Options for Reconfiguring Service Roles and Missions

Abstract : The roles and missions of the military services have remained essentially unchanged since they were established in 1948. Concerns over the budget deficit and drastic changes internationally, however, now make it vital to review the roles and missions assigned to the services. Two reviews of the services' traditional roles and missions in the past 2 years have rekindled the debate about the way the Department of Defense allots its responsibilities and resources. Senator Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, suggested the need for a review of current service roles and missions in July 1992. In a speech on the Senate floor, he enumerated several areas within the U.S. military where he felt that duplication existed among the capabilities possessed by different services. In a triennial report required by the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff undertook an extensive review of the services' roles and missions that responded to many of Senator Nunn's questions. In that report, published in February 1993, then Chairman General Colin Powell expressed strong support for maintaining seemingly redundant capabilities among the services. General Powell felt that the availability of similar but specialized capabilities represented by forces in different services allows commanders to tailor U.S. military response to any contingency. This paper, prepared at the request of the Senate Committee on the Budget, examines various ways to realign missions as they are currently assigned to the services. Consolidating support functions and eliminating conventional forces that duplicate capabilities fielded by more than one service could lead to significant budgetary savings. This paper contains several options for revising service roles and missions and examines the savings that could result as well as the effect on service capability. In keeping with the CBO's mandate to provide objective analysis, the paper makes no recommendations.