This paper was intended to be a castigation of high-handed and arbitrary methods of budgetary control utilized by the Budget Bureau in a self-designated role of judge and executioner for all programs and plans requiring Federal expenditure. The author, in the course of research, has found that while the methods used are to some extent arbitrary, the role of judge and executioner is by no means self-imposed. Rather, the role of arbiter has been imposed on the Bureau by default.
The military departments within the Defense establishment contain the professional talent necessary to evaluate and apportion the financial ouday best suited to meet National Security requirements within the limits prescribed by national political and economic considerations. These talents have been used to a large extent in the parochial arena of inter- and intra-service debate. The result has been the evolution of an arbiter in the Office of the Bureau of the Budget.
An executive unit with the authority of presidential decree in the field of finance, the Bureau has become an incisive decision-making body in any field requiring funding, with the sole objective and responsibility of insuring compliance with politico-economic policies which it helps to formulate. In effect, the bookkeeper has been called upon to manage the corporation. It does not necessarily follow, however, that a defense establishment generated in this manner will be effective. Nor can the responsibility of its lack of effectiveness rest with the bookkeeper.
Back in the comfortably uncomplicated days when there were only two military services and each of them was directly represented at the highest policy level of that day, the Presidential Cabinet level, spheres of conflicting interests between them were relatively few and easily resolved. The sea was the sea, and the land the land, and air free for all. Space above the air was certainly no issue. No program representing “dollars for survival” of a service, or even a branch of a service was essential. The kaleidoscopic age of technological advances has made a melange of this comfortable arrangement. Complexity of issues has grown beyond all bounds within which planning was conceived but twenty-five years ago.
In 1921 an office to provide suitable budgetary accounting was recognized as good business for a rapidly growing national budget. By 1946 the same office was dictating the size of the military establishment through control of the purse and was being asked for managerial concepts in all areas of government. In the Cabinet, the Secretary of the Interior was protesting the methods by which “people down the line in the Budget not much above the status of clerks made allocations within Departments between various Bureaus and Offices of that Department.” In October of 1946 the Secretary of the Navy was being advised by the Director of the Budget, James E. Webb, that he should submit alternative Budgets in terms of Fleet efficiency and capabilities. Mr. Webb expressed his desire that the Secretary of the Navy have an opportunity to submit any views along these lines before he, as Director of the Budget, went to the President with his own ideas of what to recommend to Congress for National Defense. In these cases it appears that already the bookkeeper is telling the president of the company how much to spend in which department rather than how much the company is worth. In point of fact the appropriation bills for fiscal 1948 did go through in accordance with the ideas of the Bureau of the Budget, and there was no visible effort to weigh the resulting military capabilities, or rather limitations, against diplomatic or security commitments. The beginning of the era of frustration in defense planning was at hand.
On July 27, 1947, Forrestal was confirmed by the Senate as the first Secretary of Defense. For the next two years, less three months, during which he served in this capacity, he was to be engrossed in the tremendous problems of organization. That year and subsequent years to the present were to witness the rapid erosion of an effective military machine under the lid of monetary ceilings held down by the Bureau. A struggle for the available dollars began between the services which was to forfeit for the military establishment its opportunity to develop and justify, as a unit, a sound program for defense. The battle for position in the newly created Department of Defense was absorbing the talents of those best qualified to advise the nation of its armament needs.
In the meantime the Council of Economic Advisers, established in 1946 as the watch dog of the national economy, was getting off to a slow start. There was an obvious reluctance on the part of the Bureau of the Budget to accept another agency in the fiscal arena, as a part of the Presidential family. The Bureau of the Budget already operated a fiscal division which badly needed as an excuse for existence a permanent responsibility of economic forecasting. An agency independent of the Bureau would be another element to contend with in the already formidable job of interstaff collaboration. The Director of the Bureau was careful to assist the newcomer in the direction that would least interfere with the senior Executive Office Unit. Under the first Chairman, the Council followed an ultra conservative and largely an academic policy. In comparison with the dynamic Budget Director, the voice of the Council faded to inaudibility. Even after Leon Keyserling became Chairman, the Council could not gain an influential position from which to advise. By 1952, when the Republicans moved in, its status was at a low ebb. An agency which might have developed into a suitable analytical and advisory mainstay for the President as a balance in economic judgment for the accountant group of the Budget Bureau was sidetracked into impotency. The Bureau remained the sole instrument of any permanence in a position to implement fiscal policy, and the executor of policy when policy is nebulous becomes a formulator of policy as well.
