Chapter IX: Project 80: The Hoelscher Committee Report

Of all Secretary McNamara's study projects the one known as Project 80 entitled Study of the Functions, Organization, and Procedures of the Department of the Army was the most important for the Army. In substance, it took up the question of functionalizing the technical services where previous studies and reorganizations had left it.

As in the case of Project 100 Secretary McNamara assigned responsibility for this study to Cyrus R. Vance, who appointed Solis S. Horwitz, the Director of Organizational Planning and Management, to supervise the project directly under him. They agreed and informed the new Secretary of the Army, Elvis J. Stahr, Jr., that the Army would be allowed an opportunity to study and evaluate its own organization and procedures. On the recommendation of the Chief of Staff, General Decker, Secretary Stahr selected the Deputy Comptroller of the Army, Leonard W. Hoelscher, as the project director to work directly with Horwitz's office.1

Mr. Hoelscher brought to his task greater knowledge, experience, familiarity, and professional accomplishment in the area of Army administration, organization, and management than anyone, civilian or military, associated with the Army's previous reorganizations as far back as Secretary Root. He had come to Washington in 1940 as a colleague and protégé of Luther Gulick and John Millett from the Public Administration Service in Chicago where he had been a specialist in municipal administration after a decade as city planner and city manager of Fort Worth, Texas. He had joined the Bureau of the Budget after its transfer to the Executive Office of the President in 1940 as a consultant on the organization and management of federal agencies. During the war he had as-

sisted the Army Air Forces in its reorganization under the Marshall plan and later worked with General Gates in developing the concept of program planning. He also assisted in improving the War Department's manpower statistics through the Strength Accounting and Reporting Office. After the war he became Chief of the Management Improvement Branch of the Bureau of the Budget at a time when it was actively seeking to rationalize the federal bureaucracy along functional lines. From 1950 on, as Special Assistant to the Army Comptroller, and from November 1952, as Deputy Comptroller, he was actively involved in developing the Army's functional program and command management systems, in attempting to secure the adoption of modern cost-accounting systems, and in improving the Army's management procedures generally. With General Decker he had also worked to develop a mission-oriented Army budget. Over a period of twenty years he had developed an unparalleled, intimate working knowledge of Army organization and management and its problems both as a planner and as an operator.2

gave Mr. Hoelscher some broad, informal instructions. He suggested. the study should first determine what major changes had taken place in the defense environment since the Army's last reorganization in 1955 and, second, outline what basic considerations or standards the Army should meet in the light of these changes. The study should then recommend changes required in the functions, organization, and procedures of the Department of the Army to meet these basic considerations.

The committee, Mr. Gilpatric went on, should assume no further major changes in the National Security Act of 1947 or in the Army's current assigned missions and functions to train and support forces assigned to the unified and specified commands. The Army's Chief of Staff would continue to be a member of the joint Chiefs of Staff, and the assistant secretaries of defense would remain advisers supposedly without operating responsibilities.3

Mr. Horwitz and his staff wanted other areas investigated. A perennial question was whether the General Staff should be involved in operations, how responsive it was to demands from higher echelons, and what should be its relations to other Army elements. Was CONARC necessary as a kind. of "second Department of the Army?" Should the technical services be subordinated to a "Service Command" or replaced by a "Research and Development" or "Materiel Command?" Should the Army continue to perform such "non-military" tasks as managing the Panama Canal or the civil functions of the Corps of Engineers? 4

On the basis of these instructions, assumptions, and questions Mr. Hoelscher drew up an outline showing how he proposed to conduct the study. He recommended that there be a project director with full executive authority to conduct the study and make its final proposals, assisted by a Project Advisory Committee and supported by a working staff divided into task forces assigned to investigate particular areas, organizations, or functions. General Decker approved this plan on 17 February and, as already noted, appointed Mr. Hoelscher as Project Director.

