This dissertation explores the intellectual foundation and political consequences of defense budgeting in the United States since the Second World War. In 1961 Secretary Robert McNamara implemented what would come to be called the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) in the Department of Defense. This system rationalized both the structure of the defense budget and processes for decision-making about defense priorities. The foundations for the system were rooted in more than a decade of work on the management of defense resources at the RAND Corporation. The novel policy expertise they represented earned the coterie of personnel associated with PPBS in the Pentagon the sobriquet of McNamara's “whiz kids.” Enthusiasm for PPBS and its political utility inspired President Lyndon Johnson to implement the system government-wide in 1965, and state and local governments followed suit.

This study extends from the early cold war, and what President Dwight D. Eisenhower ominously labeled the “military-industrial complex” to the mid-1970s, tracing themes of state power, executive power, expertise, and the implications of quantitative methods in political discourse. While ostensibly PPBS consisted of techniques to improve the efficiency of government institutions, it was always about more than that. Proponents lauded the effort to establish a more scientific and modern basis for policy choices, but the introduction of new analytical techniques to defense decision-making in the 1960s also proved to be exceptionally controversial as observers worried that PPBS represented a politics-as-usual power grab in the guise of scientific management. This dissertation considers the political and administrative consequences of efforts to rationalize inherently political processes.