Experts in any accounting organization are influenced by a strong feel for economy through proper management. Accounting as a tool for management efficiency is considered by many experts in this field as the forte of accounting as a science. Novick of the Rand Corporation has written an entire methodology of military programming for the Air Force on this thesis. However, he is careful to point out that the methodology based upon accounting practices is a tool for developing the program, not a guide for establishing its scope or its content. Scope and content are fundamental parameters established through a study of military requirements. Since 1945 it has been more and more apparent that the Bureau of the Budget has gradually reversed this sequence by assuming scope and content based on arbitrary dollar ceilings in estimating Defense requirements. The annual exercises engaged in by the Services in arriving at their estimates of size of forces in support of the National Security Policy are made to fit this preconceived concept in budgetary review.
It cannot be argued that determination of the degree of security for which the nation is able to pay is not an economic problem. In the expert opinions of a multitude of respected economists, however, even in a peacetime economy the average defense budget over the past ten years has never become a dangerous strain on the nation’s ability to pay. It does not follow then that the Bureau of the Budget should be forced to fit defense funding under a level budget for economic reasons. The upper limits are fixed by disassociated processes, and the Bureau is required to provide the pseudo-technical, pseudo-tactical, and pseudo-strategic logic in support of such action in the process of shrinking military estimates to size to fit within arbitrary monetary ceilings. In the effort to squeeze material requirements into predetermined dollar packages, the lower echelons in the process of review have been called upon to second guess the military in detailed areas of military judgment in which, regardless of their caliber in their own field of endeavor, they cannot have and do not claim competence. But since political leadership does not find it expedient to accept such responsibility, and the military in good faith cannot, the bureaucrat must take the action himself to comply with the political leader’s desires.
The Office of Budget Review is annually faced with the same dilemma. It must review the programs of the three services with regard to the size and scope of the required military establishment in relation to the broad policy set forth by the President, the cost as estimated by the military planners, and, in the process of review, reduce the cost estimate to a fiscal ceiling specifically set by Presidential decree. The size and scope of military requirements are developed from estimates suggested by the National Security Council based upon sources generally independent of the politico- economic advice upon which limits of the corresponding National Budget are based. Invariably, because domestic considerations influencing the national budget are of immediate and local import and the international situations and commitments upon which the defense requirements are based are less obvious and of little immediate concern to the politically potent taxpayer, the two policy guidelines are far from compatible.
Just as invariably the fiscal policy guideline is the one that remains inflexible, and requirements for security are rationalized downward to fit—not by the military planner but by the Bureau of the Budget. Since the Budget Reviewers have no direct responsibility for the capabilities of the military machine to meet its commitments but have a very real one to insure that the cost remains within prescribed limits, they have far less hesitancy in gambling with forces both in being and potential than has the military witness presenting his requirement.
It is not intended by the above conclusion to imply that the reviewing authorities within the Bureau are lacking in integrity or that they are not motivated by the highest ideals of government service. There is no question as to their past effective performance in saving the services considerable sums through knowledgeable suggestions based on past performance of industry, contractual negotiations, statistical analysis, and improved accounting procedures. These legitimate and beneficial aspects of accounting analysis and review, however, cannot hope to provide the large sums essential to reduce the initial cost estimates for required forces to within the established limits. A Defense Budget of $48,000,000,000 cannot be cut $ 10,000,000,000 by such means. Force Goals must be radically reduced. Obviously the military must reevaluate their requirements and resubmit with fewer numbers and less cost to do the same jobs. This is the area of argument providing the opportune variable. This is where the broadly worded directive “to maintain level forces for the long pull” can be complied with most readily . . . and where the myth of “level forces and level funding” can be conveniently prescribed.
But since the controlling policy directive for the military programmer has remained unmodified and the commitments of the military are not to be reduced, the military planner can wrestle with his conscience just so far and must eventually resubmit programmed forces costing well above the set figure. Even with the more flexible conscience of the Defense Department layman further reducing these estimates to figures more nearly compatible within his less than expert judgment, it remains for the Budgeteer to find technicalities in areas other than military science to reduce forces to the funding limit which has been set.
