Pentagon’s Constant War--for Turf : Service Rivalries Gum the Works and Must Be Curbed

Many think of the Pentagon in stark stereotypes. There are those who think that the institution can do no right; it’s filled with professional killers who, caring nothing about the value of the tax dollar, want only to build more costly toys. Others see a corps of dedicated professionals with highly honed skills, ceaselessly working to preserve the peace and keep the communists from our door.

If you want to understand the Pentagon, let me urge you to forget both of those stereotypes. If you want to think in terms of a stereotype, let me suggest the image of the turf-conscious bureaucrat.

A couple of stories illustrate the point.

One of the high priorities of the American defense effort is to cover the sea passages on either side of Iceland where whole fleets of Soviet submarines would pass in wartime. Despite repeated efforts by Adm. Harry Train, the Navy commander of our Atlantic fleet during the 1970s, the Air Force refused to station its newest fighter, the F-15, in Iceland. Why? Train was told that the Air Force couldn’t send its newest fighters to help the Navy when other Air Force units hadn’t yet gotten the F-15. The question wasn’t “What’s the priority job?” It was “How can I best satisfy my group of bureaucrats?”

The Navy isn’t all innocence. Train has testified frankly and publicly in retirement that he “intimidated” (his word) naval officers working in joint, all-service jobs to make sure they served the Navy’s interest. The admiral testified that he learned that this was accepted practice when he was in a joint-service assignment and was on the receiving end of the intimidation.

Another retired admiral, Thor Hansen, testified that he worked on a project for the defense secretary that could have assigned Air Force B-52s to mine sea lanes in wartime. The Navy made clear to Hansen that it did not look favorably on his helping the Air Force get a piece of Navy turf.

In sum, what you have is Navy, Air Force and Army bureaucrats fighting to protect Navy, Air Force and Army turf. I am not suggesting that smart, savvy officers enjoy giving U.S. national security interests the brush and live for no other goal. Nonsense. Many officers--more often retired ones--complain bitterly to me about the “system.” Adms. Train and Hansen are among them. But smart, savvy young officers want to gain promotions and become admirals--and they learn, albeit reluctantly, that you don’t become an admiral by helping the Air Force.

When Adm. Elmo Zumwalt was chief of naval operations, he summed it up caustically but graphically. After pinning shoulder boards on the first woman to be made an admiral, Zumwalt gave her a kiss on the cheek. A reporter observed that Zumwalt probably never thought that he’d be kissing an admiral. Without so much as a pause, Zumwalt said, “I’ve been kissing admirals all my life. How do you think I got here?”

But what we need is a little less kissing of admirals and a little more concern for the national interest. We can get it.

Last November the House passed a bill attacking the part of the problem that lies with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This week the House will vote on legislation intended to break down some of the bureaucratic barriers to good decision-making in other corridors of the Defense Department. The Senate passed such a bill on May 7. The bills aren’t identical, but they both aim to give more power to the men and women who would have to fight any future war.

For example, both the Senate and the House bills would beef up the authority of the “unified” commanders--those who are supposed to meld together the forces of the four services into a working operation but who often find the services setting off little bombs under them.

It isn’t commonly known, but the chiefs of the services are not responsible for fighting wars. They don’t direct operations. Rather, it’s the unified commanders--like the commander-in-chief Europe and the commander-in-chief Pacific--who would actually have to direct forces to fight and win a war.

The service chiefs do, however, throw a lot of weight around, especially when turf is threatened. The House bill would increase the authority of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the one member without a built-in parochial bias, to overcome turf considerations.

How do you do this? By changing the bureaucratic power structure. For example, the House bill would give the unified commanders their own operations budgets--the power of the purse that they now lack. It also would give them full command over the forces under them, so that subordinates could not go whining to their services. It would create a career force of officers in each service who would specialize in planning joint combat operations--and whose promotions and assignments would be protected from retaliation by parochial service personnel offices.

Six of the seven living former secretaries of defense have said publicly that the Pentagon decision-making process badly needs reform. Regrettably, the incumbent has opposed reform efforts for years. Under mounting public pressure, Caspar W. Weinberger recently announced a Paul-like conversion, the sincerity of which remains to be seen. Meanwhile, he must be considered a major bureaucratic impediment that reform efforts must hurdle.