How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969 is a seminal book that was published by the RAND Corporation. The book details what was novel in 1971 when the book was published, the Department of Defense Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation process. This topic may sound dry, but the process was pioneered by the men who authored How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969, in conjunction with Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, who probably saved billions of dollars. Do you believe such a simple process could save billions of dollars?
How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969 Summary
How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969 is a work of enduring value and relevance, How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969 is a classic account of the application of powerful ideas to the problem of managing the Department of Defense (DoD). The process introduced by this book is still being used today, more than fifty years later. It has saved billions of dollars.
How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969 is also a cautionary history of the inter-departmental food fights created by that effort. Robert S. McNamara took office in 1961 convinced that the Secretary of Defense, rather than the services, should control the evaluation of military needs and should choose among alternatives for meeting those needs. It should be clear that, before the pioneering of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation process, the military services each proposed their budgets, which were often redundant.
Robert S. McNamara‘s tool was a new system for allocating defense resources, the Planning, Programming, Evaluation, and Budgeting System, pioneered by the Rand Corporation, which was based on six fundamental ideas:
- Decisions should be based on explicit criteria of national interest, not on compromises among institutional forces.
- Needs and costs should be considered simultaneously.
- Major decisions should be made by choices among explicit, balanced, feasible alternatives.
- The Secretary of Defense should have an active analytic staff to provide him with relevant data and unbiased perspectives.
A multi-year force and financial plan should project the consequences of present decisions into the future. - Open and explicit analysis, available to all parties, should form the basis for major decisions.
- Most of the decisions that inspired great controversy in the 1960s are taken as bedrock defense policy today, and the methods adopted with such pain have become embedded as the Department of Defense‘s approach to defining and resolving issues.
The Rand Corporation
The Rand Corporation is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) that exists to help government agencies develop new tools and processes, like the Programming, Planning, Budgeting, and Evaluation process. The RAND Corporation is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries, and has existed since the 1950s. They have helped on a variety of issues, including the space race, the Vietnam War, the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms confrontation, the creation of the Great Society social welfare programs, and national health care.
RAND was created after people in the War Department, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and industry began to discuss the need for a private organization to connect operational research with research and development decisions. RAND is populated by experts, and always has been. There are several luminaries associated with the RAND Corporation, including Alain Enthoven and K Wayne Smith, who wrote How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969.
Conclusion
The reason a process as dry as the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation process made it into print in a book like How Much is Enough: Shaping the Department of Defense Budget 1961-1969 is that this process saved billions of dollars. The United States Intelligence Community and many other departments and agencies copied this process and put it into practice. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
