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Christian joy is tied to truth, the truth about the Lord Jesus, and so also tied to faith. Christian joy is tied to hope in God's promises in Christ. Christian joy is tied to love, the love of God in Christ. There is no Christian joy without the theological virtues. There can be no joy without it being grounded in love of God, in the truth of God and belief in him, and in our hopeful confidence in his promises. Joy is, in the final analysis, a gift of God himself, the God who is Love (1 John 4:8) and Truth (John 14:6), the God of Hope (Rom. 15:13), the God who has revealed himself in fullness in the God-Man Jesus.
Joy is intrinsically tied to truth, in particular the truths of our faith. As Joseph Ratzinger observed, "only when love and truth are in harmony can man know joy." In his apostolic exhortation on joy, Pope Paul VI was equally insistent that joy and truth are travel companions: "God disposes the mind and heart of His creature to meet joy, at the same time as truth."
In the apostolic constitution Ex corde ecclesiae Blessed John Paul II defined St. Augustine's expression gaudium de veritate as "that joy of searching for, discovering, and communicating truth," in particular the truth about God's revelation in Jesus. This joy is a precursor to the joy in heaven which is beatitude. "And this is the blessed life," wrote St. Augustine about the Holy Spirit of truth promised us by Our Lord (John 16:13), "to rejoice in you, about you, and because of you (gaudere ad te, de te, propter te)."
Joy is inextricably tied to the truths of the faith, the foundations of which--the Word of God who does not deceive and cannot deceive--gives rise to "the certainty" of the lovely truth and truthful love "that Jesus is with us and with the Father," as Pope Francis put it.
Not only is joy intimately linked with the truths of our faith in Jesus, it is also inextricably bound up in the love of Christ.
In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas ties joy and love together, love being the engine of joy. He therefore discusses Christian joy with the context of the theological virtue of charity, the love of God in Christ.
St. Thomas Aquinas divides joy into two kinds: natural joy and supernatural joy. Our experience of natural joy allows us to understand supernatural joy.
Pope Paul VI gives a litany of these natural joys, those "many human joys that the Creator places in our path," most of them based on natural virtues and obedience to the natural moral law, including: "the elating joy of existence and of life; the joy of chaste and sanctified love; the peaceful joy of nature and silence; the sometimes austere joy of work well done; the joy and satisfaction of duty performed; the transparent joy of purity, service and sharing; the demanding joy of sacrifice."
Christian joy, however, is something more than mere natural joy. It is spiritual and supernatural in origin. Christian joy does not disdain natural joys, but presupposes them and purifies, completes, and sublimates them, notes Pope Paul VI. And yet it is also something wholly other than natural joy and its sublimation.
This spiritual joy in God is two-fold continues St. Thomas. The more excellent supernatural joy is to "rejoice in the Divine good considered in itself." This supernatural joy is perfect, and is "incompatible with an admixture of sorrow."
The other supernatural joy rejoices "in the Divine good as participated by us." The presence of God in our lives, or in the lives of our neighbor, "can be hindered by anything contrary to it," and so this joy "is compatible with an admixture of sorrow," it may be bittersweet in that we may grieve the sin in our life or in the life of our neighbor.
The joy we have in God, the "perfect joy incompatible with an admixture of sorrow," helps overcome the sorrow that would ordinarily be met with in suffering without our hope in the promises of Jesus Christ. The reality of joy founded in Christian hope allows us to overcome the sorrow in suffering.
As Hans Urs von Balthasar linked hope and joy in his book Theo-Drama: "This concrete co-inherence [of joy in suffering that ought to be found in the Christian] is expressed most beautifully in the long 'as if' sequence in 2 Corinthians 6:4-10: 'We are treated 'as if' impostors, and yet are true. . . 'as if' dying, and behold we live; 'as if' punished, and yet not killed; 'as if' sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; 'as if' poor, yet making many rich; 'as if' having nothing, and yet possessing everything."
Citing to St. Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms, von Balthasar continues: "Augustine says on this passage [2 Cor. 6:4-10] that 'we can say 'as if' in connection with our sorrowing, but not in connection with our joy, for it is secure in hope."
"In a dream everything is 'as if', but on awaking the 'as if' vanishes. 'For the Apostle does not say 'as if rejoicing, but always sorrowful', or 'as if both sorrowful and rejoicing'; rather, he says 'as if sorrowing, yet always rejoicing."
