Chapter V: Between Peace and War

The immediate impact of the National Security Act on the Army was the final separation and independence of the Army Air Forces. The Chief of Staff of the Army and the Chief of Staff-designate of the Air Force signed an agreement on 15 September 1947, known as the Eisenhower-Spaatz agreement, which provided the framework within which men, money, and resources were to be transferred from the Army to the new Department of the Air Force. Among other things it said "Each Department shall make use of the means and facilities of the other departments in all cases where economy consistent with operational efficiency will result." The last phrase was a deliberately oracular expression allowing the Air Force to justify creating its own supply system despite the fact that it would duplicate and overlap facilities and services provided by the Army in many cases.6

While the Air Forces and the Navy struggled with each other over unification, the Army sought to solve several internal problems created by the Eisenhower reorganization. At a conference with General Eisenhower on 13 November 1946, the Army staff proposed a radical reorganization of both the headquarters and field establishment. General Eisenhower vetoed this plan. "Nothing should be done," he said, "to disrupt

The Directorate of Organization and Training (DOT), responsible for implementing and interpreting the Eisenhower reorganization, outlined the problem in a staff study of 15 August 1947. Confusion, it said, existed at all levels of command: at the installation level, in the ZI Army headquarters, in AGF headquarters, and within the Army staff. In the field the greatest number of complaints arose over the ZI Army commanders' responsibility for some sixty housekeeping activities at Class II installations,8 those directly under the command of chiefs of technical or administrative services in Washington.

The Directorate of Organization and Training estimated an average of one dispute a day was being referred to them by ZI Army commanders involving these housekeeping functions, the number of people performing them, or the funds required. The most important functions were repairs and utilities, including custodial services, fixed communications services such as long-distance telephone lines, and transportation services, particularly administrative motor pools. The Army commanders, for instance, found it difficult to control the expenditure of limited funds for long-distance calls between technical service installations and their Washington headquarters. Differ-

To solve these problems the Director of Organization and Training recommended a detailed survey of Class II installations to determine which could be reclassified and brought directly under the control of ZI Army commanders. It also recommended removing Headquarters, Army Ground Forces, from the administrative chain of command and restricting it to tactical and training functions.9

A similar proposal discussed by Lt. Gen. J. Lawton Collins, the Deputy Chief of Staff, with Lt. Gen. Raymond A. Wheeler, the Chief of Engineers, and Maj. Gen. Thomas B. Larkin, the Quartermaster General, would have transferred responsibility for all training, schools, and boards from the technical services to the Army Ground Forces. Generals Wheeler and Larkin opposed this scheme because it would deprive the technical services of a vital command function. The proposal in their opinion was not only undesirable. It would not work. Only their own personnel possessed the specialized knowledge and experience needed for proper training.10

General Jonathan M. Wainwright, Commanding General, Fourth Army, supported the diagnosis and views of Lt. Gen. Charles P. Hall, Director of Organization and Training, in a personal letter to General Eisenhower. He complained of having to plan expenditures and account for funds spent by agencies over which he had no control. The solution he recommended would place ZI Army commanders in charge of all posts and installations in their areas. General Jacob L. Devers, Commanding General, Army Ground Forces, agreed with General Hall and proposed to reduce the number of Class II installations by limiting them to those serving more than one

General Lutes, Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement, pointed out that General Wainwright, in urging unity of command for the ZI armies, assumed falsely that such armies were like overseas theaters. They were not, Lutes said, because arsenals and depots within the United States served the entire Army, not just the installations under a particular Army commander. Placing them under local Army commanders would be impractical.12

General Eisenhower referred the problem to an Advisory Group he had set up in June 1946 under Lt. Gen. Wade H. Haislip to study Army organization and management problems. In its final report, submitted on 29 December 1947, known as the Cook report after its principal author, Maj. Gen. Gilbert R. Cook, the Advisory Group recommended that Army Ground Forces should be eliminated as such and become a special staff agency in Army headquarters with responsibility for schools, combat arms boards, organization and training of

Realizing the proposed changes could not be made overnight, the Advisory Group recommended selecting a specific ZI army as a theater of operations and giving its commander complete control over every Army installation, facility, and activity in his army's assigned area for about six months in order to give the idea a fair trial.13

After studying these recommendations General Collins instructed General Hall to prepare a revision of War Department Circular 138 that would redesignate Headquarters, Army Ground Forces, as Headquarters, Army Field Forces, and limit its functions to staff supervision over all Army training, "including training of technical and administrative troops," to supervision of all service schools and former Army Ground Forces boards and to responsibility for the development of tactical doctrine. Army Field Forces was to be "removed from the chain of command and administration" except for specified training functions. Collins also tentatively decided to war game the theater of operations proposal of the Advisory Group for a three to six months period to determine its practicality.14

After consideration and amendment by the Army staff General Collins' plan emerged as Department of the Army Circular 64 of 10 March 1948. Army Ground Forces, stripped of its command functions, became the Office, Chief of Army Field Forces, the field operating agency for the Department of the Army within the continental United States, for the general supervision, co-ordination, and inspection of all matters pertaining to the training of all individuals utilized in a field army.15 It was responsible for supervising training, preparing training literature, developing tactical doctrine, and supervising the activities of Army Ground Forces boards in developing military equipment. Because the technical and administrative services commanded personnel and schools not "utilized in a

field army" the circular urged "the closest collaboration and coordination between the Chief, Army Field Forces, and the heads of the Administrative and Technical Services in all matters of joint interest." Exempting Class II activities and installations from control by the ZI Army commanders was a major departure from the recommendations of General Collins and the Advisory Group and another victory for the technical services.

There were minor changes under Circular 64 in Army headquarters. The Secretary of the General Staff appears for the first time on the official organization chart of Department of the Army headquarters, and the Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement was redesignated as Director of Logistics. (Chart 16) One major change, the abolition of the Directorate of Research and Development as a separate staff agency and its absorption by the Directorate of Service, Supply, and Procurement, had taken place earlier under Department of the Army Circular 73 of 19 December 1947. The ostensible reason for this change was to limit the number of agencies reporting to the Chief of Staff. A more practical reason was the lack of funds for research and development activities.

The next step was to carry out General Collins' decision to war game the theater of operations concept. The Third Army area was chosen and the project was designated as the Third Army Territorial Command Test (TACT). In October 1948 the Director of Logistics placed all production, supply, and training activities and installations in that area, including control over their operating funds, under the Third Army commander for six months. Later the experiment was extended to 1 November 1949.

