“The expanding universe” that is the United States defense establishment consumed nearly $60 billion last year, more than half the national budget (and the President has asked for additional funds this year), commands the services of some 4 million persons, sustains a high proportion of American industry, and maintains an arsenal that could demolish the planet. Only a major revolution in management and planning techniques could produce the mixture of efficiency and control that makes the system servant rather than master of the republic. From the standpoint of a participant in that revolution, Mr. Yarmolinsky explains the techniques and tools by which the civilian controls and directs the power of the Pentagon. He was a Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense McNamara and later a deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he is now a professor of law at Harvard and a member of the Kennedy Institute of Politics.
THE days when a new appointee arrives in Washington for almost any administrative job, one of the items high on his list of things to do, just after calling on the chairmen of his congressional committees, is to find a friend in the Pentagon who can give him a few helpful hints on how to make his organization work for him instead of against him. The word has got out that the politically responsible management of the Pentagon — the noncareer civilians clustered at the apex of the pyramid of power — has somehow mastered the secret of making the military and the civilian bureaucracies genuinely responsive to policy guidance.
There is some myth in this claim, but also more than enough truth in it to justify careful analysis, for what can be learned about today’s Pentagon, and for what the other big bureaucracies might learn from the revolution that has swept the Department of Defense in the short space of six years.
Not so long ago, a Secretary of War who asked to see the war plans was rebuffed by the generals. That was still pretty much the way it worked through December of 1960. In any real crisis of decision, the military bureaucrats could point out that American lives and national security were at stake, and that they alone had the experience of exercising responsibility for leading men into battle. In fact, the bureaucrats and the politicians had worked out a kind of rough division of power: the politicians decided how much money the country could afford to spend on national defense without bringing on a hair-curling depression, and the bureaucrats decided how the money would be spent, primarily on the basis of bargaining among the military chiefs of the four services. That this apportionment of funds sometimes had more to do with the relative needs and ambitions of the military services than with the requirements of United States foreign policy was an unhappy but unavoidable consequence of this way of doing business.
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