Original audio cassette(s), signed legal release forms, and edited interview transcripts are on file in the Defense Acquisition History Oral History Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Leslie J. McNair, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Harold Brown

UNITED STATES ARMY
CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY

INTERVIEW OF
DR. HAROLD BROWN

CONDUCTED BY
DR. WALTER S. POOLE, DR. WALTON S. MOODY

The Center of Military History
AT
The Center for Strategic & International Studies
1800 K Street, N. W.
Washington, DC 20006

January 28, 2004

TAPE TRANSCRIPTION

P R O C E E D I N G S

DR. MOODY:  This is an Oral History interview of the Defense Acquisition History Project held with Dr. Harold Brown, Wednesday, the 28th of January, 2004. 

Walter, we had thought for chronological precedence you should go first.          

DR. POOLE:  Yes, I wanted to start with some questions about the merits of concurrency versus prototyping, or fly-before-buy, and I found somewhat contradictory quotations that you, for example at DDR&E once were testifying in '62 saying that the costs of concurrency were such that they should be applied only to a few vital programs. 

I've also found a draft presidential memorandum in '66 that downplays prototyping on the grounds that these development prototypes usually had to be re-engineered after production began.

So I wanted to start by asking during the '60s did you see a really clear distinction this is concurrency, this is prototyping?

DR. BROWN:  I think there is a distinction but there's also a continuum.  It really depends upon how early you start to freeze the tooling for something. I believed, and I guess I still believe, that concurrency in the sense of starting the tooling quite early before testing, let alone during the development before the testing has begun, really should be reserved for what you think are vital programs.

And I think during the Cold War there were a few, including the ballistic missile program, land and sea-based, fell into that category, but since the end of the Cold War I think it's hard to justify it for anything.

DR. POOLE: So depending on when you start tooling you can say it's concurrent or it's not concurrent.

DR. BROWN: You have to, I think, ask yourself whether you're going to have to make changes in the system after you've tooled it up but, again, there's a continuum there.  You're always going to go from mark one to mark two to mark three no matter whether the system is done concurrently or not.  So, I guess I tend to stick with the first quotation because I think the second one is less relevant.

DR. POOLE:  I was thinking particularly the F-111 where there were 23 prototypes, 18 Air Force, 5 Navy. And there began to be somewhat of a difference of opinion are we prototyping or are we going with concurrency on that one. 

DR. BROWN:  That was not the main issue with the F-111. I think the problem there was that you were trying to do two different things and one of the participants didn't want to be in the program.

I don't think that the F-111 was overly concurrent in the sense that the ICBM was. But it ran into trouble with engine stalls, for example, and that probably was the most perplexing problem, the one that upset the program the most.

But I don't think that you had comparable problems on the airframe or on the electronics and that it seems to me doesn't really constitute concurrency.  Because that program was so politicized, there was all sorts of pressure to beat the stated milestones and that may have pushed the program more rapidly than it deserved to be pushed, but I don't see that as a program that was overly concurrent.

DR. POOLE:  Now of course the next administration made a great point that they were wasting money on concurrency.  We're switching to fly-before-buy.  When you came back in '77, did you believe there was any major change?

DR. BROWN:  Well, certainly there was in the prototypes that led to the F-16 choice.  They actually did fly two aircraft, two different designs and it seems to me that that qualified as a movement away from concurrency. But again, after they made the choice you wound up with a whole series of F-16s and so forth. That could support the charge that you have to make changes anyway, but I don't think so.

I think Mark I, Mark II, Mark III, as I said in the answer to the previous question, is something that's always going to happen and you shouldn't regard it as a criticism of having waited to do your production until you've run a complete program and built several that are identical to what you're going to do in production.

DR. POOLE:  All right.  In 1968, I found some congressional testimony by Dr. Alain Enthoven that OSD was promoting instead of weapon systems growth, component growth for its own sake, things like the engines, the electronics, fire control system, that could then be applied to new weapon systems as they came along and it certainly sounds like a good theory. 

Do you recall any instances where there were applications: we developed the fire control AND the engine, and then the F-15 or whatever came along, and lo and behold it was all ready?

DR. BROWN:  I can't recall any of those.  There may have been some but, as you suggest, I think at that time it was principally theory.  I think later on in the late '70s and '80s, the idea of starting with existing or new platforms, then installing modules of electronics, especially, did happen.

