Thirty years after having enacted it, Congress is reviewing the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act. Deeply controversial at the time, Goldwater-Nichols augmented command relationships, strengthened the role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, enhanced joint procurement, and redesigned personnel incentives in order to prioritize "jointness" among the services—a characteristic that the U.S. Department of Defense demonstrably lacked prior to the reforms. Congress is now determining whether further reforms are needed, and if so, what those might be. To that end, the Senate Armed Services Committee has held a number of hearings over the second session of the 114 th Congress, specifically focused on defense reform. Spurred on by congressional interest, the DOD has undertaken its own "Goldwater-Nichols" review of its internal structures, and plans to present suggested legislative changes to Congress in the coming weeks and months. Among defense scholars, observers, and practitioners there has been a near-constant drumbeat to reform one aspect or another of the DOD since its inception in 1947. Most observers agree that after 30 years, a comprehensive review of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation is warranted. Further, there appears to be a broad consensus among observers that DOD must retain its strength while becoming considerably more agile in order to enable the United States to meet a variety of critical emerging national security challenges. Yet agreement seemingly ends there. There appears to be little consensus regarding what changes are needed within DOD and what specific direction reform ought to take. Discussions have begun to coalesce around a number of proposals, including reforming defense acquisition processes, further strengthening the Joint Staff, reducing Pentagon staffs, and better empowering the services in the "joint" arena. However, ideas vary on how, specifically, to accomplish those goals. Disagreement also exists as to whether or not reorganizing DOD alone will be sufficient. Some observers maintain that a reform of the broader interagency system on national security matters is needed. This lack of consensus appears to result from diverging ideas as to what are the key challenges with the way DOD—and the national security architecture more broadly—is organized and operates. The variety of views reflects the complexity of these institutions. One observer refers to the present DOD reform debate as akin to a "Rorschach test," noting that defense experts tend to diagnose what they believe to be critical national security challenges based on their own experiences and priorities. Without a common understanding of the root causes of these organizational frictions, solutions to the national security organization challenge differ considerably. The complex nature of the Pentagon and national security bureaucracies adds to the many challenges of DOD management reform. Despite these obstacles, the case for reforming the Department of Defense is gaining traction among observers. The international security environment has grown ever more complex, in manners unforeseen when the Goldwater-Nichols legislation was enacted. This report is designed to assist Congress as it evaluates the many different defense reform proposals suggested by the variety of stakeholders and institutions within the U.S. national security community. It includes an outline of the strategic context for defense reform, both in the Goldwater-Nichols era and today. It then builds a framework to understand the DOD management challenge, and situates some of the most-discussed reform proposals within that framework. It concludes with some questions Congress may ponder as it exercises oversight over the Pentagon. The changes that the Goldwater-Nichols legislation made to the Department of Defense, and in particular, the way that DOD conducts military operations, are in many ways central to how the Department conducts military operations today. Indeed, many organization design decisions that were taken—in particular, clarifying the chain of command for more effective prosecution of joint operations and improving the quality of military advice provided to senior leaders—are so fundamental to the way DOD does business today that it is difficult to recall that it once conducted its operations quite differently. Nearly 35 years ago, the Reagan Administration came into office largely convinced that the Pentagon was highly inefficient in its business and acquisition practices, and therefore established a Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management on July 15, 1985. The commission, which was headed by David Packard (founder of Hewlett-Packard and former Deputy Secretary of Defense), was instructed to "study defense management policies and procedures, including the budget process, the procurement system, legislative oversight, and the organizational and operational arrangements, both formal and informal, among the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Unified and Specified Command system, the Military Departments, and the Congress." While the study explored many facets of the DOD and its management, the overall objective was to identify efficiencies and associated cost savings. Yet several prominent shortcomings with the manner in which DOD conducted its military operations suggested to some observers that deeper organizational and structural