In short, what von Balthasar and St. Augustine are saying is that the greater reality is not our suffering, but "the God of hope" who transforms our suffering and thereby fills us "with all joy." (Rom. 15:13) Christian joy defeats suffering. This is the gaudium crucis, the joy of the cross.
We must abide, then in faith, hope, and love of God, for joy to be a part of our life and to defeat the sorrows that suffering would otherwise bring. For this reason, Pope Francis suggested that joy is "a pilgrim virtue," a "gift that walks, walks on the path of life, that walks with Jesus, preaching, proclaiming Jesus, proclaiming joy."
Joy is contagious, cannot be suppressed; it is "magnanimous"--the thing that makes a soul great--in the words of Pope Francis: it overflows into everything a Christian does bountifully, refusing limits, irrepressible, and, like a playful energetic puppy, "cannot be held at heel."
The author Robert Burton wrote a famous though ponderous book, The Anatomy of Melancholy. The term "melancholy Christians" is, to Pope Francis, an oxymoron. In a homey image, Pope Francis says that Christians without joy "have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life."
What is needed, as part of the New Evangelization, is an Anatomy of Christian Joy, whose three sections are faith, hope, and love, but whose contents, contrary to Burton's thick tome, can all be boiled down to one Word: the Word of God made Flesh, Jesus.
Andrew M. Greenwell is an attorney licensed to practice law in Texas, practicing in Corpus Christi, Texas. He is married with three children. He maintains a blog entirely devoted to the natural law called Lex Christianorum. You can contact Andrew at agreenwell@harris-greenwell.com.
The recent botched recruitment exercise of the Nigeria Immigration Service, (NIS) has once again brought to fore how terrible the unemployment situation in the country has become. With thousands of candidates turning out at various locations across the country for an exercise that was meant to employ just a tiny fraction of the applicants, it is obvious that the joblessness condition in the country is no longer a child’s play. For the first time in the history of the country, candidates vying for employment in a government institution were so desperate and disorderly that some were actually trampled to death with countless injured in the ensuing pandemonium that exemplified a shabbily organised recruitment exercise. It was, indeed, the shame of a nation and a reflection of how bad things have gone in the country. Many analysts and commentators have already written to condemn the primitive approach of the NIS to its employment exercise, and rightly so, hence that would not form the basis of this piece.
However, in Nigeria today, growing unemployment has become a major concern. Official figures from the Bureau of Statistics puts it at about 20% (about 30million), but this number still did not include about 40million other Nigerian youths captured in World Bank statistics in 2009. By implication, it means that if Nigeria’s population is 140 million, then 50% of Nigerians are unemployed, or worse still, at least 71% of Nigerian youths are unemployed. This is particularly disturbing and counterproductive because at least 70% of the population of this country are youths. Viewed from the perspective of the recent events in the Middle East where unemployment and poverty, among others, played a key role in the uprising, one can only conclude that Nigeria’s unemployment poses a threat to its development, security and peaceful coexistence.
Former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, recently revealed that while the Nigerian economy grew at the rate of seven percent for the past five years, unemployment has actually doubled at same period. He stated that the present security crisis and internal uprising across the country are products of chronic poverty and mounting joblessness. In times past, things as choice jobs were selected by graduates and consequently unemployment was low or at best non – existent. Then, in Ibadan, Lagos, Onitsha, Kaduna, Enugu, Port Harcourt, there were industrial complexes where factories produced goods for both local and export purposes while an army of workers (skilled and unskilled) earned a living from these factories. The industrialisation wave of the 70s in Nigeria was so phenomenal that government had to introduce a number of measures, including the Land Use Act, in order to remove obstacles in the path of industries. Companies rushed to the universities every year and later to the National Youth Service Corps, (NYSC) camps to recruit skilled workers. That time, a certificate guaranteed a job, and hence a better life. Even artisans had jobs to do.