That's a lot harder to do with engines because at least in a fighter aircraft you essentially wrap the airframe around the engine.  It's not like it is in civilian transport aircraft where you hang the engine on the wing and can upgrade the engine, which you do. You do that on military transport aircraft as well but you can't do it on a fighter.

DR.POOLE:  Okay.  Now I wanted to ask a few questions about the nature of innovation.  In 1963, the Air Force sponsored a “Forecast” study that it considered very important. And Forecast anticipated major breakthroughs especially in composite metals that would make possible huge advances in aircraft speed and performance.  Now, three years later, the OSD's “Hindsight” study argued that innovation is more a slow cumulative process that really has some more synergistic effects from a multitude of small advances.  So, I wanted to get your views based on your experiences of how --

DR. BROWN:  I think the latter view is more nearly correct. You can have major ideas, conceptual ideas, and they may come true or not.  The conceptual idea of composites and so forth was a useful one but in order to realize those ideas you have to take advantage of a lot of small things, some of which may have already been developed and demonstrated before you had the conceptual idea, some of which have not and you may have to wait. The idea of composites, for example, made sense but developing the specific composites took a lot of time and in the end had significant effect, although not as revolutionary an effect as the Forecast study had predicted.

But which composites, how you dealt with them and so forth, had become from a number of scientific and then separately a number of engineering developments.  In fact the most important goal set forth in Project Forecast was the Zero CEP Concept and that took really at least 20 years or more to come near fruition. How you were going to do it really developed out of what came out afterwards.

You know we started with laser guidance, for example.  That took almost ten years to be fully developed after 1963.  We also worked on optical contrast. But it wasn't until GPS was developed for quite a different reason that really low CEPs were achieved.

So, I'm inclined toward the latter view again, with the proviso that you have to have a vision of where you want to go.  You have to have a goal, a specific kind of military capability, and then somebody with that goal in mind must take advantage of existing technologies, or still to be developed technologies, in order to realize that goal. As I say, the Zero CEP Concept is a better example probably than the composites.

DR. POOLE:  All right.  I wanted to move on to your tenure as Secretary of the Air Force.

DR. BROWN:  Yes.

DR. POOLE:  In dealing with a time when there were some quite sharp disagreements between Secretary McNamara and Systems Command General Bernard Schriever, I wanted to ask in the role of Secretary of the Air Force were you seeing yourself as an arbitrator between the two opposite sides or more of an advocate for McNamara?

DR. BROWN:  I couldn't really be an arbitrator because it was McNamara, it was the Secretary of Defense in the end who made the decisions.  I saw myself really as someone who would guide the Air Force into making sensible analyses and reaching defensible conclusions, which then I could argue to the Secretary of Defense.

Now, that again had to be in the context of the goals of military strategy and military capability that are determined by the Secretary of Defense, with whatever advice military or civilian he chooses to hear and to consider.

So, indeed I felt myself an intermediary possessed of a vision, a set of goals that corresponded to those of the Secretary of Defense, but in trying to achieve those goals emphasizing what a particular service could do and getting that service to respond in a way that would be analytically supportable and convincing as meeting those goals.  That's the way I saw it. I think the Air Force knew that. 

I believe that the Air Force military people, uniformed officers came to believe that if they could convince me and meet the criteria that I set that I could be a better advocate in their view then they could themselves.  So, again, separation of what the goals and the criteria would be.

DR. POOLE: Could it be said that the Air Force did not so much adopt the systems analysis methodology as adapt it for its own purposes?

DR. BROWN: The Air Force set up systems analysis organizations, hoping to do as well as OSD and, by and large, they succeeded, thanks to people like Glenn Kent and Jasper Welch. An example is the choice of a new attack aircraft: the F-5 versus the A-7. The Air Staff looked at an F-5 sports car compared to an A-7 truck. Air Force analysis went for the A-7, which was much more to McNamara’s liking. Of course, the Air Force never gave up on a manned bomber; McNamara wanted missiles.

DR. POOLE: Looking back, in terms of hardware, what might the Air Force have done to perform better in ROLLING THUNDER? ECM?

DR. BROWN:  Poor accuracy was the main problem; compare it to what we did in the former Yugoslavia. ECM was less important than accuracy. I’ve often thought that, with the technology now available, the McNamara line probably would have prevented much of the infiltration. Of course, that might well not have changed the outcome.

