. Army War College chose the theme of“Organizing for National Security” for its Tenth AnnualStrategy Conference in order to contribute to the upcomingdebate about institutional reform. This volume provides asummary of the proceedings of that conference. It includeshistorical, analytical, and prescriptive articles relating tothe national security bureaucracy. Virtually all of theauthors accept that some degree of reform is necessary for asystem which can trace its roots back to the 1947 NationalSecurity Act. Not surprisingly, they differ in their opinionsabout which parts of the system are most in need of repair,and in their specific recommendations. Severalcontributors applaud the trend toward jointness in thearmed services and recommend that this serve as a modelfor future reforms of the institutions responsible fornational security policymaking.

In order for institutional reform to succeed, it will haveto be guided by a coherent and compelling national strategywhich must, in turn, be anchored in widely-accepted

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national interests. It will also have to be in accord with suchconstitutional principles as civilian control of the armedforces and the inviolability of the civil liberties of allAmericans. This is a tall order for U.S. policymakers.Hopefully, the chapters in this volume will offer some usefulinsights and some encouragement.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.DirectorStrategic Studies Institute

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Douglas T. Stuart

The weekend of July 25-27, 1947, was an especiallyhectic and stressful period for the Washington policycommunity. Congress was rushing to wrap up itsend-of-term business before adjourning for the summer.The budget was the most contentious issue, since theRepublican majority was still looking for ways to make goodon its promise to cut 15 percent from the $37.5 billion thatPresident Harry S. Truman had requested in January.These deliberations were complicated by the fact that thePresident had also asked Congress for supplementalfunding for aid to Greece and Turkey. Legislation also hadto be passed in order to terminate 175 war powers which thePresident still had at his disposal from World War II.

One important piece of legislation was easily dispensedwith during this weekend. The so-called “unification bill,”which had already been passed by the Senate, was approved in the House by a voice vote on the afternoon of July 25. Fewcommentators referred to the legislation by its officialname—The National Security Act (NSA). The ease withwhich the legislation was passed belied the long process ofcongressional hearings and the intense struggles whichpreceded the final vote. The finished product was apatchwork of compromises which raised many morequestions than they resolved. Commentators wondered, forexample, how a new “super” Secretary of Defense, with thehelp of three assistants, would be able to exercise controlover the military services which were theoretically underhis authority. Some commentators asked how “jointness”could be achieved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), withouta strong Chairman to control their deliberations. The future

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of the National Security Council (NSC) was very uncertain,since President Truman viewed it as a “second”—andunnecessary—cabinet. Nor was it clear whether the newCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) would be asked to domore than simply assist the NSC in the coordination andevaluation of intelligence information provided by theseparate branches of government.

Many of these questions were answered by the late1950s. The Office of the Secretary of Defense had beenexpanded and given greater authority as the Department ofDefense. The Joint Chiefs had acquired a Chairman,although his powers were still circumscribed. The CIA hadevolved from being a support agency for the NSC into anindependent and influential component of the nationalsecurity system. Finally, the NSC had become establishedat the “top of policy hill.”1

The national security bureaucracy which exists todaydiffers in important respects from the system which was inplace by the late 1950s. However, what is most strikingabout the existing system is not how much has changed, buthow little. The Clinton administration came into officecommitted to fundamental reform of the national securitybureaucracy, and some interesting changes have takenplace since that time. But these changes are betterunderstood as exercises in gardening rather thanarchitecture.

Over the last decade many experts and political leadershave asserted that there is a self-evident need for structuralreform in the national security bureaucracy, in light of thedramatic changes which have taken place since the collapseof the Soviet empire. During the spring of 1999, the U.S.Army War College selected this issue as the central focus ofits Tenth Annual Strategy Conference. Entitled Organizingfor National Security in the New Century, the conferenceprovided an opportunity for policy analysts, governmentrepresentatives, and academic experts to discuss thestrengths and weaknesses of the existing arrangements for

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national security policy making and to propose somereforms. The organizers were careful to anchor thesediscussions in presentations on the institutional history ofthe national security bureaucracy.

The articles in this volume are based on the proceedingsof the Tenth Annual Strategy Conference. This publicationwould not have been possible without the expert assistanceand guidance of several people, including Colonel JosephCerami, Ms. Marianne Cowling, Ms. Victoria Kuhn,Professor Douglas Lovelace, Jr., Ms. Rita Rummel, and Dr.Earl Tilford. Special thanks must be reserved for Dr. StevenMetz, who played an indispensable role in the design of theconference and in the conceptualization of this book.

This volume will be published shortly before the electionof a new U.S. president. The next president will enter theWhite House at a time when the United States is enjoyingunprecedented power and influence throughout the world,and at a time when no nation in the world poses a directmilitary threat to America’s survival. The newadministration would be well advised to take advantage ofthis fortuitous situation to address fundamental problemsin our national security bureaucracy. Hopefully, this bookwill provide some valuable guidance about what works andwhat does not work in the existing system.

ENDNOTES – CHAPTER 1

1. Anna Kasten Nelson, “The ‘Top of Policy Hill’: PresidentEisenhower and the National Security Council,” Diplomatic History,No. 7, Fall 1983, pp. 307-26.

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CHAPTER 2

PRESENT AT THE LEGISLATION:THE 1947 NATIONAL SECURITY ACT

Douglas T. Stuart

At a time when the two most commonly asked questionsabout U.S. foreign policy are “Where are we going?” and“Why are we doing this?,” it is only natural that people aretempted to look back nostalgically to those periods inAmerican history when foreign policymaking shared manycharacteristics with the field of architecture. I have beengiven the enviable task of looking back to one such period,when individuals like Harry Truman, George Marshall, and James Forrestal wrestled with each other over big issues ofprinciple and policy. This article will focus on one of the most intense debates of this period, which culminated in thepassage of the 1947 National Security Act (NSA). The NSAis certainly one of the most important pieces of legislation ofthe 20th century. It established the post-war NationalMilitary Establishment, composed of the Departments ofthe Army, Navy, and (a newly created) Air Force, all underthe authority of a Secretary of Defense with cabinet rank.The legislation also provided a legal identity for the JointChiefs of Staff and created the Central Intelligence Agency,the National Security Council, the National SecurityResources Board, the Munitions Board, and the Researchand Development Board.

The fact that the NSA has not received the kind ofscholarly attention that it deserves is partly attributable tothe inclination of most commentators to treat it as a footnote in the history of the formative period of the Cold War. Whenit is placed in this context, the story of the NSA tends to beovershadowed by the dramatic events of that period. Thisarticle begins from the premise that this is a misreading of

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the history of the NSA. In fact, the 1947 Act cannot beunderstood unless one goes back to debates and decisionswhich took place during the late 1930s and early 1940s. It isof more than historical significance that these debates anddecisions were both logically and chronologically prior topost-war discussions about the nature and implications ofthe Soviet threat. Because once it is made clear that thenational security state has roots which run much deeperthan the early Cold War era, we have a basis forunderstanding why there has been so little structuralchange in the national security system since the collapse ofthe Soviet Union.

One useful date for beginning this story is July 1937,when, in the wake of the Japanese invasion of China,President Franklin D. Roosevelt seems to have made thedecision to move the nation away from a posture of “wellordered neutrality” and toward military preparedness.Over the next 4 years, the President managed a cautiouscampaign of half-steps, which were designed to give theUnited States a running start in the event that war wasunavoidable.

Aside from the specific concerns that Roosevelt hadabout what the Japanese and Germans were saying anddoing in Asia and Europe, respectively, the President waspreoccupied with two broader and deeper trends in worldaffairs. First, as a student of geopolitics, he was increasingly concerned about the rapidly improving technologies of airpower, which seemed to be on the verge of ending foreverAmerica’s historic situation of relative invulnerability. Billy Mitchell had been making this argument forcefully andeffectively since the early 1930s:

What will the future hold for us? Undoubtedly an attack on thegreat centers of population. If a European country attacks theUnited States, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, andWashington, D.C. will be the first targets.1

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The President demonstrated his sensitivity to sucharguments in an address to Congress on May 16, 1940, inwhich he noted that although the Atlantic and PacificOceans had served as “reasonably adequate defensivebarriers” in the past, they could no longer be relied upon toprotect the nation. Military preparedness, which could onlybe achieved by increased defense spending, had to take theplace of geographic isolation as the basis for Americannational security.

