Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
In 1961 the Defense Department, under a new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, began a major management revolution, based on a set of methods and techniques which came to be called a programming, planning, and budgeting system (PPBS). Few, if any, of the techniques were new. Their revolutionary impact depended upon (1) the high degree of development or sophistication to which some of them (e.g., cost and program analysis) had been driven, and (2) the relatively high degree of integration achieved in the new “system,” so that, for example, decisions about current operations can be taken in the light of their effect on programs four or five years in the future, and decisions about future goals can be taken with their implications for present operations specified.
In August, 1965, President Johnson announced his plans to develop comparable management systems in other executive departments. The progress of this effort has been uneven. But it is clear that PPBS is going to be with us for a while. This article is an attempt to assess its effect on the bureaucratic politics of the Defense Department.
Any views expressed in this paper are those of the author. They should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of The RAND Corporation or the official opinion or policy of any of its governmental or private research sponsors.
This paper was prepared for delivery on the American Government panel at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 9, 1966. It was revised and updated before the announcement of Robert McNamara's resignation as Secretary of Defense had been announced. Only minor editorial changes have been made since then. The author thinks the definite ending of McNamara's career in the Pentagon does not affect substantially what he had to say here.
1 The President's press release and related documents are now compiled in Senate Government Operations Committee, Planning-Programming-Budgeting: Official Documents, Committee Print, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (1967).
2 For an evaluation of structural-functional analysis as a method in social anthropology see Beattie, John, Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and the Achievements in Social Anthropology (London: Cohen & West, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. 4. A thoughtful but rambling evaluation somewhat closer to home is Becker, Theodore L., “Judicial Structure and Its Political Functioning in Society: New Approaches to Teaching and Research in Public Law,” Journal of Politics, 29 (May, 1967), 302–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Wildavsky, Aaron B. deals with a comparable distinction in his “Political Implications of Budgetary Reform,” Public Administration Review, 21 (Autumn, 1961), 183–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wildavsky's, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston; Little, Brown, 1964)Google Scholar, is a clearly delineated example of a process description.
4 For an excellent normative statement about the traditional military requirements determination process see House Armed Services Committee, Hearings on Military Posture, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. (1963), 361.
5 The balance all too often went too far in that other direction in wartime, when administrative doctrine dictated giving the military commander anything he asked for without challenge. Since it was, of course, impossible to do that, the field commander could be his own enemy. Pershing, for example, though anxious to get American aircraft onto the Western Front in World War I, was, by his frequent changes in major specifications, a principal cause of delays in getting production under way: see Holley, I. B. Jr., Ideas and Weapons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). pp. 67–79.Google Scholar
6 One would expect that the more the rationalizing process is unified, the more it normally will produce mutually consistent explanations based on agreed suppositions about the real situation, while the more pluralistic the process the more it would reflect disagreement about which data depict the real world.
7 Glenn Snyder has described with illuminating detail how misleading the claims of unanimous JCS endorsement were for the “New Look” elements of the fiscal 1955 budget: see Schilling, W. R., Hammond, P. Y., and Snyder, G. H., Strategy Politics and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962) esp. pp. 418–440, 486–491.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 House Appropriations Committee, Supplemental Appropriation Bill, 1957 Google Scholar, H.R. Report No. 2638, 8th Cong., 2nd Sess. (July 7, 1956), 11–12.
9 Of course, the major reason why one pushes the program budget out five years into the future is not to accommodate the convenience of systems analysis but to achieve the economies of long range programming.
10 Anthony, Robert N. has stated the case for what he calls management control, which he distinguishes from operational control, in his Planning and Control Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1965)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3. The book cannot be taken as analogous to Hitch, C. J. and MeKean, R. N., The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in relationship to Charles J. Hitch's appointment as Defense Comptroller in 1961, although the comparison with Anthony's appointment may be revealing. The Hitch-McKean volume is a set of essays representing an already existing capability. Anthony's book is an effort to formulate and clarify the tasks for developing a capability. Hitch's task was to apply a set of analytical capabilities which had already reached impressive proportions; Anthony's task, if the analogy holds, is to develop the general capabilities as well as apply them.
11 Congress must approve changes in the budget and accounting system. For OSD's efforts to win this approval, see House Appropriations Committee, H.R. Report No. 349, Defense Appropriations for Fiscal 1968, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (1967), 6–7; Senate Appropriations Committee, S. Report No. 494, Appropriations for Fiscal 1968, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (1967), p. 22; the Secretary of Defense's letter to Rep. George H. Mahon, Chairman, House Committee on Appropriations, August 7, 1967; the Secretary of Defense's Memorandum to Secretaries of the Military Departments, Subject: “Tests of Budgeting and Accounting Systems,” August 9, 1967; Department of Defense Position on Amendment Adding Sec. 641 to H.R. 10738, Approval of Accounting and Budgeting Systems, August 19, 1967; Congressional Record, 113 (August 18, 1967), S. 11842–4, and (August 21, 1967), S. 11923–5; and House Appropriations Committee, H.R. Report No. 595, Conference Report on H.R. 10738, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (August 23, 1967).
12 “Foreign Policy Making and Administrative Politics,” World Politics, 17 (July, 1965), 660.
13 I do not mean either that blaming them would take care of the matter or that no one else would be blamed. Here I am only concerned with their assumption of political responsibilities and risks.
14 It is not entirely obvious, however, how much the clarification of role and risk distributions represents an asset. If the Secretary of Defense can be held responsible for everything, that may be clear, but it is not very practical. For discussion of this problem in broad democratic representational context, see Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), ch. 2.Google Scholar
15 The case against the State Department has been givenwide publicity by Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 406, 410–413, 446–447, 513, 681, 1016.Google Scholar
16 Still the closest, probably, is its source selection for the development and manufacturing of the F-111.
17 E.g., Senate Armed Services Committee, Ammunition Shortages in the Armed Services, Hearings; Investigation of Ammunition Shortages in the Armed Services, Interim Report; and Investigation of Ammunition Shortages in the Armed Services, 2nd Report, all in 83rd Cong., 1st Sess. (1953); and Status of Ammunition and Air Munitions, Hearings, 89th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1966.
18 I am not concerned with tbe likelihood of these two conditions existing together—the continued perception of major, low probability threats and the continued lack of much military engagement.
19 Systems analysis can design flexibility beforehand for a hypothetical future, given sufficient lead time. For a price, it can build in different capacities beforehand. But it cannot tell someone how to evaluate unfolding events in order to establish new criteria by which to use the capacities it designs.
20 Organizing for Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 315.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.