The technical service chiefs remained opposed to transferring their Class II functions and to Operation TACT. The substantive issue was control over those installations and related activities with Army-wide responsibilities, arsenals, Quartermaster depots, and ports of embarkation. The Chief of Ordnance complained that placing control over such operations under an Army commander removed from the agency responsible for such functions the authority necessary to do the job. Such a move was a clear violation of the principle of unity of command which asserted that a commander assigned a task

The Third Army commander considered the test a success and recommended that Class II installations remain under his control. General Wade H. Haislip, as the new Vice Chief of Staff, decided in favor of the technical services and directed that the test be discontinued on 1 November 1949. The only changes made were to assign a few additional administrative or housekeeping duties to the Army commanders.16

Operation TACT was a minor skirmish in the continuing battle over the role of the technical and administrative services as independent commands. At the time Operation TACT was first being considered, a more important battle took place over a proposal to resurrect Army Service Forces in some form as an Army logistics command. This conflict had begun on 15 February 1947 when General Eisenhower appointed General Haislip president of a Board of Officers to Review War Department Policies and Programs, a board composed of representatives from the Army staff, the Air Forces, and the Ground Forces. The Haislip Board, as it was known, made two reportsa preliminary one on 25 April 1947 and a final one on 11 August 1947. Like the Chief of Staff's Advisory Board the Haislip Board was interested in attaining greater unity within the Army and greater efficiency and economy of operation. This policy meant greater executive control over the department's operations than the Eisenhower reorganization had provided. As one means of accomplishing this goal, both boards recom-

mended limiting the number of staff agencies reporting to the Chief of Staff directly. This recommendation was one factor in eliminating the Research and Development Division in December 1947. The Haislip Board suggested expanding the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff by adding an assistant for planning and another for operations in order to keep these functions separate. The Cook report suggested a deputy for ZI administration and one for field operations. Once these agencies were operational "authority to issue orders to the field [should] be withdrawn from levels below the Deputy Chiefs of Staff." 17

An obvious means of limiting the number of agencies reporting directly to the Chief of Staff was to resurrect ASF. General Eisenhower had kept the issue alive after the demise of ASF in a hurried penciled note in December 1946 to the Deputy Chief of Staff, stating: "My own belief is that if war should come, ASF should be immediately reestablished. Should not our plans so state?" 18

Sometime later he directed General Lutes, the Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement, to develop an organization capable of expansion as the headquarters for such a materiel command. General Lutes himself believed the best solution was to create a materiel command similar to that of the newly created Department of the Air Force in peacetime, if only to train its personnel to operate as a team in war.

The subject came up at a meeting attended by General Eisenhower, General Omar N. Bradley, who was shortly to succeed him as Chief of Staff, General Collins, the Deputy Chief of Staff, and Lt. Gen. Henry S. Aurand, General Lutes' successor as Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement, on 21 January 1948. General Eisenhower said the Directorate of Service, Supply, and Procurement should remain as a staff division in peace "under the concept of Circular 188, but provide the nuclear organization for an ASF as an operating command in war." This command would also absorb the lo-

General Collins then instructed General Aurand on 2 February 1948 to develop an "outline plan for a wartime ASF" in co-operation with the other General Staff directorates. An informal ad hoc committee headed by an officer from General Aurand's office considered several alternative methods. The committee considered first three parallel commands, personnel, training, and logistics, each under a General Staff director. The training command would include the training of technical and administrative service personnel. These three commands would function under a "Deputy Chief of Staff for Mobilization" and ZI administration. A "Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations" would be responsible for overseas commands and any ZI combat operations. Within the continental United States the Army commanders would control housekeeping functions in their areas along the lines suggested in Operation TACT.

Such a plan would have stripped the technical and administrative services of their training and personnel functions, subordinating them to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Mobilization. In the field the services would be subordinate to the Army commanders. Those services performing such unique functions as medicine, communications, construction, and transportation would become Army staff directorates. The Chemical Warfare Service would be eliminated.

A less drastic alternative proposed to adopt the ASF Post-War Organization Plan of 1944, retaining the technical and administrative services as such. The final proposal suggested a Logistics Command similar to that recommended in the Somervell Plan of 1943. Under a "Director of Logistics" and five functional directorates, plans, requirements and resources, operations, administration, and control, the technical services would be reorganized into functional groups-research and

General Aurand wanted to present these proposals to the General Staff for comment first and, after obtaining agreement within the General Staff on what position to take, to consult the technical services. Learning that General Aurand was to brief the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Gordon Gray, on The Pros and Cons of a Logistics Command, the Chief of Engineers, General Wheeler, acting as spokesman for all the technical service chiefs, requested permission to present their case to Mr. Gray at the same time. At this point General Eisenhower revised his earlier position. In a letter to General Bradley written after he had resigned as Chief of Staff and retired he said his 1946 note did not "imply any thought that the technical and procurement services should be abolished." To this he was "violently" opposed. He simply meant that "in war, a single command, responsible only to the Chief of Staff should

Armed with a copy of this letter General Wheeler and the other technical service chiefs confronted General Aurand on 13 April 1948 in Mr. Gray's office. Speaking for his colleagues, General Wheeler attacked the proposed logistics command. He cited the Patch-Simpson Board recommendation that ASF be abolished, General Eisenhower's letter, and the current organization of the Army staff outlined in Department of the Army Circular 64, 10 March 1948. He referred to the contributions made by the technical services in two world wars and emphasized the undesirability of introducing an additional staff layer between the technical services and the Chief of Staff which would require additional scarce technical specialists. He claimed that industry favored the Army's present "technical procedures."

Eliminating the technical services, he said, would require reorganization and re-education of all the armed forces and war industries. Further, the proposed logistics command did not deal with other important technical service problems like training and intelligence. In conclusion, General Wheeler stated that the chiefs of the technical services believed a logistics command would result in confusion and conflict in command and "in conspicuous extravagance in the utilization of critical personnel." In substance they opposed creating another ASF or logistics command whether in peace or in war.22

Faced with this opposition Assistant Secretary Gray suggested continued planning for a wartime ASF but designated the project more euphemistically as a proposal rather than a plan since it had not yet been approved. General Aurand, concluding that the decision earlier agreed upon in favor of formal planning for a wartime ASF had been practically abandoned, asked that his office be relieved of responsibility in the matter. General Collins agreed and ordered responsibility

Both the Advisory (or Cook) and Haislip Board reports had recommended establishment of a management planning or comptroller's office at the General Staff level. On 8 September 1947 Secretary of War Kenneth C. Royall, who had served under General Somervell in ASF headquarters during the war, appointed Edwin W. Pauley as his special assistant to study the Army's various logistics programs and "business practices" and to recommend improvements "in the interest of economy and efficiency as contemplated by unification legislation." 24

Mr. Pauley in investigating Army fiscal procedures found that no one from the Secretary on down, including the chiefs of the technical services, knew the real dollar costs of the operations for which they were responsible. The principal reason was that each technical service employed its own unique accounting system which did not cover all its functions and missions. Pauley recommended organizing an office of "Comptroller" for the Army to correct these deficiencies through the development of sound business management and cost accounting practices which would cover the total costs of the Army's major missions, programs, and activities, including the operating costs of each Army installation by major activity. These revolutionary proposals required a degree of control by the Secretary and the Chief of Staff over the Army's budget which traditional Congressional methods of appropriating funds would hardly permit 25

The Haislip Board had also criticized the Army's financial management in the context of its broad review of the Army's missions and the resources needed to fulfill them. Noting the inadequacy of the Army's current budget, it warned, "Either the War Department must revise its programs downward to come within the means which the country seems willing to furnish in men and dollars, or the country must revise upward its estimate of the imminence of the threat to its security and increase the means to meet the War Department's requirements."

