History of Joint Staff Strategic Planning, 1949-2020

This study examines the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff in strategic planning. Such planning began just after World War II as a way of preparing for a global war against the Soviet Union. After the demise of that monolithic threat in 1991, the general consensus of senior military leaders was that threats would become more diffuse and generally confined within a geographic region. That shifted the locus of planning efforts to the combatant commands and away from the Joint Staff. But declining defense budgets and the consequent need to more carefully husband resources prompted the Joint Staff to adopt a role of reviewing and balancing various combatant command plans. By 2015, however, the return of threats with global reach caused the staff to revert to its more centralized role, arbitrating and synchronizing combatant command efforts to address those threats wherever they appeared. This review not only connects presidential level strategy documents to those produced by the Joint Staff across these three different phases, but also for the first time documents how the twenty-first century concept of global integration came to be.