Congress mandated a new study of the military services’ “roles and missions” in the 2008 defense budget, and in the past few weeks, military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon have started the process. They hope to finish in time that the report might be useful to the transition team after the presidential election. According to Reps. Ike Skelton and Duncan Hunter (who sponsored the bipartisan study provision), the idea is to “identify the services’ core competencies, discover the missions going unaddressed, and examine possible duplication of effort among the branches.” As CongressDaily points out,

Critics have complained that vast sums of money are wasted due to the military operating four air forces, two land armies and overlapping intelligence and space programs.

Sounds like a reasonable point. And most of the (limited) commentary that I have seen about the study worries that the rapid timetable or entrenched political interests will prevent the study from doing its job and saving money “left on the table” in the defense budget (for example, here). The presumption is that a more centralized military organization — more “jointness” in military parlance — is a good idea. The danger, in this view, is that the military services each want to preserve “parochial stovepipes;” the implied solution is that Defense Department civilians rather than the service staffs should drive the study project.

Sometimes it’s a good thing that few studies or even “blue-ribbon panels” have any effect on the real policy environment. I would be upset if this study were likely to narrow America’s strategic options and capabilities. Or maybe I should take solace in the Congressional direction to eliminate “unnecessary” duplication, perhaps implying that Congress understands that not all duplication is bad. But I’m afraid that “jointness” is so ingrained in the modern military (and among civilian DoD leaders) that the baseline assumptions are that all competition and interservice rivalry should be stamped out.

Triggering a “roles and missions” debate every once in a while is a good idea: the services should have to justify their activities and think creatively about how they can contribute to U.S. national security. The last official discussion along these lines was a 1994 Roles and Missions Commission that released a report called Directions for Defense. Unfortunately, that report ended up ducking important debates, simply endorsing the trend towards jointness begun with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act — like endorsing motherhood and apple pie in contemporary American defense politics. The real threat in a roles and missions debate is that it will lead to collusion, a quiet agreement not to make waves, or an open endorsement of a more planned approach to defense management that assumes that ”collaboration” must be good. A roles and missions study might help create set-asides, allocating certain capabilities and skills to certain services.

In truth, it is the competitive process that stimulates creative thinking and innovation. Americans understand that set-asides lead to “good-enough” solutions rather than striving for the best performance. Duplication of capabilities gives the services a chance to propose different operational concepts, allows defense policy-makers (and the services themselves) to learn from a variety of experience what works and what doesn’t, and offers a cushion of capability if for some reason a particular weapon system or unit misses its performance goals. Facing uncertainty about threats, opportunities, mission parameters, best practices, and almost everything else about the changing strategic environment, equipment duplication seems like one of the least of our worries.  What we want is to encourage experimentation based on a couple of different organizational cultures and strategic philosophies that offer options to policy-makers.

Of course, what I’m describing is the general American preference for competition.  We don’t want a clear plan in the United States that would allocate cereal-making to General Mills (eliminating the “duplicative” efforts of Kellog’s and Post). We don’t want a single candidate on the ballot in elections. We like debate.

The goal of defense management should not be to “streamline” so much as to spur serious thinking about how to achieve American goals. We should not have roles and missions debates that allocate particular roles to particular services. Instead, we should have debates among the services in which each offers a proposal for how to solve the same problem.

Of course we don’t want the services to truly hate each other, and we have made some important progress over the past few years in improving operational cooperation.  No one favors communications foul-ups or fratricide among our forces deployed in the field. The services all understand that they are on the same side (our side, the American side). Some interservice joint training is a good idea. Other steps to improve joint operations make sense. But that doesn’t mean we need a new emphasis on joint planning and defense management.

I know it’s heresy to remember the benefits of interservice rivalry. Goldwater-Nichols and jointness are so popular now that in addition to the roles and missions study, Washington is atwitter with proposals to expand jointness beyond the military to include other parts of the U.S. foreign affairs effort (e.g., to the State Department or even to Agriculture and Energy and Commerce and the other components of Provincial Reconstruction Teams).

Harvey Sapolsky wrote a short, clear column about the benefits of interservice competition a few years back for Joint Forces Quarterly.  Now would be a good time to resurface those ideas. He, Caitlin Talmadge, and I explore these ideas in much greater length in our forthcoming book, U.S. Defense Politics: The Origin of National Security Policies.  The book won’t be out until fall, but I hope that someone will read it then…

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