The Soldier and the State

by Samuel P Huntington

  The power of Congress to enforce increased expenditures is intimately related with the legal right and duty of the military chiefs to present their professional opinions directly to Congress. Inevitably with respect to the budget, the chiefs wish more funds than the executive is willing to approve. But their right to appeal to Congress becomes a nullity unless Congress also possesses the right to act upon their appeal. These two authorities are inseparably connected, and together they are essential to the operation of the separation of powers. The right of the chiefs to speak frankly to Congress has been established in law and has been more or less accepted in practice. The authority of Congress to require military expenditures likewise should be explicitly sanctioned and acquiesced in by legislature and executive.

  * This estimate of the role of congressional committees with respect to military affairs is based on their operations from 1947 through 1954. The Senate Government Operations Committee, with the exception of a well-publicized series of hearings on the Army in 1953 and 1954, only rarely probed military matters, and its infrequent incursions into this field were generally offshoots of investigations whose primary foci were elsewhere, for example, subversion or influence in government procurement. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs considered the annual military assistance bill, but otherwise did not go deeply into military matters. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, of course, dealt regularly with issues in which the Defense Department had a direct interest.

  * In 1953 the Committee successfully threatened to hold up promotions in the Navy unless provision was made for the advancement of the Navy’s atomic submarine expert, Captain Hyman Rickover, to flag rank. In 1955 the Committee attempted to limit the discretion of the President in leaking job assignments of high-level officers by demanding that the promotions of individuals to be lieutenant generals and full generals should only be for specific posts. The executive, on the other hand, maintained that promotions should be made without consideration of future assignment. The Committee’s position was in effect a return to the preprofessional system in which rank was dependent upon office instead of being a prerequisite to office. See Army Navy Air Force Journal, XCII (Mar. 19, 1955), 848, (May 7, 1955), 1053, 1064.

  * Carl Vinson went on to argue in this speech that:

  “The responsibility of Congress is greater than merely to accept or reduce the totals proposed by the Bureau of the Budget . . .

  “Where do we look mainly in this country for the best judgment on what is needed for an adequate national defense? The ultimate responsibility for the executive branch rests, of course, with the President. But his is not the expert military view. It can never be so, nor does our system so intend. Our top source for military judgment is the Joint Chiefs of Staff who, under the law, are charged among other things with the Nation’s strategic and logistic planning. It is these men, who have risen to the top in the Nation’s armed forces after a generation of experience and effort in military life, to whom we must look, and to whom the President must look, for the most authoritative advice on our national-defense requirements.

  “This being so, I have taken the President’s military budget, which is compounded of a number of extra-military considerations, and contrasted it with the lowest budget recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is exclusively military in nature. By that process, I believe the Congress can arrive more soundly at our national-defense needs than if the President’s budget alone is taken as the criterion.”

  Vinson’s examination of the two budgets led him to recommend appropriations of $16,364,000,000 compared with the JCS figure of $17,439,000,000 and the President’s estimate of $14,765,000,000. Cong. Record, XCV (Mar. 30, 1949), 3540.

  * The Jenner subcommittee investigating the conduct of the Korean War, for instance, criticized the efforts of the Truman Administration to control the military and urged that steps be taken “to eliminate political interference in the conduct of hostilities and negotiations of a military armistice.” It also solicited the views of the retired Korean War commanders on American participation in the United Nations and the severance of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Internal Security Subcommittee, Committee on the Judiciary, The Korean War and Related Matters, 84th Cong., 1st Sess. (1955).

  * Congress may well, of course, make administrative reductions and policy increases simultaneously. In the Fiscal 1950 Air Force budget the House Committee eliminated $51,000,000 from civilian personnel, subsistence, clothing, equipage, and transportation, and added $851,000,000 to aircraft funds to maintain a fifty-eight-group Air Force. As Huzar points out, the reductions “reflected continued Congressional dissatisfaction with administration in the National Military Establishment” while the increase “expressed Congressional dissatisfaction with the Administration’s strategic program.” Elias Huzar, The Purse and the Sword: Control of the Army by Congress through Military Appropriations, 1933–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), p. 187.

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  Departmental Structure of Civil-Military Relations

  THE ORGANIZATION PROBLEMS OF THE POSTWAR DECADE

  Departmental organization of civil-military relations must provide for the performance of three distinct functions. The professional military function includes representing the nation’s military requirements, advising on the military implications of proposed courses of action and of the military needs necessary to carry out adopted policies, and directing the military forces in the implementation of national policy. The administrative-fiscal function includes representing the interests of economy and efficiency, advising on fiscal, budgetary, and management matters, and administering “civilian” activities such as supply, procurement, construction, nonmilitary personnel, and the budget. The policy-strategy function includes balancing the professional military and administrative-fiscal viewpoints, formulating the departmental recommendations on force levels and the military budget, and defending departmental views before outside groups. In a vertical system of departmental organization the civilian secretary and the military chief share responsibility for all three functions. In a coordinate organizational pattern, the civilian secretary has the administrative-fiscal function, the military chief the professional military function, and both share in the policy-strategy function. A balanced system of departmental civil-military relations maximizes objective civilian control and military professionalism through a greater degree of specialization. Each of the three functions is performed by a distinct unit within the department: the secretary is responsible for policy strategy, the military chief for the professional military function, and a separate set of officials, civilian or military, for the administrative-fiscal affairs.

