3.2 WHAT IS SYSTEMS ANALYSIS?
As its name indicates, military systems analysis is analysis of a defense problem viewed in its most general context. As analysis, it takes these problems apart into their natural component elements and seeks to identify the fundamental features as well as the critical factors characterizing each part. As system, it views the component parts in their complex interconnection with each other. In other words, systems analysis first takes things apart for detailed study and then puts them together again, but, this time, with a deeper level of understanding than was available before.
This dialectic way of approaching a problem follows the model of intellectual discourse more than the model of military deliberations. Consequently, a tension had arisen almost from the beginning between systems analysis and the military establishment, a tension that survives to this day. It did not help explaining to the military that systems analysis was not really intended to replace the military decision maker or that it only aimed at informing the decision maker’s judgment with a better understanding of the key assumptions underlying any decision; the empowered continued to resent and mistrust the intrusion of the powerless.
The suspicion entertained by the military that civilian interference into what, after all, constituted their primary area of influence would eventually lead to trouble, was not entirely unfounded. Intellectuals, no matter how much they might protest from time to time to the contrary, do have a visible tendency to take control of the conversation on the grounds that reason always overpowers judgment. The analyst’s insistence that he aspired to the role of mere adviser in matters of military acquisition and not to the role of decision maker did little to assuage the military’s concerns, particularly when evidence often proved otherwise. The military knew full well that decisions are not entirely rational processes; one can never actually decide anything by merely tallying up the good and the bad, the pros and the cons. As personal practice shows, at the end of the day, a proper decision calls for a good measure of judgment, and in that department, at least, the military had the upper hand. It was a sense of duty to their profession therefore, if not a sense of patriotic duty, that informed their concern with the introduction of civilian analysts into the military structure.
History’s verdict on the outcome of this tension appears to favor the military. Since, even at the beginning, only a few analysts truly understood that systems analysis would not be useful unless it was placed in this precise advisory role, cases when the analytic community woefully overstepped its bounds and was thus instrumental in the Department reaching the wrong decision, abound. These failures were generally of two kinds. Those analysts that could attain the needed degree of influence in the councils of war wielded that influence with a palpable measure of disdain for mere military judgment and thus became counterproductive. Those that could not, accepted military judgment completely and thus became superfluous.
When systems analysis fails in the modes described above, command technology escapes control and reverts to its own inner developmental logic. This tendency to fail has increased dramatically after the end of the Cold War and is ultimately responsible for the current failure to understand the limits of the Network Centric doctrine of war.