FDR’s second fundamental concern in the late 1930s had to do with the global spread of totalitarian governments.Since coming to office in the midst of the depression,Roosevelt had watched as dictatorial regimes spread acrossthe globe. Many American commentators celebrated thedynamism and efficiencies of these authoritarian systems,while describing the U.S. system pejoratively as a “matureeconomy.” Roosevelt and his colleagues were also acutelyaware of the natural advantages that dictatorships enjoyedin foreign affairs, and in their ability to shift their nation’seconomies into a warfighting mode at very short notice. Asearly as January 1933, Roosevelt was advised by WalterLippmann that “The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial power.”2

The President was too much of an optimist, too confidentof his own skills as a leader, and too convinced of theinherent strengths of American democracy to entertain thenotion that dictatorship was the wave of the future in theUnited States. He was also encouraged by the fact thatAmerica had at its disposal a community of experts whorepresented a relatively new field of study called publicadministration, which promised to employ theories ofmanagement science to create efficiencies in both theprivate and public sectors which would make the UnitedStates competitive with the dictatorships of the worldwithout doing violence to our constitutional system.

As the war approached, one particular book seemed tocapture both the challenges of the modern world and the

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potential for management science to make the UnitedStates competitive and secure. The book was The Impact ofWar, published in 1941 by E. Pendleton Herring, a Professor in Harvard’s Government department who was alsoassociated with Harvard’s new Graduate School of PublicAdministration. It was one of the first books to use the term“national security,” and it was certainly the mostauthoritative pre-war attempt to describe what a nationalsecurity bureaucracy should look like. Herring argued thatour history had not prepared us for the challenges of themodern world because it had encouraged Americans to holda “persistent suspicion of militarism.” He called for a newapproach to foreign policymaking, which would include apermanent and influential place for military advisers at thetop levels of government in times of both war and peace. Healso recommended that the United States take advantage of new technologies of communication and transportation toenhance “centralization, standardization andregimentation” in ways that would transform ourgovernment from a “negative state” to a “positive state.”Herring was confident that a more cooperative relationshipcould also be established between the White House andCongress, because “the pressure of circumstances closes theseparation of powers.” He claimed that radical reform of theforeign policymaking system was necessary because of thethreats that the United States was facing in 1941. But healso stressed that the changes that he was proposing wouldbe necessary for our country in a period of peace as well,because they would undergird a dynamic and influentialforeign policy. “The Roman Phalanx,” Herring reminded hisreaders, “was a necessary preliminary to the Pax Romana.”3

Professor Herring’s book was well received by the policycommunity. Reviewing the book for The Herald Tribune,Louis Hacker noted that:

If Pendleton Herring’s book is a sign of the times, we are at lastin the process of confronting our national problems realistically. It should be said at once that it is one of the most significantanalyses produced by the current emergency.4

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Two months after Hacker reviewed the Impact of War,Professor Herring’s thesis was overwhelmingly accepted bythe American people—as a result of the attack on PearlHarbor. The importance of Pearl Harbor is hard toexaggerate in any study of American national security.After December 7, 1941, the American people favored a newapproach to foreign policymaking which gave a privilegedstatus to the military while also creating new procedures for civilian-military collaboration.

The experiences of World War II tended to confirm boththe lessons of Pearl Harbor and the wisdom of Herring’sthesis. During the war there was some interestingdiscussion about what a post-war foreign policy systemshould look like, but the more important contribution of thewar was the precedents that were set by the establishmentof such entities as the Joint Chiefs, the Office of StrategicServices (OSS) and the State-War-Navy-CoordinatingCommittee (SWNCC). As a consultant to the WarDepartment, the Navy Department and the Bureau of theBudget, Herring was one of a handful of experts who studied closely the functioning of these and other federal agenciesduring the war. He also chaired the Committee of Records ofWar Administration which published in 1946 the officialadministrative history of the war effort.5

One of the principal architects of the wartimedecisionmaking apparatus was also one of the people withthe strongest opinions about the need for specific post-warreforms. George Marshall’s experience as Army Chief ofStaff during World War II confirmed his pre-war views onthe need for a complete unification of the armed services.When he attempted to raise this issue with Roosevelt andothers during the war, he was routinely rebuffed on thegrounds that a substantive discussion of this option whilethe country was at war might undermine the war effort.Marshall was not alone in arguing for the unification of thearmed forces, however. One influential ally was SenatorHarry Truman, who published an article in the August 26,1944, issue of Collier’s magazine entitled “Our Armed

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Forces Must Be Unified.” Truman concluded the article with the statement that:

The road, as I see it, stretches straight and with no turns . . . Theend, of course, must be the integration of every element ofAmerica’s defense in one department under one authoritative,responsible head. Call it the War Department or theDepartment of National Security or what you will, just so it isone department . . . One team with all the reins in one hand . . .Under such a set-up another Pearl Harbor will not have to befeared.6

Truman attributed his convictions about the need forunification to his own experiences in the military duringWorld War I, to the lessons he had learned as a member ofthe Senate Appropriations and Military AffairsCommittees, to his chairmanship of the Special Committeeto Investigate the National Defense Program and, above all,to the “Record of the Pearl Harbor Hearings.”7

During the war, FDR’s opposition made it hard forMarshall to cooperate publicly with allies like Truman, sothe General had to content himself with efforts to put theneed for unification on record within the military. He did soby highlighting the findings of the Joint Strategic SurveyCommittee (JSSC) Report (March 1944) and the Richardson Committee Report (April 1945). Both studies came out infavor of the principle of unification. Marshall had greatdifficulty in building upon such general statements,however. In a memo dated April 17, 1944, to Fleet AdmiralErnest King, Marshall pressed the argument that since theJSSC study had recommended that the Joint Chiefs“approve for purposes of study the principle of three services within one military organization . . .” the leadership of theWar and Navy Departments should begin discussionsaimed at developing plans for a “sound organization at thetop . . .” to administer the new system. He also warned thatCongress was beginning to look into the issue of unification,and that “If we cannot solve the question, it is going to besolved for us and probably in a manner that neither the War

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nor the Navy Departments would desire.”8 Marshall’spressure tactics backfired, however, because they put theNavy leadership on the defensive and convinced them toclose ranks with their allies in Congress to resistunification.

It is worth noting that prior to World War II, the servicesspoke with one voice in their opposition to unification. Thiswas due not only to the fact that both services wanted topreserve their independence but also to the fact thatCongress was primarily interested in unification as apretext for making deep cuts in the defense budget. Astatement in 1932 by Army Chief of Staff DouglasMacArthur in opposition to one such legislative proposal istypical of the common position taken by the Army and Navyduring this period;

. . . I give it as my fixed opinion that such an amalgamation asproposed would endanger victory for the United States in caseof war. . . . Pass this bill and every potential enemy of theUnited States will rejoice.9

By the second year of the war, however, most Armyspokesmen agreed with Secretary of War Henry Stimsonthat in an age of “triphibious warfare” the services could nolonger afford to think or act in isolation from each other. The Army’s new position was summarized in a report to GeneralMarshall by Brigadier General William F. Tompkins,Director of the Special Planning Division of the WarDepartment in October 1943:

. . . This war is, and future wars undoubtedly will be, largely aseries of combined operations in each of which ground, air, and sea forces must be employed together and coordinated underone directing head . . . .10

Marshall and some of his colleagues in the War Departmentwere also very sensitive to the risk that, if unification wasnot accomplished, it would be the Army which would takethe most serious hits from budget cutters when the warended.

