Download Free A Modern Design For Defense Decision Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Modern Design For Defense Decision and write the review.

This timely and wide-ranging study covers both the economic and the political aspects of defense spending—first by providing a theoretical framework and then by explaining, in a political economy context, the results of decisions to allocate scarce resources to defense. In doing so, the authors provide a comprehensive picture of the interaction between defense spending and the economic and political structure of the United States, complementing their exploration of topical concerns such as SDI with analysis of long-term trends and issues of timeless importance in the defense debate. Because of the politicizing of defense planning and procurement, there have been few significant applications of optimization techniques to high-level defense issues over the past decade. As a result, there has been a rapid decline in the importance of those techniques—historically the focus of books on defense economics. Like its predecessors, this book presents optimization techniques applicable to a wide variety of defense problems, but it also illustrates what happens in actual practice and why defense decisions are often not economically efficient. The authors discuss alternatives for cases when political constraints make efficient solutions unlikely and explore changes in the defense establishment and political structures that would make economically efficient resource allocations a reality.
When Robert McNamara became U.S. Secretary of Defense, he introduced a new mode of making policy decisions: systems analysis. In Defense Policy Formation, Clark Murdock examines what effects this systems analysis had on policy-making process both in theory and the actual practice of military innovation.
Since its creation by the National Security Act of 1947 the office of secretary of defense has grown rapidly in power and influence, surpassing at times that of the secretary of state to become second only to the presidency in the government of the United States. The pivotal secretaries, according to Kinnard, are James Forrestal, Charles Wilson, Robert McNamara, Melvin Laird, and James Schlesinger. Kinnard analyzes the administration of each of these secretaries not only within the domestic and international contexts of his time but also within the bureaucratic world in which the secretary functions along with the president and secretary of state.