[Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy] told the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the present assistant secretary could not “give orders.” McElroy proposed a civilian Director of Defense Research and Engineering who would be responsible for all scientific and technical matters pertaining to weapons development for all the services. The director would have authority to supervise and direct all research and engineering activities. Thereby this functional area would become part of the central management of the Department of Defense. There was also the unavoidable implication that civilian management at the level of the office of the Secretary of Defense could better make weapons decisions for the three services than their own civilian and professional military leaders.
… “Functionalism” emerges as the antithesis of the “generalist” concept. [In 1958,] Congress approved the position of Director Defense Research and Engineering and struck out the language of “separately administered” services, trusting that “separately organized” military departments would preserve for it the necessary alternatives.
That was an excerpt from James Roherty’s 1970 classic, Decisions of Robert McNamara. This is an important point that observers of the DoD take for granted today. The Secretary of Defense has ultimate authority over the secretaries of the military departments. The Undersecretaries for Acquisition and Sustainment, Research and Engineering, Policy, Comptroller, and so forth, have direct line authority over their counterparts in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. There is, however, a custom of delegation of authority which ebbs and flows with the reform climate. The DoD is currently in a period of delegated authority from OSD.
In some ways, this structure upsets the proverbs of administration where each link in the organizational hierarchy reports to a single boss. The original concept had the Secretary of Defense as the sole authority to make administrative commands, who then acted through the secretaries of the military departments. In other words, the three original Assistant Secretaries had no line authority of their own, but could only act through recommendation to the Secretary of Defense.* The same was true of the R&D Board and Munitions Board. These bodies, however, got things done because their membership included “dual hatted” managers of line organizations. So they executed their own decisions. Both of the boards, however, were turned into Assistant Secretaries in the 1953 Reorganization Act. In 1958, in reaction to Sputnik, the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) took over line authorities. OSD power became complete in 1961 under the leadership of Robert McNamara.
Here’s an interesting bit from Ferdinand Eberstadt, who was a central figure in the development of the Department of Defense. He brings up a valid set of questions that should be asked today, where numerous functional organizations have partial authorities over program managers.
Are the three Assistant Secretaries of Defense senior to the three military Secretaries and their civilian assistants? If not, exactly what is their relationship? And what to the military heads of the three Departments? What to the chairmen of the Research and Development Board, and of the Munitions Board?… Accordingly, I recommend against creating these three Assistant Secretaryships of Defense.
*Actually, after Title IV to National Security Act of 1949 (written by Eberstat), a separate Office of Comptroller gave it some line authorities over service-level comptrollers in setting policies directly.
National Security Act Amendments of 1949. Hearing before the Committee on Armed Services United States Senate, Eighty-First Congress, First Session on S. 1269 and S. 18943. March 24 – May 6, 1949. United States Government Printing Press, Washington: 1949.
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