Too Many Advisers Spoil the Defense : Military: Civilian leaders need to hear from those actually responsible for readiness.

Waiting for the crucial approval from the White House for many of his policy nominations, Defense Secretary Les Aspin has little more than half of his team in place in the Pentagon. Consequently, he has had to resort to novel concepts such as his recently announced “Readiness Panel” to advise on major decisions he apparently cannot make and execute with his own chain of command.

Hastily created with no coordination from either military leaders or the Congress, this panel of retired generals and admirals is to advise Aspin on issues ranging from how to avoid “hollowness”--a concept coined in the late 1970s to describe a weakened military--to the impact of changes in the status of women and homosexuals on the armed forces.

Headed by Gen. Edward “Shy” Meyer (who as Army chief of staff in 1979 coined the phrase “hollowness”), this panel can provide the political cover Aspin needs by ably advising on near-term management decisions. But there are serious questions about the panel’s long-term effects. What Aspin has done is redefine one of the most critical elements of American civil-military relations: who is to render military advice to civilian authority. The potential consequences of his unstudied approach are tragic.

First, the panel’s creation fragments advice. The Goldwater-Nichols legislation of 1986 named the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the “principal military adviser to the President, the National Security Council and the secretary of defense.” Before that, the Joint Chiefs as a body advised civilian leaders. Each service chief was the principal adviser in his area, and the aggregate advice was, understandably, diluted and poorly integrated. So, unfortunately, were the combat efforts organized under this system, including Vietnam, Grenada and Lebanon.

But since the 1986 reform, Chairmen William Crowe and Colin Powell have effectively used the “principal adviser” role to integrate the efforts of the military services, both in building and maintaining readiness during peace and in employing forces during conflict, as demonstrated in the Gulf War and in Somalia.

Now, Aspin has established a second group of military leaders, albeit retired, on whom he will also rely for advice. Whether it is a “divide and conquer” gambit to facilitate further cuts in the budget or simply a hastily and poorly thought-through idea, the net result is a decided step backward for American civil-military relations, to a fragmented system for which the nation has already paid dearly in dollars and in blood.

The second reason this permanent panel is such a poor idea lies in the nature of readiness itself. Previous secretaries have asked for advice from councils of military retirees, but almost always in narrowly defined areas, such as nuclear targeting or the role of women in combat. There is, however, nothing narrow about military readiness. In fact, it is difficult to think of a more encompassing concept. Essentially, readiness is the measure of the essence our nation’s military capabilities.

As such, it has no simple definition. Each service measures it differently. Civilian analysts delight in crunching the inputs to military readiness--manpower, levels of equipment, spare parts--but readiness is much more than the sum of its inputs. It is a subjective measure of future, expected output; the commander’s estimate of the ability of his or her unit to execute successfully its assigned mission.

And that estimate cannot, and therefore should not, be made by anyone other than the commander involved, be it unified commander-in-chief or company commander, who has allocated resources and led the unit through its preparations month after month and knows intimately its capabilities. That such commanders, from Powell to the lowest platoon commander, are also morally responsible and legally accountable for the readiness of our forces should not be denigrated with contending military advice, no matter how wise.

Regardless of the political heat about “hollowness,” such advice should not be necessary, unless one doubts the integrity of the current uniformed leaders to tell it straight. If that is the case, the secretary of defense has a lot more to be concerned about than readiness.