You can’t make decisions based on 40,000 pages of paper, McNamara was wrong

MCNEIL: … the budget system got pretty complicated under [Robert] McNamara. It took them years to wake up to the fact that he was not as competent as people thought. And finally when the reaction set in, it was a reaction against him and everybody that worked for him. And they haven’t recovered it yet…

 

HESS: Is your opinion of Mr. McNamara rather negative?

 

MCNEIL: It certainly is. I hope not unfairly.

That was some candid talk from Wilfred McNeil’s oral history with the Truman Library in 1972. McNeil, of course, was the first ASD Comptroller for DoD from 1949-1959. In a previous post, I talk about how McNeil slammed McNamara and his whiz kids for not understanding how defense management was actually run in the 1950s and before. And here he is criticizing the unification of the services.

Back to the oral history interview:

MCNEIL: I was chided, I say chided instead of criticized, one of the last times I was testifying, for having 40 new programs underway.

 

HESS: Forty programs?

 

MCNEIL: Yes. Major programs, comparatively new anyway, some of which were duplications. We were making progress on 40 and eventually we’d cancel half of them, perhaps; but still it was the cheapest way to get along. Everyday you developed something a little bit better. But you were doing it the hard way.

 

…But in the McNamara thing the judgments were made all on the basis of paperwork. And some of the paperwork would run thirty-five thousand or forty thousand pages, and you can’t tell me you make a decision that way. I’d rather take a lieutenant commander’s or an Air Force major’s opinion as he climbed out of the airplane. I used to keep one-third of my budget staff on the road all the time.

There is a lot of wisdom to what McNeil said. It’s so far in the past now that no defense official today remembers how dynamic and fast-moving the acquisition used to be. DoD is still managed in the McNamara paradigm, which cannot be considered anything other than a radical break from the institutional traditions of the United States.

The congressional commission on PPBE reform must address the fundamental questions at the heart of defense management. Is the world static and predictable, or is it dynamic and ever-evolving? Embracing the latter paradigm is absolutely essential to regaining lost ground in military capabilities vis-a-vis Russia and China.