Hoelscher had a small project headquarters staff which organized the several task forces, co-ordinated their activities, and helped prepare the final report. The Project Advisory Committee consisted of representatives of the General Staff and CONARC. The seven task forces, or study groups, were assigned to investigate the Secretary of the Army's Office and the General and Special Staffs and to evaluate the general management of the Army: CONARC, including training and combat developments; Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics (ODCSLOG), the technical services and Army logistics; Research and Development; personnel management; Reserve Components; and the Army's nonmilitary functions. No action was ever taken on the recommendations of the group studying Reserve functions, and the study group on nonmilitary functions was never formed. Later another study group was organized at the request of the Chief of Staff to investigate Army aviation.6

Hoelscher considered the selection of personnel so critical that he obtained special permission from General Decker to examine the personnel files of qualified persons rather than rely upon the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel's (ODCSPER) resumes, the usual procedure. Hoelscher was looking particularly for people whose records indicated they had inquiring, analytical minds and the kind of broad-gauged training at the Army War College or the Command and General Staff School which emphasized the Army as a whole rather than the interests of a particular arm or service. For each task force he sought a combination of officers and civilians with a general background, management analysts, and functional specialists.

assistance. Most officers were colonels, but two were general officers. Perhaps the most important was Brig. Gen. Ralph E. Haines, assistant commander of the 2d Armored Division, who was chief of the task force on logistics. He was an armor officer who had spent nearly all of his career in military operations. Hoelscher's headquarters staff came largely from the Comptroller's Directorate of Management Analysis and were chosen for their knowledge of this area and because they were available and would remain so after completing the study to follow up the committee's work.7

Second to selecting properly qualified personnel, Hoelscher stressed what he considered the proper methods of analyzing the Army's problems rather than compulsively drawing organization charts at the outset. As he saw it, this should be the very last item on the agenda after methodical analysis. To a management expert like Hoelscher, organization charts were a red herring leading people away from the real problems, the methods and procedures by which an organization conducted its affairs. If the management of the Army was inefficient, merely redrawing organization charts would not solve the problem. That was one lesson to be learned from studying previous Army reorganizations.8

made sixty field trips including a visit overseas to investigate the U.S. Army's European Command. By June they began discussing the basic considerations or standards the Army should meet. After defining these objectives they developed, evaluated, and chose among alternative patterns of organization and management.9

In investigating changes in the defense environment since 1955, the study groups concluded that there were two Paramount trends which affected the Army's operations. The first was the observable trend toward assigning all combat forces to the unified and specified commands, operating directly under the joint Chiefs of Staff. As a result, in the future the role of the services would be to organize, train, and supply these commands. Second was the equally obvious trend toward centralizing control over most programs in the Department of Defense. In these circumstances, the Secretary of the Army had more and more become an extension of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, instead of being a spokesman for Army interests and objectives. Centralization was most apparent in the areas of research and development, common supplies and services, and financial management. The increasing cost and complexity of new weapons systems had led to increasing emphasis on systems or project management which cut across service lines. The new program packages required the development of uniform management information and control systems throughout the Department of Defense for purposes of budgeting and accounting.

The study groups by mid-June had settled on two dozen basic considerations for improving the Army's performance in the areas of financial management, Army staff co-ordination and control, personnel management, supervision and co-ordination of training, control of combat developments, research and development, management of the Army's logistic systems, and the Army's relations with industry and academic life. The ultimate objective was an Army capable of meeting the requirements of "cold, limited or general war." 10

The committee began by pointing out what Army reformers had been saying since World War II. In two world wars the Army had had to change its organization, particularly its supply system, after the outbreak of war. A properly organized Army should be able to function in peace and war without such upheavals. A further consideration was that another major war probably would not allow the Army the luxury of reorganizing in the midst of combat. Therefore, if any changes were necessary, they should be made now.11

The improvements recommended in financial management had also been an Army objective for a decade: more effective long-range planning and programing, integration of planning, programing, and budgeting, and the development of programs and budgets in terms of missions performed. The development of new weapons required some form of project or systems management outside normal command channels. The Army should integrate its various programs for review and analysis and for measuring performance more effectively with less emphasis on minor details and more on anticipating future developments. The committee suggested also creating a single automatic data processing authority to assist the Army staff in controlling, integrating, and balancing its growing array of information systems..12