  The principal issue of civil-military relations in the executive branch after World War II involved the distribution of these three functions at the central service level, that is, at a level above the individual military services (Army, Navy, Air Force) but below the highest political authority in the government (President, National Security Council).* The problem arose because the United States came out of World War II with an organized military unit at this level, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which, in addition to performing professional military functions, discharged policy-strategy and administrative-fiscal functions. The absence of any significant civilian institution at this level left no effective restraints on the Joint Chiefs. They were, as Admiral Leahy remarked, “under no civilian control whatever.” Consequently, the fundamental need was to “militarize” the Joint Chiefs, to divest them of their non-military functions and to develop appropriate organs to discharge the administrative-fiscal and policy-strategy responsibilities. In a sense, the JCS existed in 1945 as the one completed room of a mansion begun in 1941. Although designed for a limited purpose, this room for four years had met the needs normally served by an entire house. In the postwar years it became necessary to build the rest of the mansion about the Joint Chiefs and to transfer to these additions much of the furniture and fixtures which had become solidly established in the JCS.
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br />   The development of a balanced system of organization was complicated by three factors. First, the simple existence of the Joint Chiefs with their existing powers and functions had a determining influence upon the nature of the American defense establishment. The organization planners did not start with a tabula rasa upon which to draw an ideal system. They began with the established fact of the Joint Chiefs. Throughout all the defense organization debates of 1944 through 1947, the continued existence of the Joint Chiefs was the one point never disputed at any time by Army, Navy, Air Force, civilian administrators, or Congress. Born to power in wartime and antedating all other central defense institutions by six years, the Joint Chiefs experienced great difficulty in adjusting to a purely professional role. Reared in an environment in which the performance of political functions by military institutions was accepted practice, civilian offices were diffident about asserting political leadership.

  A second difficulty sprang from the widespread acceptance of the fusionist approach to civil-military relations in the postwar years. Starting from the liberal preference for subjective civilian control, this theory rejected as inherently undesirable and impossible the segregation of military and political responsibilities. It furnished an intellectual rationale for opposing a balanced structure and for continuing the existing merger of functions in the Joint Chiefs.

  Thirdly, the issue of civil-military relations at the central defense level was inextricably intertwined with the issue of the relative powers of the central defense organization and the military services. Two military departments could exist without supervision. Three military departments required a fourth agency to coordinate them. The powers of this fourth agency vis-à-vis the other three was not a problem of civil-military relations. It was a problem of administrative federalism, of centralization versus decentralization, and the unification debate had both its Alexander Hamiltons and its Luther Martins. The federalism problem, however, was directly related to the civil-military relations problem. Any change in the balance of power between the central organization and the military services would affect the civil-military balance within the central organization. Conversely, any alteration of the civil-military alignment within the central organization would affect the distribution of power beween the central office and the services. The 1949 amendments to the National Security Act, for example, were designed primarily to centralize control in the Department of Defense. One means to this end was to strengthen the budgetary authority of the Secretary of Defense. This action, however, tended to establish in the Comptroller’s Office a significant counterweight to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The 1953 reorganization, on the other hand, was conceived primarily in terms of a redistribution of authority and functions within the central organization. Yet, despite disclaimers to the contrary, it had the incidental effect of still further reducing the influence of the military departments. The general trend with respect to federalism was from a loose organization to a unified organization. The separation of powers and functions within the central organization thus tended to assume greater significance than the distribution of power between the central organization and the federal units.*

  Despite the obstacles, the central organization in the postwar decade tended to evolve toward a balanced pattern of civil-military relations. The Joint Chiefs retreated from their wartime heights; the office of the Comptroller emerged as the focus of administrative-fiscal functions; Secretaries of Defense essayed the policy-strategist role. Nonetheless, the formal organization still fell short of a fully balanced pattern. The fundamental defect was the weakness of the office of the Secretary.* Both the Joint Chiefs and the Comptroller continued to tread upon ground which the Secretary should have occupied if he were to discharge his responsibilities in the realm of policy and strategy. The Joint Chiefs were part military and part political; the Comptroller was part fiscal and part political; the Secretary was part political and part vacuum.

  THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: LEGAL FORM AND POLITICAL REALITY

  For eight years after the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 a curious gap existed between the role of the Joint Chiefs as defined by statute and the role of the Joint Chiefs in practice. By law, the Joint Chiefs were to perform only the professional military function. In actual fact, they participated in a variety of political and administrative roles. The primary reasons for this failure of behavorial patterns to conform to statutory prescriptions derived from American opinion toward military affairs, the operation of the separation of powers, and the failure of the lawmakers to prescribe the organizational forms necessary to realize their intent.

  Most of the service proposals for unification in 1944–1947 envisioned legal perpetuation of the wartime status and roles of the Joint Chiefs. This made all the more remarkable the fact that the National Security Act of 1947 did not codify the World War II pattern, but instead prescribed for the Joint Chiefs a strictly military role. This surprising result was less the outcome of conscious thought than it was a product of the clash of views between the Army and Navy over the powers which should be assigned to the central defense organization. Broadly speaking, the Army wanted to concentrate power in the military component of the central organization. The Navy wanted the central organization to have as little power as possible, and, for this reason, countered the Army proposal for a rigid military integration with a plan for the loose coordination of all the departments and agencies concerned with national security. The clash between these two approaches produced a compromise in which the central defense organization was made stronger than the Navy wanted it. Within that central organization, however, the civilian component (the secretary) was given more authority than the Army wanted it to have.

  Congress spelled out the purely military character of the Joint Chiefs in four ways.1 First, the composition of the JCS was purely military. Congress in 1947, and again in 1949, rejected suggestions that the Secretary of Defense be a member of the Joint Chiefs or that the chairman be a civilian. In practice, the Secretary of Defense at times attended JCS meetings. Civilian participation, however, was appropriate only to the extent that the Joint Chiefs performed civilian functions.* Second, the National Security Act assigned purely military responsibilities to the Joint Chiefs. They were the “principal military advisers” to the principal organs of the executive branch,† The more specific duties assigned them in the act and in the implementing Functions Paper were also strictly military. Thirdly, the Act placed the Joint Chiefs within the defense establishment with respect to which the Secretary of Defense is the principal adviser to the President. To be sure, the Chiefs were unique among the agencies of that establishment in that they were under the “authority and direction” of the President as well as the Secretary, and were advisers to the President and the NSC as well as to the Secretary. The Act avoided, however, a fully developed coordinate system. It was presumed that although the Joint Chiefs would participate in many different dramas with Congress, the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense, they would play the same military role in each drama. In many ways, this was an unrealistic assumption. But it was also an unavoidable one, for the constitutional relationships of the President and Congress to the military chiefs could not be ignored.

  Finally, the National Security Act and other legislation divested the Joint Chiefs of many nonmilitary functions which they performed during the war. A common phenomenon of civil-military relations is the initial assignment to the military services of new activities related to defense. As these activities expand, however, their nonmilitary applications and implications become more significant; they gradually lose their predominantly military character; and they are eventually transferred from the services to an appropriate civilian agency. The early postwar years saw this process at work with respect to six major functions. (1) The responsibility for advising the President on over-all national security policy which had been performed by the Joint Chiefs during the war was assigned to the National Security Council
composed of top civilian officials. The creation of this agency was more important than any other organizational development in restricting the Joint Chiefs to military activities.2 (2) Central coordination of military research and development was removed from the Joint Chiefs in 1946 by Secretaries Forrestal and Patterson. The National Security Act assigned this function to a board directly under the Secretary of Defense; in 1953 the board was abolished and the functions given to an assistant secretary of defense. (3) During the war the military services created “full political and economic intelligence staffs,” and the Joint Intelligence Committee of the JCS was the principal coordinator of the national intelligence of the services, the OSS, the State Department, and the Foreign Economic Administration. In 1946 and 1947 executive action and the National Security Act established an independent Central Intelligence Agency directly under the NSC which assumed responsibility for the coordinating function.3 (4) Atomic energy had been handled during the war by the Army’s Manhattan District Project. Following considerable controversy over the merits of civilian versus military control, the McMahon Act of 1946 assigned primary responsibility for atomic programs to a civilian commission. (5) Eventually, either by the transfer of authority to another agency, as in the case of Germany, or the disappearance of the function, the Joint Chiefs lost their immediate postwar responsibilities for the government of occupied areas. (6) Prior to World War II an agency closely associated with the military chiefs, the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board, was responsible for planning national economic mobilization. After the war, however, the military realized, in Admiral Sherman’s words that “Politically, any plans of national scope prepared by the Army and Navy Munitions Board are bound to be still-born.”4 The National Security Act assigned the planning of economic mobilization to a unit in the Executive Office of the President and limited the Munitions Board to the supervision and coordination of military procurement and the purely military aspects of industrial mobilization.