Document created: 20 August 02
Air & Space Power Journal - Fall 2002

Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon by James R. Locher III. Texas A&M University Press (http://www. tamu.edu/upress), John H. Lindsey Building, Lewis Street, 4354 TAMU, College Station, Texas 77843, 2002, 544 pages, $34.95 (hardcover).

The people who wear their nation’s uniform hold a common view that civilians should stay out of the military’s business. But what if internal organizational deformities prevent the military from conducting its business properly? Shouldn’t civilians then intervene? After all, the Constitution does grant Congress the authority to make rules for the government and regulation of the armed forces. If the military is broken, does not Congress have an obligation to intervene—even against strong Pentagon objection?

This is exactly what Congress did when it passed the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 over the politically dead bodies of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and much of the military’s senior leadership. The Pentagon’s performance in Vietnam and its subsequent bungled operations in Iran, Lebanon, and Grenada revealed the persistence of interservice rivalries that sapped American military effectiveness, even against the backdrop of dramatically heightened US defense spending in the 1980s. 

Weinberger was part of the problem because he stubbornly refused to acknowledge that there was a problem. He believed that more money was the only thing the Pentagon needed, and he regarded calls for organizational reform as implicit criticism of his stewardship of the Defense Department. He eventually became his own worst enemy, driving congressional fence-sitters into the proreform ranks.

Ironically, the almost five-year campaign to strengthen the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the unified commanders at the expense of the service chiefs, and to institutionalize “jointness” within the Pentagon began in February 1982, when Gen David Jones, JCS chairman, appealed to the House Armed Services Committee to reform the JCS itself. The joint chiefs had become a committee system incapable of providing timely and useful mili-tary advice to civilian authorities or of maximizing operational effectiveness in the field. 

Jones was not alone. By the early 1980s, a growing number of thoughtful military officers and Defense Department officials, including former secretaries of defense James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, had come not only to regard the system as broken but also to understand that it could not be fixed except by congressional intervention. Just as significantly, key conservative members of the House and Senate, most notably Barry Goldwater, Sam Nunn, and Bill Nichols, were reaching the same conclusion.

How this informal alliance of proreformers on both sides of the Potomac eventually prevailed over powerful antireform forces is the subject of James Locher’s masterful narrative of the intricate history of Goldwater-Nichols. As the key staffer selected by Goldwater and Nunn to perform the research and craft the legislation for defense reorganization, Locher enjoyed an extraordinary vantage point from which to observe the interplay of politics and ideas that produced Goldwater-Nichols. Victory on the Potomac is not just a great read. It is a cornucopia of insights into the federal legislative process, civil-military relations, political coalition building, bureaucratic warfare, and the relationship of personality to political success. (For example, if the obstinate Weinberger went out of his way to alienate potential recruits in the fight against reorganization, Barry “Mr. Conservative” Goldwater provided indispensable political cover for other Republicans to oppose the Reagan administration on the issue.) The book is equally a definitive case study of the most important and successful American defense legislation of the twentieth century.

Victory on the Potomac is probably the best informed book we are ever going to get on this critical chapter in the history of US military policy. As such, it is must reading for military professionals and civilian defense-policy experts alike.

Dr. Jeffrey Record
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.