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the operations of the National Security Council and elimination
of many interdepartmental coordinating committees; removal of
certain nonessential staff activities from the immediate White
House office; devolution to individual department heads, and to
identifiable subordinates, of the responsibility for recommending
policy and for overseeing the execution of decisions; improved
coordination between the State and Defense Departments, including
the successful State-Defense Officer Exchange Program; the
deliberate use of the Budget Bureau as a prime management tool
of the President; reducing the rate of turnover of ranking
executive officers by adopting the practice that candidates for
national security posts give advance assurances that they intend
to serve at the pleasure of the President and their department
chiefs; renewal of the fight against overstaffing in the national
security departments and agencies; and long overdue federal
pay-raise legislation.

24. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Military Unification," by Roswell Gilpatric.

When the system of Joint Chiefs was created in 1948, some feared
that it would lead to a sort of Prussian General Staff, operating
independently of the civilian branch. Others have expressed the contrary
concern: that the creation of a single Secretary of Defense would
reduce the service chiefs to rubber stamps and hamper the application of
professional military expertise to the management of the armed forces.

The long debate about the relation of civil to military authority
within the Department of Defense appears to have been settled. The
Secretary of Defense is now in undisputed control. The major victims
have been the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose claims to policy-making
powers have been radically diminished since the advent of the Kennedy
Administration.

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Mr. Gilpatric in his capacity as Deputy Secretary of Defense assisted in shaping the existing structure. In this article he argues that the management of organizations as complex as the Department of Defense requires a special set of skills, which are inherently neither military nor civilian. Though over-all civilian control is essential, professional military advice is crucial also. Mr. Gilpatric believes that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are most effective when divorced from the details of administering their respective services, partly because existing missions overlap traditional service boundaries, partly to free the Joint Chiefs to concentrate on acting as a highest level strategic advisory group to the President and the Secretary of Defense. Many professional officers disagree with this view and contend that responsible strategic advice must flow from a command position within the existing services.

25. "Inter-service Competition and the Political Roles of the Armed Services," by Samuel P. Huntington.

The post-World War II history of the Defense Department has been enlivened by violent public interservice disputes as the Air Force-Navy B-36 Carrier argument of 1947-49 and the Army-Air Force Thor-Jupiter dispute of 1955-57. There has been a tendency to interpret such events as evidence of service disunity and inefficiency. Much of the impetus for Secretary McNamara's reforms of the Pentagon stems from this

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conviction. Professor Huntington argues the opposite point of view.
He holds that service rivalries tend to serve the public interest. They
provide the mechanism whereby the public in general and Congress in
particular is kept informed of the issues while national security
policy is still in a formative stage. They guarantee the active
participation of the civilian branches in the decision-making process.

Professor Huntington fears that growing centralization will
create doctrinal uniformity. He fears the stifling of debate. The
resulting decline of controversy could well destroy the cohesion and
weaken the interaction of the various components of our military
establishment. This would, in his view, undermine our security and
radically alter the established principles of civilian control.