Unfortunately, the reverse is the case now. Everywhere, it is an army of unemployed youths that define our communities while many graduates have turned to Okada riders, labourers at construction sites, etc to make ends meet. This is why there is so much youth restiveness and insecurity in the land. The trend and level of public insecurity in our country now portend a serious threat to our nationhood. Already, some foreign countries have begun to issue travel warnings to their nationals. This is strange as nobody wants to live or do business in an environment where there is much crime, violence, strife and political instability as the country is gradually turning into. Public security and safety is a necessary foundation for economic growth and social development of any society. It is therefore necessary for us to give more attention to security for the world to take us serious. A situation where violent killing of innocent souls by or in the name of Boko Haram is now a daily occurrence is not in our best interest, especially since they have now mastered how to unleash terror on our military barracks with impunity. It will not attract investors (local or foreign).
As a nation, we need to urgently fix the economy, most especially the power sector. A survey of recently apprehended criminals in the country will reveal that most of them are unemployed artisans whose businesses have been crippled by the energy crises in the country. The best systematic approach to reducing crime in any society is through the provision of an enabling environment for entrepreneurship to thrive and catalyze employment generation. It is therefore not out of place to consider massive employment generation as an issue of major focus on national development and economic growth plan of the Nigerian government.
All levels of governments in the country must redouble their efforts in taking off our teeming youth off the streets. Proactive steps must be taken to induce job creation initiatives that are capable of providing employment opportunities to our restless youths. The agriculture sector is one area where governments across the country could creatively provide employment opportunities. Interestingly, the Lagos State government is already leading in this direction with its Marine Agriculture Development Programme for Accelerated Fish Production. Till date, the programme has created over 6000 direct jobs and over 35,000 jobs indirectly to cage manufacturers, fingerlings producers, feed millers and sellers, fish marketers, processors and storage personnel amongst others with the possibility of specialization.
The Ikorodu Fish Farm Estate, which has been fully subscribed, is currently producing at 70% of its capacity. An average of 3,000 tonnes of fresh fish is produced annually from the estate with over 400 jobs created directly and over 100,000 others indirectly. The Rice for Job initiative has equally successfully offered employment opportunities for over 5000 youths that are currently engaged in rice cultivation and sales across the state. In the same vein, the AGRIC-YES initiative, designed to produce first class entrepreneurial elite farmers, is a three-phased intervention programme that has so far produced over 3,000 elite farmers in the state. Equally, through the state’s greening programme, a total of 12,000 people are directly employed while the cleaning exercise has generated over 6000 jobs.
To forestall a looming disaster in the country, governments at all levels need to ingeniously devise programmes that would incorporate the youths into the centre stage of the nation-building process in the country rather than debasing human value through a primitive and selfish programme like the shameful NIS recruitment. For this to be effectual, the course of action must commence with a fundamental revamping of the education sector. We need to alter the curriculum of our tertiary institutions to do away with courses that no longer fit into the present day’s socio-economic reality. Indeed, we need to lay more emphasis on technical education as well as courses that de-emphasise the craze for non-existing white collar jobs. Similarly, we should make efforts to promote social entrepreneurship among the youths. This could be done through the establishment of internship programmes aimed at giving youths the opportunity to learn valuable skills in contemporary fields such as Information Communication Technology, (ICT), fund development, public relations, programme development, project management and such other courses that are in high demand for now. Equally, corporate organisations, NGO’s, individuals and government institutions should be committed to mentoring of the youths to choose rightly in line with the contemporary needs of our society. God bless Nigeria.
Those listed as missing are presumed dead, but not yet located under the layers of muddy mining waste.
A total of 176 survivors have been rescued so far, 23 of whom were hospitalized.
Sixteen others were hurt, but none of them suffered life-threatening injuries.
The latest death toll stood at 429, with 1,485 people injured.
Firefighters managed to expand containment to 65% of the 234-square-mile burn zone over the weekend.
Indonesia’s disaster agency says they have recovered 1,763 bodies so far.
The epicentre of the quake was located about 19 kilometres northwest of the city of Port-de-Paix.
The death toll is expected to worsen considerably as so many regions have yet to be heard from in the aftermath of the quake.
Mangkhut already is confirmed to have killed 66 people in the Philippines and four in China.
A tornado watch has been issued for parts of North and South Carolina.
At least 310,000 people have been displaced and are taking shelter in relief camps.
Thousands are still trapped without food or water.
Rescuers today resumed the search for survivors, and to recover the bodies of victims.
The crisis is the deadliest rain-related disaster in over three decades in Japan.
