Yes Men

By Ankush

Andrew Bacevich takes Harry Reid's claim about General Pace's (quite obvious) incompetence one step further.  Rather than continuing to confirm people for the position of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "A better idea might be to abolish the position of JCS chairman altogether -- and the entire JCS system along with it."

History will render this judgment of Pace, who succeeded General Richard B Myers as chairman in September 2005: As U. S. forces became mired ever more deeply in an unwinnable war, Pace remained a passive bystander, a witness to a catastrophe that he was slow to comprehend and did little to forestall. If the position of JCS chair had simply remained vacant for the past two years, it is difficult to see how the American military would be in worse shape today.

Softening history's verdict will be this fact: Long before Pace arrived on the scene the JCS had established a well-deserved reputation as one of the most ineffective institutions in Washington. Dissatisfaction with the Joint Chiefs dates virtually from the moment in 1947 when Congress passed the legislation creating it. Trying to fix the JCS soon became a cottage industry. The widespread unhappiness with Pace's performance, culminating in his de facto firing, affirms that these various reforms have failed.

Bacevich makes a pretty compelling argument that's well worth a read.  I would just add that when you have organizations that are in conflict with one another -- as the White House and the military frequently are -- there's often an impulse to try to consolidate functions or to bridge gaps with new positions or offices.  Sometimes the problem is that the response produces an ineffective, extra layer of bureaucracy.  But other times the response is problematic because the tension was a good thing.  The JCS, as Bacevich shows, has frequently seen people who combine the worst of all possible traits: While providing ostensibly independent expertise, they typically end up being coopted by the White House, telling them what they want to hear, and providing them with cover for whatever plan -- however disastrous -- they already had.  Obviously, the military is subject to civilian command, but considering that it should generally be difficult to launch a war in the first place, and that wars frequently become intensely politicized affairs, it doesn't seem like a particularly terrible thing for there to be some greater institutional space between the White House and the military.