Hi everyone,
part of the book (Decision-Making in American Foreign Policy (p. 162)) says:
Ultimately, the United States sent approximately 1,750 Marines to Lebanon to take part in the Multi-National Force overseeing the withdrawal of PLO combatants. They were to stay in Beirut for no more than thirty days. How did the Reagan Administration arrive at this thirty-day timeframe? The Department of Defense opposed the mission completely. The joint chiefs of staff – and their civilian counterparts – were leery of inserting US forces into the midst of a zone of conflict between Israel, Syria, the PLO, and different Lebanese factions.
My question is who are those civilian counterparts of the joint chiefs of staff?
Thank you in advance.
Secretary and Assistant Secretaries of the Navy and perhaps the Secretary of Defense in that particular case. The civilian counterparts of the joint chiefs would also include the Secretaries of the Army and Air Force.
No. POTUS is capo de tutti capi. Boss of Bosses. Elmer nailed it. The branches each have a civilian Secretary underneath the Secretary of Defense. The branch Secretaries are the civilian counterparts of the respective branch’s top uniformed military officer. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the top military officer in the U.S., and the uniformed equivalent of the Secretary of Defense.
Except that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs reports TO the Secretary of Defense.
Basically the Chairman is the highest ranking military officer, but he’s still under the Department of Defense, which is a cabinet-level position under the President. And the individual services’ chiefs of staff answer to their respective service secretaries, not through the Chairman.
I would think the closest civilian equivalent to the JCS would be the service secretaries and the Defense Secretary, even though they’re a step above their respective military counterparst.
There are fewer service secretaries than services.
The Department of the Navy constitutes the U. S. Navy and the U. S. Marine Corps, with their respective Chiefs of Staff (Chief of Naval Operations, Commandant of the U. S. Marine Corps).
Likewise the Department of the Air Force consists of the U. S. Air Force (with its Chief of Staff of the Air Force) and the U. S. Space Force (with its Chief of Space Operations).
The service chiefs of staffs have their own service staff organizations to manage their respective service (in the bureaucratic sense). And the service secretaries have their own department staffs to manage the services too.
And the Joint Chiefs as an organization has its own staff (the “Joint Staff”). And the Office of the Secretary of Defense has a whopping big staff in mutiple layers, plus the staffs of the assorted Assistant Secretaries and Undersecretaries for specific topics.
It’s amazing how much bureaucracy it is. The most amazing thing about it IMHO is how it manages to stay the hell out of the way of the actual warfighting, the command of which goes directly from the Secretary of Defense (carrying out the President’s orders) to Combatant Commands.
That is one big misconception many people have. The Joint Chiefs are and advisory board for the president. They are not in the chain of command. Actual command authority goes through combatant commanders. The Chiefs of Staff of each branch are just that, chiefs of staff not commanders. The 11 combatant commanders are directly under the command of the President through the Secretary of Defense. For example during Operation Eduring Freedom the USCENTCOM commander took orders directly from the president and SECDEF. The Chiefs of Staff were not part of it other than to advise the president when needed.