On the evening of April 24, 1980, eight RH-53D helicopters took off from the aircraft carrier Nimitz, headed for a refueling site in the Iranian desert that the planners called Desert One. The goal was to free 53 Americans held hostage in Tehran.
One helicopter landed and was abandoned after cockpit indications of an impending rotor blade failure. Another lost critical flight instruments in a cloud of suspended dust and turned back to the carrier. Six reached Desert One, between about 50 and 85 minutes late, and one of those had a hydraulic failure. That left five against a firm minimum of six. The mission was aborted.
Then, while one helicopter was repositioning so another could top off its tanks, it collided with a refueling C-130. Eight crew members died.
The Joint Chiefs set up a review group under Admiral J. L. Holloway III. Its report, dated August 1980 and made public in a sanitized, unclassified version, found that the Desert One plan had not been fully rehearsed and “was soft.” There was no identifiable command post for the on-scene commander. In post-mission interviews, helicopter pilots said that in some cases they did not know or recognize the authority of those giving orders; instructions to leave the helicopters and board the C-130s “had to be questioned” to find out who was giving them. One thing, the group wrote, was related to most of the major issues and underlay its conclusions: “The ad hoc nature of the organization and planning.”
James Locher, a Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who led the work that became the Goldwater-Nichols Act, later quoted the senior commander at Desert One, Air Force Colonel James Kyle, describing “four commanders at the scene without visible identification, incompatible radios, and no agreed-upon plan, not even a designated location for the commander.”
On paper, the chain of command had been fixed long before. In 1958, Locher wrote, Congress removed the service chiefs from the operational chain and gave unified commanders “full operational command of assigned forces.” But “those provisions were not effectively implemented.”
In February 1982, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General David Jones, told the House Armed Services Committee in a closed session, in Locher’s paraphrase: “The system is broken.” More than four years of fighting followed. The act that came out of it, signed on October 1, 1986, again strengthened the unified commanders. This time it also reached into officers’ careers.
Congress had found that officers avoided joint posts. In the Navy of the mid-1980s, Locher wrote, joint duty was considered the “kiss of death.” General George Crist, the head of Central Command, testified that there had not been a single volunteer for any of the thousand billets on his headquarters staff. The services, in Locher’s account, understood that if they kept absolute control of promotions and assignments, Congress could pass all the laws it liked and little would change.
So the law wrote it into promotions. “An officer may not be selected for promotion to the grade of brigadier general or rear admiral (lower half) unless the officer has served in a joint duty assignment,” with waivers. Joint Staff officers were “expected, as a group, to be promoted at a rate not less than” officers on their own service’s headquarters staff.
In 2001, Locher graded that part a C+. Officers’ qualifications had “improved dramatically,” he wrote, but thanks not to the Department of Defense, which had been “until recently indifferent in its implementation.” It was the officers themselves, who had come to see joint experience as something that could promote their careers.