Opinion

The Other Four-Star General
By Ahmad Faruqui. PhD
Dansville, CA

The latest suicide-bomb attack in Rawalpindi took place close to the house of General Tariq Majeed. It brought out of obscurity his new posting as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC).
Majeed is one of two lieutenant generals who were given the fourth star in early October. General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the former head of Inter-Services Intelligence, was appointed Vice Chief of Army Staff. Media attention has been focused on Kayani, since he is widely viewed as heir apparent to President-General Musharraf.
But should it not focus on General Majeed? In most countries, someone in a comparable position acts as the senior defense advisor to the government. That, for example, is the case in the UK and in the US, both countries from which the Pakistani military derives doctrinal as well as organizational inspiration.
In some countries, all the service chiefs report to him. In wartime, he is responsible for coordinating operations between the services.
Typically, the appointment is rotated among the services, to prevent any service from acquiring dominance.
In the UK, the Chief of the Defense Staff (CDS) acts as the head of the armed forces and is the principal military adviser to the secretary of state and to the prime minister. Under him is the vice chief of the defense staff who acts as number four in the military hierarchy, after the CDS and the three service chiefs.
In the US, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) is the principal military adviser to the president. He is considered a member of the cabinet and leads the meetings and coordinates the activities of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, comprising the Chairman, the Vice Chairman of the JCS, and the heads of the four services.
A key difference between the UK and US models is that the American CJCS does not outrank the respective heads of each service branch. The CJCS is not in charge of any military operation and the respective service heads, who are of equal rank with him, report directly to the Defense Secretary.
Thus, in the US, although the office of the CJCS is very important and highly prestigious, he (or she) does not have any command authority over combatant forces. The chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense directly to the commanders of the ten combat commands such as CENTCOM.
In Pakistan, the CJCSC appears to have less authority than any of the service chiefs. The post was created in March 1976, based on the recommendations of a White Paper on the Higher Defense Organization (HDO) that was commissioned by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Its intent was to improve inter-service coordination, whose inadequacies were highlighted by the military fiasco in 1971.
The HDO was also designed to diminish the probability that the army chief would carry out a coup. Toward that end, the service chiefs, who were previously titled commander-in-chief, were re-titled as chief of staff.
The HDO White Paper concluded that the three services essentially fought three separate wars in 1971. As is well known, the Naval Chief heard about Pakistan’s air attack on Indian bases on the 3rd of December through Radio Pakistan, and the Commander of the Eastern garrison heard about this attack through a BBC World Service broadcast.
The Air Force Chief had personal difficulties with the President and Army Chief, General Yahya. He had concluded that the war was one of Yahya’s making and that it was not winnable. He decided to employ the Air Force in a reserve role and preserve it for a future conflict. This left the ground forces without adequate air cover during much of the fighting along the western front.
They failed to make any headway against India and the east was lost.
To prevent a recurrence, the JCSC was set up as “the highest military body for considering all problems bearing on the military aspects of national defence.” This grand thinking came to naught when General Zia, the army chief, deposed Prime Minister Bhutto and declared martial law in July 1977.
Over time, a dozen individuals have been appointed to the CJCSC position but only two have come from the other services. What is more striking is that of the ten army appointees, two have simultaneously served as the army chief, completely undermining the CJCSC position and reducing him to a high paid factotum.
The CJCSC has exercised no influence over military operations even though it was empowered with decision-making authority to ensure true joint-ness in the conduct of military operations. The Army, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the armed forces, continues to dominate the military landscape.
During the Bhutto period, General Zia, as Army Chief, exercised complete control over the armed forces. General Sharif, the first CJCS, behaved as his number two. This became apparent when the military deposed Bhutto, and Zia was installed as the Chief Martial Law Administrator. Zia continued to be the Army Chief, since that position was viewed as the senior military position. The CJCSC post became vacant on General Sharif’s retirement and was not filled for two years, without any apparent influence on military planning or operations, suggesting it did not have even have any symbolic authority.
To eliminate this ambiguity in roles, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appointed his Army Chief, General Pervez Musharraf, to simultaneously serve as the CJCSC. The rest does not bear recitation.
Brian Cloughley, in “A History of the Pakistan Army,” makes a strong case for creating a Chief of Defense Staff (CDF) on the UK model in Pakistan. The CDF would be the single adviser to government on military strategy and tactics, with a very basic mission statement: to command the armed forces of Pakistan.
The CDF would form a tri-service HQ. Each of the three service chiefs would act as an advisor to the CDF, but not be in the operational chain of command. Their own headquarters would shrink, since there would be no rationale for many of the staff branches that now exist. Concludes Cloughley, “Operations branches, these sacred bodies to which the best and the brightest aspire, would be disbanded and reconstituted within the tri-service HQ.”
It is time to seriously consider this proposal. Everything else has been tried and failed. The issue is not simply the ability of the three services to jointly fight and win a war. It is their ability to stay out of politics and to stay focused on their core competency.
If this cannot be done, the CJCSC position should be eliminated.

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