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While the experience of Pearl Harbor and the first stages of the war convinced the Army leadership that unity ofcommand had to be established at the top, the Navy, with its tradition of self-reliant solutions to challenges from not justthe sea, but the land and air as well, claimed that it hadalready solved the problem of unity of command—within itsown service. This argument is best illustrated by thecomments of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, ArtemusGates, during the 1944 Unification Hearings by the HouseSelect Committee on Post-War Military Policy (WoodrumCommittee). Gates argued that if “consolidation” wasnecessary, the government should consider “merging thewhole military establishment into the existing Navy” sinceit already had an integrated force with sea, land, and aircomponents.11

The mix of principled and particularist interests whichmade the debate over unification so difficult and intensealso complicated post-war discussions about the reform,preservation, or elimination of other entities which hadbeen established during the war. For example, most peoplebelieved that some type of intelligence service was going tobe necessary after the war. But all of the major institutionalplayers also understood that control of information would be an enormous source of post-war power and influence, andevery agency wanted a piece of the action. The Trumanadministration at first attempted to resolve the inevitableturf war by coordination schemes—most notably thecreation of the National Intelligence Authority (NIA) andthe Central Intelligence Group (CIG).12 In his memoirs,Dean Acheson speaks with disdain of all such formulas forcoordination, noting that “A good many of us had cut ourteeth and throats on this sort of nonsense.”13 In thisinstance, at least, Acheson’s suspicions concerninginter-agency coordination proved well founded, andTruman had to accept that some form of independent entitywould have to be created to centralize intelligence.Unfortunately, William Donovan and his colleagues in theOSS had made so many enemies in Washington during the

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war that the creation of a successor organization wasextremely controversial.

The Washington policy community also recognized thatafter the war the government would need a new system forconsultation between the civilian and military departmentsinvolved in foreign and security affairs. Here the model wasthe aforementioned SWNCC, even though the wartimerecord of this organization was quite limited.1 4

Policymakers also studied British institutions andprocedures for civilian-military consultation in times of warand peace. The British Committee on Imperial Defence wasof special interest as a model for civil-military cooperation.It was left to Truman and his advisors, however, to decidehow much power such an entity should be given, and who, or what agency, should lead it.

The Truman administration also needed to develop theinstitutional machinery to harness the power of science andtechnology in the post-war era. The Office of ScientificResearch and Development(OSRD), under the dynamicleadership of Vannevar Bush, had evolved during WorldWar II into a very influential institution, with its ownbudget, direct access to the President and key congressmen,and with close positive ties to the leadership of the War andNavy Departments. Encouraged by the success of the OSRD during the war, Senator Harley Kilgore and others pressedfor the creation of a strong post-war agency to direct allaspects of scientific research and development. They werechallenged, however, by spokesmen for various interestgroups—scientists, businessmen, military leaders—whowere concerned about preserving their autonomy and theiraccess to scientific innovations.15

Finally, Truman and his advisers had to decide howmuch control the government should attempt to acquireover the post-war economy. In this regard, the lessons ofWorld War II were a matter of dispute. Depending upon how generous one wanted to be, Roosevelt’s management of thewartime economy could be described as multidirectional or

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directionless. One insider, who clearly leaned toward thelatter interpretation, described the President’s efforts as“bitched, botched, and buggered from start to finish.”16 Butmost people looked at America’s wartime experience andconcurred with the judgment of the Bureau of the Budget’spost-war report on The United States At War: “The record isone in which the American people can take pride.” MostAmericans also agreed with the principal conclusion of theBureau’s study:

The speed with which the democracies did accept the challengeand the manner in which they overwhelmed those who soughtgain through war suggests that there is no need to reexaminethe claims to administrative superiority of authoritariangovernments.17

America had won the war by “resisting even the semblanceof autocratic rule,” by working with big business and byencouraging the natural competitive advantages of ademocratic capitalist system. Based on these lessons, mostAmericans were reticent to give Washington too muchcontrol over the post-war economy.

All of these issues began to converge on PresidentTruman in the summer of 1945, as both Congress and themedia became more involved in the debates over thecreation of post-war institutions. By this time, manyindividuals in the Navy leadership had concluded that theyhad already lost the battle over armed forces unification,and that the services would be combined in accordance withMarshall’s and Truman’s wishes. A key problem for theNavy in the management of its campaign againstunification was that it did not seem to stand for anythingother than resistance to innovation. This problem wassolved, however, when Navy Secretary Forrestal asked hisold friend Ferdinand Eberstadt to undertake a study of thewhole unification issue. Eberstadt had served as Director ofthe Army Navy Munitions Board during the war. Theexperience had left him with a deep disdain for both FDR(“an apostle of confusion”) and Truman.18 On the other

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hand, Eberstadt had gained an appreciation of the militaryservices, and of their ability to cooperate to accomplishcommon goals. Eberstadt made it clear to his staff at theoutset that it was important that they retain theirindependence and not be perceived as merely a propagandaarm of the Navy Department. In fact, however, theEberstadt report was a Navy product, commissioned by theNavy and staffed almost entirely by Naval officers, andEberstadt himself was, as Forrestal had assured AdmiralKing, “a member of the Navy team.”19

To put the matter simply, Eberstadt felt that the recordof interservice coordination during the war wascommendable, and that the wartime experience did notdemonstrate the need for full unification. He also worriedabout the establishment of any “General Staff”arrangement, or the creation of a powerful Chief of Staff inpeacetime, as potential threats to the tradition of civiliancontrol of the military.

But Eberstadt was not brought in to be just anotheropponent of unification. The final report that Eberstadtpresented to Forrestal in September of 1945 argued that the issue of armed forces unification was just a small part of anecessarily larger debate about post-war policycoordination. New arrangements needed to be put in placein order to facilitate civilian-military cooperation on issuesof foreign policy, defense, science, and economic planning.New machinery to coordinate intelligence gathering andanalysis was required. Above all, a new attitude had to benurtured in Washington—informed by the logic of nationalsecurity. If much of Eberstadt’s report sounded likeHerring’s arguments in 1941, part of the reason was thatHerring served as one of Eberstadt’s primary assistants inthe drafting of the report.20

The Navy did not like every conclusion in the Eberstadtreport. In particular, they bristled at the study’s support forthe establishment of a separate Air Force. Eberstadt’sreport nonetheless gave the Navy the ammunition that it

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needed to recruit both public and congressional support fora system of coordinated agencies for foreign and defensepolicymaking as an alternative to the unification of thearmed services. When the National Security Act was finallysigned into law nearly 2 years later (on July 26, 1947), itbore a striking resemblance to the recommendations whichwere put forth by Eberstadt and his team. Rather than asingle, unified military force, the legislation established aNational Military Establishment (NME), with threeindependent services. The Navy failed to block the creationof a separate Air Force, but obtained statutory protectionsfor land-based Naval Air and for the Marine Corps. TheJoint Chiefs of Staff was transformed from a temporarywartime arrangement to a permanent component of theNME, but the Chiefs were expected to work through (andunder) the newly created Office of the Secretary of Defense.The Joint Chiefs were given their own staff, of not more than 100 people, but the bill did not allow for the creation of a JCS chairman, who might have been able to bolster thenegotiating position of the Chiefs in their dealings with theSecretary of Defense over issues that had the support of allthree services.

The new Secretary of Defense, meanwhile, was nothinglike the “super” cabinet member that some journalistsdescribed at the time. In fact, Eberstadt testified on the lastday of the Senate hearings on the National Security Act that the powers delegated to the Secretary of Defense were“disturbingly general and indefinite.” He noted that theproposed legislation authorized the Secretary to“administer” the entire NME, but did not give him therequisite authority to accomplish this task. He also worriedthat the proposed bill lacked a “definite mechanism forfostering unity and teamwork among the military servicesthrough appropriate programs of joint education andtraining at various stages.”21

The NME looked nothing like the ambitious plans forarmed forces unification espoused by Truman, Marshalland most of the Army leadership. Kenneth Royall, the

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incoming Secretary of the Army, complained that the newarrangement ." . .will not save money, will not be efficient,and will not prevent interservice rivalry.”22 Supporters ofthe Navy, who could afford to be magnanimous in victory,offered reassuring statements about the proven ability ofthe services to work together in defense of the nationalinterest. But the Navy also moved quickly to prepare for thepossibility that the National Security Act was just onebattle in a long war over unification. Shortly after thepassage of the legislation, the office of the Chief of NavalOperations created OP 23, a study group whose mandatewas to keep the Navy leadership informed of alldevelopments relating to the issue of unification, andprepare for a new round of attacks by the Army. Accordingto Admiral Arleigh Burke, who took over direction of OP 23in 1948, “It was a jolt to senior naval officials” when theArmy began to make a new case for unification shortly afterthe passage of the National Security Act.23 It was left to thefirst Secretary of Defense to referee the continuing disputebetween the Navy and the Army, and to help the twotraditional services to make room for a very ambitious andassertive Air Force.

