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flict disappeared; but it was muted when the services dealt with the Secretary of Defense, especially on those issues which General [Maxwell D.] Taylor called the "blue chip" ones. (The Organizational Politics of Defense, page 108)

The impact of this change, in Lucas and Dawson's view, was to shift the focus of organizational conflict:

...Interservice conflict-adjudicated by OSD was largely supplanted by civil-military conflict. The center of gravity of defense decision-making was so decisively changed that the dominant form of organizational conflict was between the defense managers and the military services, instead of interservice rivalry. (page 98)

This change in the pattern of organizational conflict resulted from the development of expertise in OSD to challenge Service positions. Prior to 1961, OSD relied on the natural competition among the Services as the source of information to pick and choose between alternatives. The development of independent expertise in OSD, coupled with forceful management by Secretary McNamara, "created a military consensus that rested on log-rolling and on submerged differences." (The Organizational Politics of Defense, page 108)

Since 1961, independent expertise has remained an enduring feature of OSD. In response, the Services have continued to logroll on major issues and have forced OSD to assume the entire burden of challenging the policies and programs of any Military Department. The natural consequence has been a heightening of civil-military disagreement, an isolation of OSD, a loss of information critical to effective decision-making, and, most importantly, a political weakening of the Secretary of Defense and his OSD staff. The overall result of inter-Service logrolling has been a highly undesirable lessening of civilian control of the military.

The current system in many regards represents the worst of many possibilities. On critical issues, the Services logroll and deny the opportunity for effective decision-making. On lesser issues, the Services remain determined rivals and preclude the degree of cooperation and coordination necessary to provide efficient and integrated fighting teams.

4. PREDOMINANCE OF PROGRAMMING AND BUDGETING

The overall performance of DoD suffers from the predominance in organizational activity of the programming and budgeting phases of the resource allocation process. The overly extensive focus on resource decisions leads to insufficient attention to other important responsibilities:

• strategic planning;

• operational matters, including the preparation and review of contingency plans; and

• execution of policy and resource decisions. Combined with the deficiencies of the functional structure of DoD (which contribute to this problem), the predominance of programming and budgeting has inhibited the overall strategic direc

tion of DoD. There is a lack of clarity of the strategic goals of DoD (which is addressed in detail in the following subsection).

The operational side of DoD is neglected in the rush to address resource issues. The Secretary of Defense pays insufficient attention to his chain of command responsibilities. Contingency plans, joint doctrine, joint training, and coalition issues are among the operational topics that receive insufficient attention. In The Pentagon and the Art of War, Edward N. Luttwak notes the poor performance of the operational chain in DoD:

...In peacetime, delusions of adequacy persist; but ever since Korea, each test of combat has revealed gross deformations in the making of strategy, in the absence of operational art, and in tactics made willfully clumsy. (page 64)

The underemphasis of operational matters is also reflected in the professional development of military officers. The development of leadership skills needed in wartime has been given relatively low priority in the resource-oriented Services. Instead, technical, managerial, and bureaucratic skills have been emphasized. The Army's Professional Development of Officers Study supports these assertions. The officer survey conducted as part of this study revealed the following critical perceptions of the current officer professional development system:

• 45 percent of general officers agree that senior Army leaders behave too much like corporate executives and not enough like warriors.

• 68 percent of all officers feel that only two-thirds or less of their peers would make good wartime leaders.

• 78 percent of all officers agree that the officer professional development system does not go far enough today in preparing officers for war and combat.

• All officers tend to agree that the weakest areas of officer preparation tend to be warfighting, leadership, and critical thinking skills.

• 49 percent of all officers agree that the bold, original, creative officer cannot survive in today's Army.

• Company and field grade officers tend to agree that the promotion system does not reward those officers who have the seasoning and potential to be the best wartime leaders. (Professional Development of Officers Study Survey Results, pages 1, 2, and 9)

In The Pentagon and the Art of War, Edward N. Luttwak uses the term "the materialist bias" in discussing the predominance of programming and budgeting. He states:

...the pervasive materialist bias...distorts our entire approach to defense policy and military matters in general. With few exceptions (as when nuclear weapons are at issue), Pentagon officials, military chiefs, Congress, and the media all focus their attention on the measurable, material "inputs" that go into the upkeep and growth of the armed forces-i.e., the weapons and supplies, maintenance and construction, salaries and benefits. Spelled out in dollars and cents, these inputs are very important considering the federal budget and the entire relation

ship between the military establishment and the nation's economy. But the purpose of the armed forces is to make the nation secure and powerful, and for that it is the "outputs" of military strength that count....when it comes to military power, the relationship between material inputs and desired outputs is not proportional; it is in fact very loose, because the making of military strength is dominated by nonmaterial, quite intangible human factors, from the quality of national military strategy to the fighting morale of individual servicemen. (page 139)

5. LACK OF CLARITY OF STRATEGIC GOALS

In an organization as large as the Department of Defense, the clear articulation of overall strategic goals can play an important role in achieving a coordinated effort toward these goals by the various components and individuals within them. Clarity of goals can enhance unity and integration. DoD loses the benefit of this unifying mechanism through its failure to clarify its strategic goals.

