Decision Authority for Global Conflict

Final In-Class Presentation

Team Task Force Unity didn’t build hardware. They built clarity.

Led by students with backgrounds in international relations, national security, and government, Task Force Unity set out to decode a critical ambiguity in joint operations: in a conflict that spans multiple theaters, who owns the fight?

Their sponsor posed a question that cuts through layers of doctrine, policy, and organizational silos: What role should the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff play in a globally distributed conflict against a peer adversary? For the William & Mary team, the answer wasn’t just about statutory authority. It was about whether the United States could act decisively across combatant commands when it mattered most.

What Was at Stake

A modern fight with a peer adversary will not be regional. It will be global. Simultaneous pressure in the Pacific and Europe. Cyberattacks on communications networks. Contested electromagnetic spectrum. Strategic ambiguity in the chain of command.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is often seen as the central node in American defense planning. But that perception breaks down in practice. Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the Chairman is an advisor to the President and Secretary of Defense, not a commander in the field. The role lacks operational authority, which in a peacetime bureaucracy creates clarity. But in wartime, when speed and synchronization are essential, that same legal clarity becomes operational paralysis.

One of the team’s early interviews captured it best. “In a split-theater fight, the CJCS is expected to synchronize effort without the authority to direct it.” In other words, the Chairman may be the only one with the full picture — but no map to act on it.

Deep Policy Discovery

Over the course of 95 stakeholder engagements, the team spoke with former service chiefs, Joint Staff officers, strategic planners, national security attorneys, Hill staffers, and academic experts on constitutional war powers. They analyzed historical case law, wartime precedents, and doctrinal evolutions stretching back to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986.

What they uncovered was a system built for deliberate decision-making in slow-moving crises. Not one prepared for degraded communications, multi-domain escalation, or the possibility that two combatant commands might face simultaneous, coordinated attack.

Rather than default to a legal critique, the team built a futures-driven framework. They modeled three plausible paths forward, each grounded in different statutory interpretations, strategic risk profiles, and execution timelines.

Three Models for Wartime Authority

• Model 1: The Advisory Integrator A refined version of the current state. The CJCS remains advisory but is given doctrinal pre-clearance to serve as a cross-CCMD integrator in a conflict with an activated global campaign plan. This model is most legally conservative but leaves ambiguity in degraded environments.

• Model 2: The Five-Star Reinstatement In this model, Congress would revive the five-star general rank for the Chairman under a declared contingency, giving temporary operational authority over joint global actions. It is bold, historically grounded, and would require legislative action — making it less timely in an emerging crisis.

• Model 3: The Emergency Roles Matrix The team’s final recommendation. A pre-negotiated, codified doctrine mechanism that authorizes the CJCS to execute a specific set of global synchronization tasks under pre-identified conditions. This matrix would be activated in scenarios where communication with SECDEF is compromised or joint force integration is at risk.

  
  

The team validated each model through scenario wargaming and expert red-teaming, stress-testing assumptions with retired flag officers, national security legal experts, and defense strategists.

Their final deliverable was not a policy memo. It was a mission-aligned decision framework ready for real-world refinement by the Joint Staff.

Operators of Another Kind

• Adelia Purcell, an international security studies scholar, led escalation scenario mapping and red teaming. She translated high-level theory into decision-ready models and facilitated expert tabletop exercises with fluency and force.

• Ally Swindell, Brice Bakker, Lauren Snowden, and Lucas Caldas brought complementary strengths across political science, defense policy, global governance, and military history. Their work ranged from comparative doctrine research to campaign plan simulation to legal statute analysis.

  
  

Mentorship from General Mark Matthews (Ret.) and Maj. Gen. Charles Lyon (Ret.) helped ground their work in operational reality while challenging them to refine every word, model, and implied authority.

Together, the team demonstrated how future policy leaders must think — across disciplines, beyond bureaucracy, and inside the decision loops that matter most.

What Comes Next

Task Force Unity’s frameworks were shared with the Joint Staff and PME faculty at the U.S. Army War College. Their work is now being used as a provocation tool in joint tabletop exercises and as a case study in war college curricula focused on cross-theater command and control.

They didn’t change the law. But they revealed the cost of inaction and built a doctrine-level workaround that could give the Chairman the power to win when others cannot decide.

In a war that moves faster than the vote count, their question remains urgent. Who commands when it counts? Task Force Unity gave the country a better answer.