b. Personnel Strengths The number of military and civilian personnel authorized to be assigned during fiscal year 1985 to the three Service Secretariats are shown in the following table: As these personnel strengths indicate, there is a wide disparity in the size of the three Secretariats. The Navy Secretariat is more than twice as large as the Army office and 21⁄2 times the size of the Air Force office. Section 1303 of the DoD Authorization Act, 1985 requested the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the Congress on the reasons for these disparities. In response to this requirement, Deputy Secretary of Defense Taft submitted on January 7, 1985 a report, entitled Report on the Size of the Service Secretariats in the Department of Defense. This report concludes that: ...the differences among the three organizations are attributable to the fact that each secretariat is tailored to meet the particular needs of the military department which it oversees and the management style of its chief executive, the military department secretary. They do not reflect the existence of more or less "fat" in one secretariat as compared to another, or greater efficiency in the management of one military department as compared to another. Further, the size of the secretariat, alone, does not accurately represent the management overhead of a military department. To get a complete picture, the service secretariat and service staff must be considered together. When this is done, the departmental staffs of the three military departments appear to be sized comparably in relation to the total forces which they are required to manage. (page 14) In arriving at these conclusions, this report analyzes the number of personnel in each Military Department assigned to perform 19 major functions. The results of this analysis are presented in Table 6-4. Based upon this functional comparison, the report placed the reasons for a Secretariat to have a substantially higher staffing level for particular functions into four major categories: • Service-unique function -A function is performed in one Secretariat, but not in others, because it is a unique requirement of that Military Department's mission. • organizational placement decision -A function is performed in a particular Secretariat, but not in others, because of a decision by a Service Secretary. • expanded function -A function exists in all three Secretariats, but it is substantially broader in one Secretariat compared to another. |
