United States Secretary of Defense

Secretary of Defense of the United States
Seal of the Department of Defense[1]
Flag of the Secretary of Defense[2]
Incumbent Jim Mattis since 20 January 2017
United States Department of Defense Office of the Secretary of Defense
Style	Mr. Secretary
Status	Leader and chief executive officer
Member of	Cabinet National Security Council
Reports to	President of the United States
Seat	The Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia
Appointer	The President with Senate advice and consent
Term length	No fixed term
Constituting instrument	10 U.S.C. § 113 50 U.S.C. § 401
Formation	17 September 1947 (1947-09-17)
First holder	James Forrestal
Succession	Sixth[3]
Deputy	Deputy Secretary of Defense
Salary	Executive Schedule, level I[4]
Website	www.defense.gov

The Secretary of Defense (SecDef) is the leader and chief executive officer of the United States Department of Defense, the executive department of the Armed Forces of the United States.^[5][6][7] The Secretary of Defense's position of command and authority over the United States' military is second only to that of the President and Congress.^[8] This position corresponds to what is generally known as a Defense Minister in many other countries.^[9] The Secretary of Defense is appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, and is by custom a member of the Cabinet and by law a member of the National Security Council.^[10]

Secretary of Defense is a statutory office, and the general provision in 10 U.S.C. § 113 provides that the Secretary of Defense has "authority, direction and control over the Department of Defense", and is further designated by the same statute as "the principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to the Department of Defense".^[11] Ensuring civilian control of the military, an individual may not be appointed as Secretary of Defense within seven years after relief from active duty as a commissioned officer of a regular (i.e., non-reserve) component of an armed force.^[12]

The Secretary of Defense is in the chain of command and exercises command and control, for both operational and administrative purposes subject only to the orders of the President, over all Department of Defense forces: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force. This is also extended to the United States Coast Guard during any period of time in which its command and control is transferred to the Department of Defense.^{[13][14][15][16][17]} Only the Secretary of Defense (or the president or Congress) can authorize the transfer of operational control of forces between the three Military Departments (the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force) and the 10 Combatant Commands (Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command, Southern Command, Cyber Command, Special Operations Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command).^[13] Because the Office of Secretary of Defense is vested with legal powers which exceed those of any commissioned officer, and is second only to the President in the military hierarchy, it has sometimes unofficially been referred to as a de facto "deputy commander-in-chief".^[18][19][20] The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the principal military adviser to the Secretary of Defense and the President, and while the Chairman may assist the Secretary and President in their command functions, the Chairman is not in the chain of command.^[21]

The Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of the Treasury are generally regarded as the four most important cabinet officials because of the importance of their departments.^[22]

The current Secretary of Defense is retired United States Marine Corps general Jim Mattis, who was confirmed and sworn in on 20 January 2017.^[23]

History

Seal of the National Military Establishment (1947–1949), which was reorganized into the Department of Defense.

The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps were established in 1775, in concurrence with the American Revolution. The War Department, headed by the Secretary of War, was created by Act of Congress in 1789 and was responsible for both the Army and Navy until the founding of a separate Department of the Navy in 1798.

Based on the experiences of World War II, proposals were soon made on how to more effectively manage the large combined military establishment. The Army generally favored centralization while the Navy had institutional preferences for decentralization and the status quo. The resulting National Security Act of 1947 was largely a compromise between these divergent viewpoints. The Act split the Department of War into the Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force and established the National Military Establishment (NME), presided over by the Secretary of Defense. The Act also separated the Army Air Forces from the Army to become its own branch of service, the United States Air Force. At first, each of the service secretaries maintained cabinet status. The first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who in his previous capacity as Secretary of the Navy had opposed creation of the new position, found it difficult to exercise authority over the other branches with the limited powers his office had at the time. To address this and other problems, the National Security Act was amended in 1949 to further consolidate the national defense structure in order to reduce interservice rivalry, directly subordinate the Secretaries of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force to the Secretary of Defense in the chain of command, and rename the National Military Establishment as the Department of Defense, making it one Executive Department. The position of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the number two position in the department, was also created at this time.

The general trend since 1949 has been to further centralize management in the Department of Defense, elevating the status and authorities of civilian OSD appointees and defense-wide organizations at the expense of the military departments and the services within them. The last major revision of the statutory framework concerning the position was done in the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. In particular, it elevated the status of joint service for commissioned officers, making it in practice a requirement before appointments to general officer and flag officer grades could be made.

Powers and functions

Department of Defense organizational chart (December 2013)

The Secretary of Defense, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, is by federal law (10 U.S.C. § 113) the head of the Department of Defense, "the principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to Department of Defense", and has "authority, direction and control over the Department of Defense". Because the Constitution vests all military authority in Congress and the President, the statutory authority of the Secretary of Defense is derived from their constitutional authorities. Since it is impractical for either Congress or the President to participate in every piece of Department of Defense affairs, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary's subordinate officials generally exercise military authority.

As the head of DoD, all officials, employees and service members are "under" the Secretary of Defense. Some of those high-ranking officials, civil and military (outside of OSD and the Joint Staff) are: the Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Navy, and Secretary of the Air Force, Army Chief of Staff, Commandant of the Marine Corps, Chief of Naval Operations, and Air Force Chief of Staff, Chief of the National Guard Bureau and the Combatant Commanders of the Combatant Commands. All of these high-ranking positions, civil and military, require Senate confirmation.

The Department of Defense is composed of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Joint Staff (JS), Office of the Inspector General (DODIG), the Combatant Commands, the Military Departments (Department of the Army (DA), Department of the Navy (DON) & Department of the Air Force (DAF)), the Defense Agencies and DoD Field Activities, the National Guard Bureau (NGB), and such other offices, agencies, activities, organizations, and commands established or designated by law, or by the President or by the Secretary of Defense.

