Historians/History

Dwight Eisenhower's Concept of Unified Command

by David Jablonsky

David Jablonsky is a retired US Army infantry colonel. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds a MA in international relations from Boston University and a MA and Ph.D. in history from the University of Kansas. He is the author of six books, eight monographs, and numerous articles. He also a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and the US Army War College. His awards and decorations included the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the US Army War College at Carlisle, PA, where as professor of national security affairs, he held the Elihu Root Chair of Strategy; the George C. Marshall Chair of Military Studies; and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Chair of National Security Studies.

Dwight Eisenhower’s concept of unified command helped lay the foundations for the modern Department of Defense. That concept, as it emerged in his formative years, initially centered on the principle of unity of command, which was a staple of his professional military education, whether in the formal structure at West Point; the US Army Command and General Staff School; the US Army War College; or under the informal tutelage of General Fox Connor. To this was added a growing appreciation of the synergistic potential of combining land, sea and air power. As a consequence, Eisenhower brought the principle of unity of effort to his evolving concept of unified command even as the Army and Navy were still involved in only the most rudimentary efforts at jointness, coordinating only through cooperation and common interests.

For the first six months after America’s entry into World War II, Eisenhower was instrumental in facilitating the first efforts of the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff to form unified commands at the wartime theater level that incorporated the principles of unity of command and effort. His success in these endeavors resulted in his command of the Allied forces in North Africa, a hard knock experience that taught him how difficult it was to apply these principles in an actual joint and combined environment under smothering political and military supervision. Further lessons followed in the Italian and European theaters as Eisenhower honed his skills in applying the two principles in leading his unified command to final victory.

At the national level, however, it was clear to Eisenhower by 1945 that these two elements of his concept were not sufficient against the traditional tide of service parochialism. What was needed, he came to believe, was centralized unification of the services, the third element of his unified command concept, which in essence would cause the other two elements, both unity of command and unity of effort, to work in Washington as well as at the theater level. As a result, from 1945 to 1950, Eisenhower, as Army Chief of Staff and then acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), was instrumental in unification efforts, whether it was instituting the first Unified Command Plan or supporting President Truman’s initiatives that resulted in the 1947 National Security Act and the 1949 amendments to that legislation. From these experiences, he emerged with questions concerning the efficacy of the JCS organization and a conviction of the need of greater centralized authority for the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the JCS—all further reinforced for Eisenhower in 1951 and 1952 as he applied in peacetime the principles of unity of command and effort in a joint and combined theater as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.

As a consequence, six months after entering office as President of the United States in January 1953, Eisenhower instituted an Executive Branch reorganization plan for the Department of Defense. The results did not live up to Eisenhower’s expectation in terms of a unified perspective in Washington. The dual-hat status of the JCS as both service chiefs and members of the Joint Chiefs was impervious to such incremental efforts, as the President discovered in his first term while attempting to negotiate a “middle way” between solvency and security in his “new look” at national security policy. By the end of that term, Eisenhower could see no evidence that, unless specifically directed by him, the Joint Chiefs would focus their efforts on reducing their demands for resources. It was increasingly clear to the president that absent some new, more far reaching attempt at Defense Department reorganization, the Joint Chiefs would remain mired in their service cultures, an impediment to the further progress of the unification process begun in 1947 and to his goal of a more unified command structure at the highest national level.

The opportunity came in Eisenhower’s second term with the Sputnik crisis in the fall of 1957. Despite mounting criticism of his administration after the launch of the Soviet satellite, the president perceived the crisis as a means to take a major step on the evolutionary path to his goal of operational and national unity of command and effort by presenting Pentagon reorganization as a means to hold down the expanding costs of preparedness brought on by the pressures for new technology in the wake of Sputnik. The current climate of what he considered public and congressional overreaction to the Soviet satellite, he pointed out, had opened the way for “a giant step toward unification” as a necessary counter to costly interservice rivalry for the new technology.

In the 1958 Defense Reorganization Act, Eisenhower succeeded in further increasing the power of the Defense Secretary and in centralizing research and development efforts. But congressional opposition insured only minimal success in increasing the size of the Joint Staff and strengthening the position of the JCS Chairman. As a result, the dual-hat status of the JCS persisted, undermining attempts in the Reorganization Act to establish a clear command channel from the President through the Secretary of Defense to the commanders-in-chief of the unified commands. Moreover, without a strong JCS Chairman, there was nothing in the coming years to prevent the dual-hat status from vitiating Eisenhower’s attempt in the 1958 act to create a bifurcation of responsibilities between the JCS (strategic planning and advice) and the services (training and logistics).

Ironically, it would be congressional pressure almost three decades later that would force through most of the reforms desired by Dwight Eisenhower. The 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act was a vindication of the concept of unified command, which furthered unification of the services at the national level as a means of ensuring unity of command and effort from Washington down through the theater organizations.

In the new century, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 highlighted the inadequacies of the Executive Branch’s interagency system in dealing with complex contingencies, spurring a series of reports calling for agencies outside the Pentagon to increase their operational and planning capabilities. Those capabilities, the reports concluded, resided almost entirely in the Department of Defense. With current security challenges demanding solutions that more effectively integrate the non-military elements of power, Dwight Eisenhower’s approach to unified command continues to animate reform discussion at the highest level of government.