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Form Follows Function:
Options for Changing U.S. Strategy
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- While day-to-day competition focuses on deterrence and has links to war plans through nested competition activities, the relationship is at best indirect and often difficult to measure and assess.
- A more direct focus on war fighting would reduce the emphasis on day-to-day competition and security cooperation.
- Each CCDR needs the ability to shift resources between the problems their CCMD is responsible for, and leadership must accept that CCMDs cannot solve every problem.
- Reasonable consolidation could turn the current 11 CCMDs into 6, which should reduce the number of decisions the secretary needs to make and streamline meetings for the secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
- It also would streamline key forums like the “tank”—Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings—which often include 11 combatant commanders, 6 service chiefs, the CJCS, the vice chairman, and many of the Joint Staff’s three-star principals (e.g., J2, J3, J5).
- The large number of senior leaders in each meeting often limits meaningful discussion, as time is needed to give every leader an opportunity to comment.
These changes assume that consolidation can drive prioritization and integration. Larger geographic areas allow regional-oriented CCMDs to better manage assigned forces and engage partners. This regional perspective better aligns with campaigning and the use of operations, activities, and investments to deter adversaries and reassure partners. This will not significantly reduce the workforce because the CCMD will still need experts for all the issues. . .
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An OPCOM structure will operate differently than current command constructs. In a war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or Russia today, U.S. forces would have difficulty attacking Russian or PRC extended lines of communication along the “Belt and Road” countries because multiple CCMDs must deconflict forces and effects. This friction may be acceptable against opponents who cannot operate with advantage in all domains, but would likely cause the United States to lose a war with the PRC or Russia. A single OPCOM would be better positioned to conduct war planning; for example, the operational design and operational art tasks of choosing where and how to use forces without bias for or against any specific region. Today’s CCMDs have an incentive to prioritize their area of responsibility first—only the Pentagon (OSD, Services, and Joint Staff) really look at the world holistically. Additionally, OPCOM’s limited responsibilities for day-to-day competition activities would allow greater focus on preparing to conduct combined, joint all-domain conflict under the toughest conditions. Today, immediate competition requirements often, and appropriately, pull the focus of CCMDs from the important but longer-term war-planning and preparation activities.
This OPCOM construct would likely require another nation to fulfill the four-star Supreme Allied Commander Europe role that the EUCOM commander holds today. While it would be difficult, it would not be impossible to reassume the role during a major theater war if a NATO nation were attacked.. . .
There are disadvantages to this proposal as well. Reducing the role of the regional commanders would likely create perception of regional disinterest since the change would be perceived and portrayed as a retreat back to “Fortress America.” Maintaining the subject matter experts in the middle ranks (military and civilian) should limit the loss of regional expertise. Such a move would also require a substantial culture change in the U.S. military, which has operated with the current model since the 1980s—a period longer than the careers of nearly all serving military officers. A final challenge would be blending the new structure into existing alliance relationships such as Europe and South Korea, where the U.S. regional commander holds a coalition leadership role. However, this last challenge also provides a potential opportunity if the United States wants to lower its costs for supporting international alliances.
Aligning the National Security Enterprise
Alongside fundamental changes to the UCP, reorganizing the OSD without growing the overall staff size could address concerns CCDRs, their staffs, and the National Security Council frequently raise about slow DOD decisionmaking. Currently, approximately 16 individuals report directly to the secretary and 19 individuals report directly to the sole deputy secretary. Importantly, the secretary must approve any dispute between CCDRs, even over a single military dog team. The secretary’s span of control is far too large, which forces him to make too many decisions and creates an unacceptably slow decisionmaking process. Providing the secretary with three empowered deputy secretaries, in the chain of command, provides the best way to mitigate this problem.
Note: The chart shows a potential DOD organization structure without additional deputy secretaries and streamlined to six combatant commands. In this structure, all conflicts between combatant commanders or service secretaries require secretary involvement.
Note: The chart shows a potential DOD organization structure with deputy secretaries and six combatant commands. The secretary only needs to resolve conflict between services and combatant commands or around issues over which he chooses to retain all decisionmaking authority.
The current OSD staff capacity can produce far more decision memos than the secretary can review and act upon. For example, the secretary ordered a CCMD to make an adjustment in a meeting coordinated and attended by the office of one of this report’s authors. However, the CCMD staff refused to follow the secretary’s clear verbal guidance to their commander and the OSD staff until they received official written guidance from the secretary himself to “prevent miscommunication,” which wasted several weeks and hundreds of staff hours. Having deputy secretaries who can task service secretaries, CCDRs, and agency heads would substantially mitigate this problem.
One DSD could be responsible for current operations and make decisions when CCMDs disagree. A DSD for future operations could lead the services to manage trade-offs between services while overseeing service manning, training, and equipping functions. Service needs and CCMD needs would still come into conflict, but the two DSDs would be able to consolidate current and future issues to make a clearer decision for the secretary. More importantly, a DSD focused on the services would provide a stronger service perspective in many senior decision forums. A third DSD could have authority over major issues affecting the defense enterprise, such as finances, auditing, and the information technology backbone.1 Ideally, this DSD could focus on upgrading and streamlining the DOD’s information technology to improve productivity across the department. The OSD already has offices and staff that cover these issues, but few decisionmakers. Although assistant secretaries of defense (ASD) and under secretaries of defense (USD) are 4-star equivalents who have influence, they reside outside the chain of command.
