Abolish Combatant Commands

[Kirkhill]

Abolish AFRICOM, Then Keep Going

If the Trump administration wants to cut Pentagon waste and avoid future wars, it should abolish the Combatant Command system.

nationalinterest.org

In 2013, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was considering a plan to dissolve AFRICOM and combine Northern Command and Southern Command as a way to save money. In part, the rationale was that civilian and military employment at the COCOMs had grown by more than 50 percent between 2001 and 2012.

The plan to downsize failed, and the COCOMs have since grown in size, power, and influence. By 2015, retired Major General Arnold Punaro testified that the COCOMs had “expanded from lean, warfighting headquarters to sprawling mini-Pentagons with thousands of staff members. They no longer fight wars themselves but must create new joint task forces to accomplish that mission. The regional combatant commanders have evolved into political-military ambassadors, with a strong focus on peacetime engagement.”

The COCOMs helped DOD achieve jointness at the cost of generated new layers of bureaucratic bloat. Abolishing regional Combatant Commands will not make the services silo off and retreat from jointness. It will make the force more agile, less top-heavy, and cheaper.

the current structure of super-empowered Combatant Commands only emerged in 1986, when Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act that reorganized the Department of Defense (DOD).

Under Goldwater-Nichols, the COCOMs would have “broad, continuing missions…composed of forces from two or more military departments.”

....

Broad, continuing missions - a recipe for eternal war (a realistic prospect in Cold War 1986) but also a recipe for stasis, for self-perpetuation, for self-justification. After the Cold War - War on Drugs, Global War On Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan.

 

[McG]

War on Drugs, Global War On Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Are you suggesting all these occurred because combatant commands existed? That in the absence of combatant commands, the US would have ignored other stimulus and done nothing?