Curbing Innovation / 3 / 3.3

3.3 THE ART OF SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

In those cases, however, when systems analysis managed to keep to the middle ground between intellectual arrogance on one side and complete submission to military judgment on the other, analysts did contribute to the betterment of our military posture in measurable ways. From the beginning, systems analysis understood the primary role that judgment plays in making decisions and therefore aspired to operate as a supporting structure for that judgment. Listen to Alain C. Enthoven, the first director of the Systems Analysis Office in the Pentagon [1]:

Ultimately, all defense policies are made and all weapon systems chosen on the basis of judgment. The real issue is whether judgments have to be made in a fog of inadequate and inaccurate data, unclear and undefined issues, conflicting personal opinions, and “seat of the pants” hunches, or whether they can be made in the clear air of relevant analysis and experience, accurate information, and well-defined issues. In all cases the aim of systems analysis is to illuminate and inform judgment, not to replace it.

To succeed at its task, however, systems analysis needed more than a correct perspective on the problem of controlling command technology; it also needed a specific method of approach and a set of corresponding quantitative analytic techniques. Its chosen method was to subject each defense issue to interrogation and debate so that all underlying assumptions were appropriately aired and questioned by the interested parties, all subjective positions were openly recognized, and all adjectives were replaced by numerical estimates derived from calculation. For, as the founding fathers of the United States of America have so persuasively pointed out, the world knows no better way of protecting against stupidity and avarice than to let individuals, following their own self-interest in open battle with each other, make the ultimate choice.

The debate in the defense community can be focused on two different but interrelated questions: what kind of technology should the military develop next, and how many systems incorporating the chosen technology should the military acquire. In what follows we discuss these two topics separately because the quantitative analytic techniques developed to answer these two questions happen to be different.