Seeing like a state, institutional legibility, and the collapse of defense innovation

The book begins with an early example, “scientific” forestry (illustrated in the picture above). The early modern state, Germany in this case, was only interested in maximizing tax revenues from forestry. This meant that the acreage, yield and market value of a forest had to be measured, and only these obviously relevant variables were comprehended by the statist mental model. Traditional wild and unruly forests were literally illegible to the state surveyor’s eyes, and this gave birth to “scientific” forestry: the gradual transformation of forests with a rich diversity of species growing wildly and randomly into orderly stands of the highest-yielding varieties. The resulting catastrophes — better recognized these days as the problems of monoculture — were inevitable.

That was from a post on James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, “A big little idea called legibility.” Notice that is exactly what has happened with defense acquisition. R&D efforts in DoD were simply moving too fast for central control in the 1940s and 50s:

The Research and Development Board sought to accumulate information on all R&D projects proposed by the services to develop an integrated program. 18,000 project cards were received but many did not indicate funding levels, and when they did, they were inflated. Different accounting standards and reporting requirements also made it impossible to compare what was actually spent on similar projects. Further, by the time the Board received the project cards, nearly one-third were completed, cancelled, or superseded. The Board came to “rubber stamp” most projects because its members preferred not to argue against project advocates with fuller, more detailed information.

The “rubber stamp” probably saved defense innovation for that time. McNamara’s PPBS, however, brought legibility and control to the defense program in the 1960s in a similar way that the German’s brought control to their forests. Sure, everything was nice, neat, and linear to enable analyses. But it ended up making the system incredibly fragile.

Just monoculture farms led to blights and huge waves of deforestation, the PPBS led to a consolidation of weapons programs that stifled innovation and adaptability. Having just a few dozen major programs based on legacy concepts is much easier for the Pentagon’s central planners to manage compared to thousands of fast moving, overlapping, and cutting-edge programs.