DR. POOLE: Do you see any validity to the charge that McNamara, driven by the costs of Vietnam, deferred new weapon systems or went to cheaper lower risk ones?

DR. BROWN: McNamara said that requirements alone drove the budget and weapon decisions. That was not so. There was always a top budget line decided either by the President or by McNamara. There would be negotiation between the Secretary of Defense and the President or the Office of Management and Budget. Perhaps sometimes the Secretary of Defense had complete freedom to give any number that he decided on, although I think that was never completely the case. Even then, it was decided by the Secretary of Defense as a judgment of what the country could afford or what was needed on an intuitive or judgmental basis and not as a sum of program costs for programs that were determined analytically to be necessary.

So, there was a funding constraint and, therefore, Vietnam costs, which always took precedence, did limit how rapidly other things were done.  If I'm asked what effect did that have on post-Vietnam materiel capability, I guess I would answer probably not very much.  So, a short answer would be, yes, probably some programs did go more slowly than they otherwise would, but I don't think it ever had very much effect on the overall U.S. military capability.  It was nothing, for example, compared to the effect of Vietnam on Army morale and quality.

DR. POOLE:  Now I want to go to the other extreme: technological overreach and, with the wisdom of hindsight about the Mark II Avionics System, is that one that should have been cancelled at a pretty early stage?

DR. BROWN:  I don't really remember it well enough to give a considered answer on that, probably yes but that's not a very well thought out answer.

DR. POOLE:  I saw in the written record there were great hopes entertained for improving accuracy but because of the cost escalation and the technical difficulties --

DR. BROWN:  It turned out not to be the best way to do it.  I mean we subsequently found better ways to do it.

DR. POOLE:  Now I wanted to ask a question or two about cost control and the irrepressible Ernest Fitzgerald.

DR. BROWN:  We're going to run out of time because I am not going to be able to go on much past 9:20, so go ahead.

DR. POOLE:  Okay.  I just wanted to ask about when he raised, for example, the guidance system for the Minuteman II, mean time between failures, it took a huge amount of money correcting it.  Fitzgerald called it --  this was just a perpetual boondoggle.  What would be the rebuttal, saying it was necessary?

DR. BROWN:  Accuracy was important even in -- even in a Cold War -- especially in a Cold War situation where the ability to threaten the other side's strategic assets was seen -- and I would say correctly -- as part of deterrence.

So, in that particular case I think it was just an attempt on the part of the critic to find anything that he could that cost a lot of money and which some people would say wasn't worth it.

DR. MOODY:  Yes.  Thank you.  This is actually when we get to 1977.

DR. BROWN:  Yes.

DR. MOODY:  One of the first things you did was to reorganize OSD and particularly the acquisition function.  What was the rationale for the arrangements you made?

DR. BROWN:  Yes.  What I did was to essentially upgrade R&E, make it an undersecretary position, and put command and control communications, and acquisition in general under it. I put logistics along with manpower into a separate line, but put the acquisition in what essentially is the present arrangement.

The present arrangement, of course, has incorporated logistics into the Under Secretary’s responsibilities. My view was twofold.  First of all, to try to put research and development, engineering and acquisition together.  It made sense to me because it removed one handover essentially.

Second, because I thought that command and control and communication and intelligence, C cubed I, was going to be central both to strategic nuclear capabilities and conventional capabilities.

I wanted it to be part of the rest of the acquisition system and development system, whereas before you had a separate C cubed and a separate intelligence shop.  That's what I remember at least.

The other reason was that I wanted to reduce the number of direct reports.  When I came in, there were something like 30-odd direct reports to the Secretary of Defense. It’s back up there again, incidentally. So, Rumsfeld left with it and now he has – [pause] reconstituted it.

I thought that if there are thirty or forty people reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense that means some of them really aren't reporting to anybody and I wanted to tighten it up.  This was one way of doing it.

So, what I did was to put in an assistant secretary who was deputy to the undersecretary for R & E but also would cover C cubed I essentially, and you can only do that if you have the right people. I had the right people. in [William J.] Perry and [Gerald P.] Dinneen and that's why I did it that way.

I tried to do the same thing on the policy side, incidentally, where it didn't work quite as well, but you're really just interested in acquisition.

DR. MOODY:  What considerations were involved in selecting William Perry as the DDR&E, then moving up.

