| Sumario: | This article presents a discussion on the research paper "The Economic Analysis of Defense: Choice Without Markets," by Fred S. Hoffman of RAND Corp., published in the May 1959 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." There are two questions confronting those who make military decisions that Hoffman considers to be economic questions, how much to spend on military preparedness and what allocations to make among the many sorts of military capabilities competing for resources. An answer to the first question involves bringing together the community's opportunity function, which lists efficient alternative productive arrangements, and the community's preference function, with military preparedness as one of the choices. The answer to the second question involves the maximization of output, in this case military output, with given inputs. It is, in effect, part of the process of defining the community's opportunity function. The process of sub-optimization is the partial equilibrium aspect of the military maximization problem.
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