The committee's proposals for improving Army staff coordination indicated the need for some organizational readjustments. There was an apparent duplication of effort between the Secretary of the Army's staff and the General Staff which should be corrected. The Army staff should get out of operations. "There is an inevitable conflict between staff and command viewpoints," it said, indicting the technical service chiefs. "Placing both staff and command responsibilities on a single officer detracts from his capability to perform either job well." If he were responsible for a particular segment of the Army under his command, he could not see a problem from the viewpoint of the Army as a whole.13

was on the need to utilize military personnel on the basis of their capabilities rather than their branch of service. There should be broader career opportunities for both military and civilian personnel. Referring to the technical services, the report pointed out that the increasing complexity of weapons systems made greater flexibility necessary in the assignment of people with specialized talents. The major problem in training was that responsibility was fragmented among too many agencies, including the technical and administrative services. On Reserve matters the committee suggested greater participation by CONARC in command, supervision, and support of Reserve units along with an overhaul of the ROTC program. 14

The committee found responsibility for combat developments similarly fragmented. Long-range planning of new doctrinal concepts and materiel requirements was inadequate. Essentially a planning function, combat developments required an environment free from operating responsibilities and from the conservative outlook of those who distrusted changes. The emphasis in combat developments as in operations research, the committee said, should be on the application of research and development techniques to concrete military requirements. Research and development within the Army required an environment that would attract qualified scientists, engineers, and other professional experts.

Following agreement on these twenty-three "Basic Considerations" the study groups discussed alternative solutions, including alternative organizational patterns. By the end of August general agreement was reached on most major issues. During September the study groups wrote their reports, while Hoelscher and his immediate staff drafted an over-all report and dealt with criticisms made by senior members of the Army staff.

The Army as a whole was especially interested in the organizational changes the committee proposed. The most drastic was its proposal to functionalize the technical services. To perform the Army's major research, development, production, and supply functions, the Hoelscher Committee recommended creation of a Systems Development and Logistics Command, a concept dating back at least to General Goethals in World War I. It recommended transferring the training functions of the technical services to CONARC, reorganized as a Force Development Command. Responsibility for military personnel management, it said, should be transferred, with certain exceptions, to a new Office of Personnel Operations (OPO) . In line with this the committee recommended abolishing The Adjutant General's Office with its personnel functions going to OPO and its administrative functions reorganized under a new Chief of Administrative Services. An entirely new functional command, the Combat Developments Agency, later designated the Combat Developments Command (CDC), would assume responsibilities for this program formerly fragmented among CONARC, the technical services, and the Army staff.

The Hoelscher Committee and its task force on Army headquarters (Group B) also proposed important improvements in the organization and procedures of the Army staff. These included the addition of a Director of the Army Staff under the Chief and Vice Chief of Staff and splitting the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations (ODCSOPS) into two agencies, a Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy and International Affairs and one for Plans, Programs, and Systems. It proposed to regroup the Army's special staff agencies in order to reduce the number of separate organizations reporting directly to the Chief of Staff. The technical services would continue under different titles as staff agencies relieved of their field commands. The Office of the Chief of Ordnance and the Chief Chemical Officer would be abolished entirely. The proposed organization of Headquarters, Department of the Army, is outlined in Chart 25.

A Director of the Army Staff, the committee said, was necessary to co-ordinate the activities of the General Staff for two reasons. Neither the Chief nor the Vice Chief of Staff could perform this function effectively because they did not have the time to devote to it. They were too busy with activities of the joint Chiefs of Staff and other agencies outside the department. Second, co-ordinating the activities of the General Staff had become a serious problem in recent years, serious enough to justify such a position as a full-time job. The increase in the size of Army staff agencies, their expanding operations, and the frequent overlapping of their jurisdictions created conflicts which the secretariat of the General Staff could not resolve. Making the director senior to the deputy chiefs would prevent many of these conflicts from reaching the overburdened Chief and Vice Chief.17

In recommending splitting DCSOPS into a Deputy Chief for Strategy and International Affairs and another for Plans, Programs, and Systems, the committee asserted that DCSOPS responsibilities for joint staff activities were so great that it did not have time for its other assigned functions. Responsibility for organization and training was fragmented among numerous Army staff agencies. This required so much co-ordination that DCSOPS had little time for policy planning. Joint staff activities and organization and training were really two different functions that ought to be treated separately.

The Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy and International Affairs would be responsible to OSD and JCS for all joint staff activities and for international and civil affairs concerning the Army. It would relieve the rest of the General Staff of these functions and so eliminate some of the delay required to obtain concurrences from many different agencies. As the Army's operations deputy the DCSOPS would continue to run the Army War Room.18

Financial management, the committee thought, could be improved by strengthening the authority of the Comptroller, the Budget Officer of the Department of the Army, as an independent review and analysis agency for the Army staff, and as the department's Chief Management Engineer. It also recommended the adoption of mission-oriented budget packages and improved review and analysis procedures. It recommended that the Comptroller co-ordinate and integrate the development of automatic data processing systems within the department as well as systems analysis functions which relied heavily on the use of automatic data processing.20

Action officers complained they must spend many hours seeking out those who may have an interest in a particular problem-and then waiting long intervals for formal concurrence from the other agencies. The system emphasized the formality of concurrence as opposed to the substance of the problem. Partly by custom, partly by the tradition of leaving no stone unturned to assure that the staff action is complete, agencies having only minor interest in a particular problem still must be shown as concurring formally before the paper can be forwarded to the top officials of the Department. 21

The committee proposed a system of "active co-ordination" which would abolish the time-consuming, traditional system of formal concurrences. The action agency responsible for a particular project would be required to determine and develop all the possible considerations, ramifications, and consequences affecting its proposed solution, whether for or against. It would submit alternative courses of action to decision-makers along with the information needed on which to base their decisions. This system would have the further advantage of reducing the incentive to produce meaningless compromises for the sake of agreement.

Such a plan, while it resembled the decision-making techniques of General Marshall and Secretary McNamara, meant a radical break not only with traditional Army procedures but those of the entire federal bureaucracy. In this sense the proposal made by the Hoelscher Committee for active co-ordination was far more revolutionary and radical than the more publicized organizational changes it recommended.22

The task force which investigated CONARC's training and combat developments program found that the greatest weakness was fragmentation of responsibility for these two functions among too many agencies. The situation was bad in regard to training. It was even worse in the area of combat developments. The independent technical services were major obstacles to effective integration of these programs, but too many Army staff agencies were involved as well. They complicated matters further not only by causing additional delay, but their deliberations and compromises also made it difficult to obtain clear policy decisions and instructions.

The CONARC task force recommended integrating training. (Chart 26) CONARC would become a Force Development Command responsible for induction and processing (functions of The Adjutant General's Office), individual military training, the organization, training, and equipment of units for assignment to operating forces, and for supporting them and designated Reserve units at required levels of mobilization or readiness. The Force Development Command would also take over CONARC responsibilities for the CONUS armies.

If individual training remained a function of the Force Development Command's headquarters, it would have to compete for attention with unit training and installation support functions. Transferring to the Force Development Command the schools and training centers of the technical and administra-

A separate but subordinate Individual Training Command could concentrate singlemindedly on integrating the Army's individual training activities. It would also supervise the Army's service schools, training centers, and personnel processing activities. Specifically exempted because of their special nature would be West Point and its Preparatory School, the Army War College, certain intelligence schools, the Army Logistics Management Center, and "courses of instruction of a professional medical or non-military character." 24

The task force, in discussing problems of installation support under the Force Development Command, emphatically rejected any resurrection of the housekeeping command concept that had caused so much trouble before the CONARC reorganization of. 1955. The chief problem remaining in this area was financial management. Installation support funds came under the amorphous, catchall category designated "Operations and Maintenance of Facilities." There was no such category in

the Army's appropriations structure. Most of the funds to support installations came not only from the Operations and Maintenance budget but also from the Operating Forces, Training Activities, and Central Supply Activities appropriations. Here again Congressional limitations on transferring funds from one appropriations category to another were the principal cause of the trouble and led to illegal transfers among appropriations categories, as indicated earlier. The task force recommended making Operations and Maintenance of Facilities a separate and legally distinct category as the most efficient way of solving these problems.25

In recommending the integration of combat developments under a single agency the CONARC task force followed recommendations made by Project VISTA in 1952, the Haworth Committee in 1954, and the Armour Research Foundation in 1959. In its analysis, the task force suggested that four separate functions or stages were involved: long-range planning, the development of materiel, combat arms testing, and implementation, meaning the incorporation of new doctrines and weapons in military training. The combat developments agency proposed would cover only the first or planning stage. The CONARC task force suggested assigning development and user acceptance tests to the proposed logistics command, while training and doctrine would remain under the Force Development Command. The "Combat Developments Agency" would be responsible for preparing detailed military specifications for new weapons and equipment, for developing new organizational and operational concepts and doctrines, for testing these ideas experimentally in war games and in field maneuvers, for conducting combat operations research studies, and for analyzing the results in terms of cost-effectiveness. The proposed agency would include all such functions and personnel currently located at USCONARC headquarters and its school commands as well as in the technical and administrative services, the Army staff (principally the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence and DCSLOG), and the Army