It is at this time that the Budget Reviewers store of statistical lore, historical background, continuity of office, and archaic files are used in the great rationalizing purge. The manufacturer cannot produce that many aircraft in the estimated lead time allowed by contract, therefore, so many fewer B-52’s are required. A shipbuilding and drydock company has a contract for a liner hull and the employment level cannot support the additional cruiser start this next year. Therefore one less cruiser is required. Chrysler Corporation will have difficulty getting a third plant into full production in time to meet the missile contract being sponsored in the current budget, and so delete it as a requirement this year. One company’s product currently operational in the Fleet is rumored to have many faults which may well indicate the follow-on model will not be very good, and so drop the order for so many new fighters for Naval Air for the time being. Reduce the numbers in inventory in the meantime by cutting the size of squadrons as necessary. Newer equipment is more efficient, and so the same job can be done with smaller numbers. Reduce the requirement. In some instances these conclusions are partially accurate. In many more they are far from being even a near estimate. But in all cases they are judgments rendered by Budget Review Authority on Force Requirements based on the precept that in some manner the cost of the program must be reduced to prescribed ceilings.
Now it may be argued that at no time is the actual force requirement as established by the military questioned by the Review. As a matter of fact, the Bureau is very careful to avoid, by word, any semblance of attempting to fix force levels. By the process of finding in individual programs reasons why the monetary estimates are too high for the particular Budget under study, however, the hardware is not funded, and as a matter of course the actual numbers in that particular equipment are reduced. The results are the same. Or in the case of current expenditures for operating costs, lower estimates than those submitted by the military programmers, based on the judgment of the reviewers, effectively curtail the number or the quality of trained personnel produced and the number of machines and aircraft operated. The lower estimates of the Bureau over the past three years in the area of POL costs has in each of the three services forced curtailment of planned training rates in aviation, ship operations, and field maneuvers.
A Case in Point
Let us take as a case in point, the development of a major slice of the Navy program, specifically, the planning and projection of aircraft force requirements to meet prescribed commitments of the Navy as set forth in broad NSC and JCS directives. It is fairly typical of the evolution and ultimate dissolution of programs in other Defense areas.
Initially there is a certain amount of naivete in the approach of the neophyte military planner to his problem in Washington. He cannot understand how his predecessor could have gotten his projected program so completely confused. He searches for logic in irrelevant past procurement and for equipment which should have been ordered to meet reasonable, programmed requirements in the past. The requirements remain fundamentally sound and have existed for years, but contracts if let were canceled or curtailed. In his search for answers, he continually runs against the “lack of funds” barrier. Gradually he senses that this phrase cannot possibly apply to all the troubles he finds himself in, particularly in the area of program balance.
After living with the problem for about eighteen months and being of reasonably adequate intelligence, he recognizes that what is probably lacking is a realistic projection of his program far enough ahead in time to arrive at the required goal through an orderly evolution of procurement cycles. He reviews all available authoritative papers to establish his goal and discovers, generally, that a fairly constant military posture is to be anticipated. Seeking advice and counsel from his technical bureaus, he carefully develops inventories of hardware at periodic intervals into the future toward his goal. Plotting inventories against required types and numbers of equipment, he arrives at deficits to be filled in an orderly manner over these same time intervals. He turns again to his technical bureaus for the latest estimates in availability of specific hardware for purchase and, in consultation with his warfare desks and the forces afloat, selects the proper hardware for his shopping lists. He then has the basis for his cost estimates for new procurement for the budget years ahead in sequence. All that remains is to keep the program current by minor modifications as objectives change or breakthroughs in the state of the art may dictate.
He also has the essential information on which to base operating costs for each time cycle and to estimate manning levels required. He notes with some trepidation that the bill he must submit each year has a steady slope upward but is assured by his technical staff and comptroller groups that this is a forecast inflationary trend balanced by a similar rise in the gross national product, and, percentagewise, his cut is remaining reasonably constant. His program is contributing toward maintenance of “a level force for the long pull,” and he has provided for an acceptable degree of equipment modernity with fair consistency. He is prepared to submit and justify the program on these grounds.
Across the river another group of planners are approaching the problem with a different set of guide lines. The majority of this group has been at this business for a considerably longer period of time and is much closer to the ruling body-politic. They are not handicapped by periods of absence in other pursuits nor by practical background and experience in managing the machine they are so adept at dissecting. Nor is their problem particularly complex, their goal being far more specific. It is represented by a top limit beyond which the cost of a military program must not go. While the breakdown between and within the services is not so rigid, the end total must not be exceeded, and if the Defense Department cannot resolve the arithmetic of Defense costs to meet this goal, it is the duty of the Budget Bureau to do the job for it. By law the Bureau must estimate costs of each program. By administrative procedure and by influence, the Bureau reshapes the program itself.