Department of Defense Directive 5100.01 describes the organizational relationships within the Department, and is the foundational issuance for delineating the major functions of the Department. The latest version, signed by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in December 2010, is the first major re-write since 1987.^[24][25]

Amenities

List of Secretaries of Defense

The longest-serving Secretary of Defense is Robert McNamara, who served for a total of 2,595 days. Combining his two non-sequential services as Secretary of Defense, the second longest serving is Donald Rumsfeld, who served just ten days fewer than McNamara. The shortest-serving Secretary of Defense is Elliot Richardson, who was quickly moved to US Attorney General after 114 days due to resignations during the Watergate Scandal (not counting Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements and William Howard Taft IV, who each served a few weeks as temporary/acting Secretary of Defense).

Parties

  Democratic   Republican   Political Independent / Unknown

Status

No.	Portrait	Name	State of Residence	Took Office	Left Office	Days served	President serving under
1		James V. Forrestal	New York	17 September 1947	28 March 1949[28]	558		Harry S Truman
2		Louis A. Johnson	West Virginia	28 March 1949	19 September 1950[29]	540
3		George C. Marshall	Pennsylvania	21 September 1950	12 September 1951[30]	356
4		Robert A. Lovett	New York	17 September 1951	20 January 1953[31]	491
5		Charles E. Wilson	Michigan	28 January 1953	8 October 1957[32]	1714		Dwight D. Eisenhower
6		Neil H. McElroy	Ohio	9 October 1957	1 December 1959[33]	783
7		Thomas S. Gates, Jr.	Pennsylvania	2 December 1959	20 January 1961[34]	415
8		Robert S. McNamara	Michigan	21 January 1961	29 February 1968[35]	1035		John F. Kennedy
						1560 (2595 total)		Lyndon B. Johnson
9		Clark M. Clifford	Maryland	1 March 1968	20 January 1969[36]	325
10		Melvin R. Laird	Wisconsin	22 January 1969	29 January 1973[37]	1468		Richard Nixon
11		Elliot L. Richardson	Massachusetts	30 January 1973	24 May 1973[38]	114
–		William P. Clements, Jr.[39] Acting	Texas	24 May 1973	2 July 1973	39
12		James R. Schlesinger	Virginia	2 July 1973	19 November 1975[40]	403
						467 (870 total)		Gerald Ford
13		Donald Rumsfeld	Illinois	20 November 1975	20 January 1977[41]	427 ( 2585 total)
14		Harold Brown	California	21 January 1977	20 January 1981[42]	1460		Jimmy Carter
15		Caspar Weinberger	California	21 January 1981	23 November 1987[43]	2497		Ronald Reagan
16		Frank Carlucci	Virginia	23 November 1987	20 January 1989[44]	424
–		William Howard Taft IV Acting	Ohio	20 January 1989	21 March 1989[45]	60		George H. W. Bush
17		Richard B. Cheney	Wyoming	21 March 1989	20 January 1993[46]	1401
18		Leslie Aspin	Wisconsin	21 January 1993	3 February 1994[47]	378		Bill Clinton
19		William J. Perry	Pennsylvania	3 February 1994	23 January 1997[48] / 24 January 1997[49]	1085
20		William S. Cohen	Maine	24 January 1997	20 January 2001[50]	1457
21		Donald Rumsfeld	Illinois	20 January 2001	18 December 2006[51]	2158 ( 2585 total)		George W. Bush
22		Robert M. Gates	Texas	18 December 2006	30 June 2011[52]	764
						891 (1,655 total)		Barack Obama
23		Leon Panetta	California	1 July 2011	26 February 2013[53]	606
24		Chuck Hagel	Nebraska	27 February 2013	17 February 2015[54]	720
25		Ash Carter	Massachusetts	17 February 2015	19 January 2017[55]	702
26		Jim Mattis	Washington	20 January 2017[56]	Present	641		Donald Trump

Succession

Living former Secretaries of Defense

As of October 2018, there are nine living former Secretaries of Defense, the oldest being Harold Brown (1977–1981, born 1927). The most recent Secretary of Defense to die was Frank Carlucci (1987–1989), on 3 June 2018.

See also

References

Further reading

• Cohen, Eliot A. (2003). Supreme Command: soldiers, statesmen and leadership in wartime. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-3404-8.
• Cole, Alice C.; Goldberg, Alfred; Tucker, Samuel A.; et al., eds. (1978). The Department of Defense: Documents on Establishment and Organization 1944–1978 (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense/U.S. Government Printing Office. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 July 2014.
• Huntington, Samuel P. (1957). The Soldier and the State. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-81736-2.
• King, Archibald (1960) [1949]. Command of the Army (PDF). Military Affairs. Charlottesville, Virginia: The Judge Advocate General's School, U.S. Army.
• Mahan, Erin R., and Jeffrey A. Larsen, eds. (2012) “Evolution of the Secretary of Defense in the Era of Massive Retaliation: Charles Wilson, Neil McElroy, and Thomas Gates, 1953–1961,” Cold War Foreign Policy Series: Special Study 3 (September 2012), vii–41.
• Stevenson, Charles A. (2006). SECDEF: the nearly impossible job of Secretary of Defense. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books. ISBN 1-57488-794-7.
• Trask, Roger R.; Goldberg, Alfred (1997). The Department of Defense 1997-1947: Organization and Leaders (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense/U.S. Government Printing Office. ISBN 0-16-049163-0. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 July 2014.
• The Department of Defense Key Officials 1947–2013 (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense. 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 February 2013.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to United States Secretary of Defense.

• Official website