At least 67 children were among those killed this week.
The local was uninjured during the incident.
The death toll is expected to rise.
Police previously said at least 79 people died in the blaze.
The number of confirmed fatalities remains at 30.
There were at least 120 people on board the plane.
These latest discoveries brings the death toll in recent days to 10.
The bomb was dropped on Thursday.
The deadly landslide, which struck late on Friday evening, resulted from days of heavy rains.
The blaze was believed to have been set by girls protesting dire conditions they were subjected to at the shelter.
At least 50 people were killed in a single village.
The death toll of the avalanche is now at 15.
Bellmawr Borough Bd of Education is located at 100 S Bell Rd, Bellmawr, NJ. This business specializes in Education.
Bellmawr Borough Bd of Education serves Bellmawr, NJ and is located in the ZIP code. educational consultants.
Diocese of Camden Bishop Joseph Galante came to South Jersey from Dallas in 2004 with a mission and plans for change.
It has not always gone smoothly, but Galante will leave the 75-year-old Roman Catholic diocese in a stronger place than he found it.
The bishop, 74, who ordered dozens of painful school and parish mergers, is retiring for health reasons effective Feb. 12. Pope Benedict XIV has appointed Galante’s replacement, Dennis J. Sullivan, an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of New York.
When he was assigned to South Jersey, Galante said, he found a diocese with a 22 percent Mass attendance rate and 124 separate parishes, a third of which were unable to pay basic bills. A parish restructuring, which began in earnest in 2008, prompted numerous protests — and some were very disrespectful to the leader of 475,000 Catholics in six counties.
Yet, people being passionate about their parishes is something that the approachable bishop has espoused. He launched several initiatives, holding dozens of “Speak Up” listening sessions and even “Theology on Tap” nights in watering holes like Landmark Americana in Glassboro to reach out to young Catholics.
His successor, a 67-year old native New Yorker who has been a priest in areas such as the South Bronx, pledged Tuesday not to diminish the church’s commitment to Camden and other spots where it serves the poor. Those are comforting words, but Sullivan, like Galante, will face challenges in limited resources and ensuring that parishes and schools stay relevant.
For the outgoing bishop, one notable challenge came in 2011, when parishioners at St. Mary's of Malaga held months of sit-ins and vigils at their closed Franklin Township church after consolidation with St. Rose of Lima in Newfield and Queen of Angels in Buena. The closing, a diocese spokesman stated, was irreversible.
Yet, in September of that year, Galante changed his opinion and modified his merger decree so that the small church building could be open for weddings, funerals and devotional exercises, the sort of things that keep a church at the heart of a community.
The bishop never stopped listening, and that is one mark of an effective spiritual leader.
In the early 2000s, Silicon Valley-based business guru John Hagel III was involved in a high-tech start-up and hired Stephen Gillett, a young man right out of college. Less than a half dozen years later, Gillett was named a senior vice president and chief information officer for Starbucks — the youngest CIO of a Fortune 500 company at that time.
And Hagel thinks he knows a primary reason for his one-time employee’s meteoric rise. Everything that Gillett needed to know, Hagel said, he learned while becoming a guild leader in the popular online game World of Warcraft.
The co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte LLP, Hagel told the annual Wharton Leadership Conference that Gillett — just like other top players on the massive online multi-player game, with an estimated eight million participants — reached out independently to build a large team of allies that solved complex problems and developed winning strategies.
The look inside World of Warcraft and its relevance for today’s complicated business environment was part of a recent research project and book by Hagel and two co-authors — John Seely Brown and Lang Davison — that examines how companies re-invent and revive themselves by moving away from secretive, proprietary shops and toward a more open, collaborative business model. Their findings resulted in the recent publication of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.
The bottom line, they found, is that American companies will continue to fall behind their counterparts in emerging markets such as China or India unless they move toward what Hagel called “the edge,” which is where passionate, change-driven employees collaborate with others on the kind of innovations that prevent a company from seeing its core business model slowly erode. “The only thing that succeeds,” Hagel said, “is to take those initiatives on the edge and pull more and more of the core out to those edges — rather than trying to pull them back in.” He asserted that chief executives who stick to the conventional wisdom and cling to secretive proprietary business systems are doomed to fail.