Influence on Defense Planning
To obtain a proper feel for the degree to which fiscal control can influence the shape of defense posture, it is necessary to compare the amount of total military budget available for modifying any status quo and the time period associated with the evolution of any significant change in existing forces. Most significant is the fact that less than 25 per cent of the total annual fiscal outlay can be associated with the modernization of military hardware under normal “long pull” peacetime economy. The balance must go toward overhead and operating costs.
Of almost equal significance is the lead time associated with the development and production of modern weapons systems. It is obviously vital that carefully evaluated plans must extend well into the future to permit orderly phase-in of equipment which calls for up to seven years to evolve from concept to quantity production.
When a major technological breakthrough occurs, such as jet propulsion for military aircraft, the problem becomes one of even greater magnitude. For example, the first jet propelled fighter for naval carrier aviation was flying in 1943. Even with a war economy and the added impetus of the Korean police action on budgeting largess, it was impossible for the Navy to completely re-equip its fighter squadrons with jet types for ten years. A similar example is presented by the replacement program of the Air Force in their introduction of the B-52 as a replacement for the B-36.
With but 25 per cent of the annual expenditure for Defense available for modernization and with the total capital outlay represented in the inventory of combat aircraft exceeding by a factor of twelve the average peacetime Defense Budget available for new procurement over the past ten years, it is obviously impossible to maintain an adequately modernized force, regardless of reduction in development lead time. The reduction in both quantity and quality of military forces is inevitable.
It is mandatory that the military planner consider the established policy “to maintain level forces” as a maxim in developing projected military requirements. It is even more imperative that these scales of force remain as vital in support of national commitments overseas. Regardless of how fine the estimates are shaved, the “long pull” figure for the Defense Budget totals in the neighborhood of $52,000,000,000 annually as of 1956 and rises each year at a rate of some three to four per cent, paralleling the projected inflationary curve. Each year that this figure is undercut it adds to the subsequent years’ requirements and only postpones the inevitable reckoning. Ultimately, any serious logical attempt to maintain a strong military posture becomes impossible. Disoriented expediency becomes the determining factor governing size and modernity of forces. Programming disintegrates. Piecemeal replacement of obsolescence, with no chance to remold the character of the force, becomes the paramount goal. And the parameter of “balanced forces” loses its efficacy, since only imbalance can result from such fragmentary efforts.
In this piecemeal, fragmentary approach to creation of our military machine, we find a strong motivation for survival in each of the Services, as each establishment sees itself in danger of elimination as a potent force under the shrinking dollar availability. Each Service recognizes in the others a vital element of the Defense team but cannot, in good faith, accept its own demise or impotency. Where there is insufficient for all to survive, and each thinks of itself as essential for the welfare of all, the most altruistic will be justified in approaching the problem from an individual point of view. On the other hand, if a group of individuals dedicated to a common cause have at their disposal the wherewithal to share in contributing to that cause, a logical approach toward the desired end can be expected. With adequate funding for Defense made available (adequate from the point of view of balance against commitments), there would be an objective plan, rationally arrived at and feasible of accomplishment. With an impossible situation resulting from diametrically opposed objectives, i.e., world leadership, but at no cost, there can be no logical solution. The justification of size of forces essential to a nebulous objective, governed by a very firm cost ceiling, becomes an exercise in semantics.
It is this fixation on a budget ceiling without balanced consideration of what is to be done with the end product that has become a fetish destroying our capability to hold a place in the world power battle. The fetish strikes across the board at all potency in the field of international relations, but it is particularly damaging to military security. From a position of “Hang the cost, let’s get on with it” to the other extreme of, “If it costs more, forget it,” the pendulum of fiscal policy has swung its arc.
Even the military programmer in any specific field of planning becomes mesmerized by this fixation on monetary ceilings. This is not cost-consciousness. It is a reflex to oppose any and all action tending to raise costs, acquired through association with, and contamination by, the process of Budget Review. The first test of any suggested change to a program becomes one of cost, the immediate dollar outlay. The answer to this question is usually decisive. If it doesn’t fit within the current dollar ceiling, it must be discarded, potential future savings or hazards of ultimate deficiencies notwithstanding. Rationalization of such a decision to encompass military arguments must be undertaken, with the end justifying the means. Unimpassioned analysis is not practicable under this type of pressure.
