17 Layers

Newsweek

[Defense Secretary] Gates is also looking to cut the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy, which has added a thousand new staff since 9/11. Around the time of the attacks, Rumsfeld reckoned that 17 layers of officialdom lay between him and a line officer. A recent internal study, Gates says, found that “in some cases the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers.” (In 1948, when the Cold War began, the secretary of defense had a deputy and a staff of three supervising 50 employees; today, he has 26 political appointees running a staff of 3,000.) The outcome, says Gates, is “a bureaucracy which has the fine motor skills of a dinosaur.”

The Third Wave

Out of [the] driving need for the integration of Second Wave civilization came the biggest coordinator of all—the integrational engine of the system: big government. It is the system’s hunger for integration that explains the relentless rise of big government in every Second Wave society.

Again and again political demagogues arose to call for smaller government. Yet, once in office, the very same leaders expanded rather than contracted the size of government. This contradiction between rhetoric and real life becomes understandable the moment we recognize that the transcendent aim of all Second Wave governments has been to construct and maintain industrial civilization. Against this commitment, all lesser differences faded. Parties and politicians might squabble over other issues, but on this they were in tacit agreement And big government was part of their unspoken program regardless of the tune they sang, because industrial societies depend on government to perform essential integrational tasks.

In the words of political columnist Clayton Fritchey, the United States federal government never ceased to grow, even under three recent Republican administrations [..].

Powershift

We think of bureaucracy as a way of grouping people. But it is also a way of grouping “facts.” A firm neatly cut into departments according to function, market, region, or product is after all a collection of cubbyholes in which specialized information and personal experience are stored. Engineering data go to the engineers; sales data to the sales department [..].

Until the arrival of computers, this “cubbyholism” was the main way in which knowledge was organized for wealth production. And the wondrous beauty of the system was that, at first, it appeared to be endlessly expandable. In theory, one could have an infinity of cubbyholes.

In practice, however, companies and governments are now discovering that there are strict limits to this kind of specialization. The limits first became apparent in the public sector as government agencies grew to monstrous proportions, reaching a point of no return. Listen, for example, to the lament of John F. Lehman, Jr., a recent U.S. Navy Secretary.

In the Pentagon, Lehman confessed to his colleagues, so many specialized cubbyhole-units had sprung up that it is “impossible for me or anyone at this table to accurately describe. . . the system with which, and within which, we must operate.”