The NME was not the only portion of the new nationalsecurity bureaucracy to be subjected to severe challengesduring the period immediately following the passage of thelegislation. Other institutions created by the 1947 Act werealso tested, and some did not survive the shake-out. TheNational Security Resources Board was the most significant failure. The framers of the 1947 Act established the NSRBto insure rapid, comprehensive, and efficient mobilization of the nation’s resources in the event of a new threat tonational security. Eberstadt believed that, in accordancewith his recommendations,

The Statute [NSA] created no more important agency than the National Security Resources Board. It has been placed on thesame level as the National Security Council and the MilitaryEstablishment—directly under and responsible to thePresident himself.

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He described the NSRB as “a kind of economic and socialgeneral staff” which should wield during peacetimewhatever powers were necessary to adequately prepare fora national emergency.24 As previously mentioned, however,Americans came out of the war with a new confidence inunfettered capitalism and a new suspicion of governmentefforts to regulate the economy. And no one was moresuspicious of “general staffs” with open-ended mandatesthan Truman. Over the next few years, the Presidentresisted the efforts by Arthur Hill, the abrasive Chairman of the NSRB, to exploit the growing national concern about the Soviet threat to expand the influence of his agency. Duringthe Korean War, the President used the situation of limitednational emergency to shift many of the responsibilities ofthe NSRB to a new Office of Defense Mobilization. TheNSRB was finally abolished by the Reorganization Act of1953, and much of the responsibility for mobilizationplanning devolved to the separate military services.

Truman was able to draw upon the support of the Service Secretaries in his campaign to contain the NSRB becausethe armed forces feared any new institutional constraintson their budgeting and contracting activities. The armedservices also resisted efforts to transform the Research andDevelopment Board (RDB), which was established by the1947 Act under the Office of the Secretary of Defense, into aregulatory agency with direct control over their laboratories and contracting activities. Vannevar Bush accepted theposition of Director of the new science agency because hebelieved that the office could provide him with the samekind of power and influence that he had exercised duringthe war. This was a naive assumption, since by the time that Bush took over at RDB, the armed services had establishedthemselves as independent (and indispensable) sponsors ofbasic research at the major laboratories and universitiesacross the country. Pascal Zachary describes Bush’s effortsto use the RDB to reign in the military services as “aslow-motion automobile wreck.”25

18

While agencies like the NSRB and the RDB did notsurvive the shakeout period, other creations of the 1947 Actsurvived challenges during their formative years and thenprospered in the Cold War atmosphere of 1950sWashington. The National Security Council demonstratedthe most impressive ability to endure in a threateningpost-war environment. President Truman supported inprinciple the creation of a successor to the wartime SWNCCfor the coordination of civilian and military advice. Henonetheless worried about the possibility that the newagency would impinge upon the constitutionally-designated powers of the President. Consequently, Truman kept tightcontrol over the NSC after its establishment, and rarelycalled meetings of the organization prior to the onset of theKorean War. The NSC nonetheless persisted into theEisenhower era, and then began to take root at the “top ofpolicy hill."26

Conclusion.

This brief introductory article can only tell a small partof the story of the debates which culminated in the passageof the 1947 National Security Act and the struggles whichimmediately followed the passage of the legislation. The Actis best understood as a major setback for both Truman andMarshall. Both men were publicly committed to theunification of the armed forces at the end of World War II,and both were frustrated by the very effective campaign ofresistance to unification which was organized by the Navyand its friends in Congress. Truman and Marshall werenonetheless able to shake off this defeat, make the best ofthe situation, and move on to other issues. The biggest loserin all of the struggles surrounding the 1947 NationalSecurity Act was the State Department, which discoveredover time that the new arrangements institutionalized themarginalization of State in ways that had beenunderstandable during the war but were unprecedented inpeacetime. State tried to resist these trends, of course. In his first memo to the President after becoming Secretary of

19

State, George Marshall opposed the creation of both the CIA and the NSC, as infringements on the constitutionallydesignated authority of both the President and the StateDepartment.27 Dean Acheson also fought a valiantrear-guard action to preserve State’s influence within thepolicy community. His use of the Policy Planning Staff toformulate NSC-68 is a particularly interesting example ofthis campaign. By the time that Acheson left State,however, the momentum had clearly shifted in favor of thePentagon-NSC nexus. One illustration of this fact is that onhis first day in office as Acheson’s replacement, John FosterDulles advised Paul Nitze that the important work of thePolicy Planning Staff within State would need to be shiftedto the National Security Council, and that he, as Secretaryof State, hoped to be able to spend 90 percent of his time with the NSC people.28

One of the ironies of this story is that Forrestal, who canbe counted as the big winner in the struggle, was crushed bythe machinery which he was personally responsible forcreating.

Which leads to an obvious question: Why is it that, afterhaving succeeded in blocking efforts to establish theSecretary of Defense as an influential player in the newNational Military Establishment, Forrestal acceptedTruman’s offer to become the first Secretary? The answerseems to be that Forrestal saw the Secretary’s power notwithin the National Military Establishment per se, butrather in the larger network of national securityinstitutions created by the National Security Act. In ameeting held in his office just days after his appointment asSecretary of Defense, Forrestal obtained support for hisplan to locate the National Security Resources Board, theNational Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, theMunitions Board, the Research and Development Board,and the office of the Director of the Central IntelligenceAgency “as close as possible to the Secretary of Defense”within the Pentagon. It was also suggested that the building be renamed the “National Defense Building.”29 Forrestal

20

also assumed that the NSC would be the real driving force in the new national security system, and that the Presidentwould not be able to routinely perform his duties as ex officio chairman of the NSC. Under these circumstances, Forrestal believed that the President would designate the Secretaryof Defense as the “presiding officer” of the NSC and that thiswould be his power base.30 Just one week after the Pentagon meeting, however, Truman’s assistant Clark Clifford sentthe President a long memo in which he recommended that“In the absence of the President, it would seem appropriatethat the Secretary of State—as ranking member—serve asChairman [of the NSC].”31 In fact, Truman resolved theissue by rarely convening the NSC prior to the Korean War.

I will conclude by considering Ernest May’s observationthat nothing in the 1947 legislation made it inevitable thatthe government would come to look like a wartimegovernment, “with the military ascendant andmilitary-security concerns dominant.”32 This is true if onelooks at the institutions which were created by thelegislation, but not at the debates which go back to thepre-World War II era. These debates make it clear that theUnited States was about to embark on a new foreign policy,based not only on new ambitions, but on new fears, whichwould not be mitigated by victory over the German andJapanese enemies. Nor, for that matter, by the collapse ofthe Soviet enemy 5 decades later.

ENDNOTES CHAPTER 2

1. “Winged Defense,” p. 16, quoted in Michael Sherry, The Rise ofAmerican Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1987, p. 30.

2. Quoted by David Kennedy, in Freedom from Fear: The AmericanPeople in Depression and War, 1929-1945, New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999, p. 111.

3. E. Pendleton Herring, The Impact of War: Our AmericanDemocracy Under Arms, New York: Farrar and Rhinehold, 1941, p. 243.

21

4. The New York Herald Tribune, October 19, 1941.

5. E. Pendleton Herring, The United States at War . . . , PreparedUnder the Auspices of the Committee of Records of War Administration, Bureau of the Budget, Washington, DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, 1946.

6. “Our Armed Forces Must Be Unified,” Collier’s, August 26, 1944,reprinted in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, 79th Congress, 1st Session, Department of Armed Forces, Department ofMilitary Security, October 17-December 17, 1945, pp. 192-197.

7. Memoirs by Harry Truman: Volume Two, Years of Trial and Hope,New York: Doubleday, 1956, pp. 46-7.

8. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, Vol. 4, Larry Brand, ed.,Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 417-418.

9. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee onExpenditures in Executive Departments, 72nd Congress, 1st Session,Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932, pp. 249-50.

10. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, Vol. 4, p. 156.

11. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee onPost-War Military Policy, Proposal to Establish a Single Department ofArmed Forces, 78th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1944, p. 226.

12. For documents and analysis, see The CIA Under Harry TrumanMichael Warner, ed., published by the History Staff of the Center for theStudy of Intelligence, Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency,1994, in particular, pp. 29-33.

13. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, NewYork: Norton, 1969, p. 161.

14. Created in December of 1944, SWNCC dealt mainly with theterms of surrender and planning for military occupation.

15. For a discussion of the Kilgore and Bush proposals, see DanielKleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier: Post-war Research Policy inthe United States, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, passim.

16. Bruce Catton, quoted by Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War:The United States Since the 1930’s, New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1995, p. 70.

22

17. The United States At War, p. 504.

18. See the analysis of Eberstadt’s views by Jeffery Dorwart,Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949,College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1991, in particular,p. 59.

19. Ibid., p. 94.

20. The Eberstadt Report is reprinted in U.S. Congress, Senate,Committee on Naval Affairs, Report to Hon. James Forrestal, Secretaryof the Navy, On Unification of the War and Navy Departments andPost-war Organization for National Security, 79th Congress, 1stSession, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 22, 1945.

21. See U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed ServicesNational Security Act of 1947, Hearings on S. 758, 80th Congress, 1stSession, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947, pp.674-5.

22. Quoted in Clark Clifford and Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to thePresident, New York: Random House, 1992, p. 157

23. A Study of OP-23 and its Role in the Unification Debates of 1949is found in Oral History of Admiral Arleigh Burke, Vol. IV, U.S. NavalInstitute, Annapolis, MD, 1983, p. 77.

24. See the Report by F. Eberstadt to Arthur M. Hill, Washington,DC, June 4, 1948, Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S.Truman, President’s Secretary’s Files, pp. 8-9.

25. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the AmericanCentury, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, p. 336.

26. See Anna Nelson, “The `Top of Policy Hill’: PresidentEisenhower and the National Security Council,” Orbis, 7, Fall 1983, pp.307-26.

27. “Memorandum by the Secretary of State to the President,”February 7, 1947, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. 1,National Security Policy, Washington, DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, pp. 712-13.

28. See Leonard Mosley Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen andJohn Foster Dulles and Their Family Network, New York: Dial Press,1978, pp. 307-308.

23

29. “Memorandum for the Secretary,” August 2, 1947, Papers ofRalph Stohl, Box #52, Harry S. Truman Library, p. 1.

30. Ibid., p. 7.

31. “Memorandum for the President,” August 8, 1947, Papers ofClark M. Clifford, Box #12, Harry S. Truman Library, p. 3.

32. “The U.S. Government: A Legacy of the Cold War,” In The End ofthe Cold War, Michael Hogan, ed., New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992, p. 219.

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CHAPTER 3

IKE AND THE BIRTH OF THE CINCS:THE CONTINUITY OF UNITY OF COMMAND

David Jablonsky

“The past is never dead,” Gavin Stevens tells TempleDrake in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. “It’s noteven past.”1 This was particularly true for DwightEisenhower in April 1958 when, as President of the UnitedStates, he outlined proposals to Congress for thereorganization of the Defense Department. The proposalswere primarily concerned with the principle of unity ofcommand at the highest levels. The central focus was theunified command, the multi-service combatant structureused to divide military responsibility into theatersthroughout the world. The primary issue was the natureand extent of authority: By the commanders-in-chief(CINCs) of the unified commands over their componentcommanders and by the President and the Secretary ofDefense over the CINCs.

The issue of unity of command had its origins in theinterwar years, when the Joint Board of the Army and Navyprescribed the primary method of coordination between theservices to be mutual cooperation, the method in effect atthe time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In thatdisaster, the investigating committee concluded, “theinherent and intolerable weaknesses of command bymutual cooperation were exposed.”2 As a consequence,shortly after Eisenhower joined the War Department’s WarPlans Division (WPD) in 1941, there was a generalconsensus on the need for unity of command in the field.Soon, he was involved in discussions about all aspects ofunified commands and unified direction of those commandsfrom Washington. For the next 17 years he would

25

consistently continue this involvement, whether as CINC ofvarious unified and combined commands, as Chief of Staff of the Army, as acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff(JCS), or as President of the United States. Throughout that period there was a consistency in his approach to unity ofcommand that was based on an abiding belief in jointness, abelief, as he wrote in his 1958 proposals, that

separate ground, sea, and air warfare is gone forever. If everagain we should be involved in war, we will fight it . . . with allservices, as one single concentrated effort.3

The War Years.

There were many notable accomplishments at theU.S.-U.K. ARCADIA Conference which took place inWashington from December 23, 1941, to January 14, 1942.Chief among them was the informal emergence by February 9, 1942, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as counterparts to theBritish Chiefs in the newly formed Combined Chiefs of Staff(CCS). Equally important was the British acceptance of theAmerican approach to unified command. At the time of theARCADIA Conference, the British had been fighting forover two years under a committee system in each theatercomposed of “Commanders in Chief” from the three services, none of whom was provided full authority or responsibilityfor the total theater operation. It was Eisenhower’s job inWPD to prepare General George C. Marshall for his attempt at the second meeting to overcome the British preference for this system and to gain agreement for a unified commandstructure. The strength of the Allied effort in any theater, he advised in a memorandum to the Army Chief of Staff,

would be greatly increased through single, intelligentcommand. The many organizations . . . cannot possibly operateat maximum effectiveness so long as cooperation alone dictatestheir employment, no matter how sincere a purpose may inspirethe cooperative effort.4

26

The next day, Christmas 1941, Marshall introduced thequestion of unified command in each “natural theater,”arguing the need for one commander on the ground to act asa “clearing house” for all directives and recommendationsand to provide general direction to theater strategic andtactical operations.5 The British were unconvinced. Afterthe meeting, Marshall directed Eisenhower to prepare aletter that “would serve as a concrete suggestion” forestablishing a unified command in the Pacific Theater, theonly area in which the combined forces of the Allies wereactually fighting.6

Eisenhower’s draft directive for the command known asABDA (Australia, British, Dutch, American) was designedto make the concept of unified command more palatable bydemonstrating that there would be no risk to the interests of any of the powers involved. To this end, he placed numerousrestrictions on the actions of the supreme commander of thenew theater that were as severe as those under whichMarshall Foch had labored as Allied Commander in 1918.After obtaining approval of Eisenhower’s draft directive at a bedside conference with President Franklin D. Roosevelt,Marshall presented it to the American and British Chiefs.After extensive discussions, the CCS and the two heads ofstate agreed by early January on a directive similar toEisenhower’s draft to the ABDA Supreme Commander,General Archibald Wavell, the former CINC of Britishforces in India. It was a masterful achievement by Marshallwho had accomplished his primary objective at ARCADIA of agreement to the principle he believed should govern allcommand structure. “Unity of command in ABDA areaseems assured,” a tired Eisenhower noted on his writingpad. “Good start!—but what an effort. Talk—talk—talk.”7

Eisenhower’s key role in discussions about unity ofcommand was due to a number of organizational changes inWashington. Marshall was reorganizing the WarDepartment in a manner designed to give the position ofChief of Staff broad and unequivocal powers over the entireArmy. This, in turn, had the effect of placing a great amount

27

of power in WPD, which was renamed Operations Division(OPD) on March 22,1942. Marshall turned to that agency,as Ike noted when he became Chief of WPD, “for all the Joint and Combined work . . . , all plans and operations so far asactual theaters are concerned.”8 Equally important was thead hoc emergence of the JCS as a body that reported to thePresident, the only civilian in the chain of command, andthat issued orders and supervised theater commandersthrough one of its members acting as the executive agent forthe Joint Chiefs. The result was that Eisenhower wasconstantly involved at the highest level in all mattersconcerned with unified and combined commands. In March,for instance, he drafted a “former Naval person” message onthe command status in China for Roosevelt to dispatch toWinston Churchill.9 And that same month, when thePresident proposed a division of global responsibilitybetween the United States and the United Kingdom intothree general areas, it was Eisenhower who created a studyjustifying the proposals that was accepted informally byboth heads of state and their chiefs. Under thearrangement, operational responsibility was given to theUnited States for the Pacific area, to the United Kingdomfor the Indian Ocean and Middle East, and jointly to bothcountries for Europe and the Atlantic. Although there wasnever any formal approval of the Eisenhower study, theAllies acted for the remainder of the war as if there hadbeen.10

