The Department of Defense was created in the immediate aftermath of World War II to fight and win America’s wars. It has evolved over time through mission creep and congressional action, driven by a philosophy of centralization that has added tangled layers of bureaucracy that negatively impact warfighter readiness.
The secretary of Defense appears aware of this — he has directed the bureaucracy to present him with “future-state organization charts” — but he lacks a guiding philosophy. A recent working paper from the American Enterprise Institute provides options to focus the reorganization, with a decentralizing ethos.
Here we focus on the locus of centralization, the office of the secretary of Defense, and on that office’s primary means of exercising centralized control, the Defense Agencies and Field Activities. These agencies are “intended to provide a common supply or service across more than one [Department of Defense] organization,” but instead they often perform overlapping work and impede the provision of supplies and services to warfighters. The secretary’s dual role of overseeing and executing tasks makes it nearly impossible for the organization to effectively manage itself.
At its core, the Defense Department is aligned with U.S. Code Title 10 tasks, or those that organize, train and equip. However, the president’s constitutional role is to fight our nation’s wars as the commander in chief — the department is simply not organized to do that. Our report provides three different sets of options for how to reorganize the Department of Defense.
The first option, called the “Power of Three, Organizing to Win Wars,” involves three broad changes. The first removes all of the defense agencies from the secretary’s office. The second change would increase the number of military services, from the current five to eight, by merging several of the functional combatant commands with existing defense agencies and other forces, resulting in three new military services focused on nuclear weapons, cyber and intelligence, and global logistics.
The final major change would be to alter the roles of the current three politically led military departments — the Army, Navy and Air Force — into outcome-based organizations focused on winning wars. The current departments would be eliminated and replaced with three others. First, there would be the Department of Strategic Forces, consisting of the Space Force and the three new services above. Second, the Department of Pacific Warfighting would consist of the Navy, Marine Corps and Indo-Pacific Command. Third, there would be the Department of All Other Warfighting, consisting of the Army and air services, along with the European Command and Central Command.
The second option, called the “Power of Boundaries,” would restructure the office of the secretary of Defense, the combatant commands and the military departments to clarify strategic priorities, reduce redundancies and create clear boundaries of responsibilities and authorities.
First, the geographic combatant commands would be reorganized around threats such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Homeland Defense, with each command responsible for planning and operations related to their specific threat. Next, the Joint Staff would be transformed into the Council of Combatant Commanders, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs serving as the Chairman of the Council. This council would coordinate force allocation and operational planning across commands. As part of this change, the Service Chiefs and Vice Chiefs would be eliminated, merging headquarters staff and service secretariat staff into unified headquarters under civilian service secretaries. This would reinforce civilian control and eliminate redundancies. Finally, the Space Force would be separated from the Department of the Air Force to form the Department of the Space Force, with the National Reconnaissance Office as a co-equal intelligence branch.
The third option, called the “Power of Core Function,” proposes a more modest initial step of refocusing and realigning defense-wide accounts on warfighter capabilities. First, the Defense Department would eliminate or transfer programs and activities that do not directly produce military capability, such as education, security assistance, humanitarian disaster response, environmental programs and non-combat-related medical research. Next, it would align common services, such as information technology, force protection, logistics and missile defense to the Army. Similarly, the national intelligence services would be moved to the Air Force. Finally, the existing innovation organizations would merge while functions such as finance and contract auditing would remain at the office of the secretary of Defense.
These reorganization-focused options, and other studies, address a set of problems that have long plagued our defense establishment, and are driven by our belief that we are in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime period of opportunity for reform. The leadership in the Pentagon, the White House and Congress can make changes now that will enable us to persevere and succeed, while avoiding the mistakes of the past. The status quo path is too dark for our leaders to fail to seize this moment.
Elaine McCusker is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She previously served as the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary of defense (comptroller). Todd Harrison is a senior fellow at AEI. He previously worked as a senior executive in the defense industry and as an officer in the Air Force Reserves. Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. He previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.