Getting Their Money’s Worth

The most striking thing about the growing campaign to overhaul the inner workings of the Defense Department is that it’s led by some of the Pentagon’s staunchest friends. Their major beef is not that the country is spending too much on national defense, although some think it is, but that the American people aren’t getting their money’s worth.

As Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) notes, the question involves more than dollars and cents. Bluntly dismissing Administration defenses of the status quo, he says, “There will be those who say the system ‘ain’t broke, so don’t fix it.’ However, it is broke and we need to fix it. . . . If we have to fight tomorrow, these problems will cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Even worse, they may cause us to lose the fight.”

Proposals for reforming the military command and management structure have been a recurring theme, especially in the House, ever since Gen. David Jones, a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called attention in 1982 to defects in the present system. Some improvements have been made. But the services and the huge Pentagon bureaucracy resist any meaningful change in the status quo, and the Reagan Administration has shown no interest in giving them a nudge.

The Senate Armed Services Committee opened hearings this week on a staff report, two years in the making, which charges that the Pentagon suffers from confused organization, poor management and destructive interservice rivalries.

The study recommends, among other things, that the Joint Chiefs be abolished and replaced by a new Joint Military Advisory Committee with greater independence from the individual services. The staff report also proposes that unified commanders be given more authority over their single-service subordinates.

Reforming the Pentagon’s command and management structure is an uphill battle, but the odds have dramatically improved now that the most powerful figures on the Senate Armed Services Committee have joined the fight.

Committee Chairman Goldwater and Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, the ranking Democrat, are convinced that the military Establishment is in urgent need of reform, and they are leading a bipartisan effort to enact the necessary legislation within the next year.

Neither can be written off as a Johnny-one-note critic of the military. Throughout his long career in politics, Goldwater has been an untiring advocate of a strong military Establishment. Nunn, Congress’ most respected authority on defense questions, has been critical of Pentagon operations at times but always within a framework of concern for national security.

As the system works now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff is composed of a chairman and the top-ranking officers of the four services. The charge is that the service chiefs’ parochial loyalties get in the way of their obligation to make decisions on strategy, force structures and weapons choices in the broader national interest.

Nunn offers an intriguing example of the real-life aberrations of the present system: An Army commander ashore in Grenada found himself unable to communicate directly with naval units offshore; he had to use his personal telephone credit card to call stateside commanders for naval support.

The critics do not necessarily have the right answers to the problem. But, as Nunn and Goldwater are saying, the issue is too important to continue sweeping under the rug. They deserve support from those who truly want an effective defense Establishment--as distinct from those who merely want to protect career interests and defense contract profits.