The chain of command--Obama edition

Dean Barnett:

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While everyone has focused on the first part of the statement – Obama’s “absolute commitment” to defeat – I want to devote a little attention to the second part, the mechanism whereby Obama will make that defeat a reality. In Obama’s telling, he will call in his Joint Chiefs of Staff and re-jigger their priorities.

I know Obama is a student of military matters and intellectually voracious, so it is thus rather stunning that he would betray such ignorance regarding the way the military actually functions. In truth, the Joint Chiefs are not part of the chain of command. Indeed, they are specifically by statute not part of the chain of command but instead serve solely in an advisory capacity to the president.

Surely Obama knows this. Obviously he wouldn’t be seeking the role of Commander-in-Chief without knowing how the job is done. So what follows will be familiar to him, but may be enlightening to the media types who to date have overlooked yet another Obama misstatement.

In 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols act passed congress, and it reorganized the way the military functions. Its prime goal regarding the Joint Chiefs was to cut down on inter-service rivalries. To give you the hyper-condensed Reader’s Digest version of things (which will still obviously put you several leagues ahead of presumptive-nominee Obama), the intent was that a guy like Norman Schwarzkopf could have command of a theatre without having to repeatedly go hat in hand to the different services. The Joint Chiefs would have a representative from each of the services that could advise the president of their individual service’s insights, but they were specifically cut out of the command loop so that the Schwarzkopf-type could run things efficiently.

So what is to become of our poor President Obama, barking out orders to his Joint Chiefs only to learn that they don’t carry out orders but just give advice? Will he claim he is powerless to end the war? Or will he eventually figure out that he has to get Odierno or Mullen or Petraeus on the phone to make his wishes known?

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One of the reasons Tommy Franks turned down the job of Army chief was that he did not want to be in a none command position. If you read his book American Soldier it becomes very clear that he and not the joint chiefs was responsible for the war plan in Iraq. In fact when the plan was presented to them he got the kind of squabbling Goldwater-Nichols was supposed to do away with.