The Budget Bureau is under no such pressure and requires no further logic than monetary limitation. Cold appraisal based on algebraic addition to arrive at a predetermined sum is the simplified approach of the Budget Review process. Rationalization of reduced estimates or elimination of entire programs is not necessary. There is no arbiter beyond the Bureau itself to reason with. Not even the Congress can increase appropriations and authorize additional funds with any degree of certainty that utilization of such funds will be implemented.
The Monetary Ceiling
Theoretically the Military has recourse to the President as the final decision authority. Practically such recourse is not available. The Chiefs of Service are so far removed, buried under mountains of civilian secretaries, that direct access requires a crisis upon which a career must be staked. Theoretically, the Bureau of the Budget in its review of military programs receives its guidance for monetary ceilings from the President. Actually these orders are formulated and promulgated within the Office of the Bureau. They are intended to implement policy as prescribed by the President after consultation with his most responsible and able advisers. Attempts to identify these advisers invariably lead in a circle.
Defense Secretary Wilson publicly acknowledged that his budgetary requirements were well in excess of the ceilings imposed. Imposed by whom? Previously quoted was a passage from Defense Secretary Forrestal’s diary pointing to the Director of the Budget. Under the present Administration, George M. Humphrey, when Secretary of the Treasury, has been considered the most influential economic adviser. However, his influence on the Defense Department is not apparent, and he was not a member of the National Security Council nor in the line of command with the Budget Bureau. It is difficult to assign him responsibility for setting Defense ceilings. The Council of Economic Advisers has had insufficient stature to influence such decisions, though their advice in their Fifth Annual Report, devoted to the subject, found no such ceiling essential to the health of the National Economy. The President’s chief political advisers on the White House staff, including his Special Administrative Assistant, Hauge, are strongly influential, but are primarily concerned with domestic political policies. In this composite group there is lacking the consistency of tenure which has been apparent in our Defense fiscal policies extending through both Democratic and Republican Administrations. And this brings us back to the only group in a position to advise authoritatively and consistently at the highest governmental level, the Bureau of the Budget.
The potency of the Director of the Bureau in this regard is confirmed by Edward H. Hobbs in his favorably biased study of Executive Office agencies in which he reports:
“The Director’s influence over the President, nevertheless, is always to be feared by department heads, for in times past he has served as keeper of the Presidential conscience, and his instinctive habit of saying ‘no’ may often counter the Presidential bias toward saying ‘yes.’ A Director who has the confidence of the President and the Congress is strategically located for exercising influences which go beyond strictly money affairs.”
This was written in 1953. There is little doubt that what was true “in times past” is even more significantly so today. In fact, his suggestion that the Budget Director become the Presidential Chief of Staff is as close to an accomplished fact as can be, without specific administrative order. Mr. Hobbs must have added the Congress as an essential confidant of the Director through deference toward that body, as the Congress has no control over the appointment of the Director and no direct influence over his actions in any way. The Director is not even required to defend the various components of the Budget which he prepares for submission. Hobbs’ point that the Director “is not particularly useful unless he can get along with Congress” has lost its validity several times since, most recently when the past Director suggested to Congress that they do their own reviewing if they wanted to find budget areas to cut.
Impact of Domestic Politics
The Budget Director is the President’s man. The President is an elected official whose Party stands or falls with him. Increased costs of government, unbalanced budgets, and higher taxes are not conducive to success at the polls without a strong sales campaign and an unpopular one. Without an obvious crisis, such a campaign could mean political suicide. The President’s man is strongly motivated to protect against such politically hazardous fiscal policy. It is, in fact, his primary motivation. His decisions cannot help but be biased by this criterion. And from his influential and authoritarian position, he shapes the security of the Nation with this criterion as the deciding factor.
