WASHINGTON: One of America’s most respected strategists is calling for a comprehensive review of the military’s roles and missions to prepare the way for revision of the basic law undergirding the modern force, Goldwater-Nichols.

The combination of an excellent quartet of lawmakers leading the armed services committees; the markedly complex and global set of threats from ISIL to North Korea to China and back to Russia;and Sen. John McCain and Rep. Mac Thornberry‘s commitment to a review of Goldwater-Nichols all make this a good time for a complete strategy review, said Andrew Krepinevich, head of the respected Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in an interview with me earlier this week.

The best model for such a review, Krepinevich says, would be President Eisenhower’s Project Solarium, a complex, focused and far-ranging strategic review performed in 1953. It included three different teams working from differing assumptions about US goals. They worked non-stop over six weeks, forcing participants to keep their eyes on the ball and lending impetus to the effort.

Andrew Krepinevich

“There’s a hierarchy to these things. You really need to sit down and say, given our resources and goals, what can we reasonably expect to do and what’s the cost to do it,” Krepinevich says. “What you’d like to have are the leaders of the armed services committees — Congressmen Thornberry and Smith, and Senators McCain and Reed — establishing an independent commission and do their own Solarium-like review.”

Right after I confirmed that McCain planned a review of Goldwater-Nichols, I contacted several other players in earlier efforts to rewrite that law, and you could sense the excitement in their voices and emails.

The issues at play when we do begin writing the new Goldwater-Nichols — are

• How many combatant commanders should we have and what should their responsibilities be;
• Should we have something like a general staff, with its ability to -do in-depth advance planning as well as to help run wars, as opposed to the Joint Staff we currently have;
• Should we build unified standing joint task forces? Currently, our Joint Task Forces are cobbled together for each challenge;

“Sen. McCain is really on to some great issues, with real import. He knows the dedicated work which was required of members and staff to make GN86 happen and could push it as his lasting legacy,” a former congressional aide who helped push the last reform attempt at the turn of the century said in an email. “The challenge he will have is finding an administration which cares enough about these matters to participate in an informed debate committed to constructive reform.”

Nathan Freier

Another source, a strategy professor at the Army War College, focused on what changes should be made to the law. “The real answer is yes, there does need to be some sort of transformation of global command and control of military forces worldwide,” Nate Freier told me last week.

What does he have in mind? McCain and the Obama administration should reduce the number of combatant commanders — the leaders at Central, Pacific, Africa, etc. commands — who actually fight the wars.

“If i were king for a day, I would go down to four,” he said. The US should stick AfriCom and EuCom back together and merge NorthCom and SouthCom. he said, adding that “there’s a decent argument to go down to three.” He focused on the fact the so many problems the US military now copes with — cyber war, transnational terrorism, and radical Islam — don’t have clear geographic focus.

Krepinevich notes that cyber issues didn’t exist when Goldwater-Nichols was written, yet another reason to examine what our red lines and responses should be.