Defense, Department of. Created in 1949, the Department of Defense was an outgrowth of the
National Security Act of 1947, which had “unified” the armed services. The debate in Congress leading up to the 1947 legislation had its origins in the experiences of World War II, which, despite the overall success, had revealed numerous problems in command and control and the allocation of resources. Aiming to avoid similar situations in the future, President
Harry S. Truman recommended a War Department plan calling for a highly centralized and closely unified structure, including a separate air force, under a single secretary of defense. The navy worried that such a setup would threaten the future of naval aviation and the independence of the Marine Corps, and urged that instead of unification, attention be given to improving high‐level policy coordination, with Britain's Committee of Imperial Defence serving as the model.
The resulting compromise, enshrined in the National Security Act of 1947, borrowed from both sides. Congress wanted the savings promised by unification, but it was afraid that an overly centralized system would produce a “Prussian‐style general staff,” reducing congressional and civilian control over the military. In enacting legislation, it leaned more toward the navy concept, with emphasis on a loosely unified defense establishment, a secretary of defense with limited authority, and new coordinating machinery, including a
National Security Council to advise the president on policy questions, a
Central Intelligence Agency for the coordination of intelligence gathering and analysis, and a National Security Resources Board to plan the management of resources.
The unique feature of the act was its handling of service unification. In the preamble to the law, Congress stated that its purpose was to unify the services but “not to merge them.” Its vehicle was a hybrid organization it called the National Military Establishment (NME). Although the secretary of defense was designated the NME's senior presiding official, he exercised only “general direction, authority, and control” over the military services, which retained the status of “individual executive departments,” but without cabinet status. The Navy Department remained the same, while the War Department became the Department of the Army. To placate airpower advocates, the act established a new Department of the Air Force, organized from what had been the Army Air Forces. As part of the NME, the act gave statutory standing to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which had operated without a formal charter since their creation in 1942; and it established a Munitions Board for interservice coordination of logistical planning, a Research and Development Board to do the same in the areas of science and technology, and a senior‐level War Council (renamed the Armed Forces Policy Council in 1949) to help coordinate overall NME policy.
Early Development.
The first secretary of defense,
James Forrestal (1947–49), took office on 17 September 1947. For staff support he had but three special assistants whose statutory authority was unclear. As secretary of the navy during the unification debate, Forrestal had been a reluctant convert to service unification and had assured Congress that there would be no need for a large bureaucracy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Once installed in his new job, he adopted a go‐slow approach—“evolution, not revolution”—toward integrating service activities, but did not receive what he considered sufficient support or cooperation from within
the Pentagon. An added handicap was President Truman's practice of setting rigid budget ceilings, an untoward consequence of which was to encourage interservice competition and feuding over the allocation of funds. At critical conferences in 1948—Key West in March and Newport in August—Forrestal tried to convince the services, especially the navy and the air force, to set aside their differences and work together. But he found it impossible to overcome their resistance with reason and persuasion.
Forrestal eventually concluded that the secretary's powers and staff support needed legislative strengthening. His successor,
Louis Johnson (1949–50), believed he already had the power and authority he needed, but acquired even more when in August 1949 Congress amended the National Security Act. The 1949 amendments converted the NME into a full‐scale executive department, the Department of Defense (DoD), and designated the secretary of defense as “the principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to the Department of Defense.” The services were downgraded to the status of “military departments,” but with the proviso that they remain “separately administered,” and the qualification of “general” to describe the secretary's powers and authority was dropped. The secretary also acquired a deputy (previously an undersecretary deriving from special legislation enacted in April 1949) and the special assistants became assistant secretaries of defense, one of whom was designated comptroller, while a nonvoting chairman was added to the Joint Chiefs. The secretary of defense thus emerged as a true executive, not the
primus inter pares (first among equals) he had been under the original law. With unencumbered powers and a strengthened staff, he became the focal point of an increasingly centralized administrative system.
From this point on, challenges to the secretary's authority became rarer, but did not cease immediately. The most serious assault occurred in the summer and autumn of 1949 during the “Revolt of the Admirals,” in which senior navy officers, reeling from Johnson's economy measures and imposition of authority, openly attacked the wisdom and impact of service unification and the growing reliance in U.S. defense policy on air‐atomic power as the country's first line of defense. But following the across‐the‐board military buildup precipitated by the outbreak of the
Korean War in June 1950, the stresses and strains on interservice relations eased as money for defense became more plentiful.
The 1953 and 1958 Reorganizations.
The Korean War revealed that true unification still had far to go. As defense spending surged, jumping from approximately $14 billion in fiscal year (FY) 1950 to $49 billion in FY 1953, it put growing pressure on the secretary to effect sound departmental policies. A common complaint in Congress was that the services continued to mismanage and squander resources while unnecessarily duplicating functions. In November 1952, the outgoing secretary of defense, Robert A. Lovett (1951–53), sent President Truman a detailed letter pointing out flaws in the existing setup. Lovett thought the secretary should have more explicit authority over the services; a military staff of his own to augment the Joint Chiefs; and greater flexibility to deal with the problems of supply and logistics.