Inadequate funds made economy of operations all the more essential, but in the board's opinion ". . . neither the organization, the procedures, nor the general attitude of the Army is conducive to maximum economy." It did not see how substantial economies could be made within the existing fiscal structure of the Army "which largely divides fiscal authority from command responsibility." It urged employment of improved management techniques in "organization, procedures, statistical reporting, budgeting, cost accounting," and similar activities. As a first step in this direction it recommended establishing in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff "an agency similar to the Navy's Management Engineer or the Air Force's Comptroller to attack this problem on a specialized and continuing basis." 26

Similarly General Cook had recommended that Congress enact legislation freeing the Army from an archaic budget structure where the tail wagged the dog. The existing appropriations structure recognized only the technical services. New legislation should provide that money be appropriated for the Department of the Army and not to individual technical services and that budget categories be related to the Army's missions. The Army itself net-ded an agency where organizational, management, and financial problems would be treated together as one problem. A staff division concerned with "organization and training" was not such an agency. The least the Army could do would be to set up a management planning branch within the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff. The Cook report recommended placing such functions under a Deputy Chief of

After considering these reports, both Secretary Royall and General Eisenhower agreed on the need for an agency at the General Staff level which would be responsible for the Army's budget and fiscal programs as well as organization and management. Secretary Royall favored appointment of a civilian as comptroller who would work directly under the Secretary, while General Eisenhower preferred that the comptroller be part of his military staff.28

General Eisenhower's view prevailed. Department of the Army Circular 2 of 2 January 1948 provided for a military comptroller with a civilian as deputy within the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff. The directive transferred to this office the functions and personnel of those staff agencies principally concerned with the Army's financial management, the Budget Office, the War Department Manpower Board, the Central Statistical Office, and the Chief of Staff's Management Office. As the department's fiscal director the Comptroller was to supervise also the operations of the Office of the Chief of Finance. Department of the Army Circular 394 of 21 December 1948 additionally transferred supervision of the Army Audit Agency to his office from the Assistant Secretary of the Army. As the Army's management engineer the Comptroller would play a major role in the Army management and organization in the next decade.

Col. Kilbourne Johnston, the son of Brig. Gen. Hugh S. Johnson of World War I and NRA fame, was the first Chief of the Management Division of the Comptroller's Office. Like his father before him he was an aggressive promoter of the concept of a functionally organized Army staff. Like his father he also encountered bitter opposition from the chiefs of the technical services.

Among his first assignments was the development of a plan for reorganizing the Army staff under a proposed "Army Bill of 1949," including a re-examination of the question of resurrecting Army Service Forces in some form or other. The result was a lengthy two-volume interim staff study on The Organization of the Department of the Army, submitted on 15 July 1948. Known as the Johnston plan, it was the first detailed analysis of Army organization in the postwar period and the predecessor of several more to come.30

In the Johnston plan the Management Division noted that previous studies by the Organization and Training Division, the Haislip and Cook Boards, and the Logistics Division had raised two basic questions: "Are the Technical Services to be functionalized?" and "Are Departmental functions to be decentralized to area commands through a single command channel?"

Echoing General Somervell's views, it asserted that in both world wars the Army had had to abandon its "permanent statutory structure" and create an emergency organization for two major reasons: the lack of a genuinely functional staff with single staff agencies responsible to the Chief of Staff for each of the department's major functions, and "an unwieldy span of control" with too many agencies responsible and reporting directly to the Chief of Staff.

A tremendous headquarters staff and much duplication of effort was the result. Another reason was overcentralized control by wartime agencies which had created friction, delay, and difficulties in co-ordination. On top of this most military personnel misunderstood or misinterpreted the reasons which led to creating wartime organizations and their emergency procedures.31

The Management Division next surveyed current departmental operations and concluded that there were eight major weaknesses. Too many agencies were reporting directly to the Chief. of Staff, a situation duplicated in the internal structure of the various staff agencies themselves. Army staff functions, such as training and supply, were fragmented among several agencies and staff levels, producing conflict and duplication. There was too much centralization within each agency. There were multicommand channels including the technical and administrative services and various special staff agencies in addition to the General Staff. There was a gap between strategic and logistical functions within the General Staff and the technical services, little integration and control, continual duplication, and a waste of manpower and money which still failed to produce any "authoritative, integrated logistical-strategical plans." The General Staff neglected its planning functions because it was involved in daily operational details. The staff's complicated organizational structure caused delays through excessive staff-layering and too much attention to minor activities. The survey counted 294 divisions, 884 branches, and 638 sections in Army headquarters plus 86 standing committees and boards, not to mention many temporary committees. Last, rigid compartmentalization created situations in which the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing, and intramural disputes, even on minor matters, continued to go all the way up the chain of command to the top. Consequently the Army staff and individual agencies could not act promptly and effectively.

General Staff's logistics planning bore little relation to the Congressional archaic appropriation structure based on the technical services. Additionally, appropriations failed to follow recognized channels of command. No adequate machinery existed for readjusting budgets after the Bureau of the Budget and Congress had altered the Army's initial budget request. Finally, diffusion and fragmentation of manpower controls among many agencies made integrated, rational control over manpower impossible.32

The Army should have a functional staff where single agencies were responsible to the Chief of Staff for each major functional program. "Traditional service organization is neither functionally nor professionally constituted in the light of modern warfare even though originally so conceived. Evolution has rendered the Technical Services bureaucratic to the point of obsolescence." There should be a reduction in the number of agencies reporting to the Chief of Staff, a single staff layer in the General Staff, and genuine decentralization of operations to the field. A properly organized staff should provide a simple, easily understood structure, divorce operations from planning, integrate current program planning with war and mobilization planning, integrate logistical operations and planning, provide a single command channel to the field, reduce the size of Army headquarters by limiting such activities in Washington to those which had to be performed there, and

The three principal features of the Johnston plan designed to achieve these objectives were (1) to reduce the number of agencies reporting to the Chief of Staff by creating a Vice Chief of Staff and two Deputy Chiefs of Staff who would supervise the General Staff; (2) to functionalize the Army staff, meaning the technical and administrative services, along lines similar to the old Somervell-Robinson proposals; and (8) to place all ZI field installations and activities under the Army commanders, including those Class II installations commanded by the chiefs of the technical and administrative services. In summary, the principal aim of the Johnston plan, like its predecessors, was to abolish the technical services as independent commands, making them purely staff agencies.

The Johnston plan provided the Secretary with two new assistant secretaries, one for politico-military matters and the other under the Under Secretary for resources and administration. The Chief of Staff would have a vice chief and two deputy chiefs, one for plans and another for operations, which would keep these functions separate. Other agencies reporting directly to the Chief of Staff would be the Army Comptroller, the Chief of Information, and the Inspector General. Under the two deputy chiefs the plan proposed ten functional directorates Personnel and Administration which would supervise The Adjutant General's Office; Intelligence; Training, which would supervise the Chief of Army Field Forces; the Quartermaster General for Supply and Maintenance; the Chief of Transportation; the Chief Chemical Officer for Research and Development; the Chief of Ordnance for Procurement; the Chief of Engineers for Construction; the Chief Signal Officer for Communications; and the Surgeon General. As alternatives, it suggested placing the Chief of Transportation under the Quartermaster General, reverting to the pre-World War II pattern, or placing the Chief Chemical Officer as Director for Research and Development under the Chief of Ordnance.34

as "Phase I." Functionalizing the technical and administrative services would come later. Under Phase I the vice chief and two deputy chiefs would be appointed to carry out the reorganization. The existing Plans and Operations Directorate would be transferred to the Deputy Chief of Staff level to assist them, along with four reorganization "command posts," one each within the secretariat, in Plans and Operations for the zone of interior, in the Director of Logistics Office to reorganize the technical services, and one under the Director of Personnel and Administration for the administrative services.

