By Andrew Tilghman
November 11, 2015
The joint-duty assignment requirements that help define modern military officers' career tracks have inadvertently fueled the Defense Department’s bloated bureaucracies and should be fundamentally reformed, a top defense expert told lawmakers Tuesday.
The long-standing joint-billet requirement for senior officers has forced the Pentagon to maintain large headquarters structures, said John Hamre, the head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an influential Washington think tank.
“They need that headquarters structure to get joint-duty billets for everybody," Hamre told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. "There just are not enough jobs without it."
“It's very hard to get through the system now," he said. "And so the personnelists have kind of engineered pathways through this complexity, and it's created an excessively large headquarters structure."
Influential lawmakers are considering a massive overhaul of the 1986 law known as the Goldwater-Nichols Act. It created the requirement that all general and flag officers serve in a joint-service position outside their own military service.
The rule was originally drawn up after the Vietnam War, intended to force parochial officers to communicate more effectively across service lines. But critics now say the joint-billet requirement has achieved its goal, and that it should be reformed or removed to help make today's military more flexible.
Those critics say that the requirement forces some troops to waste time in a joint billet that does not comport with their personal career goals or maximize their technical expertise. Under current laws, promotion boards are required to look unfavorably on officers who do not fulfill the joint-billet requirement.
The law is hindering the Pentagon’s effort to reduce the size of its headquarters structure, a longstanding goal cited as a necessary budget-cutting measure but encountering stiff bureaucratic resistance.
“We've got to figure out … how do we take pressure out of the system so we're not feeding big headquarter structures that are really doing too much micromanagement?” said Hamre, who helped author the Goldwater-Nichols law three decades ago.
Some of the Pentagon's top civilians are eager to scale back the joint-billet requirements as part of a broader push to reform the military personnel system.
Some experts suggested eliminating the geographical combatant commands or vastly reducing their size because they no longer actually fight wars.
“The reality today is that we are war fighting with joint task forces," said Jim Thomas, a defense expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 'We're not war fighting with those combatant commands.”
Thomas said that scaling back today’s massive military headquarters structures is ultimately about optimizing readiness.
“You do it partly maybe to save money, but really the bigger reason is you do it to gain back your agility as an organization,” he said.
“We are losing the command-and-control competition against all of our adversaries today,” Thomas said.
“All of our adversaries, from great powers like Russia and China to non-state actors like al-Qaida and quasi-state[s] like [the Islamic State group] …they are moving faster and making decisions faster than we can possibly keep up [with],” Thomas said.
Read the story at Military Times