The principal antagonist of the Joint Chiefs within the central defense organization was the Comptroller. Like the JCS, however, his office afforded an excellent illustration of the deceptive quality of the formal legal structure. On the organization charts the Comptroller was lost among the crowd of nine assistant secretaries of defense. In actual operation of the Department, however, he was a political force rivaled only by the military leaders themselves…
Thus, the Comptroller’s office developed as the Freudian superego of the Department: an internal mechanism of restraint and control reflecting external demands and interests. It was the “garrison in the conquered city,” giving powerful representation to an essentially unmilitary and alien element in the Department.
A final factor enhancing the power of the Comptroller was the continuity in office of Wilfred J. McNeil. McNeil had been the Fiscal Director of the Navy under Forrestal. In 1947 he became the budgetary and fiscal assistant to Forrestal as Secretary of Defense. In 1949 he became Comptroller, a position he still held in 1955. He was unique among the higher leaders of the Defense Department in that he preformed the same job for all of the first five Secretaries of Defense. It is not surprising that he was labeled the “virtually indispensable man” of the Pentagon. The Comptroller’s office possessed knowledge and experience in a way which even the military could not rival and which was quite beyond the grasp of transient political appointees.
That was a provocative excerpt from Samuel Huntington’s 1959 classic, The Solider and The State. Here’s more on that from Elliot Converse’s Acquisition History Volume I:
During 1947–1949, the secretary of defense threatened service independence in acquisition most visibly and powerfully through control of the budget. The secretary, for example, established a ceiling for R&D funding and ultimately decided how much of that amount each service would receive. Most worrisome to the military departments was OSD interference in the content of acquisition programs….
Moreover, both it and the determination of R&D ceilings were essentially arbitrary decisions; they were not based on any systematic relation of financial resources to military strategy. Not until the early 1960s, during Robert S. McNamara’s tenure as secretary of defense and the introduction of systems analysis techniques and the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), would service acquisition programs be challenged on this ground.
Of course, much of the Comptroller’s power over acquisition decisions now resides with OSD Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, which grew out of Program Analysis & Evaluation, which was a Laird-era downgrading of the Assistant Secretary for Systems Analysis, which used to be the Office of Systems Analysis underneath Comptroller.
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