To reduce the number of agencies reporting to the Chief of Staff the Johnston plan proposed to place the Office of the Chief of Finance under the Comptroller and the Historical Division under The Adjutant General, the Inspector General in the Office of the Vice Chief of Staff, and the Legislative and Liaison Division, the Public Information Division, and the Troop Information and Education Division under the Office of the Chief of Information. The technical and administrative services would "normally report" to the Chief of Staff "through" either the Director of Logistics or the Director of Personnel and Administration.36

principles of the Johnston plan. Maj. Gen. Harold R. Bull, Acting Director of Organization and Training, however, proposed an alternative solution that was closer to the organization finally adopted. Separating plans and operations, he said, would create an awkward span of control for the Deputy Chief for Operations. Instead there should be three deputy chiefs, one for plans, another for operations, and a third for administration, including logistics. He would also replace the existing directorates with four functional Assistant Chiefs of Staff. He would not functionalize the technical services, but he would relegate them to a purely advisory role by removing from them control over personnel, intelligence, training, and logistics operations and taking away their command over field installations and activities.38

Maj. Gen. Daniel Noce, the Deputy Director of Logistics, told General Aurand the technical services might oppose the Johnston plan. He recalled their successful opposition to General Somervell's earlier proposals. Unless they were "brought into the picture" and "sold . . . as partners in the new reorganization," their opposition would wreck the Johnston plan. Its chief defect, he thought, was the concept of functionalization itself which would divide responsibility for commodities among several agencies.39

Brig. Gen. John K. Christmas, an Ordnance officer serving as Chief of the Logistics Directorate's Procurement Group, recommended retaining the technical and administrative services. He would go no further than placing them solely under the supervision of the Directors of Personnel and Administration and of Logistics. His Ordnance background was apparent when he asserted functionalization was unworkable in any organization which produced, procured, and used as many and as wide a variety of products as the Army did. Functionalization would divide responsibility for producing, procuring, and supplying commodities instead of placing responsibility for them properly in one agency "from factory to firing line." 40

Except for Maj. Gen. Frank A. Heileman, the Chief of Transportation, the technical service chiefs opposed the Johnston plan in principle and in detail, both individually and collectively, in writing and in person. Collectively, on 31 August 1948, they signed a joint round robin protest to the Chief of Staff. As their appointed spokesman Maj. Gen. Everett S. Hughes, the Chief of Ordnance, expressed in person their opposition on 15 September 1948 to the Chief of Staff, General Bradley, and the Army staff.

General Hughes said the basic proposition of the Johnston plan was to abolish the technical services through functionalization. The Army had debated this issue before. The Patch-Simpson Board had rejected it, and General Eisenhower himself was on record as "violently" opposed to the concept. Industrial leaders whom he had consulted opposed functionalization. He would agree to the control over the technical services but not to their abolition or consolidation. The question he did not consider was how a functionally oriented organization like the General Staff could effectively control the operations of commands with multiple functions like the technical services.

General Hughes then presented another round robin letter signed by himself and six other technical service chiefs opposing the Johnston plan. In an organization the size of the Army which had developed through "generations of experience," it stated, major changes should not be made unless they were "conclusively advantageous." The proposed reorganization was not. It was unsound. It would break up the technical services which had proven themselves in all American wars and had a right to continue serving the country. It would destroy "their team spirit, their team knowledge, their team power for action and their team contacts with each other and with the industrial and professional world." Instead of the Johnston plan, they proposed:

to continue the present responsibility and statutory authority of the various Technical Services, which means they should continue to render specialized services, to train personnel, to do research and develop, to design procure, store, issue and maintain the closely related family groups of commodities with which they are charged.

After General Hughes' talk, General Bradley said no firm decision had yet been made. It would not be easy to reach one, but he and others felt something had to be done. It was not enough to say that because we have always "done it this way" that we should continue doing it. General Collins urged the technical service chiefs to consider at least reducing the procurement services to Ordnance, Quartermaster, and Signal.41

Colonel Johnston then revised his plan after conferences with the General Staff. The principal change, reflecting the views of the Director of Organization and Training, involved the functions of the two new Deputy Chiefs of Staff. Instead of one for plans and another for operations, there was one for plans and operations and another for administration. Phase I would also place the technical and administrative services directly under the authority of the Directors of Personnel and Administration and of Logistics.

General Bradley urged approval of Phase I of the Johnston plan at least because "We are every day convinced that the present organization here at the top will break down. We just can't handle it." Secretary Royall still hoped to restrict procurement to Ordnance and Quartermaster. General Lutes also reminded him there was no provision for effective control over the technical services because their supervision was divided among the Army staff. General Eisenhower, who was also present warned against rejecting the technical service chiefs' views as "hopeless" and "bureaucratic." They sincerely believed they could perform properly under the existing system. But he did wonder what had become of his earlier suggestion to limit the number of technical services involved in procurement.

Following conferences with Generals Bradley and Collins, and with Colonel Johnston, Secretary Royall on 20 September said he enthusiastically agreed with the ultimate goals of the Johnston plan as well as the detailed proposals for Phase I. He agreed to place the technical services under the control of the Director of Logistics but wanted a parallel link to the Assistant Secretary of the Army in charge of procurement. Secretary Royall asked that the concept of a single personnel and administrative agency be explored further. Finally, he selected General Collins as the new Vice Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer as Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations, and General Haislip as Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration.43

A General Staff working committee revised Colonel Johnston's amended plan further. The knottiest problem remained the relations between the General Staff directorates and the technical services now that they were to be placed under the control of the Director of Logistics. The Acting Director of Organization and Training pointed out that "All General Staff Divisions have a vital interest in both budget and manpower requirements of the Technical Services in carrying out their assigned missions." The Director of Logistics, he said, should review rather than control these operations. General Aurand, on the other hand, while agreeing to allow direct communications between the Director of Personnel and Administration or the Director of Intelligence and the technical services, strongly opposed direct dealings between the technical services and the Director of Organization and Training on manpower allocations or the Comptroller on budget requests. He insisted that the Director of Logistics should be responsible for allocating manpower and appropriations among the several technical services. The services objected to being cut off from direct

On 18 October 1948 Secretary Royall approved the revised Phase I proposals with one more major change. He thought there was insufficient civilian control over the business and financial side of the Department of the Army and requested amending the draft circular to stress the civilian secretariat's supervisory role over Army logistics.45

Phase I of the Johnston plan was announced in Department of the Army Circular 342, 1 November 1948, effective 14 November 1948. (Chart 17) The three principal changes from the Johnston plan were (1) the creation of two Deputy Chiefs of Staff, one for plans and combat operations and another for administration, (2) spelling out in greater detail the role of the Assistant Secretary of the Army in procurement and industrial relations in accordance with Secretary Royall's request, and (3) an attempt to delineate more precisely the authority of the Director of Logistics over the technical services in their relations with other Army staff agencies.