challenges were plaguing the Department, and that these issues were not being sufficiently addressed by the Packard Commission. Congress therefore saw deep concerns develop as examples mounted that significant reforms to the Department of Defense were needed. Those examples included after action reviews of the following incidents: Desert One, Operations in Grenada, and the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. After six months of planning, preparation, and training, in 1980 the U.S. military initiated a raid to rescue 53 American hostages being held in Tehran after the 1979 uprising in Iran. The operation failed. Only six of the eight helicopters arrived at Desert One, the rendezvous point in the middle of Iran, and a further helicopter suffered significant mechanical problems. Determining that the remaining helicopters did not have sufficient capacity to proceed, the mission was aborted. As the helicopters departed, one crashed into a C-130 aircraft carrying fuel and other servicemembers. All told, the United States lost eight military personnel, seven helicopters, and one C-130 aircraft, and left behind weapons, communications equipment, secret documents, and maps, all without making contact with the enemy. After action reviews of the mission suggested that a key underlying problem with the mission was that the services were unable to operate together. As one observer wrote: [T]he participating units trained separately; they met for the first time in the desert in Iran, at Desert One. Even there, they did not establish command and control procedures or clear lines of authority. Colonel James Kyle, U.S. Air Force, who was the senior commander at Desert One, would recall that there were, "four commanders at the scene without visible identification, incompatible radios, and no agreed-upon plan." The inability of the services to operate together effectively led many to believe that the needs and interests of the individual military services were being prioritized over joint mission requirements. As the President's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee: One basic lesson [to be learned from the failure of the mission] is that interservice interests dictated very much the character of the force that was used. Every service wished to be represented in this enterprise and that did not enhance cohesion and integration. Although Operation Urgent Fury (the 1983 U.S. military operation in Grenada to rescue U.S. medical students and other American Nationals after a Marxist coup) was generally viewed as a success, tactical and operational shortcomings marred the mission and became the subject of subsequent controversy. A primary issue was that units from the different U.S. military services conducting the mission proved unable to communicate with each other. Army elements could not use their equipment to communicate with sailors on the USS Guam to coordinate naval air support, and at times took drastic action to find ways to correct the problem. For example, some Army officers from the 82 nd Airborne Division flew by helicopter to the USS Guam to begin coordinating air support, and even borrowed a Navy UHF radio to continue to do so while back in Grenada. Unfortunately, the Army officers operating the borrowed radio did not have the appropriate Navy clearance codes, rendering the equipment useless. It was also reported that one 82 nd Airborne officer, frustrated with the situation, used an AT&T calling card from a civilian pay phone to call Fort Bragg and ask their higher headquarters to address the problem. Subsequent analysis led observers to conclude that the inability of the services to formulate and execute joint equipment and communications requirements was at the heart of the problem. After action reviews also concluded that fire support from the Navy to the Army was a "serious problem," and that the coordination between the two services ranged from "poor to non-existent." The two services did not coordinate their assault plans prior to the operation, and went into combat without any real sense of each other's requirements, leading observers to conclude that the episode illustrated the "inadequate attention paid to the conduct of joint operations." Another issue was the lack of sophisticated mapping capabilities. Troops had to use tourist maps. In conjunction with the aforementioned communications challenges, the lack of intelligence led to what some believed were unnecessary casualties. U.S. Navy Corsair airplanes accidentally attacked a mental hospital; two days later, they hit an a 82 nd Airborne brigade headquarters building, wounding 17 U.S. soldiers. These issues, in conjunction with others including the lack of a designated ground commander and logistics issues, led a Senate study to conclude: The operation in Grenada was a success, and organizational shortcomings should not detract from that success or from the bravery and ingenuity displayed by American servicemen. However, serious problems resulted from organizational shortfalls which should be corrected. URGENT FURY demonstrated that there are major deficiencies in the ability of the Services to work jointly when deployed rapidly. The Services are aware of some of these problems and have created a number of unites and procedures to coordinate communications... However, in Grenada, they either were not used or did not work. More fundamentally, one must ask why such coordinating mechanisms are necessary.