Retired Marine Corps Reserve General Arnold Punaro recently advocated creating a four-star autonomous warfare command, drawing parallels to the establishment of U.S. Special Operations Command after the failed 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, Operation Eagle Claw, and to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Those analogies are unpersuasive.

A joint command responsible for developing—and potentially employing—unmanned weapons would centralize functions best left to the services. Joint command at the operational level of war, a creation in part of the Goldwater Nichols legislation, is regarded as a major enabling factor of U.S. military combat success in t since 1990. Yet advocates of the law, including Punaro’s former colleague Jim Locher, have concluded that some of its joint administrative structures have not worked nearly as well.

News reports suggest that the House Armed Services Committee is considering reestablishing an Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee in the next Congress. That’s unsurprising. Each session brings new topics and different approaches, especially with the prospect of a partisan turnover. As the leader of the last HASC O&I staff who was there with many of the current members, I suspect these are the interrelated aspects of a reconstituted O&I that HASC is likely contemplating:

Staffing and bureaucratic limitations.