DR. BROWN:  Well, it's an interesting story.  He was the first person I asked, and he was also the eighth person I asked.  I asked him first -- I didn't know him well. I had met him I guess briefly in the '60s when he was in the private sector.  I guess he was running a laboratory for GT&E; then he built his own company.

And he was highly recommended.  He had the right kind of experience I thought, and a lot of people whom I trusted said he was a good organizer.  He had built his own company.  He was thoughtful, analytical.

So, that made a lot of sense.  As I say, I asked him first.  He said no and I then tried a number of other people.  All of them said no, three or four others actually.  Then I said, look, why should I go down the list.  Why don't I try to get to Perry again?

So, I called him up and the argument I used was: a number of people have had this job that I'm offering you.  Actually yours is going to be a better one, and each of them was reluctant to do it, and afterwards they always said, “it's a good thing I did that; it really made me,” and the same thing will be true of you. That may have convinced him. It surely turned out to be true.

DR. MOODY:  Actually, I wanted to get back a little bit to the organizational issue. How did your plans evolve?  What was the purpose of the Defense Resources Board?  What was its relation to the larger issue?

DR. BROWN:  Well, the Defense Resources Board was set up to make the program decisions, essentially. It had to include the various people in the office of the Secretary of Defense. My view was--again, this revolved to some degree around people-- that by having the staff offices in the OSD participate and having, if I remember correctly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs also participate, you could bring together the judgments.

Those judgments have to include more than the acquisition issues.  They have to include program priorities and the security policies that underlie them. By putting the Deputy Secretary in charge the idea was to get somebody to knock heads together.

And you have to have the right person. In Charles Duncan I thought correctly that we really had the right person, because Charles is a very quiet but very determined and very tough person.  He was able to essentially stare down almost anybody and I thought that worked pretty well.

And in the subsequent years we used the Defense Resources Board to make difficult program and budget decisions.

DR. MOODY:  So then the DSARC focuses on strictly the acquisition?

DR. BROWN:  Yes.  I would add that, you'll have to ask what Bill Perry's recollection is.  My recollection is that on the development programs I gave him an enormous amount of leeway.  I really delegated a large part of that decision making to him.

He would check with me and he would always tell me what he was up to.  I very seldom suggested that he change what he was doing. 

When it came time to decide how much of something to buy, that of course goes beyond the development program and it includes inputs from other than the acquisition side of the house.  How you buy it is an acquisition decision but how many you buy is a program decision.  It has to involve the service inputs, the inputs of the PA&E.

DR. MOODY:  So that you would draw a distinction here of that which is --

DR. BROWN:  Well how you acquire is something really for the undersecretary, now, for acquisitions.  How many is something to which that undersecretary has an input but it's not the sole input nor is the service input the sole input.

DR. MOODY:  But then how many is also related to the unit cost.

DR. BROWN:  How much it costs, that's right.  You get a curve.  It's how much it costs for how many and then you have to weigh that against other priorities.  You have to ask yourself how much does this add to your military capability?  And that's what the Defense Resources Board has to deal with.                

DR. MOODY:  I see myself segueing right into the whole argument of the defense reformers was that essentially the unit costs were getting to the point where some radical approach [was needed].

DR. BROWN:  Yes, that was a big argument and they were wrong.  I think few of them would now argue the same case, but I don't know.  You'd have to talk to the Gary Harts and others of this world and ask really whether you wanted to have a lot of P-47s instead.

You know my argument, Bill Perry's argument too, was we that are not going to be able to afford the manpower to operate a lot of low tech things and we believe that our comparative advantage is technology, that is we're better at technology than we are at mass, large mass.

That's quite different incidentally from World War II where the U.S. won on the battlefield by having more, not by having better.  German land materiel was better than U.S. materiel, but we had a lot more.  Now separately you can say well, we had Enigma.  We had radar.  We had the atom bomb. That's all true but in the land battles and the air battles we prevailed by numbers of planes and aircraft; in the end, we won by larger numbers.   but we couldn't compete with the Soviets, or rather we weren't prepared to compete with the Soviets on the basis of numbers.  They had 20 percent or 25 percent of their GDP going into their military.  We had in the '70s five percent or less.

How were we going to compete?  We had to compete with technology and we were better at technology than they.  In economic theory comparative advantage is not our competitive advantage over the other fellow.  It's a comparative advantage of how well you're able to do one thing versus another. Technology was both our comparative and competitive advantage.