This year’s Wharton Leadership Conference — titled, “Leading in a Recovering (and Even Rebounding) Economy” — came at a time of increasing focus on corporate executives and the role they play in defining a business’s direction, its image and its accountability. The conference was organized by the school’s Center for Human Resources, Center for Leadership and Change Management and Wharton Executive Education, in partnership with Deloitte. Hagel heads Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, which studies emerging business strategies.
Hagel’s more than 30-year career in the business consulting and high-tech industries also included a stint at iconic 1980s video game firm Atari, as well as launching the e-commerce practice at McKinsey. He said the bad news uncovered by his research team was that the erosion of American business leadership was not so much a function of the downturn beginning in 2008 as it was a systemic decline dating as far back as the mid-20th Century.
In trying to quantify the problems facing American industry, Hagel and his co-authors found little existing data to measure the overall performance of U.S. companies. So they worked up some measurements of their own — and even they were surprised at what they uncovered. Since 1965, they learned, the return-on-assets for all American firms has eroded by 75%.
What went wrong? Hagel argued that American companies and their leaders were essentially not prepared for a move away from a corporate model of “knowledge stocks” — developing a proprietary product breakthrough and then defending that innovative advantage against rival companies for as long as possible — and toward a more open and collaborative business model that he called “knowledge flows.” The problem, he said, is that because of the increasingly global nature of business competition, the value of a major proprietary breakthrough or invention erodes in value much more quickly than in the mid-20th Century.
Indeed, in searching for examples as they researched The Power of Pull, Hagel and his co-authors looked far outside of traditional American corporations — at the highly competitive sport of large wave surfing, for example — to find places where teamwork, collaboration and skill in communication were bringing new heights of invention and success.
One conventional corporation that Hagel praised as an edge-based business is the German software giant SAP. He said the company’s longtime CEO, Hasso Plattner, came to a decision that the firm was too hierarchical and too adverse to change; his solution involved buying a rival run by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi. Plattner tasked Agassi with launching a venture called NetWeaver, an integrated technology platform. “Plattner said that [NetWeaver serves a function that is] not part of our core business, but it’s a highly speculative new initiative,” Hagel noted. “He said [to Agassi], ‘I want you to use that product to create a very different set of relationships with our customers and with our third-party-channel partners of various types.’ Shai Agassi used that mandate to go out and create this software user developer network which now has two million participants.” The network, Hagel said, is currently helping SAP to develop both new products as well as new kinds of business relationships.
In that sense, Hagel thinks the teamwork and communication skills that SAP software designers have been gaining are quite similar to the talents that leaders among the millions of online gamers playing World of Warcraft — people like Starbucks CIO Gillett — have also been acquiring. In addition to the leadership qualities involved with becoming the head of a guild and assembling a problem-solving team from previously independent players, World of Warcraft enthusiasts, as noted by Hagel, conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader. In addition, he said that game players typically customize their own dashboards to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy.
Jacob deGrom threw eight stellar innings of one-run ball and had an RBI single, but this time it wasn’t the Mets who rained on his parade. At least not entirely.
Though the Mets still couldn’t give their ace enough run support for a victory — but what else is new — it was a Chicago thunderstorm that stopped the game before the start of the 10th inning Tuesday night at Wrigley Field.
The game was tied at one after the Cubs went down in order in the bottom of the ninth. It will be continued on Wednesday afternoon at 1 p.m., followed by the regularly scheduled game approximately 45 minutes after the end of the suspended one.
DeGrom accounted for the only Met run with his infield single in the sixth that scored Todd Frazier. He couldn’t hold the lead for long, though, as the Cubs scored in the bottom of the seventh on a sacrifice fly by David Bote to tie the game.
The Mets had a chance to stretch the lead in the seventh when Jeff McNeil led off with a triple off the right-field wall. The ball might have been a homer earlier in the game, before the wind shifted prior to the sixth.
With the infield playing in, De La Rosa got Austin Jackson to line out to short, Michael Conforto to line out to first and then struck out Jay Bruce — following an intentional walk to Frazier — to end the threat.
DeGrom ultimately went eight innings, allowing eight hits while striking out 10 and lowering his ERA to a miniscule 1.68.
A bloated command structure, with four-stars reporting to four-stars, needs a trim.
