Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 126

Some argue that assigning forces to CCMDs would
make it harder to allocate forces for crises. This is not a
valid argument against assignment for two reasons: first,
if forces were assigned appropriately, the volume of allocations would be reduced. The combatant commanders
who used forces the most would already have a command relationship with those forces, as USPACOM and
U.S. European Command do now. Employment would
not require a temporary transfer. Allocations would
receive greater scrutiny as they would always require
weighing one commander’s priorities against another’s
before transferring a requested unit. Second, the secretary of defense can allocate any force at any time for a
military mission. The secretary is not limited to units
not assigned to CCMDs. Combatant commanders may
nonconcur with allocating their forces, but the secretary
of defense can overrule the combatant commanders.
Currently those with assigned forces can nonconcur
when the Joint Staff or the services recommend allocating away from one CCMD to another.
As of 2016, CCMDs with a large number of assigned forces rarely request allocation because they
have enough forces to perform their steady-state
missions. Commands without assigned forces submit
many allocation requests, particularly USCENTCOM.
Service-retained forces have no operational mission; they are simply a pool of forces. Thus, any time
USCENTCOM has requested allocation of a force, the
services have had no counterargument if a force was
ready and available because that force had no other
competing mission. A combatant commander with an
assigned mission, however, could produce a counterargument. Since 2011, Army units based in the continental United States (mostly service-retained) have rotated
more often than optimal; th R