It has become expedient to provide a governor for this rapidly expanding economy of ours under our system of free enterprise. The methods used seem to be most effective and permit reasonably fine control. We have observed, among them, adjustment of margin requirements in stock transactions, easing and tightening of credit through discount rate adjustment, commodity controls through subsidies, and other relatively painless but modestly effective fiscal measures. These are the vernier calibration tools. For the coarser adjustments what better tool can be found for the economist than the Defense Budget? Here is forty billion a year to play with, ten billion of which can be turned on or off annually as expediency may dictate. Is it possible that Budgetary dictatorship is leading in this direction? A look at specific military force levels budgeted for since 1947 would tend to support the affirmative. But the scope of this paper prevents a detailed analysis of this precept. Classified material would have to be used. However, in one major program area, graphic curves of operating aircraft numbers against time have the contours of a roller-coaster. It would be interesting to compare the hills and valleys in point of time with the fluctuating political needs for control of the national economy.
In their book on Financing Defense written in 1951, Albert G. Hart and E. Cary Brown point out that:
“ . . . economic stabilization sets the standards for budget policy in a readiness economy. The outgo side of the budget . . . has to be shaped to the needs of defense.”
They describe budget policy as taking outgo as “given,” with the effective use of tax policy as a tool against inflation to stabilize the economy in the face of inflationary pressure. After acknowledging that the pattern of military budgeting “invites inefficiency” as a result of the “feast or famine” history based on austerity followed by panic and offering as a basically sound rule the motto inherited from World War II—“Take the dollar sign off defense”—they submit, paradoxically, to monetary ceilings for the military as insurance for getting the most for the defense dollar. The perpetual mistrust of the economists toward granting the military a “bottomless pocket- book” is in perennial conflict with the acceptance that “For defense economies within the general framework of defense plans, our reliance must be upon the military themselves. . . .” That some credence should be placed on this mistrust of the military is evident from a history of mistakes and inefficiencies associated with the administration of such large sums composing the defense budgets. That which is not recognized is that excessive checks and balances through external comptroller control and arbitrary dollar ceilings can be extremely dangerous.
If we must fear that the Military would delve into the open purse with abandon in a single track objective of getting all they could while the getting was good under conditions of national crisis, it would appear that by similar singlemindedness the Bureau personnel would be inclined to keep that purse securely zippered when periods of international relaxation permit. Since public opinion swings widely to both extremes and in the final analysis exerts the major influence, this has been the pattern. That part of our governmental organization best qualified to temper the extremes finds itself in opposing camps and in bitter competition. We must look to political leadership to remove the economics of defense from the political arena in a bipartisan approach, which will create an atmosphere of harmony within the segments of government responsible for the national defense.
A Change in Philosophy
No great reorganization would be necessary within the Military Establishment to develop and present an accurate analysis of the forces required to back United States foreign policies and insure adequate military strength to meet obligations to our allies and to provide for our own defense. It has become quite obvious that along with a strong deterrent capability, contact forces are essential. Barring semantics of the partisan struggle for an adequate share of the limited Defense Budget, professional military men with sufficient background and experience recognize and acknowledge the need for strength on land and sea and in the air. Jointly they are capable of advising the country of the cost, in manpower and equipment, to balance with military power the nation’s aspirations in the world arena. Should the bill presented be beyond the limits the nation is willing to accept, at least the nation will have a realistic view of the disparity. Within lower limits less can be done, but again a fairly accurate estimate of where we must reduce our commitments can be made, or the relative risks of overcommitment can be more accurately judged.
It is a change in the philosophy of approach to military planning that is needed. The military planner developing force requirements must have an accurate and specific goal in mind. He must be aware of the relative costs of meeting that goal by means of the various weapons systems available to him. Efficiency in application of military power in support of national policy should be a strong motivating force influencing his final decisions. But he should not be asked to fit his requirements for a specific goal within a preconceived dollar ceiling. He should be free to assess the degree to which a dollar limit will or will not meet the requirement. He should be the source of unbiased information on the nation’s military readiness and capabilities before Congress, completely divorced from the necessity to defend, on political grounds, the Defense Budget. His professional integrity should be unimpeachable, and his politics bipartisan.
The Bureau of the Budget should not be required to justify force goals in the military field. Nor should this office find itself in the position of rationalizing downward the size of the military establishment to fit within a preordained monetary ceiling. Again “let the shoemaker stick to his last” and the Budget Bureau concentrate on the economy of operations by accounting analysis. If it is impracticable to divorce this Bureau from the political arena surrounding the Office of the President, it should be insured that adequate balance is provided in matters of fiscal policy through the Council of Economic Advisers and, in the Congress, by closer liaison with, and access to, the military professional.
*The opinions or assertions in this article are the personal ones of the author and are not to be construed as official or as the views of either the Navy Department or the U. S. Naval Institute.