By the time of his global study, Eisenhower was alsoheavily involved as the newly promoted head of WPD in theissue of unified commands within the American forces. Inthe U.S.-dominated Pacific, General Douglas MacArthurwould not serve under a naval officer, and the Navy wasopposed to placing most of its ships under his control. As asolution, Eisenhower helped to establish two separatecommands in the Pacific. On March 9, 1942, he prepared amemorandum for Marshall to the JCS outlining a detaileddivision of the Pacific into two theaters of operation, whichwas approved after a few compromises at the JCS meeting

28

that same day. At the end of the month, the Joint Chiefsissued a directive establishing the two Pacific Commands:the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) under GeneralMacArthur and the Pacific Ocean Area (POA) underAdmiral Chester Nimitz. The next week, Eisenhowerdrafted a directive to MacArthur defining the SWPAboundaries and establishing the new commandarrangements. The CCS was to exercise general jurisdiction over grand strategic policy; the JCS would exercise specificjurisdiction over all matters pertaining to theateroperational strategy in SWPA, with the Army Chief of Staffacting as the executive agent: “All instructions to you will be issued by or through him.”11 As for the combined aspects ofthe new command, Eisenhower was careful to provide moreauthority to the new CINC than he had granted under thepolitical limitations of the ABDA structure. “Commandersof all armed forces within your area,” he concluded,

will be immediately informed by their respective governmentsthat, from a date to be notified, all orders and instructionsissued by you in conformity with this directive will beconsidered by such commanders as emanating from theirrespective governments.12

Other command arrangements with the Navy were notalways so easy to work out during the winter and spring of1942. Eisenhower did not question Admiral Ernest King’soverall commitment to jointness. “He said at one time tome,” he recalled later of an encounter at the time with theirascible CNO, “. . . one of the things I continually searchmyself for is to see whether I am acting according to logic ormerely out of blind loyalties of 40 years in the Navy.”13

Nevertheless, King proposed separate Army and Navycommands in the Caribbean, which Eisenhower advisedMarshall to resist because “the Army looks upon the area asa single theater.”14 There was also a constant battle with the Navy over unity of coastal command, which Eisenhowereventually brought to a successful conclusion. It could be anexasperating process. “Fox Conner was right about allies,”

29

he wrote on his desk pad in February. “He could well haveincluded the Navy!”15

Eisenhower may have been referring to his experiencethat same month as a permanent member, along with anaval counterpart, of the Joint Planning Committee (JPC),tasked the previous summer by the Joint Board to report ona recommendation to establish a Joint General Staff fromboth services as well as the position for “an officer of theArmy or the Navy as Chief of the Joint General Staff.” TheJPC report at the end of February was signed by both men,announcing their inability to agree and the irreconcilabilityof their respective positions. The Admiral favoredincreasingly joint relations, but advised that only acombination of extended time and education could instructofficers of one service sufficiently about the other service tomake any joint general staff either feasible or advisable.Eisenhower, on the other hand, favored therecommendation, emphasizing that “coordination bycooperation is ineffective,” and that officers assigned to ajoint staff billet would soon discover that “their exclusiveresponsibility to the Commander in Chief for the operationsof all the armed forces should tend to free them from thepurely service points of view.”16 As a result of the lack ofagreement between the Army and Navy, the matter wasdeferred for later study; and, by the time it was raised againmore than a year later, it had merged into the studies thatwould bring increasing focus on the larger issue of armedforces unification.

For Eisenhower, there were two important andinterrelated consequences from these experiences at OPD.To begin with, Marshall recognized his growing expertise inthe complex world of unified and combined commands andhad him in May 1942 draw up a directive for the futureAmerican commander in a European Theater of Operations(ETO). The second consequence was that Eisenhower hadbecome convinced that there should be no restrictions on the authority of the commander as he had written into hisearlier proposal at ARCADIA for the ABDA commander.

30

The head of the ETO must have complete control over theplanning and implementation of operations. “It isessential,” Eisenhower insisted, “. . . that absolute unity ofcommand should be exercised by the Theater Commanderto be designated.”17

When Eisenhower was appointed in June 1942 to carryout his own directive for the ETO, he knew from a visit toEngland the previous month that he could expect resistancefrom the British to the formation of unified commands forany Allied operation. These expectations were confirmed inAugust when Eisenhower was appointed as commander ofthe Allied North African expedition and attempted toestablish control over all the services of both countries, toinclude direct command of the ground forces not only for thelandings, but for the follow-up operations as well. TheBritish authorities, however, provided a directive for theirFirst Army Commander that was essentially a copy of a1918 directive, reserving all tactical control to the Britishcommander who could appeal to the British government ifhe thought his forces might be “imperiled” by allieddirection.18 Eisenhower protested that the instructionsviolated every concept concerning unity of command andshould be rewritten

in the form of a short statement of principles, emphasizingunity of the whole" and the purpose of both countries" to unifythe Allied force and to centralize responsibility for itsoperation. . . .19

It was the new commander at his best—conciliatory,impersonal and objective, yet quietly passionate aboutunity of command and unified operations. In the end, theBritish agreed to his request, thus establishing animportant new basis for Allied operations. “From the day Icame over here,” an elated Eisenhower wrote Marshall inOctober,

I have dinned into the British the fact that you consideredunity of command to exist only when the Commander of anAllied Force had the same authority . . . with respect to all

31

troops involved, as he had to those of his own nationality. I amnow benefiting from this crusade. . . .20

The issue appeared again, however, when the CCSissued directives in late January 1943, stipulating thatEisenhower’s three deputies would “cooperate” with eachother in planning and executing the invasion of Sicily.21 Tocompound the matter, the three subordinate air, land andsea commanders were all British: Air Chief Marshal ArthurTedder, General Harold Alexander, and Admiral AndrewCunningham. Nevertheless, Eisenhower was determined to operate his theater as a truly unified command. The Britishsystem of cooperation, he emphasized in a passionatemessage to Marshall, was inadequate to the demands ofmodern conflict. A theater CINC must be free to makedecisions “under the principle of unity of command;” and inthe future he would be on his guard “to prevent anyimportant military venture depending for its control anddirection upon the ‘committee’ system of command.”22

Eisenhower succeeded in this goal for the Sicilyoperation by means of his internal administrativearrangements as well as by the force of his own personalityand his focus on unity of command. He maintained closecontact with his air and sea commanders, co-locating theirheadquarters with his own in the St. Georges Hotel inAlgiers. And although he permitted Alexander to commandonly those ground forces actually engaged in combat, hemaintained close liaison with the British general throughpersonal visits, phone calls, messages, and the exchange ofstaff officers. Ultimately, the three commanders respondedto Eisenhower’s efforts as commander-in-chief and helpedhim create the organization for unified command that theCombined Chiefs had denied him in a formal directive.

By the end of the Sicilian campaign, Eisenhower hadstrengthened his position with a command structure thatwas approaching the ideal organization that he hadoutlined to the British Chiefs the previous August.Alexander was in charge of those land forces in Sicily

32

engaged in actual operations, while Eisenhower retainedhis position of overall ground commander. And actingdirectly under him, Tedder and Cunningham had completecontrol of the theater air and sea forces. So impressed werethe Combined Chiefs with the control exercised byEisenhower under his unified structure, that theyauthorized him full discretion in choosing the times andplaces for future landings in his Mediterranean theater. InSeptember 1943, Eisenhower summarized his views onthese experiences to Lord Louis Mountbatten, recentlyappointed by the CCS as Supreme Commander of theSoutheast Asia Theater and anxious for advice “on thepitfalls to avoid and the line you consider one should takeup.”23 Mountbatten’s three deputies, Eisenhower advised,would be accustomed to dealing directly with their ownnational ministers and would have senior subordinates ofopposite nationality who would also deal directly with theauthorities from their own countries. He recommended thatthese channels “should be interfered with as little aspossible,” but cautioned Mountbatten that no one else mustbe allowed to communicate with the Combined Chiefs. Thepractical result, he concluded, “was that f inalrecommendations as to operations . . . and requests forneeded resources must likewise pass through you.”Drawing upon his own experiences with the CombinedChiefs, and the strengths of the personal traits that hadallowed him to operate fully as a CINC without a formalcharter of complete control, he concluded that:

while the set-up may be somewhat artificial and not always soclear-cut as you might desire, your personality and good sensemust make it work. Otherwise Allied action in any theaterwill be impossible.24

