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65 Building a More Effective Military MY EARLY CONGRESSIONAL service on committees on agriculture and small business served the Fourth District very well. In 1980, when I joined the Armed Services Committee, I was finally in a position to begin fulfilling my childhood dream of assisting in keeping America safe—and benefiting my beloved Missouri. My seat on the Armed Services Committee came about through the good offices of my friend Dick Bolling. Dick was a veteran, even having served as an aide to Douglas MacArthur, and was very pro-military. In 1980, a death created a vacancy on the committee. Dick pushed me to take it, which I did. Then he used his position as chairman of the Steering and Policy Committee to put me on as a permanent member the following year. I had finally reached my lifelong goal of serving the nation’s military, but like any new recruit, I had to start from the bottom rung. Even for a junior member of the committee, there was no lack of things to do. The early 1980s were marked by dramatic American military actions. Unfortunately, two of them shared a common failing. The unsuccessful raid to free American hostages held in our embassy in Iran was blamed in part on poor coordination among the military services, while the ultimately successful action in Grenada was made much more complicated by the same flaw. Today’s younger generations may not recall how the Iran hostage crisis gripped America’s attention, frustrating our best strategists and painfully tarnishing our image around the world. To some, that mocking image was of an impotent super-nation. We seemed to some to be paralyzed, powerless, outmaneuvered by thugs who brazenly seized our embassy and held our people for 444 days, from November 4, 1979, until the final hostages were freed on January 20, 1981. The Iran hostage taking was a diplomatic crisis, to be sure, but the failed attempt to rescue the hostages by military means indicated to me a far deeper crisis in the need for concerted, integrated action among the services—what the military calls “jointness.” B u i l d i n g a M o r e e f f e c t i v e M i l i t a r y 66 Once negotiations to free the hostages had proved futile, the U.S. military mounted a secret rescue called Operation Eagle Claw. But Eagle Claw was aborted in the blowing sands of the desert on April 24, 1980, when three helicopters malfunctioned due to mechanical reasons. As the stealthy rescuers converged to begin their operations outside Tehran, the rotor of a Navy helicopter sliced into an Air Force transport plane. In mere seconds, there were fiery explosions that killed eight men before the operation could swoop in to extricate any hostages. The TV news images back home showed scorched ground and shattered aircraft, an image of unmitigated disaster. Popular reaction to the failed Iran rescue attempt, at a time when Vietnam was still fresh in memory, prompted some to question whether our military was still the world’s most capable or best equipped. The popular if uninformed questions were about basic competencies. But I never questioned the devotion or spirit of service in our military personnel. I believed then and I know now that the real issues behind the failed rescue arose from the lack of jointness in executing such a complex and challenging mission. At the most basic points in its concept and evolution, there had been too little coordination of the mission’s training, oversight, and execution. As a result of the disaster in the Iranian desert, conversations about improving military jointness intensified. But they were still only an intermittent part of a much larger dialogue in the early 1980s about America’s standing in the world and the readiness of our military. In this dialogue, I stood firmly on the side of favoring the most up-to-date military, with joint training to make the most of our services’ united strength. It was not a majority view. The conversations regarding the need for jointness gained more urgency as we moved further into the new decade and a new presidential administration. President Jimmy Carter, whose single term was dominated by the anguish of the Iran hostage crisis, left office at the very hour on January 20, 1981, when the last of the hostages went free and Ronald Reagan was sworn in as his successor...

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