Word: mcneil
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They turned for guidance, as if by instinct, to Assistant Secretary Wilfred McNeil, a handsome, blue-eyed Iowan whose fiscal talents won him a reserve rear admiral's rank during World War II. McNeil was brought in by Forrestal to supervise the defense budget, and had done the job for every Secretary of Defense since. He appealed to Wilson and Kyes because he could talk their language-production phasing, subcontracting, economic units. He was a storehouse of facts & figures about the armed services, and little short of a magician when it came to budgetary techniques...
Along with facts & figures, McNeil gave Wilson and Kyes a short course in weapons systems and grand strategy. It was a short course which wound up proposing a $5 billion cut in the U.S. Air Force (TIME, May 18). Day in & day out McNeil opposed the program to build the Air Force up to 143 wings by 1956, and advanced the late Admiral Forrest Sherman's arguments that the U.S. should divide defense appropriations among the three services without establishing a specified date when any one of them should complete its buildup...
...when Charlie Wilson's defense budget went to Congress, it was clear that the Sherman plan had triumphed. Most of the $5.2 billion cut in appropriations for fiscal 1954 came out of Air Force funds. Of the total cut, a whopping $3.4 billion-a figure set by Wilfred McNeil-came out of funds for Air Force procurement...
...trouble, McNeil explained, is "the basic system." To illustrate "the system," he produced charts of the red-tape jungle of contract-placing. "There are people going home tired every night with unfinished work," he said, "yet I feel we have too many [people in the Pentagon]. Why do we have too many? I think those charts tell the story...
...McNeil's charts showed bewildering mazes of bureaus and sub-bureaus through which procurement orders had to pass. Kentucky's Senator John Sherman Cooper studied the charts, announced that by his count an ammunition order "would go through 42 different departments and almost 200 operations" before contracts were actually placed. Senator Byrd asked McNeil how far the order would travel in the process. Said McNeil: "The speedometer reading on that is 10,000 miles, I am told...