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ared on the surface to be radical surgery, they were in fact of a continuing evolutionary process dating back to the shall reorganization of 1942. Reformers within and outside Army had struggled for over twenty years to rationalize the y staff along recognizably functional lines. Traditionalists, esented by the chiefs of the technical services, countered ɔnducting a series of rearguard actions aimed at preserving dual status as both staff and command agencies.

At the same time the Department of the Army was growing er and its operations more complex and diverse. Reformers ht a means of establishing more effective executive control these expanding activities along lines similar to those loped by DuPont and General Motors in the 1920s. One ns was to functionalize the archaic structure of Army and nse Department appropriations and later to reorganize 1 on the basis of military missions performed. Another and llel effort was to establish such controls through a top-level above the Army staff which would co-ordinate and intee military budgets with military plans. Project 80 and ect 39a were part of this evolutionary process which, judgon the basis of past performance, was likely to continue finitely into the future.

CHAPTER XI

Conclusion

Reflecting on the struggles over executive control in business and government Elihu Root concluded: "The natural course for the development of our law and institutions does not follow the line of pure reason or the demands of scientific method. It is determined by the impulses, the sympathies and passions, the idealism and selfishness, of all the vast multitude, who are really from day to day building up their own law." 1

The history of the organization of the War Department since Root's day has amply illustrated his observation. The central issue from 1900 to 1963 has been the nature of executive control-not whether there should be any executive control at all but whether this control should be exercised at the traditional bureau level or at the level of the Secretary and the Chief of Staff or, more recently, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In turn, this struggle has reflected a similar one in the American society at large as the nation evolved from a loosejointed agrarian federation into a highly industrialized, urban nation. Secretary McNamara in 1963 represented the rationalists, beginning with Root, who sought to apply pure reason and scientific method to military organization. He once remarked:

Some of our gravest problems in society arise not from overmanagement but out of undermanagement.. . Exploding urbanization has been a fact of life in the Western world for more than two hundred years but there is no evidence that man has overmanaged this problem; there is much evidence that he has undermanaged it.2

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A military organization would appear to be far more amenable to centralized and rational management than the process of

1 "Public Service by the Bar," address of the president [Elihu Root], reprinted in Report of the 39th Meeting of the American Bar Association, Chicago, Ill., 30-31 Aug and 1 Sep 16.

Robert S. McNamara, The Essence of Security (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 119.

industrialization and urbanization of society at large in a democratic state devoted to the principle of free enterprise. Yet it too has been subject to the "sympathies and passions, the idealism and selfishness" both of members of the organization itself and the political representatives of the larger society it serves.

From Mr. Root's institution of the General Staff as a means of controlling the bureaus until 1917, when the United States entered World War I, that agency had to struggle merely for the right to exist in a hostile political environment. At the end of this period Congress, influenced by traditional, agrarian antimilitarism, had all but legislated the General Staff out of existence. In World War I the resultant tiny staff devoted its efforts at first to organizing, partially training, and transporting overseas a huge citizen army. The failure of Secretary Baker, an old-fashioned Jacksonian, to assert effective authority over the bureaus led to an almost complete breakdown of the war effort in the winter of 1917-18. Under the pressure of events and goaded by industry and Congress, a revitalized General Staff under General Peyton C. March established effective control for the first time over the bureaus.

After the war the immediate necessity for these controls disappeared, and the bureaus reasserted their traditional freedom through Congress. In the long armistice that followed the General Staff did not have to struggle for existence. It was practically one bureau among equals, although in the late thirties under the impact of a modest rearmament program it was able to assert itself with greater confidence.

The infinitely greater mobilization required in World War II demanded correspondingly greater executive control, and General Marshall found it necessary to establish control not only over the traditional bureaus but the General Staff as well. He centralized administrative responsibility in three major commands-Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Army Service Forces. This left him free to devote his own efforts to his principal function of advising President Roosevelt on strategy and the conduct of military operations around the world. In carrying out these duties Marshall relied heavily upon a greatly expanded Operations Division of the General Staff, while the rest of the latter body was shunted to one side for most of the war.

General Marshall wanted to establish equally firm executive control over a unified department of the armed forces after the war. The Navy frustrated his plans for unification while the Army staff, led by the traditional bureaus, abandoned General Marshall's tight control over the Army for a decentralized organization similar to the prewar pattern.

After passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and its amendment two years later, effective executive control over the Department of the Army gradually passed from the Secretary of the Army to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Defense Comptroller, culminating in the managerial revolution of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Control over military operations in this period passed from the services to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Within its own administrative sphere the Department of the Army sought to assert increasingly greater control over internal operations through new functional program and command management systems. It made special efforts to develop more effective means of co-ordinating the technical services which led ultimately to their demise as independent commands in the Army reorganization of 1962.

As the pendulum swung back and forth, the protagonists remained the same. On the one side were the traditionalists, both civilian and military; on the other were the rationalists seeking to establish the same kind of executive control over the Army and Navy that had been imposed on some industries by modern, giant corporations.

The traditionalists represented the customary methods of conducting the business of the Executive Branch of the federal government where power and responsibility have been deliberately fragmented among competing bureaus. As a permanent bureaucracy they possessed intimate, detailed knowledge of how the Army and the War Department operated. Temporary, politically appointed secretaries came and went with little knowledge of these details. They were forced to rely upon the bureaucrats for information, and thus the bureaus more often than not controlled the secretaries instead of the reverse.

Secretary Root intended the General Staff to be a permanent agency whose knowledge could be used to balance that of the bureaus and to supervise their operations. Instead of con

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