We said our technology would be better, and I had confidence that we could get our reliability and maintainability, up to levels that would work and we did.  That was the basis and is the basis now for American military predominance. 

It's not just that we have so much more than everybody else.  We have it better than everybody else.  We're able to use electronics, sensors, sub-systems, systems and systems of systems in a way that no other military organization can, and we train to do so.

And that was our argument.  The argument of the so-called reformers was: make it simple and have a lot of it, and high tech won't work.  It will just cost a lot more (which it does), and it won't perform.  And, you know, for a while it looked as if they might be right but it didn't work out that way.

DR. MOODY:  Whether there was a good deal of innovation going on and technical solutions that weren't obvious to outsiders at the time, what would you consider the most successful innovative program say of the late '70s?

DR. BROWN:  Well there are a whole bunch of them, you know.  Clearly there are GPS, PGMs, Stealth, JTIDS.  It didn't really come to fruition until the '90s -- we started it in the '70s, the material was then bought in the '80s and used in the '90s. Those are the sort that I'm talking about.

DR. MOODY:  I'm thinking too of precision weapons, which is something the Air Force uses.

DR. BROWN:  Sure.  Well that actually, as I say, that started in the '60s but it wasn't until the early '70s, the last days of the Vietnam War that even the first of those started to have any effect, the laser-guided systems for example.

But the real precision weapons were developed in the '70s and began to be bought in the '80s, and used in the '90s. I should add cruise missiles.

DR. MOODY:  Yes, absolutely.  Now actually there are a couple of questions there.  I think that would be, so what were the pros and cons with the B-1?  I mean what were the considerations that went into the position of the administration?

DR. BROWN:  Yes, well first we cancelled the B-1.  That was one in which I had recommended to the president that instead we go with a low production rate, not necessarily because I thought the B-1 was the right way to go but because I believed that if we didn't proceed with the B-1 the pressure to do another missile would be enormously greater and I would have liked to defer that a little bit, in other words keep that open.

We were going to have to do something and I wasn't sure whether it was a bomber or a missile that was better.  President Carter felt he had to keep a campaign promise and in retrospect that was probably the right decision.  He should have canceled it.

The mistake was not destroying the B-1 tooling, because we had a better idea for a bomber, which became the B-2. By allowing the tooling to be kept we allowed the next administration to go ahead with the B-1 and delay the B-2, which was a very bad trade.

The Air Force, of course, both the Air Staff and the civilian secretary of the Air Force, wanted a bird in the hand and essentially that's what the B-1 was.  I had real concerns about going ahead with the production.  I would not have gone ahead with large-scale production but would have deferred decision.

We then went ahead with the MX missile, the basing of which proved a very difficult and in the end an insoluble problem. The B-1 ran into big trouble in its development but that was after my time. I didn't make any of those decisions.  They ran into real trouble with the electronic countermeasures, for example.

In retrospect, the right decision would have been not only to cancel the B-1 but to have started early on a stealth bomber.  We had already done the stealth fighter aircraft, the F-117 and we should have done the stealth bomber. I'm not sure it would have been possible in 1977 to say we're canceling the B-1 and we're stepping on the stealth bomber because the stealth story really didn't come out until 1980.

DR. MOODY:  I'm going to shift a little bit, but one of the problems associated with acquisition is described as the “revolving door” and those officials, military and civilian, who deal with contractors are affected.

DR. BROWN:  It's a problem, but I think the big problem is the reverse of what the public view is.  Indeed there are abuses but, in fact, the existing regulations, existing laws and regulations (which are violated sometimes) are the real abuses. They are themselves overly restrictive. Despite the wishes of some people to make them more restrictive, they are so restrictive that they really have resulted in a diminution of the quality of talent available at the high levels.  Anybody who comes in except at retirement age is essentially disqualifying himself or herself from participating in an effective way afterwards in the private sector.

That's an overstatement.  What really happens is that anybody who accepts a high level position in the Defense Department, a presidential appointment, then hopes to have some career afterwards in a defense related business, is going to be severely disabled in that ambition.

The result is that you get people who are essentially at the end of their careers or people that don't know anything about it, and I think many of the advocates of closing the revolving door think that's the way it ought to be. Their idea is that you ought to have people that don't know anything about it.  Then they're unprejudiced.  They don't have any earlier connections.  They come to it clean.

