Senator Karl Mundt expressed it in hearings on PPBS conducted in 1967: We used to face the question: “How much should we spend for a weapons system?” Defense had a united front and asked for a certain amount of money. Now we have to make decisions… on which defense system and techniques we should have… It is in the wrong arena at our end of the Avenue. because we are not the experts in defense, and we are not the economists and the engineers.
…. If the Congress shouldn’t have to make such multi-billion dollar decisions, who should? Senator Mundt’s attitude is representative of a serious problem faced by the civilian leaders of the Defense Department during the years 1961-1968. PPBS was making available more useful information to Congress, but ironically some members often didn’t seem to want it.
That was from Enthoven and Wayne’s classic book, How Much is Enough? The authors didn’t really answer the question as that closed the section, but they started up on a discussion of a small, expert analytical staff reporting directly to the SecDef (i.e., the Office of Systems Analysis).
The Systems Analysis office was frequently criticized for slowing down the decision-making process unnecessarily, delaying decisions to buy badly needed weapons and equipment, and stifling innovation. As one critic put it, “the systems analysis business is being used to kill ideas and to delay them. . . . I know of no study that has been made . . . by the Department of Defense which has not caused delay, or which has added one iota to our national defense, not one.”
This criticism rests on the false premise that all delay is bad… The alternatives would be either to accept blindly all the recommendations that are made, or to make quick decisions on some arbitrary basis.
My response would be, do not blindly accept recommendations but allow them to proceed with some discretion and understanding that the analytical staff will evaluate rigorously the outcomes of those decisions. The analytical staff is in the same position as Congress — too small and uninformed to make the right decisions on an immense portfolio of defense programs prior to any empirical evidence.
Rather than being gate keepers to any and all actions, these analysts should be filtering out bad projects and have a say when analysis is tractable: major hardware procurement and fielding decisions. The history books are replete with examples where the “neutral expert” was completely against the most important military innovations (for example, ballistic missiles, the sidewinder missile, GPS, the B-52 bomber, nuclear aircraft carriers, and the list goes on and on).
It is interesting that Congress members understood their relative ignorance in 1960s, but over time, learned that they could use the DoD programming system to their own self-interest: protecting jobs in their districts. It’s not surprising, then, that DoD has a “legacy systems” problem that didn’t really exist prior to the PPBS. It may sound odd to modern ears, but there was no defense authorization process prior to 1961! Yet they still performed their duties of oversight for over 1950 years using what I call the method of insight-and-investigation.
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