Chapter VIII: 

 

The McNamara Revolution

 

One of the major issues of the 1960 Presidential campaign was the alleged inadequacy of the Eisenhower administration's direction and management of the nation's security. Two of the principal critics were retired Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell D. Taylor and the former Army Chief of Research and Development Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin. The Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Senate's Committee on Government Operations, under Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, began a series of hearings and investigations in January 1960 which also concentrated on the inadequacy of this country's national security organization. Senator John F. Kennedy, when running for President, appointed Senator Stuart E. Symington of Missouri, a former Secretary of the Air Force under President Truman, chairman of an advisory committee to investigate the organization and operations of the Department of Defense. Finally two RAND Corporation officials, Charles J. Hitch and Roland N. McKean, criticized the financial management of the Department of Defense in The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age.

 

General Gavin charged that the roles of the joint Chiefs as heads of separate military services were incompatible with their functions as the nation's top military planners because they could not in practice divorce themselves from the particular interests of their individual services. There were "interminable delays" in reaching decisions caused by disagreement and deadlock among the services. He suggested abolishing the joint Chiefs of Staff and substituting a Senior Military Advisory Group to the Secretary of Defense. Its members would be senior officers who had just completed a tour of duty as their service's chief of staff, and a functional joint staff would support them.1

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General Taylor had become the principal military spokesman of the Marshall tradition of tight executive control over the armed services before and after his retirement as Chief of Staff of the Army. In The Uncertain Trumpet, he, like General Gavin, was critical of current military strategy because it neglected the Army in favor of the massive deterrent of the Strategic Air Command. Concentration on total nuclear war similarly neglected the requirements of conventional and limited warfare, the principal type of conflict that had developed during the cold war.

 

Like General Gavin, Taylor also criticized the procedures by which the joint Chiefs of Staff reached their decisions. Repeating General Marshall's dictum, he told the Jackson Committee that "you cannot fight wars by committee." A single armed services chief of staff should run the Secretary of Defense's "command post" for him, assisted by an advisory council. In summary effective control over operations required more efficient planning as well as a more efficient planning organization.

 

The current role of the Defense Department Comptroller disturbed General Taylor. Given the fact that the joint Chiefs of Staff were often in deadlocked disagreement, he asserted that "strategy has become a more or less incidental by-product of the administrative processes of the defense budget." To avoid this situation he would restructure defense budgets on the basis of the strategic missions to be performed rather than on the resources or functions required to perform them. What was needed was a strategy of "flexible response" capable of meeting all levels of conflict from "cold" through "limited" to "total" war; "atomic" deterrent forces based on intercontinental missiles rather-than manned bombers; "counterattrition forces" capable of fighting "brush fire wars;" guerrilla and other "limited" conflicts; mobile reserve forces, including mobilization stockpiles; air lift and sea lift forces; antisubmarine warfare forces; continental air defense based on the development of antimissile missiles; plus whatever resources were required to support general mobilization and civil defense programs. The three military services would be reorganized similarly as operational commands while the three service departments would be organized to mobilize, train, and support

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them. In this manner American military commitments could be balanced effectively with the resources required to fulfill them, another objective which General Marshall had posited at the end of World War II.2

 

Outside the military services a special Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee under the chairmanship of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat of Texas, in 1957 began a continuing series of inquiries into satellite and missile programs, into the role of the Bureau of the Budget in formulating and executing defense budgets, and into other major issues.

 

Senator Jackson's Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery investigated "whether our Government is now properly organized to meet successfully the challenge of the cold war." 3

 

Former Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, a leading civilian disciple of General Marshall, was the first witness to testify before this committee. Echoing his predecessor, he said bluntly that the "committee system" under which the Department of Defense and, indeed, the entire federal government operated traditionally was the principal obstacle to effective decision-making. He admitted that the committee system had developed out of the federal form of government as part of "a series of checks and balances" to prevent any one group within the government from becoming too powerful.

 

The often forgotten fact is that our form of government, and its machinery, has had built into it a series of clashes of group needs...This device of inviting argument between conflicting interests-which we can call the "foulup factor" in our equation of performance-was obviously the result of a deliberate decision to give up the doubtful efficiency of a dictatorship in return for a method of protection of individual freedom, rights, privileges, and immunities.

 

Mr. Lovett feared that within the executive branch alone there was an observable trend to expand the committee system

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to the point where mere curiosity on the part of someone or some agency and not a "need to know" can be used as a ticket of admission to the merry-go-round of "concurrences." This doctrine, unless carefully and boldly policed, can become so fertile as spawner of committees as to blanket the whole executive branch with an embalmed atmosphere . . . . The derogation of the authority of the individual in government, and the exaltation of the anonymous mass, has resulted in a noticeable lack of decisiveness. Committees cannot effectively replace the decision-making power of the individual who takes the oath of office; nor can committees provide the essential qualities of leadership.4

 

Thus did Mr. Lovett compare the Marshall tradition concept of tight executive control with the traditional procedures of completed staff actions.

 

Senator Stuart Symington represented Air Force critics of the JCS committee system. As chairman of a task force on defense organization and management appointed by Senator Kennedy during his 1960 campaign for President, Symington heavily weighted his committee with Air Force spokesmen. One was Thomas K. Finletter, the first Secretary of the Air Force. Another was former Assistant Secretary and later Under Secretary of the Air Force Roswell L. Gilpatric.

