Enthoven, Alain C. and K. Wayne Smith. How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program 1961-1969. The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA. 1971. (ISBN 0-8330-3826-5) Under Secretary McNamara, the "whiz kids" instituted the Office of System Analysis (currenty Program, Analysis and Evaluation) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Enthoven and Smith describe the rationale for this office. They contend that decision makers need a staff capable of providing alternatives and objective evaluations. They argue military leaders, while they have undisputed expertise, do not understand the full range of political aspects that affect major decisions. They further cite examples of bias in analysis prepared by advocates.

Davis P. and D. Blumenthal. 1991. The Base of Sand Problem. Available at RAND.org.

George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, William G. Hunter. Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery , 2nd Edition (Hardcover). Wiley-Interscience, 2005. A significant update to the original 1st Edition (1978). "Frequently conclusions are easily drawn from a well-designed experiment, even when rather elementary methods of analysis are employed. Conversely, even the most sophisticated analysis cannot salvage a badly designed experiment."

Thomas P. M. Barnett. The Pentagon's New Map. G.P.Putnam's Sons, 2004. "There will be other 9/11s until the entire U.S. Government -- not just the Pentagon -- adopts a new and broader definition of national security crisis and reorders our entire national defense establishment around it." (p.257) "What stands between us and the goal of making globalization truly global is the threats posed by the forces of disconnectedness -- the bad individual actors that plague the Gap. Defeat them by denying them the Gap as their own and the Core wins this war on terrorism, plain and simple." (p.304)

Not everything at http://orsagouge.pbwiki.com/Readings is worthy of being called *critical* but there's a good selection there. Have a look.