Word: staffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chairman, each member of the J.C.S. wears two hats-one as chief of his own service and the other as a joint chief. General Thomas White, as an example (which applies equally to the other service heads), spends most of his week as Air Force Chief of Staff, working on Air Force problems, expounding Air Force doctrine, fighting Air Force battles. But then comes the moment when he walks into a secret Pentagon room, sits down at a table with the three other members of the J.C.S., and puts on his other hat. As a member of the Joint Chiefs...
...That, gentlemen, is not the way to prepare for war. If we had an effective central planning body acting as a staff to our Commander in Chief, digesting all of these things, putting them into their relative framework, and out of it producing a program for the country, that program, when approved by the Commander in Chief, would in my opinion have the loyalty of every service, and the bickering would stop...
...general ideas. Vannevar Bush has been joined over the years by some of the nation's foremost military thinkers: onetime Army Chief of Staff (1945-48) Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army Generals Joseph Lawton Collins and George C. Marshall. Air Generals Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold and Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, Joseph T. McNarney, former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, former Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter and Los Angeles Industrialist John McCone, who served as special assistant to Defense Secretary Forrestal in 1948 and as Air Force Under Secretary in 1950-51. Although they differ in detail, all have advocated what amounts...
Such a general staff would be composed of the ablest available career officers, freed of obligations to or responsibilities within the separate services. They would work under a Chief of General Staff, who would make out their fitness reports and from whom they would get their promotion recommendations. The general staff would serve as an expert, unified, military planning and advisory board to the Secretary of Defense. A primary responsibility: working out an integrated war plan for all the armed forces...
...critics of a general staff system, still led by the Navy and including many a Congressman, can be expected to put up a fight against any such change however labeled. Main lines of their argument: a general staff might 1) drain the separate services of esprit de corps, 2) commit the U.S. to a single, inflexible strategic course that might prove disastrous, and 3) concentrate military power to the extent that a Chief of General Staff could become a man on horseback, riding rough shod over democratic institutions...