Separate Definitions Hobble 'Joint' Forces
t a recent policy seminar in Washington, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., la-mented the military services' lack of progress in improving their ability to operate as a synergistic whole. Lieberman, one of the most respected members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he did not see "a real joint process that does trade-off analysis and makes decisions among major service weapons that perform identical or overlapping combat functions." The committee of senior military officers created to perform this function, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, is simply "not doing the job," he added.
How can such a perception exist when senior military officers and other defense officials routinely say that joint forces will fight all future wars? Perhaps senior members of Congress and their counterparts at the Pentagon are working from different definitions of the term "joint."
Joint operations and joint forces are nothing new, but the need to squeeze more combat power from better integrated forces and get more leverage from an increasingly strained Defense budget have led senior military leaders and members of Congress to focus more on the promise of "jointness." The Pentagon recently renamed the Atlantic Command in Norfolk, Va., the Joint Forces Command and gave it responsibility for writing doctrine, developing requirements and conducting experiments for joint operations. This follows earlier steps increasing the size of the Joint Staff and its scope of responsibility to include program and budget matters that had been the domain of the military services. But true progress toward providing the nation with integrated capabilities has been modest at best.
The reason may be the Pentagon's own definition of "joint." In its publication defining military terms, the Pentagon describes "joint" as connoting "activities, operations, organizations, etc., in which elements of more than one service of the same nation participate." Accordingly, joint forces contain elements of two or more services operating under a single commander, and joint doctrine establishes principles that guide two or more services coordinating operations toward a common objective. While Lieberman clearly believes "joint" to include efforts to design and integrate the basic structure of the military services, the services define "joint" more narrowly as efforts that merely facilitate the coordination of forces.
The services have statutory responsibilities for raising, training, maintaining and administering their own forces. They broadly interpret this to mean they have the principal voice in defining the forces necessary for executing the national military strategy. Although national security and military strategy inform the services about how many Army divisions, Navy carrier battle groups and Air Force fighter wings they will have, the services determine how these formations are structured, equipped, trained and manned.
It should be no surprise, then, that military leaders are less than enthusiastic about pursuing joint solutions that may come at the expense of their own services. There is no guarantee they will scrutinize how their forces coordinate and fit with those of others services, the degree of overlap, or how changes in one force might yield an overall increase in effectiveness. Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented that when he was in charge of developing the overall Navy program he did so with virtually no knowledge of Army and Air Force systems that might have changed the Navy's operational concepts and investment priorities.
When it codified the function of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, known at the Pentagon as the JROC, Congress expected it to examine the balance and mix of forces across the services, to analyze which mixes provided the best capability for meeting established missions, and to suggest to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs "alternative programs and budgets." Such an undertaking would have inserted the chairman, the JROC and the Joint Chiefs into the unfamiliar terrain of program development, where the services have long roamed unchallenged.
But as Lieberman has noted, the definition of "joint" remains narrow. Instead of an effort to examine how the services should be structured and how they might best work together, "joint" has remained largely limited to studying the divisions among them. Although there have been efforts to determine whether the performance parameters of certain weapons systems can be redefined to allow them to operate together effectively, the current focus of jointness remains principally on systems providing communications, intelligence, logistics or medical support. Such capabilities are clearly important, but they lie far from the heart of any service's identity or core warfighting capability.
Those in the Pentagon who work on joint issues believe the current process is a vast improvement over past practices. And they are correct. Though the record is modest to date, the joint requirements and program oversight process has been useful in strengthening the connections between the services and enhancing understanding among them.
Nevertheless, redundancies remain because current efforts at jointness do not focus on them. The danger for the Pentagon is that congressional leaders clearly have a larger definition of "joint" in mind. If Pentagon leaders continue to avoid the larger joint issues by clinging to their limited definition of the term, they run the risk of having it redefined for them.
Col. M. Thomas Davis retired as the Army Chief of Staff's chief of program development in 1997. He is the author of Managing Defense After the Cold War (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 1997) and is directing a study of PPBS for Business Executives for National Security.