Circular 342 stressed the temporary nature of the reorganization, pending development of a "more effective organization." At the same time it stressed that the only changes being made concerning the technical and administrative services were to place them "under the direction and control" of the Directors of Logistics and of Personnel and Administration so far as their relations with the rest of the Army staff were concerned. "The

The precise nature of the control to be exercised by the Directors of Logistics and Personnel and Administration over the still powerful technical services remained unclear. They still retained their own personnel, intelligence, and training functions and their own budgets even if under supervision by the General Staff. They still continued to command their own field installations. The question remained how a staff agency like the Directorate of Logistics, responsible for a single function, could effectively control all the activities of such multifunctional staff agencies and military commands. As General Larkin explained it to General Collins some months later: "My first act as Director of Logistics was to tell the Service Chiefs that, despite their appearing under me on the chart, I expected them to deal with any appropriate Director without coming through me." In practice the control of the Director of Logistics over the technical services was limited to those logistical matters he had formerly controlled and no more. Under Department of the Army Circular 342 there was no change in the traditional status of the technical services so far as their supervision and control were concerned.46

The Management Division continued to urge action on the later phases of the reorganization supposedly initiated by Department of the Army Circular 342. After additional investigation Maj. Gen. Edmond H. Leavey, the Comptroller, recommended in March 1949 the consolidation of training functions under the Army Field Forces and personnel functions under the Directorate of Personnel and Administration as

The existing organization, he said, was unsatisfactory because it was "neither a true functional staff nor a true integrating staff," both of which Secretary Royall had approved as organizational objectives. Department of the Army Circular 342 was only a step in the right direction. Revising the National Defense Act of 1916, as amended, would be another.47

A six-month independent staff study by the management advisory firm of Cresap, McCormick and Paget, requested by Assistant Secretary Gordon Gray in October 1948, also demonstrated the need for improving further the organization of the department. Cresap, McCormick and Paget formally submitted its study to Secretary Royall on 15 April 1949. This and General Leavey's proposals for further reorganizing the Army staff provoked an angry outburst from Lt. Gen. Thomas B. Larkin, the new Director of Logistics. As Quartermaster General he had strongly opposed the Johnston plan, and his new position gave the technical services a much stronger voice on the Army staff. He complained to General Leavey that the latter's apparent objective was "a functional organization, naively assumed as a panacea for all ills real or imaginary." His own experiences overseas during the war contradicted this idea. "Concrete results [in improving the operation of the Army's logistics system] will appear soon if I am not forced to waste the time of my staff probing abstruse theories as desired by Col. Johnston." The plans of Colonel Johnston's he had seen "would make top organization still more complex. Much is beyond my comprehension." As for the Cresap, McCormick and Paget Survey, he added, "I do not see where it helps to pay outside firms large sums to tell the Army how to organize." Instead he recommended reducing the Army staff 30 percent across the board and giving "the organization a chance to work without constantly proposing changes to try out new theories.

The principal reason for his antagonism toward the Cresap, McCormick and Paget survey was evident. Like the Johnston plan it recommended functionalizing the Army staff. Its final report identified several familiar problem areas in the Department of the Army. The department's activities cost too much money and required too many people to perform them. Departmental personnel lacked "cost consciousness." It took too long and was too difficult to get action or decisions. There was too much duplication and red tape, inadequate co-ordination, inadequate planning, and too much centralization. The department had poor procedures for planning, programing, and controlling its operations. Its organizational structure was weak because its headquarters was divided into too many separate agencies. At the same time some important functions were not being performed at all, and responsibility in some instances was assigned to the wrong agency. Finally, organizational relations between Army headquarters and field installations were too complicated and confusing.

To economize on manpower and money, to get prompt action, to cut down red tape and eliminate confusion, to create an organization more nearly like those of the Navy and Air Force and one suitable for wartime expansion, Cresap, McCormick and Paget proposed a number of objectives. The Army should integrate responsibility for long-range, basic planning and separate it from operational planning and operations themselves which should remain integrated. The Army's budget structure should parallel its organizational responsibility. The Army staff should be functionalized by concentrating responsibility for basic functions in single agencies, reducing the number of independent and autonomous agencies, and in general grouping related activities. Finally, departmental relations with the field should follow a single staff and line command channel.

top level of the Army staff was similar to those established under Department of the Army Circular 342, with one important difference. Instead of a Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Combat Operations and one for Administration, it proposed a functional realignment with plans and programs, including programing and budgeting, under one deputy and operations and administration under another. The Army Comptroller would become in effect a third deputy. This three-deputy concept, as it later became known in the Army staff, essentially provided for broad, across the board planning, execution, and control or review and analysis of performance. It was the type of centralized executive control engineered earlier at DuPont and General Motors and adopted in the Marshall reorganization. Following World War II an increasing number of major industries adopted this approach, notably the Ford Motor Company.49

The Army's functional staff would consist of nine directorates under the Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration: War Plans and Operations, Personnel, Security, Training, the Surgeon General, the Chief Signal Officer, the Chief of Engineers, Procurement (Ordnance), and Supply (Quartermaster). Finally the Cresap, McCormick and Paget proposals would make all Army headquarters agencies purely staff advisers to the Chief of Staff with operating responsibilities decentralized to the field. The continental armies and other regional commands would direct all field operations under the staff supervision of the Department of the Army. 50

service chiefs at two conferences in May and June 1949. The Management Division also prepared a review of the proposals. The principal objections came from General Larkin and the technical service chiefs. For the third time in less than a year they presented united opposition to any proposals for functionalizing their agencies out of existence. In yet another round robin letter, dated 19 May 1949, the chiefs complained to the Chief of Staff:

The recommendations made in the report revolve about the theory that a functional breakdown of the Army's mission is a more suitable basis for primary organization than is a product-technical division. Nowhere in the report is this statement proven, and nobody has even been able to present to us an example where such a type of organization has proven effective when applied to an operation of the magnitude, diversity, and scope of the United States Army.51

The report is basically unsound in its reasoning. It follows the line that any error in a huge organization can be cured only by a reorganization. I have been in the Army since 1908 and in the Ordnance Department since 1912. During that time I have participated in n + 1 reorganizations and have observed that always afterward the ignorant, the undisciplined, the empire-builders, the lazy, and the indecisive continued to make the same mistakes they made prior to the reorganization.