Lovett was only one of many who felt that defense organization could be improved, and with the change of administrations in January 1953, reforms came quickly. As a first step, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower named a committee headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller to review DoD's organizational needs. Eisenhower had long favored a more closely unified defense establishment, and it was with this goal in mind that the Rockefeller Committee framed its findings. Guided by the committee's report, Lovett's letter, and his own instincts, Eisenhower issued an executive order, Reorganization Plan No. 6, to provide a “quick fix” that avoided the need for legislation. Implemented in April 1953, the reorganization eliminated the Munitions Board and the Research and Development Board, transferring their functions to the secretary of defense. It also created six additional assistant secretaries of defense and a general counsel, and empowered the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to manage the Joint Staff (the JCS bureaucracy). Eisenhower had wanted to go further, especially in strengthening the powers of the JCS chairman, but his soundings among members of Congress convinced him that the time was not yet ripe.
In 1958, after the Soviet success in launching the first space satellite, Sputnik, and amid chronic interservice bickering and competition over the U.S. guided missile program, Eisenhower sent Congress additional proposals for defense reform, which this time would require legislative authority. Arguing that “separate ground, sea, and air warfare is gone forever,” Eisenhower asked for further changes that he hoped would dampen interservice rivalry, blend their efforts more efficiently and effectively, and streamline command and control mechanisms to meet the new demands of the atomic era. Criticism of the proposed changes came mostly from the navy, fearing more loss of autonomy, and from its supporters in Congress, led by Representative
Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. But the predominant sentiment among legislators favored the more centralized and unified defense establishment the president wanted.
The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 amended the 1947 law by taking the unification process about as far as it could go without abandoning the concept of individual military services. The main changes were a significant clarification of the secretary's authority, including the power to transfer, reassign, abolish, and consolidate service functions; the addition of a new senior official, the director of defense research and engineering (DDR&E), to oversee research and development matters; a new chain of command, running from the president through the secretary of defense to the unified field commanders, thus bypassing the service secretaries; and increased authority for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who could now participate as an equal in their deliberations. Instead of being separately administered as in the past, the military departments were to be “separately organized”—a gesture toward preserving service autonomy but a distinct departure from the days when the departments had functioned as sovereign entities. Though the 1949 amendments had already largely settled the matter of the secretary's authority, the 1958 reorganization removed any lingering doubt and made it possible to consolidate and centralize activities with an unimpeded mandate.
McNamara's Impact.
The first secretary of defense to make full use of the increased powers bestowed by the 1958 reorganization was
Robert S. McNamara (1961–68). A former president of the Ford Motor Company, McNamara entered office with a formidable background in business techniques that emphasized statistical analysis and close program management. His advent would, as it turned out, usher in some of the most far‐reaching changes the DoD had yet experienced, earning him both high praise and summary condemnation. His initial task was to fulfill President Kennedy's campaign promise of overcoming purported inadequacies in the country's defenses—weakened conventional forces owing to an overreliance on nuclear weapons in the 1950s, and a dangerous “missile gap” in which preliminary evidence suggested that the Soviet Union was outproducing the United States in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Further intelligence confirmed that missile gap worries were unfounded, but as a precaution against expected Soviet increases, McNamara set in motion a strategic buildup, which by the end of his tenure encompassed a triad of strategic forces consisting of 1,054 ICBM launchers, a fluctuating number of long‐range bombers, and 41 fleet ballistic missile submarines—the basic structure of the strategic deterrent until the 1980s.
Though Kennedy usually gave McNamara a free hand running the department, it was with the understanding that improved efficiency and toughened cost controls would offset much of the increase in expenditures for new missiles and other weapons systems. Defense spending at the outset of the 1960s consumed nearly 10 percent of the gross national product, and it was not Kennedy's intention that it should get any larger. Accordingly, McNamara introduced a variety of reforms, including mission‐oriented budgeting with five‐year expenditure projections, the use of “systems analysis” techniques that relied on computer‐driven models to evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of weapons, and a highly publicized cost reduction program. In addition, he expanded the practice, begun in the 1950s, of consolidating key functions by creating new DoD‐wide agencies for supply, intelligence, and contract auditing. Not all of McNamara's unification measures turned out as he planned, however. A case in point was his abortive effort to cut aircraft procurement costs by developing a single fighter‐bomber, the TFX (F‐111), for both the air force and the navy. But compared with previous secretaries of defense, he achieved an unprecedented degree of centralized civilian control.
Under McNamara, Defense also acquired a more prominent role in foreign affairs through its “little State Department,” the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), headed in the 1960s by a succession of able assistant secretaries, including
Paul H. Nitze, John McNaughton, and Paul Warnke. During a decade dominated by volatile national security issues—the Berlin Wall Crisis, the
Cuban Missile Crisis, the Dominican Republic, nuclear strategy, arms control, and Vietnam—McNamara and ISA were a conspicuous and influential part of the response. One of McNamara's most impressive accomplishments in foreign affairs was to convince
NATO to reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons and to develop a more balanced defense posture known as “flexible response.” But his successes with NATO contrasted sharply with the debacle in Southeast Asia. Secretaries of defense had customarily stayed out of the operational side of military affairs, leaving them to the professionals, but McNamara inserted himself directly into many of the details of running the
Vietnam War. Initially a strong proponent of American involvement in Vietnam, he gradually came to have doubts and left office counseling stepped‐up efforts at negotiations and disengagement.
