“Unintended consequences” from the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act and lagging defense spending have weakened America’s ability to deter its adversaries and need to be addressed, researchers with AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies argue in a new paper.

“U.S. deterrence is wavering,” Mitchell Institute Dean retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula warned in a Jan. 21 event rolling out the paper.

China’s military growth, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korea’s and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and Iran’s support of terrorism “reflect critical gaps in America’s military to deter assaults on U.S. vital interests,” Deptula added.

Retired Gen. T. Michael Moseley, former Air Force chief of staff; retired Maj. Gen. Larry Stutzreim, Mitchell’s director of research; and Richard B. Andres, a non-resident senior fellow at Mitchell, co-authored the new report, which recommends significant growth in defense spending better matched to the threat, and reforms to restore “competition” between the services and in industry, the authors said.

The paper also calls for a “new NSC-68″—a reference to the then-secret policy paper drawn up by Paul Nitze in 1950, which called for sharply increased defense spending, development of new nuclear weapons, containment of the Soviet Union and preparations for economic and strategic conflict.

“Today, we need an NSC-68 level of reform that guides whole-of-government action to avert a third World War, [and] to present the flight plan necessary for effective defense reform,” Deptula argued.

Goldwater-Nichols was designed to streamline the chain of command, removing the service chiefs and the chairman of the joint chiefs and focusing instead on the regional combatant commanders, with the intention of curbing inter-service rivalry and ensuring unified command of disparate forces. The chairman now has an advisory function, and the COCOMs focus on short-term operations, not long-range readiness. The law was prompted by a lack of service cooperation leading to failure in the 1980 Iran hostage mission and a poorly coordinated invasion of Grenada in 1983.

Yet, based on the written works and testimony of various national security leaders over the last two decades, the Mitchell analysts concluded that Goldwater-Nichols has had “unintended consequences” that are “at the heart of the challenges we face today.”

At the time, Andres said, it was “a necessary and even overdue reform,” because it tackled the problems of “inter-service rivalry and strengthened joint operations.”

But a lack of competition between services for who can best accomplish a mission has led to slow capability development, as has consolidation of the defense industry from a hundred large suppliers to just five, he said. And by removing the service chiefs from the chain of command, “no one … had both the authority and the incentive to focus on long-term defense planning: the kind you need to deter Russia and China.”

The combatant commanders couldn’t perform this role usefully, he said, because they cycle through their jobs in just two years. Moreover, the COCOMs tend to focus on their own theater problems and not on integrated approaches to global deterrence, the authors said.

Worse, while the 2018 National Defense Strategy assumed the military needed to be able to fight just one major war—and that adversaries would not collaborate—the opponents have “exploit” this flawed thinking, Andres said.

This “isn’t just our assessment,” Andres said. “This is what the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the National Defense Strategy found last year.” War with China is “a real possibility” if “our military no longer possesses the capability or the capacity to uphold our security commitments, and if deterrence collapses.”

Budget

Moseley said the baseline share of gross domestic product for defense is now about three percent, factoring in inflation, but ought to have a floor of five to six percent.

“The beauty of a floor also gets you around the notion of supplementals, [and] of contingency funding, because all that has historically come out of the cuts that each of the services gets,” he said. A level of six percent is needed because “you’ve got to make up for that lost time.”

In the 2000s, the Navy and the Air Force budgets took hits as the Pentagon focused its resources on Afghanistan and Iraq. Because of that, the Air Force was “forced to eat our own seed corn as far as the investment accounts,” Moseley said.

Critical programs like air refueling and the F-22 were gutted, he noted, forcing the Air Force to do things like keep flying the Eisenhower-era KC-135.

Further delay will mean the only solution to replacing obsolete gear is “to buy your way out of it. It’s going to be more expensive. I would suggest that we’re probably there right now in the Air Force,” Moseley said.

The issue is only growing more acute—Moseley noted that while Air Force leaders are still undecided on the future of the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, China has flown several new experimental models in recent weeks.

Reforms

Extra money won’t help, though, without new structure and rules to govern its use, Moseley said, likening it to filing a bucket with holes in the bottom; the “holes” being “bureaucracy and the organizational failures. You need to fix the structure, acquisition, contracting, planning, long range planning, etc., and then address the money. Otherwise you’re just going to waste money.”

The needed change would replicate NSC-68 by approaching U.S. national security with a ‘whole of government’ approach, one that includes the Department of Defense, but also “Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice, etc.,” said Moseley. “And then you back that up with a change of the bureaucracy and get at this massive amount of waste and drag.”

Moseley said he is not worried about changes to Goldwater-Nichols resulting in a return of service infighting. The military, he said, has had 40 years of a “joint” culture and professional military training reinforcing it.

Asked what steps the reforms should take, Andres said “you’ve got to get the President to ask Congress to take action,” and for Congress to do that “quickly, because we don’t have a long clock on this.”

The paper, he said, “does not go into the specifics of this, but we need reform … or something completely different. But the first action is going to be the President calling on Congress, and it needs to be bipartisan. This is a bipartisan issue. We’ve seen a lot of the same things coming out of both sides of the political spectrum now in terms of what we need to do.”

Andres said the “window is closing” on America’s deterrence credibility.

“Without action, the U.S. faces ether strategic defeat or a catastrophic war. Reform is not optional; it is essential for national security and global stability.”

The paper recommends:

An NSC-68-style review which realigns defense strategy with modern threats, taking into account an “all-of-government” approach.
Reform or replace Goldwater-Nichols, restoring the service Chiefs to the chain of  command and reducing bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Raise the defense budget to between five and six percent of GDP to rapidly fund modernization—both capability and capacity—and restore a force-sizing construct that the U.S. military be able to handle two major theater wars. Space and cyber forces also need strengthening.
Invest according to “cost effective warfighting capabilities,” using the “cost per effect” methodology. Conduct a roles and missions review to “determine the most cost-effective service investments.” Shift counterinsurgency investments to high-end warfare capabilities.