The only proponents of such a scheme whom I have known to date have been theorists who have not lived and worked in a Technical Service and have not become familiar with the complete and absolute necessity for an organization established on a product basis from research and development through to final disposition of the end item . . . . I conclude that the report is biased and unscientific and prepared not to reach a conclusion but to support a conclusion already in mind.52

The proposed reorganization would prove thoroughly unsatisfactory at the management level, the operational level, and the field level. The cost of the change would be exorbitant in time, money, personnel, efficiency, and morale. The present approach to merge the Technical Services and the General Staff into one Army Staff can only result in failure of the Army to accomplish its mission in a time of emergency . . . .53

All of Cresap's arguments were founded, he said, on the erroneous idea that a functional organization was more suitable than the existing product-technical organization of the technical services. The National Defense Act recognized that the Army had two radically different missions, military operations on the one hand and procurement and industrial mobilization on the other. Recognizing this difference the National Defense Act kept them separate by statute. The Cresap proposal to "scramble" these two different missions was unsupported by anything but opinion. He saw no need for any basic change in the technical services currently assigned responsibilities for co-ordination, operation and direction of research, development, procurement, and supply or for their command over their own field installations and activities.54

Similar comments came from other technical service chiefs. General Larkin, on 13 June 1949, endorsed the views of his former colleagues. Based on "a preconceived idea of functional organization advanced a year ago by the Army Comptroller," the Cresap, McCormick and Paget plan would abolish the technical services in all but name. "With them would go

decades of sterling service in peace and war." It would discard proven ability to perform specialized services for "an entirely unproved theory." It would diffuse responsibility for individual commodities or services instead of concentrating them as the existing system did in the technical services. Larkin questioned the so-called economies to be obtained from adopting the Cresap, McCormick and Paget recommendations. He objected to the fact that a civilian organization was prescribing for a purely military organization instead of the "best professional Army minds." He doubted that any major reorganization was necessary other than to reduce the size of the Army staff and improve its quality.

Among General Larkin's specific objections was the proposal to align the Army budget along organizational or functional lines. Co-ordinating a functional budget program would be at least as difficult as co-ordinating the existing budget, he thought, and might result in creating "a more severe financial strait-jacket." In a final criticism he denied that the technical services were "autonomous" or independent agencies. They were not. Their budgets and personnel ceilings were established by higher authority "just as any other Army agency." In the field their operating agencies were responsible to the regional Army commanders on a great many matters. The Organization and Training Division approved their organization, equipment, and functions. The Director of Personnel and Administration supervised the career management of their military personnel and Army Field Forces their schools and training.55

The Management Division in its Final Recommendation to the Chief of Staff for Action on the Report of the Cresap, McCormick and Paget Survey of the Department of the Army asserted that the crux of the issue lay in the difficulty the Army's functionally organized General Staff had in controlling the operations of the technical services, which individually performed all General Staff functions for themselves as independent field commands. The Cresap, McCormick and Paget report, said the Management Division, had firmly asserted that

...if the parallel, duplicating, and overlapping product-technical or "bureau" organization is adhered to multiple command channels are unavoidable. If there are multiple command channels at the top of each there must be a Commanding General-not a staff officer. It is thus necessary to organize a complex of headquarters and over this complex to superimpose another headquarters staff. That is why there is so much "red-tape" and "layering." . . . If a single command channel is provided and operating functions decentralized down that chain, all that need remain in Washington is the pure staff coordinating function and the necessary central control function appropriate to a supreme headquarters. This is the fundamental argument on which the CMP recommendations are based. The [other] deficiencies . . . were largely found to stem from this basic deficiency. It is the main root of the trouble. Any definitive organizational solution must correct this root evil. CMP recommends a single command chain.56

The Management Division prepared a synthesis of all comments and criticisms on the Cresap report with summaries of previous Army staff surveys and the current reports of the Hoover Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government. It concluded that the CMP report and its recommendations were sound although it suggested some changes. Instead of eliminating Class II installations, it suggested retaining them until the entire Army supply system could be reorganized and integrated. In the department it recommended retaining instead of abolishing the traditional General and Special Staff system. It would retain rather than eliminate the Director of Logistics to direct the Ordnance Department, Quartermaster Corps, and Chemical Warfare Service as the nucleus of a reorganized Army supply system. The Transportation Corps would retain its current special staff status instead of being merged with the Quartermaster Corps again. Finally, the Management Division would leave The Adjutant General's Office within the Directorate of Personnel and Administration instead of separating its administrative from its personnel functions.

bulk allocation functions; consolidation of all Army staff training functions under the Director of Organization and Training and all training operations under the Office, Chief of Army Field Forces; and transfer of the troop basis and mobilization planning functions to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations. After consolidating the Army's supply system under the Director of Logistics it would change the Corps of Engineers on military matters, Signal, Medical, and Transportation Corps into advisory staff agencies. It would place the Historical Division under the Chief of Information and retain the civilian component, National Guard and the Reserve, offices as special staff agencies. Concerning the Army's financial affairs it recommended that the Army adopt the Hoover Commission's concept of a "performance budget" reorganized along regular command lines. The Army Comptroller should be responsible for integrating the Army's "program review and analysis" functions with the rank of a third Deputy Chief of Staff. 57

General Haislip, the Vice Chief of Staff and a strong wartime critic of the Army Service Forces, made the principal decisions to accept, modify, or reject the Management Division's recommendations. On 23 December the new Chief of Staff, General J. Lawton Collins, forwarded his recommendations based largely on those made by General Haislip, to Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray, who had replaced Mr. Royall, accompanied by a lengthy memorandum of explanation.58

of the proposals made by Cresap, McCormick and Paget and the Management Division did not analyze problems in sufficient detail to determine whether the troubles were those of administration or organization, and where they lacked sufficient detail or analysis Collins had rejected them. Where he had to reach decisions arbitrarily or "unilaterally," he said he had relied heavily upon his own experience and judgment which had taught him that a proper organization should be based on the sound principles of Field Manual 101-5, the staff officer's handbook.

The internal self-analysis of Army organization over the past two years had been useful, he said, but there had to be some organizational stability if the Army was to operate effectively. "The Army can ill afford the loss of day to day operating efficiency which arises from spasmodic, major organizational change. Since the termination of World War II, our Army organization has been in a state of flux. I believe that the time has now come when a measure of stability must be assured."

General Collins' major recommendations dealt with the number of ZI armies, the relations between Class II installations and the Army commands, the degree of centralized control over the Army supply system, the role of the Army Comptroller, the suitability of the General and Special Staff system for directing the Army, the assignment of personnel to the General Staff, and the further decentralization of operations from the General Staff to Army Field Forces, the Army commanders, and the chiefs of the technical and administrative services.

Collins recommended retaining the existing number of six ZI armies and the Military District of Washington and rejected any substantial changes in the existing Class II command structure. Based on the results of Operation TACT, he suggested adding further housekeeping functions for Class II installations to the responsibilities of the ZI Army commanders. He would also increase their responsibilities for local operations and activities confined to a single Army area. In continuing to exempt Class II functions from ZI Army control, General Collins had followed the judgment of General Larkin and the chiefs of the technical services.

Collins would retain the General and Special Staff system on the grounds "that our departmental staff organization should be as analogous as possible" to Field Manual 101-5, "with which the entire Army is familiar and which has proven itself so often." This meant returning to a four-division General Staff with each division headed by an Assistant Chief of Staff. He recommended consolidating the Organization and Training and the Plans and Operations Divisions into one staff agency and transferring manpower controls from Organization and Training to G-1 and Army Field Forces. He would initiate programs for improving the quality of officers assigned to the General Staff while reducing its numbers by decentralizing more operating responsibilities to the Chief of Army Field Forces, Army commanders, and the chiefs of the technical and administrative services.

tory for the technical services over functional reformers. A memorandum of 14 November 1949 from General Larkin to General Haislip shows how much influence he had on the Chief of Staff's final recommendations. General Larkin, reviewing once more the history of recent organizational developments affecting Army logistics, repeated arguments he had made earlier against the Johnston plan and the Cresap, McCormick and Paget report. The technical services had performed their missions effectively during war and in peace time. They had "an esprit de corps, a professional focus and internal and external relationships" impossible in the "indistinctive," "nebulous" functional organization proposed to replace them.60

The organizational arrangements envisaged by Field Manual 101-5 have indeed admirably met the exacting demands of combat operations and I do not question their suitability. But we are here concerned with different problems and different requirements. To me the differences are striking, and it does not seem logical that the organizational design of the headquarters of an Army Group, an Army Corps or Division should closely resemble the organizational design of the D/A.