A few months later, after being appointed to commandOVERLORD, Eisenhower once again encounteredsituations that were not so “clear-cut” as he attempted toresolve organizational problems concerning his newcommand structure under Supreme Headquarters, AlliedExpeditionary Force (SHAEF). In the Mediterranean, he

33

had commanded all the U.K. and U.S. military assets in histheater. In his new capacity, he did not initially have control of the British and American strategic bombing forces—animportant point for him based on the recent experiences atSalerno. As a consequence, Eisenhower requested that, atleast for several months before and after the Normandyinvasion, the bombers be placed at his disposal to destroythe railroad infrastructure in France and the Low Countries and to prevent speedy German reinforcements once thelocation of the cross-channel assault had been revealed.Initially, the SHAEF Commander’s proposal for what cameto be called the “Transportation Plan” was resisted by thecommanders of the two strategic bombing forces, whoperceived their primary missions as the destruction of theindustrial infrastructure in the German heartland. Thearguments over the issue swept back and forth duringFebruary and March 1944. Eisenhower remained adamant,finally forcing a decision in his favor by being prepared “toinform the Combined Chiefs of Staff that unless the matteris settled at once I will request relief from this command.”25

Eisenhower’s stance, Stephen Ambrose points outconcerning the ultimate effectiveness of the TransportationPlan, “was perhaps his greatest single contribution to thesuccess of OVERLORD.”26

Eisenhower also drew on his Mediterranean experiencewhen he stipulated that General Bernard Montgomery wasto command only the ground forces committed to theNormandy assault. Once the Allied forces had achieved abreakout from the landing beaches, Eisenhower planned tohave the British general revert to command of one armygroup of British and Canadian armies, while General OmarBradley would take command of the other army group ofAmerican forces. At one point, Montgomery proposed thathe continue as a ground force commander after Normandythrough the fall of 1944 while retaining command of hisarmy group—an idea that Eisenhower termed “fantastic”since it would have placed the British commander “in aposition to draw at will, in support of his own ideas, upon the

34

strength of the entire command.”27 Eisenhower was on tosomething. For later, when the British were unable topersuade him to change his so-called “broad-front” strategyfor moving on the Rhine and the industrial heartland ofGermany, they raised the idea of altering SHAEF’scommand structure in order to achieve their objectives for asingle thrust to Berlin. At Montgomery’s suggestion, theBritish Chiefs proposed that General Alexander, then CINC of the Mediterranean Theater, substitute for Tedder asSHAEF deputy and assume the role of a single groundcommander to ease Eisenhower’s task of both planning andimplementing the European War. Eisenhower wasadamant in his refusal, notifying General Alan Brooke, thehead of the British Imperial Staff, that there could never beany question “of placing between me and my Army GroupCommanders any intermediary headquarters either officialor unofficial.”28

This lack of a land commander, as Montgomery pointedout, diminished overall direction on the battlefield. But itwas a price that was paid to hold together the alliance, for asAlexander had demonstrated as ground commander in theother theaters, the same pressures would apply to whoeverwas in charge. And those pressures, as Eisenhower wellknew, could come from the very top, as demonstrated by thevehemence with which Brooke and Marshall defended theinterests of their respective armies, even when those forceswere under his command.

In the end, there was no other commander on either sidein World War II who had more complex unified andcombined command experiences than Eisenhower.Moreover, it is easy to forget from a perspective of overhalf-a-century how unique those experiences were. Untilthat conflict, no American had ever been in charge of a largeunified command consisting of armies, navies, andairforces; and none had ever directed an allied command.There were, of course, unified and combined operations inother theaters of the global war. But they were less complex: in the Central Pacific because the forces were primarily

35

naval; and in the Southwest Pacific, the Middle East, andSouthwest Asia because the forces were much smaller ineach theater. Finally, in the European and African theaters, the German, Italian, and Russian forces were dominated byarmy ground troops with no attempts to organize theseforces jointly under anything approaching unifiedcommands. And in fact, only Japan among the Axis powersattempted to unite its three services under the command ofone officer.

The Post-War Years.

From the end of World War II until he assumed thePresidency of the United States in 1953, Eisenhower servedin a number of positions that caused him to maintain hisfocus on the principle of unity of command, but in anenvironment that was far more complex and far lessmalleable than he had been accustomed to as a wartimeSupreme Commander. In that position, there had been asingle overriding goal. But during his tenure as Army Chiefof Staff from December 1945 to February 1948, Eisenhowerentered political-military conflicts as the military head ofone of the services, an interested party who, despite beingprimus inter pares in prestige, was only one among equals in power. After SHAEF, it was a time of frustration forEisenhower. Shortly after assuming his new duties, hewrote his son that the position of Army Chief “was a sorryplace to light after having commanded a theater of war.”29

And more than halfway through his tenure, he confided that “since my own method worked well for me when I was a little ‘Czar’ in my own sector, I find it difficult to readjust to thedemands of this city.”30

Much of the frustration had to do with Eisenhower’sefforts to achieve unity of command at all levels. In the field,despite a general agreement to retain the unified commandsystem in peacetime, there were major disagreementsbetween the Navy and the Army over which service wouldhave command of various Pacific areas. Throughout the

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spring and summer of 1946, the new Army Chief of Staff was constantly involved in representing General MacArthur’sposition to the JCS. But there were pressures forcompromise, as he noted in August, in the form of “thereport of the Pearl Harbor Committee, the urgent desires ofthe two Secretaries for an early solution to the problem, andthe demands of the press and public for elimination of ‘PearlHarbor’ conditions.”31 Moreover, Eisenhower had alsoenlarged the issue by that time to encompass a globalstructure to achieve “sound unified commandarrangements at the earliest possible time” in “othertheaters and areas in the world where in certain cases thesituation is at least as acute as in the Pacific.”32 InSeptember, he forwarded a draft global unified commandplan to the JCS which outlined the roles of the Joint Chiefs,as well as of unified and component commanders. Theproposal, however, also included a new plan for the Pacificthat was unacceptable to the Navy. At the same time, theNavy also rejected an Air Force proposal that the StrategicAir Command (SAC), operating under one commander on aglobal basis, should be supported by other CINCs.

By early December, an increasingly impatientEisenhower had worked out compromise wording on SACauthority acceptable to both services, and had madeimportant concessions to the Navy in the Pacific, leavingMacArthur without any reference to that ocean in his title.It was a far different experience than the heady wartimedays at OPD four years before, when Eisenhower hadwritten the directive for MacArthur’s command of a majorPacific theater of operations. When President Harry S.Truman approved the first Unified Command Plan onDecember 14, 1946, MacArthur was designatedCommander in Chief, Far East (CINCFE), one of sevenunified commands, and one which limited his authority ineffect to the Philippines, Korea, and Japan. Mostimportantly, however, the document retained Eisenhower’sproposals, based on recent changes to the 1935 manual,Joint Action of the Army and Navy (JAAN), for the role of

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commanders in the global unified plan. Unified commandswould consist of two or more components, each component to be commanded by an officer authorized to communicatedirectly with his appropriate service headquartersconcerning administration, logistics, and training. Thecommander of the unified command would operate with ajoint staff composed of appropriate members of the servicecomponents under his command. Finally, the JCS wouldexercise strategic direction, as it had in wartime, assigningforces to the unified commands as well as stipulating themissions and tasks for those commands. The JCS would also continue the wartime practice of designating a service chiefto act as an executive agent for the Joint Chiefs to overseethe operation of each unified command.33

All in all, the first Unified Command Plan was atremendous accomplishment for the new Army Chief ofStaff—the result of conciliation, principled compromise,and the ability to move beyond service parochialism to aglobal vision. Typically, Eisenhower played down theService infighting and his pivotal role when he reminded aCongressional Committee the following May that hiswartime experience

was that of a unified single commander, having all servicesunder my command. . . .