And I happen to think that's not the best way to do it.  Having said that I think that the abuses, and there have been abuses, are outrageous. 

I was able to get to serve in DDRE some very, very good industry people, half a dozen of them, ten of them, people like McLucas, Fred Payne, and Al Flax, a whole bunch of people, and after they left there was never any scandal.

Some of them went into industry.  Some of them went into doing different things.  It's virtually impossible to get such people now, because the rules have been tightened so much. But they're not completely different. You were always prohibited from dealing with a specific issue in which there had been decisions in which you had participated. But now there's a penumbral effect so that even if you go out and work on something that has nothing to do with anything you did before, you're subject to criticism, quite aside from any real abuses of the system. I think this is a big problem.

Incidentally, the one category of people who have the easiest time coming into and out of government are the lawyers and it's no coincidence that these are the people who make the rules, including so many members of Congress. 

DR. MOODY:  In your view, when you were Secretary of Defense, which of the services was the most effective in the area of innovation and acquisition?

DR. BROWN:  I think the Air Force probably did well.  The Navy also did well but in very selective fields.  The Navy was not terribly innovative when it came to ships but it did well with respect to aircraft.  The Air Force did well with respect to space, for example, and electronics. 

The services are different. And of course innovation is not limited to technology.  You can have innovation in tactics.  You can have innovation in organization and there I think the Navy did well.  But of the services, the Air Force is the one most dedicated to technology.  It feels technology is in a way its reason for existence, and it emphasizes technology.

The Navy in the past has emphasized capital expenditures in the way of ships. Carrier battle task forces cost $30 or $40 billion, and until recently ships have been the pieces of hardware that lasted the longest. There are no naval ships I think that are as old as the B-52s but that's an exception.  And so the Navy emphasizes major long-term capital expenditures in ship building programs.

The Army emphasizes personnel.  The Army is built around people and personnel training and so forth. The Marine Corps also emphasizes people but rides on the Navy when it comes to acquisition. The Army does its own acquisitions and probably is most prone to getting tangled up in its own underwear when it comes to making acquisitions.  The Army has the hardest time in the acquisition business.  I'm not quite sure I understand why.  But given those characteristics, you'd expect the Air Force to be the most technologically innovative.

DR. MOODY:  What role did you assign to PA&E, program analysis?

DR. BROWN:  There's a long history that Republican administrations downgrade PA&E, at least the political pressure in Republican administrations is to downgrade PA&E and say pay attention to your uniformed people.  That tradition has eroded somewhat in recent decades.

And Democrats come in and they say be analytical and raise the profile of PA&E. And I did.  I gave it an Assistant Secretary, and I relied a lot on Russ Murray and the people that worked for him, but I didn't always follow what they said. 

I think in that sense I perhaps relied on them less than McNamara did but more than the people in the Nixon and Ford administrations, let alone the Reagan administration.  They were an important element and I used them to provide an alternative to what the services came up with. They won some and they lost some.

DR. MOODY:  I had separately written down a couple questions which actually seem to me to be related, and one was on how issues like SALT and PD-59, and on another side the Team B report, affected how acquisition takes place, and then I see I also had something about the Rapid Deployment Force.

DR. BROWN:  These were all significant effects. I think Team B had its effect later on, after our administration, but I don't think they affected the acquisition process very much, except as to quantity.  They may have affected some or influenced some decisions on how much of something to buy or whether to buy something but not as regards the acquisition process itself.

That's also true of SALT.  It did influence requirements, less so acquisition. But it would have influenced one acquisition very strongly if we had not been able to alter the negotiations, because when we came into office, the Ford administration at Vladivostok had effectively given away the cruise missile by agreeing to a 600 kilometer range limit applied to submarine-launched or air-launched cruise missiles.

It took a lot of re-negotiation to get that back up to 1,500 kilometers, which completely changed the program and its utility. But again that affected a decision rather than a process.

DR. MOODY:  Of course the cruise missile was a joint acquisition program.

DR. BROWN:  Yes.  The Joint Cruise Missile Office, which Bill Perry suggested and ran out of his office really, though a Navy admiral ran it, was a good example of a joint program.

The Air Force had its own version.  The Tomahawk really became the workhorse, but by having a single joint office run both programs, I think we saved some money although at the cost of several arguments.  That was an innovation in acquisition but of modest effectiveness.

