1. No organization can achieve or maintain efficiency in structure or operation by having a critical review made by expert outsiders once each five or ten years – even if, contrary to the experience of previous surveys of the Department of Defense, the recommendations of the review panel are unfailingly adopted. A good organization must have built into its very structure the incentives to its personnel to do the right things.
The administrative problems posed by the Department of Defense arise in good part because (a) its professional corps has a strict hierarchy which more often punishes than rewards criticism and innovation at lower ranks, (b) its central product – military efficiency – cannot be easily measured in peace time and therefore rewarded by larger appropriations and more rapid promotions, and (c) many of the prices put on its inputs (conscripted troops, rent-free land, etc.) are wholly incorrect measures of the scarcities of these inputs.
2. Competition between the military services should in general be encouraged rather than deplored. This competition is a major element of civilian control, and I do not place a low value on the fact that of the major powers only the United States and Great Britain have avoided military takeovers in the last 200 years. This competition is also a source of strength in discovering good and bad weapons and tactics: for example, we would not have a respectable rifle if the Army had kept sole control of the weapon. Even a limited amount of duplication of function is part of a prudent national policy.
3. The hierarchical structure of the Services is necessary to discipline and the coordinated control of large numbers of men, but it is not necessary to innovations in techniques nor is it even favorable to civilian review and control of the military establishment…
4. The vast, horrendously expensive, weapon systems which now consume so large a part of the budget of the Department of Defense may be our saving or our downfall. The great difficulty is that presently we do not know. Operational testing is almost non-existent in the weapons acquisition process. The recommendation of the Report that systematic operational testing be introduced deserves the highest priority.
That was George Stigler’s recommendations added to the “Fitzhugh Report,” 1 July 1970. He later won the Nobel memorial prize for economics in 1982. I think those remarks hold up quite well nearly 50 years later.
I think only the fourth item, Test and Evaluation, has received adequate discussion in the intervening years — and despite the emphasis placed on T&E in the 1980s, we still are mired in concurrency and unrealistic tests. In other words, little has changed.
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