Fox reports that he “died at home in his sleep Monday morning, his wife Diana … said he had been in failing health for some time. Known as a policymaker with a fixation for statistical analysis, McNamara was president of the Ford Motor Co. when President John F. Kennedy asked him to head the Pentagon in 1961.” McNamara’s name will forever be associated with the charge that he replaced the idea of victory with “cost effectiveness” in Vietnam; that he spent lives in the pursuit of some elusive metric. But the blame for that has to go back much further, to Korea when Douglas MacArthur discovered that Washington at least, believed there was indeed a substitute for victory.
The idea that a certain amount of blood had to be used to grease the wheels of peace may have been a rational calculation under the shadow of the bomb. The ultimate proof of the efficacy of containment is that you are reading these words. The counterfactual argument is uncertain and speculative at best. But it was a profoundly corrosive and cynical idea whose moral ends could not be made to meet until Ronald Reagan found a way to win the Cold War in non-nuclear fashion. In a world which declares itself unwilling to even use the words “terrorism” any longer it is sometimes easy to forget for how long civilization was preserved by holding hundreds of millions on each side of the Iron Curtain hostage to destruction. The price of deterrence, for the sensitive at least, was a kind of moral damnation. Who knows to what extent McNamara’s subsequent career in the World Bank was driven by the need to shrive himself, yet of what sin that others were not guilty of, who can say, but himself?
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns :
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.I pass, like night, from land to land ;
I have strange power of speech ;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach. …He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all….The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone : and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn :
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
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I could get more angry at Local Board #80 in Niagara Falls, NY for re-classifying me 1-A and sending my draft notice in late 1967 if I was of a mind to get mad for my service. On reflection though, it wasn’t so bad, going to Indochina. Like Michael Herr said in his wonderful book “Dispatches”, “Instead of happy childhoods, we had Viet Nam”. It shaped me a lot and gave me resilience in my subsequent years.
Probably McNamera’s greatest sin was the strong points on the DMZ like Con Thien and Khe Sanh and Cam Lo. Instead of dropping max ordinance on the NVA regiments, brave Marines were exposed to NVA artillery and a grinding conventional infantry war that cost plenty of good men (two for example, Operation Buffalo and the Khe Sanh hill fights)
McNamera, Rusk ,et al,” the best and the brightest” show us how clueless the elites are about matters military as well as economic and diplomatic.
T. R. Fehrenbach discussed the blood for peace issue–in a bipolar, nuke-armed world, in “This Kind of War”, about Korea, some of whose concepts were visible in Viet Nam.
Also a bang-up history of the war, its origins, and a discussion of the military in a liberal democracy.
The multiple realities that were the Vietnam war must be assigned as J.F. Kennedy achievements or debacles, depending on your universe. They so seldom are. The history strangely becomes “complex” when the dope who started it is lefty and lovable.
The poet T. S. Eliot wrote: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”
Amazingly prescient, we suffer still.
the current wipeout of american banks tracks what happened to american banks back in the 70′s.
at that time the McNamera was head of the World Bank. His idea was for American banks lead by the world bank to “recycle” petro dollars to latin american and african governments by way of loans– on the theory that governments couldnt go bankrupt.
they can and they did. They took down a large percent of the US banking system with them.
courtesy of McNamera.
Was McNamera responsible for the Edsel? If so he was three for three….and a perfect example of the way democrats somehow fail upwards.
Give Reagan all the credit you like, but please don’t leave out Margaret Thatcher or Karol Wojtyla from the equation.
the interesting thing about McNamera is that he began his career in Curtis LeMay’s command. I forget whether he was in the bombers or part of the targeting staff.
I think LeMay ended his career in the republican party as an advocate of greater nuclear vigilance vis the russians. He lost.
imho LeMay and McNamera learned very different things from those bombing runs.
I looked into McNamera’s family history many years ago. His dad was a recent emigrant to the USA. For a guy to take on so much responsibility for a country in which his roots are so shallow… is asking too much. He will not balance on the side of his own country much–because there’s not much too it. Not compared to the impassioned demands of other unsubdued countries.
Pardon the OT post:
Regarding the meet-n-greet discussion nested in “The eyes of Tejas are upon you”, I’d be interested in meeting fellow BC’ers, but Houston is a bit of a trek from North GA. It looks like I’ll finally have to get a Twitter account to follow Leo’s initiative, though.
Wretchard, any chance of getting a link to that Twitter acct posted here -with a tiny explanation of its purpose? Like many semi-regulars, I miss many posts because Life Happens… no doubt many others have missed this who would LOVE to be involved…
Triton
McNamara seemed to me to have succumbed to his critics and conscience at least by the time Errol Morris made Fog of War. The spectacle of his often nearly-pleading explanations induced sympathy for the guy, at least for me. Why they couldn’t understand the stupidity of Khe Sahn & etc. beforehand will forever be hard to fathom; why we don’t simply obliterate our enemies instead of trying to publicly cuddle them and concede to them and engage in the truly stupid fiction that we are equals with them – and yet also covertly subvert indigenous regimes and impose sanctions and electronically surveille them… well it’s complete debauchery. It’s a totally passive aggressive and shameful approach, in my opinion, and it – the strategy – more than anything has given the most fuel to the fire of the subversion of our national character, culture, and especially our political class. There would be a lot fewer jobs and a lot less chatter and a lot less false equivalence among friends and enemies if you just did the natural thing – that is, if a guy is pointing a gun at you and preaching gibberish and you have a B-52, you just waste the f-cker. QED.
I believe Robert McNamara was one of the “Whiz Kids.”
There is a certain kind of symbiosis between the Military and the Corporation. What they have in common is the need to organize mass numbers of men (and more recently women) into a unitary organization to achieve a common purpose. For the Military, it is to bring enough force of arms to bear to achieve a political or diplomatic or existential purpose. For the Corporation, it is to bring enough resources to bear to achieve economies of scale.
A large organization that works effectively is a difficult undertaking. One way to do this is the hierarchical structure. General-Colonel-Major-Captain-Lieutenenant-Sargeant-Corporal-Private. President-Vice President-General Manager-Director-Manager-Supervisor-Group Leader-Engineer, or Supervisor-Foreman-Worker-Assistant.
Another way to do this is to tolerate some degree of waste — there may be an abundance of middle managers or of certain workers, and a lot of them may be drawing pay and eating Army food while doing crossword puzzles, but the point is that each woman and man has a particular job to do, and provided that job gets done with minimum distruption to the rest of the organization, the Army or the company functions as a well-oiled machine. Waste is just a cost of getting a large enough organization to paradoxically get the economies of scale.
The other aspect to the symbiosis is that war had become an industrial undertaking — think the dictum that amateurs discuss strategy, professionals worry about logistics. The South had the better generals, but the North had the industrial production to grind the South down. WW-II Germany also had the better generals and in many cases superior tanks and perhaps fighter aircraft; the United States had and to an extent the Soviet ally had the overwhelming advantage in industrial production to grind Germany down, provided the Allies had the will to spend the blood and treasure to do the grinding — the Germans thought that was a close thing though on the ultimate question of will, perhaps because of their misunderstanding of the United States and the German failure to read up on Oliver Cromwell, the New Model Army, the Americans mockingly called Red Necks after the scarves worn by the Cromwell faction, and the English Civil War.
What I think happened is that Mr. McNamara as a Whiz Kid was part of a group of Young Gun (OK, another metaphor) operations research people, a fancy term for the study of how to reduce waste in large organizations and make them even more effective as an Army, more profitable as a business. These Whiz Kids helped win WW-II by streamlining wartime production — the Sherman tank was an inferior design to the German Tiger, but we overwhelmed the Germans not only with an abundance of tanks, but with an abundance of artillery shells (and the P-47 fighter bomber). The Germans regarded the “extravagant” use of Arty as “unfair”, but as they say, C’est la guerre!
On his laurels of being a WW-II Whiz Kid, McNamara was recruited by the Ford family to run their auto company. On the laurels of being a Ford CEO, he was recruited to run the Defense Department. To say that the “architect of the Edsel” was the “architect of the Vietnam War” is a gross oversimplification in pursuit of talking points against a man who served his country under a Democratic Party Presidential Administration.
