If Trump wants to cut Pentagon waste and avoid future wars, he should set
his sights on abolishing the Combatant Command system.
Abolish AFRICOM, Then Keep Going
Justin Logan / National Interest and The Cato Institute
(May 31, 2025) — The torrent of foreign policy news in the second Trump administration flows so fast that big ideas are often swamped and sink. One such case was the report in February that President Trump was considering abolishing Africa Command (AFRICOM).
Abolishing AFRICOM is a good idea, but it is only a start. The Trump administration should shut down all the regional Combatant Commands (COCOMs).
The idea may seem radical, but the current structure of super-empowered Combatant Commands only emerged in 1986, when Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act that reorganized the Department of Defense (DOD).
If the Trump administration wants to cut Pentagon waste and avoid future wars, it should set its sights on abolishing the Combatant Command system.
Under Goldwater-Nichols, the COCOMs would have “broad, continuing missions…composed of forces from two or more military departments.” The idea was to diminish competition between the various services of the military by forcing them to work together in a given theater under combatant commanders—“jointness” is the military term. While jointness in fighting wars has its benefits, jointness in peacetime, including budgeting and planning, has notable downsides.
For decades, scholars and policymakers have known that the COCOMs are bloated and have grown beyond reasonable bounds. As a Washington Post article 25 years ago noted, Combatant commanders have “evolved into the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire’s proconsuls—well-funded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of US foreign policy.”
In 2013, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was considering a plan to dissolve AFRICOM and combine Northern Command and Southern Command as a way to save money. In part, the rationale was that civilian and military employment at the COCOMs had grown by more than 50 percent between 2001 and 2012.
The plan to downsize failed, and the COCOMs have since grown in size, power, and influence. By 2015, retired Major General Arnold Punaro testified that the COCOMs had “expanded from lean, warfighting headquarters to sprawling mini-Pentagons with thousands of staff members. They no longer fight wars themselves but must create new joint task forces to accomplish that mission. The regional combatant commanders have evolved into political-military ambassadors, with a strong focus on peacetime engagement.”
The COCOMs helped DOD achieve jointness at the cost of generated new layers of bureaucratic bloat. Abolishing regional Combatant Commands will not make the services silo off and retreat from jointness. It will make the force more agile, less top-heavy, and cheaper.
There are three reasons to shut down the COCOMs. First, they are unnecessary. When the United States undertakes wars, it establishes new commands to oversee their prosecution, making COCOMs redundant to warfighting. Second, they have contributed to the bloat of the general officer corps, making the services more centralized, slower, and more expensive. Third, they have grown into needy and assertive lobbies for more foreign interventions. On net, they make the military more dysfunctional.
As General Punaro noted, in the major wars fought since Goldwater-Nichols, the DOD set up new commands to conduct combat operations. In some of the more haphazard wars during this period, like President Obama’s Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, the relevant COCOM was in charge of the war but struggled to manage even Libya-sized operations. This should not be surprising since AFRICOM’s official mission at its founding was “not to wage war, but to prevent it.”
Unsurprisingly, when DOD realized how poorly AFRICOM had performed in the Libyan war, they began to find more operations for it to conduct across Africa and to grapple with the requirements of leading operations. The first interest of any organization is to survive. But in general, combatant commanders see themselves as diplomats with guns, distributing money and weapons to local partners. This is not a proper role for the US military.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had it right when he said in April that the DOD should be “laser-focused on our mission of warfighting.” The DOD should handle military objectives, and the State Department should handle diplomacy. The current division of labor is that the COCOMs do everything poorly, and the State Department is missing in action. With a substantial reorganizationunderway at State, winding up the COCOMs could help restore the Department’s rightful place in US foreign policy.
Beyond their irrelevance to warfighting, the COCOMs are a primary driver of the bloat in the officer corps, which the Trump administration is targeting. Secretary Hegseth recently issued an order to reduce the number of active-duty four stars by 20 percent in an attempt at “removing redundant force structure to optimize and streamline leadership by reducing excess general and flag officer positions.” The Secretary has identified a real problem, but paring down bloat in the officer corps requires going after the Combatant Commands.
As political scientists Benjamin Friedman and Harvey Sapolsky wrote, COCOMs are “flag officer magnets.” Over 25 percent of the total four-stars presently serving in the US military—10 of 38—are at Combatant Commands. Beyond the top, there is a bloat of three‑, two‑, and one-star generals supporting them at the COCOMs. If the proliferation of flag officers is a problem, Combatant Commands are a big part of its cause.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the COCOMs have become noisy lobbies for foreign interventions and the resources to support them. A particularly glaring case is Central Command (CENTCOM), whose commander, General Erik Kurilla, has been working hard to push the Trump administration toward war with Iran and away from diplomacy. Kurilla also has been forcefully advocating for more resources for his command, including a carrier strike group and Patriot missile batteries pulled from the Indo-Pacific to support operations in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility.
At a time when the official Pentagon story is that China is the pacing challenge and the organizing principle of US defense strategy, it is becoming clear that special pleading from various COCOMs is detracting from the Pentagon’s ability to focus on that issue.
The Trump administration has shown that it will not genuflect at icons of the Beltway foreign and defense policy establishment’s shared religion. The orthodoxy of structuring the US military around the COCOMs should be no different. If Trump and Hegseth view mounting defense costs, bloating in the officer corps, and institutional pressures for war as problems to solve, they should consider shuttering AFRICOM, but they should also keep going and take direct aim at the regional Combatant Commands.
Justom :pgam os Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute
