Taking the place of the Draft Presidential Memorandum was a new document called the Program Objective Memorandum (POM), through which the services could outline their programs… The POM projected spending into the future and used the same program package framework (i.e. “strategic forces,” “general purpose forces”) introduced by Robert McNamara and the whiz kids… Upon receiving the individual POMs the Secretary of Defense and his systems analysts reviewed the documents for compliance with the broad guidelines the services were given. They identified issues the POMs raised and reported on them (in documents called Issue Papers) for the Secretary of Defense.
The systems approach and long-term planning that motivated McNamara’s program budgeting survived, but as the POM demonstrates, the execution of the process was much more decentralized. While one account finds the POM process “roughly analogous to the ‘for comment’ DPM of the McNamara system,” in the sense that here the services made their own views known, a significant difference was that now the services developed their own programs rather than responding to a proposal already put forth by the OSD… After reviewing the POMs the Secretary issued a decision document, roughly analogous to the final Draft Presidential Memorandum called the Program Decision Memorandum (PDM). The PDM, in turn, was to inform the Five Year Defense Program, just as McNamara’s final Draft Presidential Memorandum had done.
That was from Vance Gordon, Dave McNicol, and Bryan Jack, “Revolution, CounterRevolution, and Evolution: a Brief History of the PPBS,” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), 12, copies appear in the collection of the Historical Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Arlington, Va., and in the personal collection of Bernard Rostker of the RAND Corporation, Arlington, Va.
People today complain that the defense budget process comes from the bottom-up, and that those at the bottom are least likely to push for innovation. They say more power needs to swing back to the top, so that OSD analysts have the first say in where budget goes, not just trimming around the margins.
They perhaps forget how awful McNamara’s top-down version of the PPBS budget process was. You literally had 200 or so analysts with little or no military experience that became the planners of the entire force structure.
In my mind, it isn’t top-down or bottom-up that is the problem. There needs to be an interaction between the two. Rather, it is a focus on paper analyses and rigid long-term program planning that is at fault. Laird kept the PPBS rather than jettisoning it completely for the structures that existed in the Eisenhower years and before. For more background on this long and complicated history of how the PPBS corrupts — not necessarily top-down or bottom-up — read “A History of Thought in Defense Acquisition.”
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