Rather than the current system, where the services control the vast majority of funding, each DSD should control a portion of the overall budget established by the secretary. This would enhance the secretary’s influence over the budget and help encourage trade-offs between services for similar mission functions. Additionally, this construct would provide a stronger pathway for CCMDs to advocate for funding of near-term priorities. This should include providing CCMDs with a method to “bid” to use extant forces while providing a clear market signal for what CCMDs truly value. These adjustments also enhance the secretary’s power by pushing less important decisions to empowered DSDs, which would allow the secretary more time to focus on major strategic issues, such as determining how to apportion funding between current and future priorities and any other issues the secretary prioritizes. When the secretary takes on a major issue, like Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, the DSDs can keep everything else moving. Overall, adding two DSDs and empowering them should substantially improve the benefits of CCMD consolidation without adding large additional staffs.
Recommendations
The United States is entering a new era of great power competition that demands more than marginal reform—it requires a new map. The current UCP reflects the world as it was, not as it is becoming. Designed for the post–Cold War moment and stretched to address everything from terrorism to near-peer rivalry, the combatant command structure has become a bureaucratic labyrinth. Each node—each four-star billet—fights for attention, resources, and relevance. Instead of generating clarity, the system multiplies friction. If Washington wants to win in the era of systems warfare and strategic competition, it must reimagine the machinery of defense—starting with the architecture of command. The recommendations that follow aim to generate more flexible options for national leadership, rebalance the relationship between current operations and future force design, and create an institutional structure that can think, compete, and adapt at the speed of relevance.
First, the DOD should significantly reduce the number of four-star CCMDs and broaden the responsibilities of each four-star commander. The CCMDs give greater emphasis to their specific problems; however, the proliferation of “priority” problems has created an arms race for bureaucratic power instead of improved prioritization and subject matter expertise on each issue. Consolidating the CCMDs into three regional commands and three functional commands provides the best first step. These consolidated CCMDs should have additional budgeting authority to purchase munitions or commercially available solutions that do not create a long-term sustainment bills.
Second, the secretary or Congress should create a deputy secretary of defense (DSD) who is in the chain of command for all of the Combatant Commands (largely current operations focused) and another who is in the chain of command for all of the services (largely future focused). Each of these DSDs would have budgetary responsibilities for the entities they are responsible for. The primary purpose of these DSDs would be resolving disputes between CCMDs or Services in accordance with secretary and presidential guidance. Today, there are too many four-star commanders with appropriately different priorities that the secretary must adjudicate. The system generally works well for important and urgent problems, but all other decisions move at a glacial pace.
Third, the options outlined in this paper require immediate attention by an interagency planning team to assess their viability. This team could—within 60 days—offer concise recommendations for the next UCP. If the DOD has more time, then a more sustained, deliberate effort should be undertaken by a mix of think tanks and federally funded research and development centers to ensure that the secretary has access to a broad range of perspectives, as well as insights from war games, that can inform the FY 2027 NDAA.
Fourth, the interagency team should also confront one of the most overlooked barriers to strategic coherence: the fact that the Department of State and the Department of Defense use different maps to see the world. This is not just a bureaucratic artifact—it is a strategic liability. When diplomats and war fighters operate on mismatched regional boundaries, they create seams that adversaries can exploit and that allies find confusing. The result is a series of missed opportunities and diminishing marginal returns in everything from security assistance to crisis response. If the United States wants to operate as a truly integrated state actor in a contested world, it needs to align its cartography. Harmonizing these maps would enhance interagency planning, create shared mental models, and help forge more coherent campaigns that blend defense and diplomacy across regions.
Conclusion
Reforming the Unified Command Plan is a way to support the Trump administration’s desire for a smaller, more focused federal government and national security enterprise. However, such an effort should rest on interagency coordination and rigorous analysis, including ideas outlined in this report and past work completed in accordance with the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2022. This report provides a starting point for discussion and analysis, not a final answer.
The designers of the current UCP faced a different international situation, a different range of threats, different communication tools, and a different speed of events. Today, the U.S. administration anticipates a need to shift U.S. grand strategy to be more agile and efficient while also better aligning with changing international conditions. Administration officials have clearly signaled a desire to lower international commitments today to preserve and expand economic strength for a potential great power conflict with the PRC tomorrow. This “reordering” of national strategy will create the largest change in the international system since 1945. Fewer resources will also require the DOD to do less with less on a daily basis. Therefore, the DOD must operate differently so it can rapidly adjust training and operations as the international situation and presidential priorities change. Operating differently requires an updated military command structure to effectively use the resources the American people have given the DOD. As U.S. national strategy evolves, the military instrument must adapt to support that strategy if it is going to meet the moment. Form should always follow function.
Todd Simmons is a senior non-resident fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a professor of practice at the Marine Corps University, School of Advanced Warfighting. Colonel Benjamin Fernandes is an Army strategist at the National Defense University. Benjamin Jensen is the Frank E. Petersen Chair at the School of Advanced Warfighting and the director of the Futures Lab at CSIS.The conclusions and opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the opinions or official position of the U.S. government, Department of Defense, National Defense University, or School of Advanced Warfighting.
This report is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this report.
Please consult the PDF for references.
Please see below for an appendix summarizing options for reorganizing U.S. military command structures.
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