War College. (Chart 27) Under its command would be the Office of Special Weapons Development at Fort Bliss, Texas, concerned with tactical nuclear operations, and the Combat Developments Experimentation Center at Fort Ord, California. Combining these elements in a separate Department of the Army staff agency, designated as such rather than as a field command, was suggested as the best means of emphasizing that its function was planning as distinct from current operations. "This agency would emphasize creative activity requiring imagination and the ability to focus on the future. It would be a challenger of current doctrine and an innovator of new concepts, which, in turn, demand new hardware."26

The most important Project 80 task force was the one under General Haines responsible for studying DCSLOG, the technical services, and Army logistics in general. The central issue, as in previous reorganizations, was how to assert effective executive control over the operations of the services. The services themselves had continued to deny the need for controls limiting their traditional freedom of action either through placing them under a logistics command or by breaking them up along functional lines. The Palmer reorganization of 1955 which tried to place them under the "command" of DCSLOG simply had not worked. DCSLOG had never been able to assert effective control over them because it had to share this authority with the rest of the Army staff. In 1961 they remained seven organizationally autonomous commands. They employed nearly 300,000 military and civilian personnel at approximately four hundred installations inside the United States with an estimated real estate value of $11 billion and a current annual budget of $10 billion.

General Haines' task force initially identified thirteen problem areas requiring detailed investigation. Approximately half involved DCSLOG and the Army's logistics systems only. The rest involved other Army staff agencies, including personnel management, training, and intelligence.27 Another important task was to conduct interviews and obtain the opinions of a broad spectrum of individuals inside and outside the Army.

One was the new Assistant Secretary of Defense for Installations and Logistics, Thomas D. Morris, a career civil servant with intimate knowledge of financial management and logistics. His deputy, Paul Riley, who had worked on logistics management problems in the Department of Defense since 1958 was another. Both criticized the Army for excessive delay in making decisions. They also felt that while the Air Force and Navy came up with firm, long-range logistics programs the Army generally presented only one-year projections which merely summarized the technical services annual programs. Dr. Richard S. Morse, the new Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development, asserted the Army must cut red tape and make decisions more promptly. All three thought the independence and conservatism of the technical services caused most of these problems.28

After investigating the thirteen logistics problem areas General Haines' group concluded by making a number of recommendations, many of which had been made before. Effective management of Army logistics, it said, required that the Army staff should confine itself to planning and policy-making and divorce itself from the details of administration. The Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, the principal offender, was so involved in overseeing administrative operations that it neglected its planning functions. It could not function effectively as commander of the technical services because of the concurrent jurisdiction exercised by other Army staff agencies over the technical services. Second, below the Army staff there should be "positive, authoritative control over the wholesale Army logistic system." Third, both in the Army staff and in the field, development and production must be closely related. Fourth, the argument of commodity versus functional organization oversimplified the problem. Whatever logistics system was adopted, both elements would have to be present at one level or another. The principal aim should be to eliminate the duplication, unnecessary staff-layering, and rigid compartmentalization of the existing. system. Such an organization should also be adaptable to "systems management" which cut across

The whole Hoelscher Committee generally agreed that the technical services should be functionalized. It agreed that the General Staff should get out of operations and that training, combat developments, and personnel functions within the Army logistics system could be more effectively performed if these functions were transferred to the proposed Force Development Command, Combat Developments Agency, and the Office of Personnel Operations. Other Army-wide services of the technical services could be transferred to special staff agencies without harming the Army's logistics system.30

The logistics task force considered three alternative organizational patterns for managing Army logistics. The first involved two functional field commands, one for research, development, and initial production and a second, the Army Supply and Distribution Command, for the later phases of the materiel cycle. The second alternative was to create two commodity commands, one for military hardware, including all major weapons systems, and another for general supplies and equipment, many of which were under single managerships. Finally, the task force considered setting up a single Systems and Materiel Command responsible for the entire spectrum of supply from research and development through distribution and maintenance.

