In an essay published in 1978, the highly regarded historian John Lukacs argues for history that is “microcosmic and sociographic, not sociological and generalizing.” By that he means history from the viewpoint of the participants. But just how close must the historian be to the people that he or she is studying? To write a useful history of acquisition, must the researcher be or have been an active participant in the process? Is the field so arcane that only insiders can really understand it? Is the history of military acquisition therefore like the history of science, where the historian needs special preparation in order to work successfully?
That Thomas C. Hone’s “The Historiography of Programming and Acquisition Management since 1950,” and is an important resource for anyone interested in a short-cut to important works and their significance in the area of weapon systems acquisition. I recommend that you watch his video embedded at the bottom of the page at the link.
I think it’s important to strive for active participant knowledge in historical research, but often one of the benefits of hindsight is that we can integrate and understand more aspects of what was happening. We know how it turned out. So we can generate concepts with greater explanatory power, though perhaps we don’t have better predictive power than their active participant knowledge.
Here is Hone again:
There is no need to describe for military historians the political and bureaucratic backlash to Secretary McNamara’s initiatives. But if he had been too strong an executive, infringing on the traditional—and perhaps even the legal—prerogatives of the military services, then what was the alternative? David Packard, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, provided the answer in 1970. It was a formal sequential process, mandated by the Secretary of Defense that was based on milestone reviews, and it became the basis for the 5000-series of Department of Defense Directives that still govern the process of acquiring major military systems. Under Packard—or because of Packard—the services adopted life-cycle costing, parametric cost estimating, and the idea of designing to cost, which made cost as important a governing factor in acquisition as schedule and performance.
This is the standard view, but I don’t entirely agree. For example, in 1962 McNamara implemented three “Key Decision Points” which were basically the exact same approval gates that Packard implemented as “Milestones” in the 5000-series. Similarly, another key aspect of the 5000-series is the Decision Coordinating Paper (DCP), a 10-20 page document outlining program objectives, was actually created by McNamara in 1967. The Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council, chaired by DDR&E, was new, but functioned almost in exactly the same way as the Comptroller and Systems Analysis office did in the McNamara years. For all Laird and Packard’s talk, they didn’t extinguish “systems analysis” from decision-making.
I’ll leave you with some great questions from Thomas Hone:
Despite these obstacles to historical research, some questions are obviously important. Does it make sense to talk of a military-industrial complex? Is it a useful concept in studying military acquisition? If not, have historians developed a better concept?
Has program budgeting been a useful, effective management tool? Is it still? How would we know?
Do major military systems, such as ships, aircraft, missiles, and fighting vehicles, cost too much? If I compare the constant dollar cost of a ship today with the constant dollar cost of a similar ship from 50 or 75 years ago, what will I find? Is that sort of comparison even a historical exercise? Or is it a form of analysis that belongs to some other discipline, such as operations research or economics?
What is the most effective way to study the influence of science and technology on the military services? How reliable are the oral histories of individuals involved in military acquisition or defense programming and budgeting? Was the Goldwater-Nichols legislation effective? How has implementing it influenced the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process, or the defense acquisition process?
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