DR. MOODY:  The general take in the pamphlet histories of acquisition that the approach of the Carter administration and of Harold Brown at the Department of Defense in the acquisition process was a centralization that had been done away with earlier.  That sounds like a cliché.

DR. BROWN:  It happened to a degree.  If you compare it with what came after, it was considerably more centralized.  It was somewhat less different from what came before.  As I said, when Republican administrations -- when the Nixon administration came in -- the mantra was: well, we must let the services, the uniformed people, run this.  That was more of a mantra than a policy.

Laird downgraded PA&E, and then he began to use it more after he did pull some authority back to OSD. But it is true that when we came in we did centralize it still more.  When the Reagan people came in they completely decentralized it and the budget review process to a high degree became a stapler to staple together what the services had and that was the budget.  That's a bit of an overstatement. 

DR. MOODY:  Well, that would be sort of like letting Congress figure it out.

DR. BROWN:  Right, except the Congress more or less gave them what they wanted. The Bush 41 people exercised more control and then the first Clinton administration tended to re-centralize. I think what you now have is an anomaly in those things, because you have a very substantial centralization now in a Republican administration.

DR. MOODY: The thing I'm concerned about is this issue that keeps coming up of the unit costs, the whole cost analysis.  Is there a creative way to deal with unit cost?

DR. BROWN:  I think it's very difficult.  I think that costs tend to escalate.  Programs tend to increase in scope, and once a program is approved its advocates and the users pile on new requirements.  Things go up.  That's quite aside from inefficiencies in development and procurement.

Although the Defense Department is an offender in this regard, it's not an unusually large offender for government.  If you compare it, let's say, to the Big Dig in Boston or compare it with the new Capitol Center, you'll find that the Defense Department's performance is A-plus by comparison.

That's not much of an excuse, but it is important to keep in mind what you're comparing things with.  If you compare it with the private sector, it probably does not do as well as the private sector, but you do not have the discipline of a bottom line in the government, and the result is always going to be less efficient.

DR. MOODY:  You also have a political process.  The big discussion in acquisition is always that the contractors buy in, that they bid low to get the job. 

DR. BROWN:  I don't think that's always the case. It is sometimes the case but I think the problem generally is more of a ballooning of the program than it is of a deliberate understatement of the costs. 

Sometimes there is an understatement of the costs, and it depends on the nature of the contract.  There still are some that come in at or under cost -- under estimate.

DR. POOLE:  Of course, Robert Charles hoped the total package procurement would help solve the problem, which it never did.

DR. BROWN:  It doesn't, and actually the worst situation occurred when contractors were forced to do development on a fixed price basis, and the DoD later backed off from that.  That happened in the Reagan administration and that was a disaster.

DR. MOODY:  Yes, I was thinking, the assumption always was that the C-5 was a case of the contractors buying in.

DR. BROWN:  It was, but it was not a pure overrun, I mean, compared to many of these.

DR. MOODY:  David Packard put out a big memo trying to get other terms for cost growth he could use.

DR. BROWN:  Well, of course, the Congress then put in a reporting requirement --the SARs requirement -- which essentially was designed to make everything look as if it was overrun.

DR. MOODY:  Yes and it worked.  There were constant critiques of the SARs and the costs that were put into that.   Were you able to discuss this rationally with Congress?

DR. BROWN:  Not really.  I think the Congress is in a difficult position because it has to maintain that it is assuring the efficient use of the taxpayers' dollars. Yet the system that the framers set up of divided responsibility, separation of powers, was intended to prevent efficiency in the sense that they did not want a strong executive. 

They wanted to curb executive powers; efficiency and representation of constituent interests are incompatible.  Members of Congress get elected very largely on the basis of local interest and local interest is not conducive to efficiency.

So, the Congress, as I say, is in an anomalous position.  They have to claim that they're trying to save taxpayers' money but, at the same time, they have to try to get as much of it spent in their home districts as possible. 

DR. MOODY:  Hence, a liberal Congressman from California is in favor of the   B-1.

DR. BROWN:  Yes, I mean I always heard from Tip O'Neil and Ted Kennedy.  They'd call me about the engine for the F-18.  They'd say we don't want you to buy too many F-18s but buy enough so the GE factory in Lynn gets engine business.

DR. POOLE:  Okay, well thank you sir. 

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