The Haines task force and the Hoelscher Committee, except the task force considering research and development, believed that two separate functional commands would create complex problems of co-ordination in addition to splitting the materiel cycle. Two separate commodity commands would deal with research and development and with distribution. Here, the likely transfer of the single manager agencies to the newly created Defense Supply Agency made it questionable whether a separate supply command was really necessary. Conse-

The research and development task force protested that such a command would subordinate research and development to production and operations. World War II demonstrated that successful research and development resulted from a separation of research and development from supply activities, while industrial production and military supply were not adversely affected to a material degree by such a separation. "Furthermore, historical events reveal the suppressive effect of the prevailing social order on innovating activities, which on that account must be removed from the control of day-to-day operations for maximum results." As an alternative this group preferred an organizational pattern in which research and development was separated from other supply functions. The pattern proposed by General Haines' group, they believed, was worse than the existing organization. They also wanted to strengthen the role of research and development at the Army staff level by reverting to a three-deputy chiefs of staff concept, one for joint plans, another for operations and readiness, and a third for Army programs and resources.32

The Hoelscher Committee replied by pointing out that the Army's research and development program would continue to be headed by an Assistant Secretary for Research and Development and on the General Staff by the Chief of Research and Development. Important elements of the Army's research and development program would be under the new Combat Developments Agency. The Haines group added that under its proposed organization the new Systems and Materiel Command would place sufficient emphasis on research and development by appointment of a Chief Scientist as adviser to the commanding general, a Director for Research and Development, and by providing a special office for Project Management.

The overriding reason that the Hoelscher Committee and General Haines' logistics task force selected a single logistics command was that they considered it both unwise and impractical to separate research and development from production because of the need for close co-ordination between these func-

The basic organization proposed for the Systems and Materiel Command, later to be called the Army Materiel Command (AMC), consisted of a headquarters with three functional directorates for research and development, production and procurement, and supply and maintenance plus a supporting staff. (Chart 28) The Haines task force had deliberately placed Project Management, Plans and Programs, and a Chief Scientist inside the office of the commanding general to emphasize the importance and priority of these functions. The principal field agencies were a series of commodity-oriented development and production commands similar to the existing Ordnance Department's field agencies and a functional supply command responsible for both transportation and distribution.33

The Personnel Management report was a unique feature of Project 80 because previous Army organization studies had paid little attention to this subject. They had said little beyond asserting that in any functional reorganization the technical services should lose their personnel as well as other nonlogistical functions.

The Personnel Management task force asserted that responsibility for this function continued to be fragmented among twenty different agencies on the basis of historical accident rather than rational design. There had been little improvement since 1945 when Drs. Learned and Smith had complained: "No single agency in the War Department General Staff has adequate responsibility or authority to make an integrated Army-wide personnel system work."

The mixture of staff and operating responsibilities within these agencies made integrated control even more difficult. The agencies primarily responsible for personnel management were DCSPER, The Adjutant General's Office (TAGO), and the technical services. But nearly all other Army staff agencies were involved, and all combined staff and operating responsi-

bilities. For practical purposes responsibility for personnel management in the Reserve Components was a separate area with its own personnel management program. TAGO also supervised Army recruiting, induction, and personnel processing in the field. It ran the Army's welfare and morale programs. Finally TAGO was the Army's chief administrative officer, records keeper, postman, and printer.34

Improvements in personnel management since World War II had been piecemeal. Personnel and manpower statistics had greatly improved, especially after TAGO obtained the use of a large computer in the 1950s. As a consequence, manpower controls were more effective. Personnel classification and career management, both military and civilian, had also improved. Combat arms officers, in particular, were receiving much broader educations, both within and outside the Army. This was less true for technical service officers.35

The Personnel Management task force did not believe that further major improvements in Army personnel management were possible under the existing system. Co-ordination and control were extremely difficult when twenty agencies shared responsibility for the program. Second, the Army staff and DCSPER in particular were too heavily involved in operations, and the Army staff's long-range personnel planning had suffered as a consequence. A third major criticism was that career management, especially in the technical services, tended to be narrowly tailored to serve branch or service interests.36

According to Mr. Hoelscher, the most difficult area in reaching final agreement among the committee as a whole concerned the initial or basic military training of the individual soldier. This area extended from planning the Army's enlisted military personnel requirements in terms of individual military occupations, througFl induction, basic training, and ultimate assignment to specific units or services. This was precisely the area where current responsibilities were most fragmented and