In The Organizational Politics of Defense, William A. Lucas and Raymond H. Dawson discuss the importance of organizational goals in enhancing organizational unity:

At least two factors are particularly significant in limiting the degree to which an organization fragments into autonomous, confederated divisions: (1) the degree to which the members of the organization adhere to the basic organizational goals; and (2) the extent to which it is possible to put those organizational goals into practice. If the participants in the component units accept the organizational goals and the goals can be expressed in meaningful terms, then the sub-goals and specialized ideologies of the [military] departments will develop only until they appear to be detrimental to the basic goals of the organization itself. If these constraining factors are not present, the "centers of interest" [the Military Departments] may become so diverse that centrifugal forces are set in motion which rend the organization. (pages 11 and 12)

In this context, Lucas and Dawson note the importance of clarity of goals:

... If the organization's goals are clear and its members are committed to them, the ends-means connections of the various activities will be clear, and conflict and goal displacement will be relatively low. When the goals are ambiguous, however, there is great latitude for conflict and for sequential displacement of organizational goals by sub-ideologies, and sub-ideologies, in turn, by activity-decision rules [e.g., in Vietnam, these were number of aircraft sorties and the number and tonnage of bombs dropped]. And, concomitantly, it becomes more likely that the nature of that displacement will serve the varied selfinterests of groups and individuals in the organizations. To the degree they have been unable to operationalize the common defense, members of the defense establishment then become engaged in the competitive pursuit of their own normative ac

tivities [those activities most central to the achievement of each Military Department's sub-ideology]. (page 16)

This is exactly what is happening in DoD. The vagueness of the strategic goals of DoD as a whole has led to their displacement by the sub-goals and sub-ideologies of the Services. The Services then compete to secure resources for programs that promote their subgoals. Yet, the ability of OSD and OJCS to decide between these competitive programs is hampered by the lack of clear goals and the accompanying lack of program yardsticks.

This goal displacement and program competition by the Services has taken the form of a "requirements approach." Lucas and Dawson discuss this approach as follows:

The historical means by which programs have been defined to cope with national security needs has been by service statements of what they "require." This "requirements approach,” as Bernard Brodie has called it, has been the operational manifestation of military sub-ideology. The services come to believe that their requirements are a reasonable minimum definition of what is adequate, and they press to have them fulfilled. Too frequently a service group will lose sight of the vague goal of security and fix instead upon the more concrete sub-goal of its requirements. They equate security with requirements, leading them to view the compromise of their requirements as the compromise of national security. (page 67)

The Services have continued the requirements approach, now stated in terms of 18 Army divisions, 600 Navy ships, and 40 Air Force wings. The relationship of these requirements to DoD strategic goals has been poorly developed, primarily because they were not derived from them. Their source is the sub-goals and sub-ideologies of each Service. Warner and Havens describe this phenomenon as a "means-ends inversion, the neglect of the claimed goals in favor of the means as ends in themselves." ("Goal Displacement and the Intangibility of Organizational Goals," page 541)

What makes this approach so difficult to counter in DoD is that Service leaders -both civilian and military believe that their behavior is correct. Lucas and Dawson comment as follows:

...The departmental ideologies that result from specialized centers of interest, whether they are in industry or government bureaucracies, are powerful explanatory factors precisely because they lead men to believe in the correctness of their own behavior. Their actions might be ill-advised or short-sighted, but organizational conflict is often all the more intense because it is well-intentioned. (page 11)

In their book, In Search of Excellence, Lessons from America's Best Run Companies, Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. list eight basic principles used by the best-run companies. One of these, which they term "simultaneous loose-tight properties", is applicable to the issue of unclear DoD goals. They describe this principle as follows:

...fostering a climate where there is dedication to the central values of the company combined with tolerance for all employees who accept those values. (unnumbered page)

In explanation of this principle, Peters and Waterman offer:

...The excellent companies are both centralized and decentralized. For the most part... they have pushed autonomy down to the shop floor or product development team. On the other hand, they are fanatic centralists around the few core values they hold dear. (page 15)

...a remarkably tight-culturally driven/controlled-set of properties marks the excellent companies. Most have rigidly shared values. (page 320)

...when we look at McDonald's or virtually any of the excellent companies, we find that autonomy is a product of discipline. The discipline (a few shared values) provides the framework. (page 322)

In DoD, this principle cannot be applied due to a lack of shared values or goals. DoD is more difficult to manage because the strategic goals around which the department's officials could become "fanatic centralists" have not been clearly articulated. As a result, DoD cannot provide its components more autonomy because they seek to promote their own self-interested goals and values.

Nothing in this discussion is intended to imply that the clear articulation of strategic goals is an easy undertaking. The complexity of DoD's missions and the rapidity of change in the international security environment make the formulation of strategic goals extremely difficult. It is precisely for this reason that DoD must devote more attention to this vital task.

6. INSUFFICIENT MECHANISMS FOR CHANGE

Throughout history, military organizations -like all large organizations have been noted for their resistance to change. A popular military maxim is:

Any change, even for the better, is to be deprecated. (Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations, page 268)

Basil H. Liddell Hart cited the resistance to new ideas in the military profession:

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out. (Thoughts on War, v, 1944) The U.S. military establishment shares the resistance to change innate in the military profession. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, General David C. Jones, USAF (Retired) spoke of the resistance to change in the U.S. military establishment:

By their very nature, large organizations have a built-in resistance to change. As the largest organization in the free world, our defense establishment -the Department of Defense -has most of the problems of a large corporation but lacks an easily calculated "bottom line" to force needed change. At the core are the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps: institu

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