Samenvatting

In this article the role of financial information in the armed forces is discussed against the background of economic behaviour. Economic behaviour envelops the optimization of the relation between resources and contribution. If resources as well as contribution can be expressed in an overall criterion (money), a mutual tuning between the claim on resources andcontribution can take place. In the armed forces the public contribution is in principle not traded on a market, so that the profits are not expressed in financial terms. The absence of this overall criterion makes it impossible to assess to what extent the claim on resources is justified by the contributions. Apart from that it is also very difficult to quantify the contribution of the armed forces in other terms and to link them to the claim on resources.This has led the present practice of the management control taking place in separated compartments of resources and contribution, where the concepts of efficiency and effectiveness have been degraded to economy and goal achievement, respectively. The creation of intermediate objectives allows a partial opening of the compartments. An intermediate objective par excellence is the availability of the armed forces in peacetime. A recent calculation has shown that approximately 91% of the expenditure is related to this intermediate objective. With the help of this intermediate objective efficiency and effectiveness can once again acquire meaning for the armed forces.