McNamara confirmed that each major weapon system development program and all basic and applied research programs would be examined at their inception as well as at the time of production decision. He intended to examine the entire plan on paper-key elements such as the number of units, deployment schedule, estimated kill probabilities, and total estimated cost. Admiral Burke quipped that this sounded like “program birth control.”
… Admiral Burke believed that the Navy’s weapon systems did not easily fit into functional or program categories and that the new framework would effectively dismantle the Navy’s existing flexible approach to planning. Furthermore, for financial managers and budget officials on all the service staffs, the imposition of quantification tools and the wresting away of decisionmaking by OSD seemingly impugned their objectivity.
That was from a Volume V of the History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense series, The McNamara Ascendancy 1961-1965. Of course, this policy of program birth control continues today. Nothing shall start unless the entirety of its decades-long lifecycle is analyzed on paper for years.
The PPBS forced the Navy to lose its flexibility to go after emerging tech. Most major elements of the Navy’s force structure that exist today were already well underway before McNamara rolled around. The Army had already started losing that flexibility in the FY 1952-1954 period.
Here’s another interesting bit of color. The arrogance of the whiz kids faded pretty fast after they realized they were out of their league. McNamara, Hitch, and Enthoven all basically exited defense work by the end of the 1960s, never to return. And yet, generations later, we are stuck with their system. Awkwardly, it is a system where novices who knew a bit of linear programming presumed their absolute superiority over military experts with hands on experience.
The brilliant, brash Enthoven [30 years old!] and a number of other young analysts–a new generation of “Whiz Kids”–according to some observers came to Washington with a certain disdain for the military, not averse to asserting “their youthful civilian power.” Enthoven recalled that before going to the Pentagon he had thought of writing a book about the management of the Defense Department. What distressed him as much as anything else was the “absurd notion” that the comptroller should not have anything to do with weapons, forces, and strategy. Moreover, Enthoven considered the JCS staff bureaucracy part of the problem, not part of the solution, and felt that the JCS had become a “great big political logrolling affair.” To Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke many of the newcomers seemed arrogant and overbearing. They apparently thought that “all civilian officials of the Department of Defense were superior to all military officers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
It’s not absurd at all. The Comptroller should have zero say in program planning. They should advise about the sufficiency of funds and related matters. Period. The whiz kids really believed that budgets and military force planning were the same thing, and all that should be the responsibility of the Comptroller. Ultimately, that proved unworkable and ASD(Comptroller) Robert Anthony restored some semblance of sanity after 1965.
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