The Personnel Management task force's principal recommendation was to consolidate control over Army military personnel management in a single Office of Personnel Operations and transfer to it all such functions performed by the Army staff, including TAGO and the technical services, except for such professional groups as the Army Medical Corps, the Judge Advocate General's Corps, and the Chaplains Corps. DCSPER would retain responsibility for general officer assignments. It also recommended organizing officer personnel management within OPO along "branch" lines for technical service as well as combat arms officers with brigadier generals assigned as branch chiefs to provide proper top-level supervision. (Chart 29)

OPO would operate under the General Staff supervision of DCSPER, and the Hoelscher Committee stressed that the DCSPER and the Chief of OPO should not be the same person since the purpose of OPO was to relieve DCSPER of all operating responsibilities. TAGO would be abolished and its personnel responsibilities transferred to OPO, including welfare and morale services. Its personnel research function would be transferred to the Army Research Office. The Hoelscher Committee also recommended transferring responsibility for induction and recruiting, examination, reception, transfer, and separation of enlisted personnel to the proposed Individual Training Command tinder CONARC as mentioned earlier.38

When Mr. Hoelscher's over-all report and those of the task forces had been drafted, he submitted them to the Secretary of the Army's staff and to the General Staff representatives on the Project Advisory Committee for comment.40 The technical services, the agencies most vitally affected by the proposed reorganization, were not consulted. General Colglazier, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, informed technical service chiefs in late September that their comments were not wanted at this time and cautioned them against revealing information on Project 80 to "unauthorized" persons.41

General Colglazier's office had kept the technical service chiefs reasonably well informed of developments. Brig. Gen, James M. Illig, Chief of DCSLOG's Office of Management Analysis, and his assistant chief, Dr. Wilfred J. Garvin, as members of the Project Advisory Committee, were the principal contacts between the Hoelscher Committee and the technical services. At the end of July General Illig and Dr. Garvin learned of the alternative organization patterns being considered and developed a set of DCSLOG counterproposals.

The "Illig-Garvin" proposals and the criticisms of the final Hoelscher Committee report, also made by General Illig and Dr. Garvin, represented a rough consensus among DCSLOG and the technical services. They accepted the Hoelscher Committee concept of one or more logistics commands, but insisted the technical service chiefs should remain as such on the Army staff with responsibility for personnel management and training.42

The creation of a logistics command, General Illig and Dr. Garvin said, was preferable to the situation that had developed since the Palmer reorganization of 1954-55 were there was no effective direction and control over the technical services short of the Chief of Staff himself. The evil, as they saw it, and the great "divisive" influence within the Army was the progressive "functionalization" of Army operations, programs, and budgets.

"The preoccupation of multiple Army staff agencies with specialized functional areas and related programs and budgets had impaired the command integrity of the Technical Services and prevented effective management of their several functions towards a common end." The technical services were the victims rather than the cause of the trouble. Illig and Garvin believed a Systems and Materiel Command such as the Hoelscher Committee proposed was clearly preferable to the evil consequences of the creeping functionalization of the past decade.

They did not agree with the Hoelscher Committee's contention that the Army staff should divorce itself from operations. The technical services had long and successfully exercised both staff and command functions. Detailed control by the Army staff was necessary to answer questions and meet criticisms from the Bureau of the Budget, the General Accounting Office, and Congress. Increasing costs, decreasing appropriations, and technical problems encountered in the earlier stages of research and development were other reasons why DCSLOG and other Army staff agencies had to exercise detailed controls over operations.43

Concerning the organization of the Army staff General Illig and Dr. Garvin opposed continued separation of research and development from production, preferring an arrangement which separated development and production from supply and distribution. They opposed a separate Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy and International Affairs, suggesting instead creating an operating deputy for JCS affairs within the Office of the Chief of Staff. They objected to the proposal for a Director of the Army Staff as an additional unnecessary staff layer. This

was the Vice Chief of Staff's responsibility. An assistant to the Vice Chief of Staff who would direct Army staff programing and systems management was preferable to the proposed deputy for these functions. The heads of Army staff agencies also should retain their right of personal access to the Chief of Staff. No change in traditional Army staff procedures which eliminated this right was acceptable.44

