The Pentagon’s first comptroller was against merging the armed forces

In 1972, Jerry Hess interviews Wilfred McNeil, the Department of Defense’s Comptroller for the first five Secretaries of Defense:

HESS: What were your views on the advisability of unifying the armed services into one department, sir?

MCNEIL: Well I was against the merger. But at the same time I felt that there had to be some mechanism to better tie the efforts of the several forces together. Perhaps I felt that way because of our day-to-day discussions, some of them heated, which caused us to think in that direction. What actually came out of it, the National Military Establishment, seemed to be going a bit far towards merger. What I would call the [Ferdinand] Eberstadt plan answered pretty well the questions that people had about duplication, et cetera. It was an effort to establish a holding company with very strong subsidiary companies reporting to it. The system of having a small headquarters staff seemed to be all right; that is, just enough staff to see that there was some coordination in tying efforts together. I was against merger, and I’m still against it. I was against it in the Blue Ribbon Panel discussions. I was against it in a couple of talks I made in graduation ceremonies at the Industrial College, at the Army War College at Carlyle, and so forth. I have kept the same position right on through. This over-centralization is not healthy.

HESS: Why? What were your reasons?

MCNEIL: When I gave a little talk at the Industrial College graduation one of the magazines billed it that this speech wasn’t clear. It was on the subject of over-centralization. I can give you this reproduction which has excerpts from it, which may give you the story.

HESS: All right.

MCNEIL: But what you get in over-centralization is delays. In the office of Secretary of Defense you’ve got a dozen people that can say no — only one can say yes.

First, I felt very strongly and I still do (I don’t know how to get there quite), that if I was running a company, a conglomerate, and certainly the Department of Defense is a conglomerate, I would want each of the operating divisions to be headed by the strongest people I could get, and be pretty much able to stand on their own feet.

If there was something they could do jointly, I’d use the whole office to see that they did it jointly. But on daily operations I would want them to make their own decisions. The more you centralize, the more authority you take away from operating heads. Before long they won’t make any decisions – operating decisions – they will pass the buck. When it goes to the home office, if it’s over-built and over-centralized, all you get is a clerk, some clerk’s okay on something that ought to require the attention of a very capable person. To follow that through, then, you commence to find you get lesser qualified people to head these — to be the presidents of these — subsidiary corporations.

I felt very strongly, and that is where I disagreed with Max Leva when he agreed with Don [Donald S.] Dawson and others that the service Secretary no longer be invited to Cabinet meetings, because then instantly you dropped it one layer down. I felt that the Army, Navy, and Air Secretaries should be very strong, powerful people, in their own right. The Secretary of Defense’s job was to tie their efforts together, but not to take away their day-to-day operating responsibilities. One reason I am against a pyramid organization is that you can kibitz better than you can operate. And if you keep the office of Secretary of Defense in the position of kibitzing, you’ll find it tightens up the whole organization, but you don’t take away the authority of people on the job to operate.