A field army, corps or division, etc. it [sic] is not required to provide for most of these responsibilities, except in unusual circumstances. And when such circumstances arise, as for example, during occupation, the organization of the field headquarters concerned undergoes many changes. There are perhaps, therefore, persuasive reasons for supposing that the influences which have twice compelled major reorganizations at the Seat of Government when war was upon us, flow from the inclination to conform our organization here to that of a field army and the like.

"with knowledge commensurate with the responsibilities for the Army's budget?" What steps should be taken to minimize the number of instances in which important decisions had to be made under the most extreme pressure without adequate background information. Perhaps consolidating his own office and those of his civilian staff with the General Staff into "a single Executive Office" would produce greater teamwork and more informed participation.

Secretary Gray did not think that General Collins' preference for maintaining organizational stability and the status quo was necessarily sound. "I am at a loss to know how we can meet new challenges or deal with old ones if we are to limit ourselves to what has already been tried. I feel we should all continuously maintain inquiring, open, and receptive minds respecting these matters." 61

General Collins assigned the Management Division and the Organization Branch of the Directorate of Organization and Training responsibility for monitoring the changes Secretary Gray and he had agreed upon, for co-ordinating their details with the Army staff, and for preparing their publication. The results of this struggle between the functionalists in the Management Division and the traditionalists on the General Staff appeared in two Department of the Army special regulations, SR 10-5-1, Organization and Functions of the Department of the Army, of 11 April 1950, effective at once, and SR 10-500-1, Organization and Functions, Continental Armies and Army Areas (Including the Military District of Washington), of the same date, but effective 1 July 1950. Over the next several years additional regulations in the SR-10 series appeared, prescribing the organization and functions of all Department of the Army agencies, including the technical services and special staff agencies.62

SR 10-500-1 listed the new or increased responsibilities of Army commanders over Class II installations and activities including inspection of personnel and administration, intelligence, training, and logistics. Most of the functions assigned were still of a local administrative or housekeeping nature, ranging from Quartermaster laundries to administrative motor pools. These details remained a constant source of irritation between post commanders and the commanders of Class II installations, particularly where the funds involved were limited.

SR 10-5-1 began with a summary of Army organization history since 1789. Pending Congressional action on a new Army organization act, the legal basis for the current organization of the Department of the Army remained the First War Powers Act of December 1941, the National Security Act of 1947, and the Constitutional powers of the President as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. It listed thirteen major military and civil functions of the Army based on a series of program definitions prepared in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and designed to assist the Army in controlling its operations through the program review and analysis techniques recommended by Cresap, McCormick and Paget. Besides traditional Army staff functions there were programs for command and management, construction, joint projects with other services, and civil works. These programs were functional in nature, and few of them coincided with the missions or budgets of the several technical services.63

The new organization adopted the three-deputy concept recommended by Cresap, McCormick and Paget and Colonel Johnston. (Chart 18) It provided for a Secretary, Under Secretary, two assistant secretaries, one for General Management and another for Materiel, and a Counsel as the Secretary's special legal adviser. The Chief of Staff and Vice Chief of Staff had three deputies, one for Administration, another for Plans, and the Comptroller as a third. The Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans

no longer was responsible for combat operations on the principle that planning and operations should be separated. The Comptroller gained the status of Deputy Chief of Staff but not the title because, unlike his colleagues, he was directly responsible to the Secretary as well as to the Chief of Staff. Following the Cresap, McCormick and Paget report the Comptroller's functions included responsibility for "integrating program review and analysis," but not "management engineering" because this was not a "statutory" responsibility of the Comptroller. Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration, believed this function ought to be assigned to his agency. The particular agency involved, Colonel Johnston's Management Division, remained in the Comptroller's Office.64

At the General Staff level, instead of the previous five directorates, the Army returned to the familiar Pershing pattern of four Assistant Chiefs of Staff as General Collins had recommended. The Directorate of Organization and Training was eliminated with its personnel functions transferred to G-1 and most of its training functions transferred to the Chief, Army Field Forces. Responsibility for training policies and mobilization planning remained with G-3.

Along with the General Staff were five familiar special staff agencies, the Inspector General, Judge Advocate General, the Chief of Military History, the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, and the Executive for Reserve and ROTC Affairs. Also at the special staff level there was one change separating the Office of the Chief of Legislative Liaison from the Office of the Chief of Information. The Civil Affairs Division and its functions had been taken over by G-3, as recommended by Cresap, McCormick and Paget. The Office of the Chief of Finance was made a special staff agency under the Comptroller.

The increased status of the Comptroller, the return to the Pershing pattern with Assistant Chiefs of Staff, and the elimination of the Office of the Chief of Special Services as a separate agency were not substantial changes. The only important one was the adoption of the three-deputy principle, which required transferring responsibility for supervising combat operations from the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Administration and eliminating the Directorate of Organization and Training.

The technical services had been successful, in the reorganization just described, in defending their independence and integrity against the functionalists. They were less successful in defending their statutory base in the Army Organization Act of 1950. Lt. Col. George E. Baya of the Comptroller's Management Division on 1 December 1948 prepared a 114page compilation of laws of a permanent and general nature affecting the organization of the Army which listed nearly four hundred provisions governing the Army passed piecemeal by Congress since 1916. Many involved picayune details of administration. Some provisions conflicted with others. The total effect was to hamstring the Secretary and the General Staff in carrying out their responsibilities of managing and directing the department and the Army. In Colonel Baya's words, ". . . the laws governing the organization of the Army and the Department of the Army were in a mess." 65

quiring an act of Congress to abolish and eighteen which could be abolished by executive action, but there were no provisions of law requiring any specific organization of the General Staff. If he wished, the Secretary could probably transfer responsibility for procurement to the Chief of Ordnance, for supply to the Quartermaster General, and for research and development to the Chief Chemical Officer.

Colonel Baya also prepared a Plan for a Bill which Colonel Johnston submitted at this time to the Army staff for comment. The object was "to provide for the Organization of the Army and Department of the Army." It was not a reorganization bill but only a legislative study proposing to place the Army "on a sound statutory basis" with greater authority granted to the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of Defense, and the President to adapt the Army's organization, to changing conditions than existing legislation permitted. It did not assign specified functions, duties, or powers to any particular agency within the Army, leaving this up to the Secretary's discretion, except for the civil functions of the Engineers and the duties of the judge Advocate General, Surgeon General, and Chief of Chaplains.66

The Baya bill led to another battle with the technical service chiefs concerning their assigned statutory responsibilities. While the bill proposed to continue the offices of the chiefs as statutory agencies, it granted the Secretary authority to change their duties and functions as he saw fit. Individually and collectively the technical service chiefs attacked this provision. In another round robin they objected to this grant of authority to the Secretary. They believed the "soundest statutory basis" for organizing the Army was still the National Defense Act of 1916, in particular Section 5 which recognized them and their authority and restricted the General Staff to

The traditional system of necessary checks and balances and the protection against weaknesses in the human element, to which even the greatest minds are susceptible, have not been insured. The broad peacetime powers requested are like a two-edged sword in that the Secretary of the Army could be subjected to pressures from all echelons to reassign duties and functions in order to increase their prestige and power. Experience shows that the Army is safeguarded against ill-conceived changes only as long as organization and functions are prescribed by statutes.