 

Not surprising, the criticisms and recommendations made by the Symington Committee reflected policies advanced by the Air Staff in 1959 in its "Black Book on Defense Reorganization" favoring "total unification." Interservice rivalry, the committee said, prevented the JCS from functioning effectively. To eliminate this rivalry it recommended abolishing the joint Chiefs of Staff in favor of a single armed forces Chief of Staff, called the "Chairman of the Joint Staff," who would be chief military adviser to the Secretary of Defense and the President and direct the activities of the joint staff. He would also preside over a Military Advisory Council composed of those senior officers who had just completed tours of duty as chiefs of staff. Divorced from their services they would no longer feel required to place service interests above everything else.

 

Second, the Symington Committee proposed to abolish the three "separately administered" services and reorganize them as "organic units within a single Department of Defense." The Secretary of Defense would be assisted by two Under Secretaries, one for Weapons Systems and another for Administration. The former would be responsible for all logistical support

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SECRETARY McNAMARA

 

activities, including research and development, production, procurement, and military construction and installations. The latter would be responsible primarily for personnel and financial management. A series of functional directorates similar to the existing Assistant Secretaries of Defense would act as the department's staff.

 

Finally, to integrate the services completely the committee recommended adopting uniform recruitment policies, uniform pay scales, unified direction of all service schools, and a more flexible policy of transferring personnel among the services. The military services would retain their individual chiefs of staff who would have direct access to the Secretary of Defense. The services would also retain such vestiges of their former separate identities as their distinctive uniforms.5

 

Spokesmen for the Army's Marshall tradition and the Air Force were the major critics of the Eisenhower defense policies and organization. Representatives of the Navy, which remained the principal supporter of the JCS committee system, were conspicuous by their absence. Supporting the critics was the

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Mr. VANCE

 

observable trend of the previous decade in the direction of greater authority and control over the services by the Secretary of Defense. As one student of the defense organization put it: "Gradually, and with a finesse which demands respect, the services are being dismembered and disembowelled, so that the question of their utility is decided continually in decrements. Since we cannot reasonably expect to turn the clock back, the only relevant question is whether the process is too fast or too slow." 6

 

The trend toward centralized authority in the Secretary of Defense seemed likely to continue, but future developments were partly contingent on the man President Kennedy selected as his Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara. McNamara was a highly successful industrial manager, a "comptroller" in the broadest sense of that much-abused and misunderstood term. Most of the reforms he instituted as Secretary of Defense and the techniques he employed were ones which management experts since the days of General Somervell's Control Division had repeatedly recommended. What was unique was the rapidity with which he absorbed information and made decisions. What had disturbed him most at the outset was the long time it took to get decisions out of the Department of

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Mr. HITCH

 

Defense. In the General Marshall tradition he placed the blame for delay on the committee system with its endless bargaining and compromises. He intended to replace committees where possible by asserting greater executive authority, responsibility, and control over the department and its operations. As he said, "The individual in the position of responsibility must make the decision and take the responsibility for it." 7

 

Secretary McNamara was surprised to find that there was no management engineering agency within his office responsible for reviewing organization and procedures. He promptly assigned this function to the department's new General Counsel, Cyrus R. Vance, a veteran of the Johnson Defense Preparedness Subcommittee. Another Johnson subcommittee veteran, Solis Horwitz, became Director of the Office of Organizational and Management Planning under Mr. Vance. This agency was responsible for directing or supervising studies requested by Secretary McNamara in its assigned area and for monitoring major organizational changes in the Department of Defense stemming from such projects.

 

One study led to regrouping the functions of the Assistant

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Secretaries of Defense. The two Assistant Secretaries for Manpower, Personnel, and Reserve and for Health and Medical services were combined under one Assistant Secretary for Manpower. The Assistant Secretaries for Supply and Logistics and for Property and Installations were also combined under one Assistant Secretary for Installations and Logistics. An Assistant Secretary for Civil Defense was added because this function had been transferred to the Defense Department. Other studies resulted in abolition of more than five hundred superannuated departmental committees and in a major reorganization of the Air Force's field establishment into a research and development or Systems Command and a Logistics Command.8

Mission or Program Budgets

 

Secretary McNamara's first major reform was to revise the Defense Department's budget to reflect the military missions for which it was responsible. The person most directly responsible for this project was the new Defense Comptroller, Charles J. Hitch. The Office of the Comptroller in the Army for several years had advocated such a budget. When McNamara became Secretary of Defense the Army's Chief of Staff was General George H. Decker, a former Comptroller, who sought to develop some means of presenting the Army's costs of operation in mission terms. In the fall of 1960 shortly after he became Chief of Staff, Decker had initiated additional investigations of this concept.9

 

Mr. Hitch believed that the combination of functional budget categories and the rigid budget reductions of the Eisenhower administration had created unmanageable problems, with each service favoring its own projects at the expense of joint ones, concentrating on new weapons systems at the expense of conventional ones, and neglecting maintenance.

 

The Army's own modernization program emphasized the development of missiles and Army aviation at the expense of conventional weapons and equipment, Mr. Hitch charged. In

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an era of financial austerity the Army's major overhead operating costs, the operations and maintenance program, suffered most. More and more equipment was useless for lack of spare parts. Deferred maintenance seriously impaired the Army's combat readiness. Local commanders often had to transfer operations and maintenance funds intended for repairs and utilities for more urgent missions, an illegal transaction made possible by the thin dividing line that existed in practice between procurement activities and overhead operations.10

 

Another major weakness of the existing budget was the failure to relate functional appropriations to major military missions or objectives. Mr. Hitch proposed a series of nine "Program Packages" designed to solve this problem. (Table 3)

TABLE 3 

MAJOR PROGRAMS, TOTAL OBLIGATIONAL AUTHORITY 

(IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS)