Joint Chiefs of Staff

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, often shortened to JCS, is the senior military advisory group within the U.S. Department of Defense. Its members are the highest-ranking uniformed officers from each branch of the armed forces, and they counsel the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council on military strategy and operations. The group's composition is set by law and includes a chairman, a vice chairman, the chiefs of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force, plus the chief of the National Guard Bureau. Each service chief also answers directly to their own department secretary, like the secretary of the Army or the secretary of the Navy, for day-to-day management of their branch.

A major turning point came with the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Before that, the Joint Chiefs had a more direct hand in commanding troops. Today, they serve as advisors, not commanders. The chain of command runs from the president to the secretary of defense and then straight to the regional combatant commanders, bypassing the Joint Chiefs altogether. The same act created the vice chairman position and made the chairman the principal military voice to the president and the defense secretary. To support their work, the Joint Staff, a headquarters unit at the Pentagon, draws personnel from all six service branches and is run by the director of the Joint Staff.

The institutional roots go back further, to the Joint Board established in 1903 to coordinate Army and Navy planning. During World War II, the Joint Chiefs functioned informally under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, gaining statutory recognition only with the National Security Act of 1947. The formal organizational structure we know today took shape in 1949 after subsequent reorganization. [edit]