If a clever engineer imagines a new weapon for the Air Force, and if the research-and-development office specializing in that class of weapons approves of the idea, funding for its development must first be authorized by the Systems Command, then by the Air Force Assistant Secretary for Research and Development, and then by the staff of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
Actually, this grossly simplifies the process. The Office of the Secretary of Defense includes a Director for Program Analysis and Evaluation, with his own large staff, skilled in mathematical techniques of analysis designed to uncover unnecessary or excessively costly “programs”; the engineer’s clever idea may not survive their scrutiny, especially if its virtues cannot conveniently be presented in numerical form. And then of course there is the overall budget to consider — and for that the Secretary of Defense has an Assistant Secretary Comptroller, and he too has a large staff empowered to overrule all who come before them.
… All these hurdles are a formidable barrier to innovation, yet we know that a great many new weapons are successfully brought from research to production. But the process takes a very long time… its Soviet counterpart and countermeasure are not far behind. Thus our insistence on overmanagement has much the same effect as all the restrictions of Soviet life have on the creativity of Soviet scientists.
And the multiple layers of management, the diffusion of authority, also have another effect: they greatly complicate everything that goes through the system. Only very rarely does the clever idea become a clever weapon of simple and economical ingenuity.
That was Edward Luttwak’s 1985 book, The Pentagon and the Art of War. Of course, even Luttwak’s account is a gross oversimplification of the number and types of approval a program needs.
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