Post‐McNamara Changes.
After McNamara came a reaction to centralized authority. Most of the managerial and budgeting techniques he had pioneered more or less survived, but his use of civilians in roles traditionally reserved for military professionals had aroused too much resentment among the services and too much skepticism in Congress for his successors to do likewise. Heeding the critics, President Nixon appointed a Blue Ribbon Defense Panel to review the department's procedures. The panel's report of July 1970 condemned the McNamara style of highly centralized decision making as “inherently inadequate to manage the spectrum of activities required of the Department of Defense,” and urged that the military departments be restored to greater authority and responsibility. Few formal changes actually resulted, but in deference to the services' sensitivities, Secretary of Defense
Melvin Laird (1969–73) took steps to reinvolve the military in key decisions, notably budget planning, and to reduce the high profile that ISA and systems analysis experts had enjoyed in McNamara's time.
Meanwhile, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War had seriously eroded the military's prestige and credibility, and as the war wound down, cutbacks in military spending followed, leaving what some considered a “hollow” and demoralized force more in need of unified direction than at any time since the late 1940s. At Laird's suggestion, Congress in 1972 authorized a second deputy secretary of defense, though the post remained vacant until 1975. The role of the deputy had traditionally been that of the secretary's “alter ego” (Forrestal's concept), and having two in that job proved awkward and redundant. In 1977, in an effort to streamline functions, Congress abolished the second deputy slot and created two new under secretaries with broad responsibilities—one for policy, to supervise such tasks as strategic planning, military assistance, and international security affairs; and a second for research and engineering. President Carter wanted to go further and initiated a major defense organization study, completed in 1980, which recommended strengthening the role of the Joint Chiefs and upgrading the management responsibilities of the service secretaries. But after Carter lost the 1980 election, the study was largely forgotten.
The Goldwater‐Nichols Reforms of 1986.
By the mid‐1980s, organizational reform of the Defense Department was again a topic of intense discussion, with the initiative this time coming from Congress rather than the executive. President
Ronald Reagan was determined to reverse what he considered a decade of neglect of the armed forces, but the sustained buildup he launched in 1981 also gave rise to congressional criticism of waste, abuse, and cost overruns. Endeavoring to ease congressional anxieties, the administration in 1982 reluctantly accepted legislation creating an inspector general for the Defense Department. Reagan and Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger (1981–87) opposed more extensive organizational change and tried to dissuade Congress from acting precipitously by forming an advisory commission on defense management headed by David Packard, a former deputy secretary of defense. One of the commission's main findings was that procurement procedures needed a drastic overhaul, starting with appointment of a high‐level procurement “czar.” Congress needed little nudging, and in the summer of 1986 it created the post of under secretary for acquisition, later giving it the same pay grade as the deputy secretary and potentially sweeping authority over nearly all facets of the procurement process.
More extensive reforms followed with the passage of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, a bipartisan measure spearheaded by Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative William Nichols. The goal of the
Goldwater‐Nichols Act was to revitalize the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose stature and effectiveness had diminished steadily over the past several decades. In an attempt to reverse this trend, the law gave the JCS chairman added advisory powers and administrative authority over the Joint Staff; established a vice chairman to help oversee JCS business; and assigned more responsibility to the combatant (i.e., unified) commands. The idea was to encourage more “jointness” among the services, not just in Washington but in the field and at the various service schools, and in so doing, presumably, to improve planning and combat readiness. Although the performance of U.S. forces in
the Persian Gulf War (1991) seemed to bear out the soundness of the new emphasis on joint doctrine, subsequent misadventures in Somalia and command and control problems in the Middle East suggested a need for further refinements.
For the Department of Defense, the major challenge by the 1990s was to readjust to an international environment in which the dangers of Soviet military power no longer overshadowed all other security problems. The ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought respite from the continuous tensions of the previous four decades, but also increased pressure from Congress and the public to curb military spending. This meant thinking differently about defense needs, and, as a congressional commission on military roles and missions pointed out in May 1995, more sharing of service responsibilities. In these circumstances, the demands on the secretary of defense to provide unified strategic and programmatic guidance were, if anything, apt to increase. Centralization of authority around the secretary of defense, though often unpopular with the services, had grown to be a practical necessity.
[See also
Cold War;
Defense Reorganization Acts;
Rivalry, Interservice;
World War II: Postwar Impact.]
Bibliography
Steven L. Rearden , History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Formative Years, 1947–1950, 1984.
Robert J. Art, Vincent Davis, and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Reorganizing America's Defense, 1985.
Doris M. Condit , History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Test of War, 1950–1953, 1988.
James A. Blackwell, Jr., and Barry M. Blechman, eds., Making Defense Reform Work, 1990.
Roger Trask and and Alfred Goldberg , The Department of Defense, 1947–1997, 1997.
Robert J. Watson , History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: Into the Missile Age, 1956–1961, 1997.
Steven L. Rearden