Proposed reforms to the U.S. military command structure designed to save money likely won't save enough to matter. They could, however, be a good idea anyway.
Six years ago, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced plans to, among other things, shut down Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and move to cut at least fifty generals and admirals and 150 Senior Executive Service positions over the next two years. This was in reaction to the new “austerity” facing the Department of Defense and was ostensibly going to provide cost savings that could be “reinvested” in the warfighting forces. JFCOM was ultimately absorbed into the Joint Staff and the personnel cuts never came.
Gates' successor, Chuck Hagel, ordered a 20 percent cut in his own staff at the Pentagon as a “first step.” His uniformed counterpart, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, made vague promises of similar cuts in his staff as well as those of the Combatant Commands and the service component staffs that support them. Thus far, little has happened to implement these plans.
Now, Congress is getting involved.
John McCain (R-AZ), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been especially vocal for the need to revisit the iconic Goldwater-Nichols reforms. That law, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this October, went a long way to breaking down the provincialism between the military services (the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines) by elevating the role of the Chairman and the geographic combatant commanders (the heads of Central Command, European Command, etc.).
His chamber's version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017 would, among many other changes, increase the power of the Chairman to reallocate forces between the GCCs and to require the Secretary to “select one combatant command and direct the commander to replace the service component commands with joint task forces focused on operational military missions” in hopes of “improving the integration of operational efforts across the command, streamlining unnecessary layers of management, and reducing the number of staff."
Additionally, the Senate bill would reduce the number of generals and admirals 25 percent across the board., contending that “the size of the general and flag officer corps has become increasingly out of balance with the size of the force it leads” and noting that “Over the past 30 years, the end-strength of the joint force has decreased 38 percent, but the ratio of four-star officers to the overall force has increased by 65 percent.” But, again, the main focus is on budgetary savings to allow leadership to “shift as many personnel as possible from staff functions to operational and other vital roles."
As Brian Palmer noted back when Gates proposed the cuts, getting rid of generals and admirals doesn’t really save much money in the grand scheme of a $600 billion annual Defense budget. That remains true even when one factors in the accompanying support staff that goes with each of those billets.
Further, as Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) rightly notes, the 25 percent figure seems “pulled out of thin air” rather than as the basis of any serious needs assessment.
Still, the proposals are a step in the right direction.
While planning staffs are an essential part of large military organizations, there has been massive bloat in the three decades since Goldwater-Nichols. Partly, that's a function of the law's requirement that officers complete a qualifying joint assignment before being selected for general or flag rank. That, naturally, creates institutional pressure to create qualifying billets. More significantly, the law rightly stripped much of the power that the service secretaries and chiefs had in the budget process. The bureaucratic work-around was to increase the size of the service component staffs at each of the combatant commands in order to ensure service “equities” were constantly looked after in the planning process. While understandable, it not only led to much larger and more expensive staffs than necessary but undermined the chain of command. The (usually four-star) commanders of Army, Navy, Marine and Air Forces in a theater report directly to the four-star geographic combatant commander. But they also answer “indirectly” to their service chiefs, who have Title 10 “man, train, and equip” authorities. The two masters are in constant tension.
The pilot program is a step toward mitigating that problem. Take the current Pacific Command organizational chart as an example. The four-star commander has a three-star deputy and a two-star chief of staff. There are nine J-code staff directors, who range from two-stars to colonel/captain rank, each of whom have a subordinate staff. There are three subordinate unified commands (Japan, Korea, and special operations) commanded by three-, four-, and two-star generals, respectively. Then there are four subordinate component commands, representing the services. The Army and Navy each have four-stars, while the Air Force and Marines have three-stars. There's also a separate standing task force commanded by a rear admiral and a handful of special headquarters. And that's just the top level of the organization.
Not only is that a lot of overlapping staff, with several four-stars reporting to one another (and in some cases to yet another) but it's not even a warfighting headquarters. In the old days, a General Norman Schwarzkopf would run the war as the CENTCOM commander. Nowadays, we form a joint or combined task force, typically assigning either the deputy GCC or one of the component commanders as the task force commander and then designating a joint/combined ground force, maritime force, and air component commander. Why not just operate that way all the time rather than creating a new organization on the fly when it's time to actually fight the force?
Navy, and Air Force to be filled as they choose."