Interagency military cooperation just the first step

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

BRUSSELS

In the middle of a covert operation ordered by President Carter to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran on April 24, 1980, military tanker aircraft landed on remote Iranian roads in the middle of the night to refuel U.S. helicopters as they flew from ships in the Persian Gulf toward Tehran, where radical students were keeping U.S. Embassy staff prisoner.

As every history student knows, Operation Eagle Claw was bungled when one of the helicopters landed on top of one of the tankers, destroying both aircraft. In the end, five airmen and three Marines died, five of their comrades were seriously injured and in total eight aircraft were lost.

The mission failed and the United States was humiliated.

One contributing factor to this disaster was the fact that the Army, Air Force and Navy used different radio frequencies to communicate with one another. Tragic events such as these led to the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. This act helped ensure that the military services waged war jointly, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a series of single, geographical Combatant Commands, rather than through the different and competing bureaucracies of each individual service. As writer Katherine Boo noted, the act “drained the military’s bureaucratic swamp.”

If the details of the Goldwater-Nichols Act are little known outside the Pentagon, their effects were on full display in the first Gulf War, the first U.S. conflict after the law’s enactment.

Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had complete freedom, as the war’s unified commander, to employ the services as hesaw fit. Together with his boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin L. Powell, the two Army men could fend off pressure from their own service, set the timing of the air war over the Air Force’s objections and deny the amphibious landing coveted by the Marines. Goldwater-Nichols’ accomplishment was to provide the ingredients for military victory in the Gulf and the supremacy of the U.S armed forces.

But since the end of the Cold War - and especially since Sept. 11, 2001 - the challenges the United States has to face have changed dramatically. Today, as the Iraq war has shown, it is not enough for the United States to win on the battlefield. It is not enough to have the biggest, best or even most effective military.

To win in places like Mosul, Mogadishu and Mazar-e-Sharif requires a broader set of capabilities beyond those the military can bring to bear. And it requires an effective interagency national security system, ensuring that all the elements of national power - military, diplomatic, economic - can be brought to bear in a unified fashion.

Yet as the United States struggles to come to grips with these new challenges, it is saddled with a system of government inadequate to the task.

As a new report by a nonpartisan commission states, the “U.S. national security system cannot adequately protect America, its interests and its citizens.”

Led by one of the architects of the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, James R. Locher III, the Project on National Security Reform has prepared 100 case studies of interagency operations since 1947 to show that - whoever wins the presidential election in November - considerable reform will be required in the U.S. government.

Supported by a who’s who of Washington’s national security establishment - including former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and several four-star generals - the report, “Ensuring Security in an Unpredictable World: The Urgent Need for National Security Reform,” makes for a harrowing read.

Several passages dissect the lack of interagency coordination in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Even when civilian agencies were capable of providing Provincial Reconstruction Teams (U.S. civil-military units) with representatives, they lacked the necessary funding and resources to adequately support their staff in the field.”

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