The "Soft" Factors in Systems Studies.

The article focuses on the fact that policy failures in the U.S. may be attributed to the limitation of military systems studies and the manner in which policymakers use them. The military systems studies have the self-imposed limitation of playing down the broader political factors is defensible up to a point in the attempt to deal with a critical portion of the overall problem. The chief difficulties arise in the transition from the suboptimized analytical studies to decision making. In this respect, analysts may have been remiss in failing to appreciate the crucial role of bureaucratic structures. The system studies even when stated to be limited and suboptimized were inevitably incorporated a number of non-technical assumptions though typically in a tangential and implicit fashion.