THE THIRD WAVE
But, in a revealing quote cited by Armbrister, a Defense Intelligence Agency official explained: “The way it probably worked … is that he got the book on his desk one morning at nine o’clock with orders to return it by noon. That book is the size of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. It would be a physical impossibility for him to study each mission hi detail.” Nevertheless, under the pressure of time, the risk on the Pueblo mission was termed “minimal.” On average, if the DIA agent is correct, each military mission evaluated that morning received less than two and a half minutes’ consideration. No wonder things don’t work.
Pentagon officials, for example, have lost track of $30 billion in foreign weapons orders and do not know whether this reflects colossal errors in accounting, or a failure to bill the purchasers for the full amounts due, or whether the money was dribbled away on other things entirely. This multibillion-dollar bungle, according to a Department of Defense comptroller, has the “lethal potential of a loose cannon rolling around our deck.” He confesses, “The sad fact is that we don’t really know how big this [confusion] really is. It will probably be five years before we’ll be able to sort [it all] out.” And if the Pentagon, with its computers and surefire information systems, is becoming too large and complex to manage properly, as may well be the case, what about the government as a whole?
The old decision-making institutions increasingly mirror the disarray hi the outside world. Carter adviser Stuart Eizenstat speaks of “the fragmentation of society into interest groups” and the corresponding “fragmentation of congressional authority into subgroups.” Faced with this new situation, a president can no longer easily impose his will on Congress.
Traditionally, an incumbent president could cut a deal with half a dozen elderly and powerful committee chairmen, and expect them to deliver the votes necessary to approve his legislative program. Today congressional committee chairmen and women can no more deliver the votes of the junior members of Congress than the AFL-CIO or the Catholic Church can deliver the votes of their followers. Unfortunate as It may seem to old-timers and hard-pressed president», people— including members of Congress—are doing more of their own thinking, and taking orders less submissively. All this makes it impossible, however, for Congress, as presently structured, to devote sustained attention to any issue or to respond quickly to the nation’s needs.
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