In this book we have introduced the basics of the federal budget process, provided an historical background on the foundation and development of the budget process, indicated how defense spending may be measured and how it impacts the economy, described and analyzed how Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBES) operates and should function to produce the annual defense budget proposal to Congress, analyzed the role of Congress in debating and deciding on defense appropriations and the politics of the budgetary process including the use of supplemental appropriations to fund national defense, analyzed budget execution dynamics, identified the principal participants in the defense budget process in the Pentagon and military commands, assessed federal and Department of Defense (DoD) financial management and business process challenges and issues, and described the processes used to resource acquisition of defense war fighting assets, including reforms in acquisition and linkages between PPBES and the defense acquisition process.

Acknowledgements. Chapter I: National Defense Policy and Resource Decision Making: Unique Challenges. Chapter II: The Federal Government Budget Process. Chapter III: Budgeting for National Defense: Complicated but Workable. Chapter IV: The Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution System.

This book focuses on the inherent contradiction between bureaucracy, hierarchy, and the vision inspired by the architecture of modern information technology of a more egalitarian culture in public organizations. We agree with Evans and Wurster and others who have argued that, in the future, knowledge-based productive relationships will be designed around fluid, teambased collaborative communities, either within organizations (i.e., deconstructed value chains), or in collaborative alliances such as those with ""amorphous and permeable corporate boundaries characteristic of companies in the Silicon Valley"" that is, deconstructed supply chains. In such relationships everyone can communicate richly with everyone else on the basis of shared standards and, like the Internet itself, these relationships will eliminate the need to channel information, thereby eliminating the trade-off between information bandwidth and connectivity. ""The possibility (or the threat) of random access and information symmetry,"" they conclude, ""will destroy all hierarchies, whether of logic or power