Rumsfeld’s New Joint

That wacky Rummy is at it again. This time, he wants to reform the services to increase joint-ness between the services. The article is long on unnamed sources, who mostly claim that more jointness will cure what ails us. There’s no doubt that much of the alleged joint cooperation between the services is bogus, and that much of the work that some parts of the services do could be consolidated.
A lot of this work has been done; for example, there’s already a uniform military pay system administered by the Defense Financial and Accounting Service. The article claims that part of the new plan is to get more jointness in procurement:

Rumsfeld has also targeted the way the Pentagon develops and buys weapons as a function that needs to be done more jointly too. He tapped Edward Aldridge, the recently departed under secretary of defense for acquisition, to help form a central body with greater power to determine the military’s equipment needs – a function the services now do individually.
“What we need to do is … say ‘What [are] the needs of the Department of Defense in a joint sense?’ So that when programs are developed by the services they are by definition born joint,” Mr. Aldridge says.
Joint development of weapon systems is supposed to save money by ensuring the weapons can operate with all the services’ existing technology from the outset instead of requiring costly retrofitting later.

For common gear like ground radios, this seems like a no-brainer, but it has the serious problem of ignoring the basic concept that the services have different mission requirements. Some multi-service/multi-role projects have turned out well and provided economies of scale (e.g. all of the services now use the same basic personal weapons, the M9 pistol and the M16A2 rifle, with SOCOM units getting different issue to meet their needs). Other projects, like the ill-starred TFX/F-111 and SINGCARS, haven’t worked out so well; for still others, like the JSF, the jury’s still out.
My worry is that in the name of jointness, we’ll see more one-size-fits-none solutions that argue away the specific requirements of individual services; the biggest areas where this seems likely to me are theater missile defense (where the Army/Marines and the Navy have vastly different reach and mobility requirements), aircraft of all sizes (hey, where’d my close-air support go?), and ground combat systems. I’m all for commonizing radios, BDUs, helmets, machine guns, and so on, but I doubt it will stop there.
The other interesting part of the article is this:

But by pressing for greater civilian control over what the services buy and how they train, Rumsfeld could nudge them toward greater back-office cooperation… The Pentagon requested $1.8 billion over the next six years in its FY 2004 budget to create a new joint-training capability. As part of Rumsfeld’s strategy, a mix of current and retired officers are developing joint strategies at Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. JFCOM also serves as a voice for regional combat commanders in how the Pentagon develops forces and new weapons.

It’s impossible to tell if this means “let’s train everyone the same” (bad) or “let’s train them to work together beter” (good). As I said some time ago, I don’t want to see mixed-gender training inflicted on the Marines, and I’d hate to see Army or Marine training dumbed down. Note that I am not disparaging the Air Force or Navy, merely pointing out that the Basic School, the School of Infantry, and other service-specific training can’t easily be replaced by a generic all-service training program. Take a look at the list of Marine schools and you’ll already see a bunch of them that are joint– anything with “naval”, “detachment”, “joint”, or “element” in the name is a dead giveaway.