More than Advice? The Joint Staff and American Foreign Policy

Abstract

This may be a strange time to be suggesting that the Joint Staff (JS) has an influence on foreign policy, given events of the past six years. After all, when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki testified to Congress that the United States would need significantly more troops for occupying Iraq than the administration had been planning for, his career ended abruptly. Critics of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) argue that the system should be rebuilt because of the JCS’s historical (Vietnam)2 and more recent (Iraq) “failures.”3