Joint Chiefs Of Staff Essay

The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council (NSC), formally designating several military members to provide direct advice to the president. The newly-created Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) and the separate Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force were the original statutory members, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were represented by the SECDEF to ensure foreign policies were consistent with military capabilities. Since 1947, the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has evolved, and they have periodically held executive authority over theater or area commanders in chief (CINC), but they have consistently functioned as the managers of each of their services separately. The issue of their role within the NSC was resolved in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act, which clearly designated the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) as the principle military advisor to the President, and removed the Chiefs from the chain of command of combatant forces. Arguably the biggest impact of the Goldwater-Nichols Act was to identify the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the leader among equals, representing the service chiefs and combatant

In 1972 Morton Halperin lamented the substantially reduced influence of the military given the limited access the Joint Chiefs had to the President and over reliance on the SECDEF. He cited the need to “press upon the Joint Chiefs to transcend service biases and come up with agreed positions based on a unified perspective.” By the early 1980s, there was a growing movement to reform the JCS system, led by the sitting chairman, Gen. David Jones. US military operations in Grenada and Lebanon in 1983 brought the endemic and longstanding operational ineffectiveness driven by service parochialism into relief, and helped drive the impetus for bi-partisan legislative