First Admiral William J. Fallon took over as head of U.S. Central Command, even though it’s the Army and Marines that are most engaged in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Admiral Mike Mullen, the chief of naval operations, has been nominated to become the next head of the joint chiefs of staff. If approved, that means a Naval officer will helm the joint chiefs, Central Command, Southern Command, Pacific Command (an understandably typical position for an admiral) and Special Operations Command. What’s up with the Navy’s commanding position?
One factor is obvious, says Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute: The Navy “has not been tarred by the failure in Iraq.” In other words, it’s precisely because the Navy doesn’t have the degree of skin in the game that the ground services have that admirals are making for attractive nominees for vacancies at key commands. That certainly tracks with Defense Secretary Gates’s worry that General Peter Pace’s prospective renomination hearing would have become a rancorous reexamination of the Iraq war. And it’s doubly surprising, given how the Navy was the service most comfortable with ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man most closely associated with Iraq other than President Bush. “The irony is that the Navy culture was always able to get along with Rumsfeld, but otherwise rolled rather quickly with the Rumsfeld reversal” underway thanks to Defense Secretary Gates. No one can say the Navy is anything but buoyant. “The Navy has an intellectual tradition stronger than that of the other services,” Thompson adds, referencing the overrepresentation of Naval officers on the Joint Staff.
Robert Work, a retired Marine colonel and defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, sees the boom in Naval officers taking key commands and positions as a trade-off between the concept of jointness — that is, all the services planning and fighting together — and the diversity of service culture on display. “It risks skewing decisions over time,” Work says. “If you get five Navy officers in a room to solve a given problem, the answer is going to be different than if you had five Army officers and five Navy officers.” That can have a significant impact when it comes to considering an extended stay in Iraq and Afghanistan or what post-Iraq defense strategy ought to resemble. “Naval officers would probably look at it and say, ‘We’d prefer to distribute forces off-shore, and we’d like to maintain a light footprint on-shore,'” Work says. “Meanwhile, the Army says it’s all about boots on the ground.”
Fallon’s appointment to Central Command certainly indicated a look beyond Iraq and Afghanistan in the region — and toward Iran, resulting in a bolstered naval presence in the Persian Gulf. “We have a ground force built on fighting short wars, and now we find ourselves in a marathon. The strain on the ground forces is extraordinary right now,” Work adds. He cautions that the real heavy lifting on reshaping defense policy is going to happen during the 2009 Quadrennial Defense Review — the Pentagon’s massive, periodic strategy overview — and, of course, the 2008 election. But the turn toward the Navy could indicate a rethinking in the Pentagon about how to sustain a long war while reducing the pressure on the Army and Marine Corps.