The team that I saw developed in that area, in my conviction,was the only kind of team that could have won the Europeanwar. I think that lesson is so clearly understood by all of us thatthere is no one of the services that objects or would tolerate anyother solution except the single command in a single theater ofwar. We have believed that so much that we have attempted tocarry that into our peacetime practices in attempting to set up asingle commander in the Western Pacific, the Central Pacific, inthe Caribbean, and so on. No matter from what service hecomes, he commands the operations, the defenses and strategicconcerns in those areas.34

The presence of the Army Chief at the congressionalhearing was also a reflection of the larger issue of defense

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unification that had been festering since early in the war.For Eisenhower, the successful wartime experience in thefield under unity of command made a compelling argumentfor unification at the highest level of the armed forces withclear and accountable authority down to the unifiedcommanders in the field. “I am convinced,” he testified inNovember 1945,

that unless we have unity of direction in Washington, throughthe years of peace that be ahead, we may enter anotheremergency, in a time to come, as we did in Pearl Harbor.35

To this end, he favored the War Department proposal tounify all services under a single, cabinet-level head, aSecretary of National Defense, who would in turn be servedby a single Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. The Navy, onthe other hand, proposed to maintain a coordinate, not aunified organization, with a committee system to adjustactivities of the War and Navy departments and to integrate military policy and programs with overall domestic andinternational requirements.

Both services outlined their proposals before a Senatecommittee in October 1945. The War Department plan, aspresented by General J. Lawton Collins, was confusing andinconsistent, particularly in the peculiar dual relationshipof the service chiefs as subordinates to the Chief of Staff ofthe Armed Forces in the departmental hierarchy, but asequal members of the advisory Joint Chiefs of Staff. Inaddition, the solid command line used by Collins on hischart clearly showed the theater commanders directlyunder the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, thus implyingthat he alone would direct operations by the CINCs in thefield. Collins was at great pains to emphasize that the single Chief of Staff would not have a large staff and that theindividual service chiefs would continue to act for the JointChiefs as executive agents to carry out the JCS directiveswith the operational staffs of their own services. But 2weeks later, before the same committee, Eisenhowerrejected the solid command line on the organizational chart.

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The Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, he recommended,should be removed from the chain of command between theSecretary on the one hand and the service chiefs and theater commanders on the other, and be depicted in the advisoryorganizational box of the JCS as the chief advisor to thecivilian head. Eisenhower was sure that this had been theoriginal intent since “by drawing him as he appears on thechart, it looks like he is the fabulous man on horseback thatwe are always talking about.”36

On December 19, 1945, President Truman sent aunification message to Congress that clearly favored thesingle department proposed in the Collins Plan.Nevertheless, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wasoptimistic as the new year began, since the new Army Chiefof Staff and his naval counterpart, Admiral Chester Nimitz,had already begun negotiations that appeared likely tosettle what the Secretary termed the unification lawsuit.“Eisenhower is a good practical Dutchman and so isNimitz,” Forrestal observed, “and between them I believewe will make progress.”37 Another year would pass,however, before both chiefs and both service secretariescould arrive at a draft proposal for unification, and eventhen it required presidential decisions on severalintractable issues. Eisenhower was committed throughoutthe process to establishing overall unity of commandexercised by a civilian secretary. “I personally do not carewhat the language of the bill is,” he testified to Congressthat spring.

I want to get started with a man to whom we can all go, a civilianwho comes down here and tells you people. . . . “Here is thepicture of national security of the country; here is what we thinkwe need. . . .” That is important to me.38

The compromise unification proposal was dispatched toCongress early in 1947 and emerged with somemodifications after prolonged hearings and deliberations on July 26 as the National Security Act. The new law created acoordinated defense establishment more in keeping with

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the Navy model—an organization which Eisenhower aptlycharacterized as “little more than a weak confederation ofsovereign military units.”39 The compromise was mostnoticeable in the powers provided to the Secretary ofDefense, who instead of presiding over one single executivebranch department, was to head a National MilitaryEstablishment consisting of three executive departments,one for each service and administered by cabinet-levelsecretaries. The services, which now included an Air Force,retained their essential autonomy as well as the roles andmissions that had emerged from the war—a statusexplicitly acknowledged in the Act’s provision “for theirauthoritative coordination and unified direction undercivilian control but not to merge them.” Equally important,the Act established the JCS as a permanent organizationserved by a joint staff limited to 100 officers divided withequal numbers from each of the military departments. TheJoint Chiefs were provided with statutory authorization tocontinue their wartime roles: To act as the principalmilitary advisors to the President and the Secretary ofDefense; to prepare strategic plans and provide for thestrategic direction of the armed forces; and “to establishunified commands in strategic areas when such unifiedcommands are in the interest of national security.”40

Despite his support for the unification compromise,Eisenhower revealed some key reservations in hisoccasionally unguarded testimony to the House and Senatecommittees in the spring of 1947. The idea that the JCSwould continue as a collaborative, coordinated bodyobviously bothered him when he acknowledged underpersistent questioning that

there is weakness in any council running a war. . . . In war, youmust have a decision. A bum decision is better than none. Andthe trouble is that when you get three, you finally get none.41

One solution was a single Chief of Staff, which he admittedwas his personal preference, but too disruptive an issue.“Time may bring it about, and it may show that this is the

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better system.”42 In the meantime, it was necessary toestablish a truly joint culture. It was a basic fact, he pointedout, that

when you have kept services apart and you wait until men are50 before they begin to meet and know much about each other, itis pretty difficult to develop the kind of team play that applies on one of the Knute Rockne football teams.43

A year later, Eisenhower returned to the theme in hisfarewell memorandum to Secretary of Defense Forrestal.“Someday it will be possible,” he wrote,

to give to selected officers of the several services ‘combined arms’ commissions that will transcend in prestige and in public regard anything they could hold of comparable rank in one of theindividual services.44

The memorandum was also a reminder of the need for anevolutionary approach to the provisions of the NationalSecurity Act.

There should be no hesitancy in using the ‘trial and error’method so long as these proceed from minor innovation towardlarger and more radical objectives in final result.45

The two men were able to act on this advice when, lessthan a year later, Forrestal asked Eisenhower to serve ashis adviser and informal Chairman of the JCS. FromDecember 1948 to July 1949, Eisenhower divided his timebetween his duties as President of Columbia University and his responsibilities as Chairman in increasingly tensesessions with the Joint Chiefs. He later recalled that, asChairman, “I was an umpire between disputing services;sometimes a hatchet man on what Fox Conner used to callFool Schemes.”46 A major motivation for Forrestal was touse Eisenhower effectively as a senior military adviserinteracting with the JCS in order to obtain an amendmentto the National Security Act that would provide apermanent Chairman for that body. “With Ike here for 60days,” he confided in his diary, “I think we can get the

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pattern set and prove its workability by pragmaticexperience.”47 At first, however, Eisenhower was moreinclined to focus on a self-imposed majority rule procedurefor the JCS, whereby if the Joint Chiefs failed three times toreach unanimity on a given issue, the majority view wouldprevail. But after his initial experiences of attempting toadjudicate bitter interservice parochial disputes, hechanged his mind. “The JCS need a chairman at the veryleast—and by that I mean a fourth member who can divorcehimself from his service background.”48

By that time, Eisenhower was heavily involved in allaspects of proposed changes to the 1947 Act. The Chairman,he suggested, should “take precedence” over all others, butbe a non-voting member of the JCS, a move that would “tend to allay suspicions that the man was going to be an arbitrary boss.”49 Nor should there be any fixed ceiling for the JointStaff. In addition, he was particularly concerned that theright of service secretaries to appeal directly to thePresident and the Director of the Budget be eliminated. Itwas a matter, after all, of the centralizing spirit of the lawand how that was to be conveyed in the proposedamendments.

I think that the language should carry the clear intent ofCongress to place the maximum amount of authority in thehands of the Secretary of Defense with restrictions imposed inonly a few vital areas where obviously Congress should dictatethe type of organization desired. My impression of the law asnow written is that it sets up an official upon whom is placedgreat responsibility and then a deliberate shackle wasimposed upon him to the extent that his effectiveness iscurtailed.50

On August 10, President Truman signed PL 216, theNational Security Amendments of 1949, which transformed the National Military Establishment into the executiveDepartment of Defense. The amendments, reflecting somecongressional modifications, remained essentiallyconcerned with the two issues for which Eisenhower hadprovided input: The extent to which the Secretary of

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Defense’s formal authority was to be increased and thescope of the authority of the Chairman position that was tobe added to the JCS. In terms of the Secretary, thequalifying “general” was removed from the originaldescription of his “direction, authority, and control.”Equally important, the service secretaries