General Illig and Dr. Garvin agreed on the creation of a separate combat developments agency. They opposed making CONARC responsible for all technical training because technical service specialists, including civilian experts, not only worked with the combat arms but also within the Army's wholesale logistic system and in jointly staffed defense agencies like the new Defense Supply Agency on functions unrelated to CONARC's training mission. For similar reasons Illig, Garvin, Colglazier, and the technical service chiefs opposed transferring technical service military officer personnel management to the proposed Office of Personnel Operations where the influence of the combat arms would be predominant. They simply did not believe combat arms oriented agencies like CONARC or OPO could produce the kind of skilled technicians required in an era of rapid technological change .for service throughout the Army and Department of Defense. It was clear from all their comments that DCSLOG and the technical service chiefs objected more to losing responsibility for military training and officer personnel management than any other features of the Hoelscher Committee report.

Under the alternative organization proposed by Illig and Garvin, responsibility for individual training and personnel management would remain under the technical service chiefs as Army staff agencies. To the new Systems and Materiel Command they proposed also transferring "career management and personnel operations" of the Army's wholesale logistic establishment as part of "the command function of the Technical Services" it would inherit. In summary, they recommended that

for the Chiefs in the Technical Service [sic] in AR 10-5, to manage the careers of all military personnel assigned to Army technical corps, to direct and control Army technical schools, and to furnish those currently assigned Army-wide services which are not transferred to the Systems and Materiel Command 45

The technical services and The Adjutant General's Office were to be functionalized. The agencies primarily affected were the offices of the chiefs of the technical services which were either abolished or reorganized functionally as Army staff agencies except for the Surgeon General and the Chief of Engineers. The field installations of the technical services were to remain, although their exact relations to the new field commands were undecided. Technical service personnel would still retain their branch insignia and designation just as the combat arms had after the abolition of the chiefs of the combat arms under the Marshall reorganization in 1942.

The principal logistics agency of the Army in place of the technical services was to be a single Systems and Materiel Command. It would be responsible for the entire materiel cycle from research and development through distribution and major maintenance activities, except for combat development functions. It would inherit most of the personnel and field installations of the technical services.

CONARC would be reorganized as a Force Development Command, a designation later dropped, to include all the technical service schools and training facilities, while losing its combat development functions to the Combat Developments Agency. A new major field command under CONARC would be responsible for training individuals, including their

Another new field agency rather than a command was to be the Office of Personnel Operations responsible for all Army personnel management functions previously performed by DCSPER, The Adjutant General's Office, and the technical services. The management of general officer careers would remain a DCSPER function.

Less noticed was the reorganization of Army headquarters proposed by the Hoelscher Committee because this feature was largely eliminated in the final reorganization plan approved by Secretary McNamara. The principal changes proposed were to create a Director of the Army Staff with the rank of lieutenant general to act as the deputy of the Vice Chief and Chief of Staff in supervising the work of the Army staff. Second, the committee proposed to separate the operational planning and training functions of DCSOPS into two agencies, a Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy and International Affairs and another for Plans, Programs, and Systems, which would include responsibility not only for organization and training but also for co-ordinating Army plans, programs, and budget functions in these areas.

The Adjutant General's Office was to be abolished with its personnel functions going to OPO and CONARC, while its administrative functions would be reorganized under a new Chief of Administrative Services. The Office of the Chief of Military History would be abolished also and its functions transferred to the latter agency.

While public attention focused on the organizational changes proposed by the Hoelscher Committee, the latter made two major recommendations for improving Army staff procedures. First, it recommended that the General Staff divorce itself from operating responsibilities by transferring personnel responsible for such functions to the new major field commands. The principal agency affected would be DCSLOG, which as a

result of the Palmer reorganization in 1955 had greatly increased its staff. Second, it proposed to reform the General Staff's "staff actions" procedures by cutting down on the number of formal concurrences required in favor of procedures which were aimed at producing quicker and clearer decisions and actions.46

Six months of detailed research by a carefully selected staff which balanced professional and military talent in many areas made the Hoelscher Committee report the most thorough and detailed investigation of Army organization and management since World War I. Following submission of his report, Hoelscher and his headquarters staff conducted special briefings at Carlisle Barracks in mid-October for Secretary Stahr, General Decker, the General Staff, and representatives of the technical services. General Decker then disbanded the Hoelscher Committee, except for a small headquarters staff.