The chiefs objected that the bill would undermine morale. It did not provide the same status in law for all the technical services, granting professional recognition only to lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and civil engineers, but not to others. By eliminating those provisions guaranteeing the services their independent status, the bill left the impression that they might one day be liquidated. Otherwise why remove these provisions? Finally there was the question of esprit de corps.

In the proposed organization military and civilian personnel of the Army are members, perhaps very temporarily, of some nebulous organization called a service, a service without functions, without permanence, without stability. There can be no esprit de corps since there is no corps in which to have any esprit. In order to maintain the high standards of morale and insure its everlasting continuance, currently designated names and appropriate functions of the Technical Services should be retained.

existing legislation demonstrated, nowhere in the National Defense Act of 1916 or its amendments was legal recognition or status granted to the several technical services, corps, or departments as such. The law designated and assigned specific functions to the offices of the chiefs of these services only. The question was not one of unrestricted power and authority but where and at what level such power and authority should be exercised. Traditionally and in law it lay with the chiefs rather than the secretaries.

While the technical services chiefs opposed the Baya draft, the rest of the Army staff agreed in general with its provisions. The Management Division revised the Baya draft in the next six months as the result of specific criticisms and suggestions from the Army staff, the Navy, the Air Force, the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget before sending it in July 1949 to the Secretary of the Army for submission to Congress.68

The bill, finally submitted to Congress on 21 July, followed the general outlines of the Baya draft. Secretary Gray in a covering letter pointed out that "the desired flexibility in organization in the Department of the Army is in part accomplished by the repeal of laws specifying the duties of various officers in the Department, and by providing that the Secretary of the Army under the direction of the President and the Secretary of Defense, be authorized to describe the duties of these offices." Hereafter, various duties and functions could be performed by whatever office or branch of the Army the Secretary might designate. Among other provisions specifically proposed for repeal were the first twenty sections of the National Defense Act of 1916, which the technicaf services regarded as their "Magna Carta." 69

Baya testified at great length. The Army Organization Act of 1950 passed by Congress basically followed the Baya draft. It contained only three substantive changes. To control the number of Army officers serving in Washington it provided that "not more than 3,000 officers of the Army shall be detailed or assigned to permanent duty in the Department of the Army, and of this number, not more than 1,000 may be detailed or assigned to duty on or with the Army General Staff, unless the President finds that an increase in the number of such officers is in the national interest." Second, the law protected the medical and legal professional staffs by stating that "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as reducing or eliminating the professional qualifications required by existing laws or regulations of officers of the several different branches of the Army." Finally, it added that "nothing in the Act shall be construed as changing existing laws pertaining to the civil functions of the Chief of Engineers or the Engineers Corps of the Army." This prevented assigning the civil functions of the Engineers to any other Army agency. Other provisions continued unchanged concerned the military functions of the Engineers, the functions of the judge Advocate General and the administration of military justice, and the National Guard and Organized Reserves.70

The new law marked the end of a five-year period of continual organizational change within the department and the Army. The technical services were the victors in several campaigns designed by their opponents to functionalize them out of existence. The Army Organization Act of 1950 left this issue open by providing that the Secretary of the Army could legally reassign the duties of any technical service, except the Corps of Engineers, along functional lines. To this limited extent Congress had now granted the Secretary executive authority previously denied him under the National Defense Act of 1916.

Army Special Regulation 10-5-1 settled, presumably for good, was the question of the "command" of the Army. According to existing law and the Constitution the President was Commander in Chief of the Army, a function he normally exercised through the Secretary of War. The Chief of Staff acted under the direction of the Secretary of War and, after 1947, the Secretary of the Army, except as otherwise directed by the President.

Congress had abolished the Office of Commanding General to eliminate the friction between that office and the War Department under the Secretary. Unfortunately Secretary Baker ignored this and resurrected the problem by making General Pershing commander of the American Expeditionary Forces independent of the War Department General Staff. The subsequent antagonism between General March and General Pershing was almost inevitable.71

The Pershing reorganization tried to eliminate this friction by providing that the Chief of Staff in the event of war would command the "field forces," leaving the Deputy Chief of Staff behind and subordinate to him as Acting Chief of Staff. Army Regulation 10-5 of 18 August 1936 went further, stating that the Chief of Staff was also "in peace, by direction of the President, the Commanding General of the Field Forces." 72

President Roosevelt at the outset of World War II chose to exercise his role as Commander in Chief actively by dealing directly with General Marshall on strategy and military operations, bypassing the Secretary of War. He repeated his intention to deal directly with Marshall in his executive order of 28 February 1942, approving the Marshall reorganization. As a result General Marshall in reality did command the Army throughout the war under the President's direction.73

over-all investigation of the organization of the Department of the Army. Lt. Col. Archibald King, ASC, submitted to the Management Division a memorandum on the Command of the Army, accompanied by a short legal history of the relationships among the Presidents, Secretaries of War, Commanding Generals, and Chiefs of Staff. Both documents were widely distributed throughout the Army as part of the recommendations on Army reorganization prepared by the Management Division and Cresap, McCormick and Paget.74

As a consequence of these criticisms the Army Organization Act of 1950 and the parallel Army regulations eliminated all references to the Chief of Staff's "command" role. The Army Organization Act clearly stated that the Chief of Staff should supervise the operations of the Department of the Army and the Army, preside over the Army staff, and, in general, "perform his duties under the direction of the Secretary of the Army," except when otherwise directed by the President or the Secretary of Defense. Army regulations stated:

Command of the Army and all components thereof is exercised by the President through the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army, who directly represent him; and, as the personal representatives of the President, their acts are the President's acts, and their directions and orders are the President's directions and orders.

In these regulations the Chief of Staff was the "principal adviser" to the Secretary of the Army, responsible to him for planning, developing, and executing Army policies. He supervised the activities and operations of the department and the Army, performing these duties and others prescribed by law or assigned him by the President and the Secretary of the Army. Unless directed otherwise, the Chief of Staff normally performed his duties "under the direction of the Secretary of the Army." The principal exceptions to this rule were the statutory functions assigned him under the National Security Act of 1947 as a member of the joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally,

The key phrases in the law and regulations are "advise," "supervise," "preside," and "perform" his duties under the direction of the Secretary of the Army. The word "command" and similar words such as "direct" and "control" are absent. Whether the Chief of Staff would ever "command" the Army in a practical sense depended on whether the President or Secretary of Defense chose to act as President Roosevelt did in dealing with General Marshall. Since World War II, Presidents have not done so, dealing with Army Chiefs of Staff through the Secretaries of Defense and Army or as members of the joint Chiefs of Staff.