It is irresponsible to compel one individual to serve as the only source of professional military advice.
It is irresponsible to compel one individual to serve as the only source of professional military advice.
T he United States’ ferocious use of force against Iran has failed to secure American objectives because of a profound disconnect between our political and military leadership. As the conflict drags on, it’s becoming clearer than ever that America’s problem does not lie in its military power or operational skill, but in a military culture that increasingly intervenes in and seeks to set policy. Against Iran, and in the Middle East more broadly, this imbalance is recoverable. But the U.S. faces a long-term, more dangerous threat from China in the Indo-Pacific region that requires a properly balanced — and therefore unequal — civil–military relationship.
The harsh reality is that America’s military culture may lose us our next war. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth can begin to fix this problem by ensuring that the president, when faced with crucial and time-sensitive military decisions, has access to multiple points of professional military view.
Military operations are enormously complex. They are defined by what the German philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz termed friction — the tendency of even simple actions to contain compounding difficulties that slow an overall system disproportionately — and the fog of war, which is the fundamental uncertainty surrounding the plans, force distribution, and capabilities of the adversary, and of one’s own forces. There is, in turn, seldom one “optimal” solution to a battlefield problem. War is the domain of chance, and thereby of choice. Commanders’ decisions, from a platoon holding a ridgeline to a commanding general in his headquarters, are fundamental to combat outcomes.
Military officers are tasked with mastering the profession of arms. But those officers who interact with policymakers have a unique responsibility. They are responsible for developing and presenting multiple courses of action in an objective manner, indicating the opportunities and risks associated with each option, and providing a well-reasoned professional judgment as to which course of action is the most viable. Crucially, they must be prepared to execute any course of action on which the civilian policymaker decides.
The universal uncertainty of war necessitates hearing out multiple points of view when taking any major military decision. Until the 19th century, commanders usually relied on war councils for major decisions and the advice of a few trusted confidantes day to day. In the modern era of global warfare, a hybrid administrative-analytical-operational body — the permanent staff — was created to clearly assess and decide on courses of action. Modern staffs have different specialties, ranging from plans to intelligence to manpower. They are designed to aggregate knowledge and generate synthetic products for their commanders to make informed decisions under pressure.
Major policy decisions on a war’s direction, however, are the most fundamental decisions that can be made. It would be grossly imprudent to have just one point of professional advice with access to key decision-makers, namely the president and secretary of defense. Yet this is precisely how the United States national security system currently operates. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, is the only official source of military advice to President Trump and Secretary Hegseth. This is a tremendous responsibility — one that is impossible to execute practically. Such a system also creates the risk of political overextension, in which the chairman provides policy guidance — the domain of the civilian — dressed up as military advice.
It is irresponsible to compel one individual to serve as the executive’s only source of professional military advice, particularly in a strategically consequential war such as the U.S. campaign against Iran. It is especially irresponsible because the United States military has a pattern of deciding to fight the wars it wants, rather than accepting strategic reality.
It is a commonplace to assert that the United States has never lost a war, at least not on the battlefield. Political leaders may have retreated, the narrative goes, particularly in Vietnam. But the military remains undefeated, with the potential exception of the grubby stalemate with the British from 1812 to 1815. Under this view, the problem is politicians who either meddle too much in war planning or contrive missions the military cannot achieve. Put another way, either American leaders refuse to leave war to the professionals, or they succumb to “hammer–nail syndrome” and assume that military force can solve apparently political or diplomatic problems.
This neat point construed to protect professional military pride elides the fundamental reality of military strategy.
In deciding what kind of war that it wants to fight, the United States military has too often constructed strategic choices for policymakers that lead naturally to the military’s desired decision. The most obvious example comes from the U.S. military’s lopsided battlefield triumph in 1991. Almost explicitly as psychological recompense to the failure of Vietnam, the George H. W. Bush administration allowed General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of U.S. Central Command, to fight Iraq as they saw fit. The result was a narrow campaign that left a necrotic Iraqi regime in power for another decade, a choice that prompted 20 years of indecisive Middle Eastern military operations that have accumulated a mixed record at best.
Indeed, the problem in Iraq was not the alleged slipperiness of the insurgent adversary. It was, instead, the U.S. military’s stubborn unwillingness, once again, to recognize and adapt to the war it was fighting. It took three years of war in Iraq to produce a doctrine for counterinsurgency operations. It took another year for the Pentagon to begin procuring purpose-built armored personnel carriers to protect American soldiers from Iranian-derived improvised mines. The U.S. military simply refused to adapt to the war it faced. A similar issue occurred in Afghanistan. After 2015, the United States had finally constructed an Afghan military optimized to fight, though that battle-readiness was reliant upon extensive American logistical and intelligence support. The U.S. military never seriously attempted to convert this force into a fully independent one, thereby creating a catastrophic vulnerability.
With only one point of professional military advice, there is clear risk that no executive is presented with a fair series of options. This is almost certainly occurring today — not because of malice or unprofessionalism, but because of the structural realities at hand. The only rapid recourse for President Trump to gain military advice is to turn to the chairman. The result has been narrowed military options, thus diminishing the influence of Central Command commander Brad Cooper’s advocacy for an expanded military campaign.
The question is not simply of good or bad policy. It is over who has the right to decide when, where, how, and why the United States uses military force. By limiting advice to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the president naturally receives a much narrower picture than otherwise, absent serious competing military views.
This was not always the case. Before the 1986 Goldwater–Nichols Act, the chairman was merely one co-equal military adviser, alongside the service chiefs of the Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps. All of these posts are held by senior officers who know their own services better than anyone. Historically, other individuals have also weighed in, like the Eisenhower administration’s General Andrew Goodpaster, who was a key military adviser and military aide to the president. This multiplicity of views gives the president the options he deserves. Today, with Goldwater–Nichols, Admiral Cooper struggles to get a hearing in the White House — either directly or indirectly through his service chief, who himself is sidelined because the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the president’s preeminent military adviser.
In the Middle East today, the president deserves strategic options. But the United States faces a threat in Asia that is significantly more expansive than Iran. China has the intent and capability to challenge the United States for power in the Pacific, particularly by sparking a confrontation over Taiwan. In the event of such a confrontation, the U.S. will be faced with a rapidly expanding crisis that includes conventional military operations on air, land, and sea, likely combat in space, nuclear deterrence, and cyberspace operations.
Having only one military voice to assess every plan is a prescription for defeat. Competition in the marketplace serves consumers’ interests. Checks and balances, a form of competition between branches of government deliberately engineered by America’s founders, protects individual liberty and minority rights. American presidents need the same competition in strategic options. They don’t have it today.