By Seth Cropsey
Saturday, April 25, 2026
Navy Secretary John Phelan was unceremoniously sacked on
April 22. The Navy secretary is responsible for training, supplying, and
organizing the service as well as a host of other administrative tasks that are
essential, including building more ships more quickly. However, the days when
Lincoln’s navy secretary, Gideon Welles, exercised direct control over naval
operations are long gone.
The same disconnect exists today between military service
chiefs and operational control of forces. The former do not maintain
operational control over the latter. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s
dismissal of U.S. Army Chief of Staff Randy George was remarkable not for its
impact, but its lack of impact on operational issues. The reality is
that the Iran war has demonstrated the extraordinary power the Joint Staff
wields, compared to the service chiefs.
The Joint Staff is the central operational staff of the
U.S. military. Made up of senior and mid-level military officers and some
civilians, it reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are composed of the
chiefs of each of the U.S. military’s services — the Army, the Navy, the Marine
Corps, the Air Force, and the Space Force.
This is profoundly relevant for the balance between
soldiers and statesmen and bodes ill for the future of American strategy. The
solution is legislative: Congress must re-empower the services in budgetary and
strategic terms, including giving them direct military access to the president.
Since the Vietnam War, the military has benefited from a
certain professional mystique. Just under 20 years after American de facto
defeat in Vietnam, the U.S. military had transitioned from a conscript force to
a fully professional one. It had birthed a new military doctrine, AirLand
Battle, that fused cutting-edge computer technology with airpower and
long-range weapons to transform the military balance with the USSR. Crucially,
it won a resounding victory over the million-man Iraqi military in late February
1991, ejecting it from Kuwait while suffering extraordinarily light casualties,
all without getting bogged down in the dreaded quagmire of occupation and
stabilization.
This professional redemption, which remains a
foundational intellectual and mythic one for the U.S. military, essentially
relieves the uniformed military of responsibility for American strategic
mistakes. Casualties incurred during the U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1993
were blamed on Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (according to the media
narrative), members of Congress, and the military establishment, all of which
were accused of providing insufficient military support. Throughout the 1990s,
the U.S. used force with extraordinary caution, prioritizing force protection
over actual tangible effect, resulting in indecisive campaigns in the Balkans
whose lack of results were blamed on civilian leadership, not military
planners.
Then came the early 2000s Global War on Terror. The
initial interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wildly successful — both
demonstrating the sheer scale of American military power in unique ways. Yet
both interventions resulted in unsatisfying protracted wars. As the Iraqi
insurgency exploded, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian team
were pilloried for their lack of strategic foresight, while American military
leadership rested on the myth of its supposed prudence and skill. A similar
story occurred in Afghanistan, with civilian leadership being blamed for
strategic listlessness, unlike the always professional, politically neutral
military.
Misfortune has many fathers, but the point is that it
comes not only from civilian mistakes, but also from military ones.
The secretary of defense has a right to relieve any
officer in whom he has lost confidence. Civilian control of the military is
sacrosanct under any administration and must remain a cardinal principle of
American policy and civic life if the U.S. is to remain a republic. The
difficulty is that the trend of American military misfortune and
ineffectiveness — which since the end of the Cold War has largely been the rule
— stems in no small part from the institutional design of the Joint
Staff. It is this system that makes General George’s relief irrelevant in the
short term and warps policymaking in the long term.
The Joint Staff as we understand it today was created in
the aftermath of a tremendous military misfortune, the botched rescue of
American hostages in Iran in 1980, and the after-action review of the American
invasion of Grenada, also deemed feckless by insufficient inter-service
cooperation and coordination. Formalized in the 1987 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the
Joint Staff itself grew by several orders of magnitude. The revised system
removed the military services from operational roles while making the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs the sole military adviser to the president.
Nominally, the services remain responsible for manning,
training, and equipping themselves. This should give them authority over what
to procure, when, and why — and by extension, over doctrine (the way in which
wars are fought), and some elements of strategy. In practice, however, the
Joint Staff, with its full suite of functions from plans to operations and
policy, executes these functions, working in concert with the combatant
commands. The result is a concentration of talent in the Joint Staff, given the
body’s bureaucratic relevance and thereby relevance for promotion.
This has two effects, one on military planning, the other
on strategy-making.
First, because the Joint Staff has so much leverage, the
president loses the benefit of competing military options. This reality is on
full display today. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine is an
extraordinarily talented officer, with a remarkable feel for operational art
and an ability to orchestrate complex military operations seldom seen over the
past 20 years. The issue, however, is the need for truly distinct operational
plans. These should include a range of choices from a large-scale ground
deployment in southern Iran to the blockade policy now in effect. President
Trump has the right and responsibility to select between options: like any
commander in chief, he should be presented with a range of choices. These
choices are invariably better if they stem from the input of true specialists:
the four-star officers who have ascended to become the military services’
leaders.
Second, the Joint Staff, alongside the combatant commands
— the military organizations that conduct operations in different parts of the
world — have functionally replaced the diplomatic role that the State
Department’s regional bureaus should play. The result is an atrophied
diplomatic service that clings to aphorisms about engagement and apparent
Iranian pragmatism, a reflex that exists even in this administration. Indeed,
one can explain the U.S.-Iran negotiations in Islamabad principally through Vice
President JD Vance and Deputy National Security Adviser Andy Baker’s remaining
convinced that some sort of pragmatic alternative exists within Iran. Absent
the need to conduct day-to-day tangible diplomacy and confront the realities of
power, the State Department has atrophied, a result of the
post–Goldwater-Nichols system.
Yet in the current scenario, it is utterly irrelevant
that the professional head of the U.S. Army was sacked in the middle of a war.
Aside from the regrettable effect on morale of relieving a superb leader
without explanation, it has precisely no impact upon the planning and conduct
of military operations in the Middle East. This is not a tenable situation.
In the next budget cycle, Congress should strongly
consider major revisions to the Goldwater-Nichols system. Three elements are
crucial.
First, Congress should mandate that the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs is not the sole source of senior military advice to the commander
in chief, but one of several, primarily the service chiefs. This will produce a
competition of highly informed operational and, perhaps, strategic ideas to
offer the president, while also revitalizing the relevance of the service
chiefs’ billets.
Second, Congress should ensure that the services, not the
Joint Staff, have budgetary authority. Budgets should come from the services —
and responsibility should lie with the services to ensure that projects are
executed. There must, of course, be oversight and direction from the Pentagon’s
civilian officials. But the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force should
be both responsible for force design and accountable for failure.
Accountability is particularly in need as the military relearns the importance
of mass, incorporates AI and cyberwarfare, and reconsiders the relationship
between quality and quantity.
Third, Congress should create a statutory relationship
between the combatant commands and the State Department, inserting top-level
American diplomats into the realities of military planning. Even when American
flag officers are excellent warrior-diplomats, like Admiral Brad Cooper of
Central Command, they need diplomatic support. In turn, exposure to real front-line
political-military issues could improve State Department diplomatic and
operational culture.
Today’s system of high command is hobbled by a 1986
Congress’s blindness to the benefit of competing operational and strategic
ideas. Its four-decades-old devolution of power to central staff at the expense
of military service expertise is precisely the wrong paradigm for the new forms
of kinetic and asymmetric warfare that are unfolding today.
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