Inter-service rivalry and the Joint Chiefs of Staff: A comparison of military force deployments under the weak and strong chairman models

Over its approximate fifty year history, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) has been plagued by the issue of inter-service rivalry, often called "servicism." Ironically, the JCS was designed to prevent this sort of phenomenon by increasing coordination and cooperation among the military services in a variety of matters. Deploying military forces into combat is one area where problems of rivalry among the armed forces have consistently occurred. The objective of this study is to determine what impact peacetime structural design changes with the Joint Chiefs of Staff has had upon inter-service rivalry regarding military force deployments during war. The expectation is that structural design changes instituted under the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 have decreased the impact of inter-service rivalry, thus enhancing the influence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) and the Commander-in-Chief (CINC) at the expense of the corporate JCS. The basic assumption guiding this research is the notion that the structure and organization of the JCS significantly affects military force deployments. The Korean War is used to examine military force deployments under the JCS before the 1986 reforms, while the Persian Gulf War against Iraq is used to evaluate deployments after the law was established.