United States Department of Defense
The Secretary of Defense (SecDef) is the pioneer and CEO of the Department of Defense, an Executive Department of the Government of the United States of America.[5][6][7] The Secretary of Defense's control over the United States military is second just to that of the President.[8] This position compares to what is for the most part known as a Defense Minister in numerous other countries.[9] The Secretary of Defense is designated by the President with the counsel and assent of the Senate, and is by custom an individual from the Cabinet and by law an individual from the National Security Council.[10]
Secretary of Defense is a statutory office, and the general arrangement in 10 U.S.C. § 113 gives that the Secretary of Defense has "expert, bearing and control over the Department of Defense", and is additionally assigned by an indistinguishable statute from "the main aide to the President in all issues identifying with the Department of Defense".[11] Ensuring non military personnel control of the military, an individual may not be selected as Secretary of Defense inside seven years after help from dynamic obligation as a charged officer of a standard (i.e., non-hold) segment of an outfitted force.[12]
The Secretary of Defense is in the levels of leadership and activities charge and control, for both operational and managerial purposes subject just to the requests of the President, over all Department of Defense powers: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force. This is likewise stretched out to the United States Coast Guard amid any timeframe in which its summon and control is exchanged to the Department of Defense.[13][14][15][16][17] Only the Secretary of Defense (or the President) can approve the exchange of operational control of powers between the three Military Departments (the branches of the Army, Navy, and Air Force) and the nine Combatant Commands (Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Northern Command, Pacific Command, Southern Command, Special Operations Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command).[13] Because the Office of Secretary of Defense is vested with lawful forces which surpass those of any authorized officer, and is second just to the President in the military pecking order, it has now and then informally been alluded to as an accepted "appointee leader in-chief".[18][19][20] The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the foremost military guide to the Secretary of Defense and the President, and keeping in mind that the Chairman may help the Secretary and President in their charge capacities, 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 by and large viewed as the four most essential bureau authorities in light of the significance of their departments.[22]
The present Secretary of Defense is resigned United States Marine Corps general James Mattis, who was affirmed and sworn in on January 20, 2017
The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps were set up in 1775, in simultaneousness with the American Revolution. The War Department, headed by the Secretary of War, was made by Act of Congress in 1789 and was in charge of both the Army and Navy until the establishing of a different Department of the Navy in 1798.
In light of the encounters of World War II, proposition were soon made on the most proficient method to all the more successfully deal with the vast joined military foundation. The Army for the most part supported centralization while the Navy had institutional inclinations for decentralization and existing conditions. The subsequent National Security Act of 1947 was to a great extent a trade off between these dissimilar perspectives. The Act combined the Department of War (which was renamed as the Department of the Army) with the Department of the Navy to shape the National Military Establishment (NME), directed by the Secretary of Defense. The Act likewise isolated the Army Air Forces (known earlier and ahead of schedule in the war as the Army Air Corps) from the Department of the Army to end up noticeably its own branch of administration, the Department of the Air Force. (Each branch was furnished with its own particular Secretary.) right away, each of the administration secretaries kept up semi bureau status. The principal Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who in his past limit as Secretary of the Navy had contradicted production of the new position, thought that it was hard to practice specialist over alternate branches with the restricted forces his office had at the time. To address this and different issues, the National Security Act was changed in 1949 to additionally combine the national protection structure with a specific end goal to lessen interservice contention, straightforwardly subordinate the Secretaries of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force to the Secretary of Defense in the hierarchy of leadership, 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 division, was likewise made as of now.
The general pattern since 1949 has been to additionally bring together administration in the Department of Defense, lifting the status and experts of regular citizen OSD representatives and protection wide associations to the detriment of the military offices and the administrations inside them. The last significant update of the statutory structure concerning the position was done in the Goldwater– Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Specifically, it hoisted the status of joint administration for charged officers, influencing it practically speaking a necessity before arrangements to general officer and banner to officer evaluations could be made.