If anything, Mr. McNamara was the architect of the Ford Falcon, which perhaps gives one the greatest insight into his Spartan and utilitarian thinking regarding both things military and things civilian.
So the man who gave us the Ford Falcon also gave us the Minuteman Missile, which kept the peace to this day. The Minuteman was a Ford Falcon of atomic delivery systems — no frills, on budget, bare bones transportation of a nuclear munition. Compare that with the accessory-laden overchromed MX Peacekeeper boondogle under Reagan some 20 years later. I just saw a restored a Falcon with a For Sale sign — they won’t let me have a surplus Minuteman warhead, but my wife might let my own a Falcon to contemplate a thing built on the same principles of economy of function.
A woman lawyer, one time neighbor, friend of my Mom, liberal anti-war Democrat, once suggested to me that Mr. McNamara has a lot to answer for to the many women who sent their sons off to never return, especially in light of his mea culpa some years back about admitting to Vietnam being a mistake. Maybe that was the liberal Democrat in Mr. McNamara talking, but it didn’t get him any respect from liberal Democrats or anyone else.
Maybe the mistake to which he was confessing was that overwhelming industrial might is not the sure fire path to victory as it was claimed for the American Civil War and for WW-II — in Vietnam we had met a foe who had bested us in the will department under the circumstances in question. Would my mom’s friend have admitted that she too was part of the equation of victory vs stalemate vs defeat, and would she and others in the anti-war contingent look the Gold Star moms in the eyes for her influence on how things turned out?
For whatever his failings, I want to remember Robert McNamara as a patriotic American who served his country in two wars, for one of which he receive accolades, one for which he received scorn, but he did what was right in protecting America to the best of his considerable intellectual abilities, and for that I honor him.
McNamara’s one undeniable contribution was the development of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System – PPBS. The idea was that you planned and budgeted for your future weapons needs in a systematic manner. Before PPBS the individual military commands – not even the Services as a whole – talked to the makers of their equipment and asked them how they could do better. If you were flying ground attack with F-84’s then you talked to the maker, Republic, and got them to develop the F-105 as a replacement.
But PPBS was supposed to be driven by military needs and it tended to go the other way, the F-111 being a prime example.
PPBS still rules at the 5 sided fort on the Potomac but don’t forget that it was Col John Boyd who broke out of that system to develop the F-16, and by association, the F-18. PPBS was then brought into play to acquire the weapons systems but Boyd’s vision was needed first.
McNamara thought he could replace vision with bureaucracy and fix the resultant flawed programs by sheer force of will. He was part of a failed era in which “DC Knows Best” was the rule, and sadly, that era has returned.
Organized destruction is by definition ineffcient. That his belief was sincere, I accept. That he was an honorable man, I agree. That he was wrong….well I too was there, and saw things differently.
Here’s an obama columbia U paper published in the NY Times as reviewed by the National Review today
The New York Times unearthed a 1983 article called, “Breaking the War Mentality,” that Columbia student Barack Obama wrote for a campus newspaper. The article shows that Obama dreaded American “militarism” and its “military-industrial interests,” while effusing enthusiasm for the dangerously delusional nuclear-freeze movement.
Moreover, while indicating a preference for the political wisdom of reggae singer Peter Tosh over Ronald Reagan or Scoop Jackson, Obama bewailed the “narrow focus” of anti-militarism activists, worrying that they were targeting the “symptoms” rather than the real “disease,” namely, America’s underlying economic and political injustice:
RWE/11–if you were flying the straight-wing F-84, you talked to your Maker all right because you were taking your life in your hands. At least until about the G model, I believe, in 1951.
Funny, I was listening to some old USAF pilots talk about that very aircraft this AM.
“Whiz Kids” one of those was a McNamara protégé, C.Peter McCollugh, who turned down the personal computer concept and eventually ruined Xerox. Did I mentioned he also gave away mouse technology to Apple.
Still shocks the system to realize that Tet –the acknowledged turning point –was allowed to happen via Cronkite et al’s exclusive framing, when several fundamental facts about Tet were allowed to be buried and to this day are not much known in USA.
Not just the part about the communist offensive having been shattered, but that the surprise attack had been set up in the first place by treachery, by the communist initiative of a grandly publicized offer and acceptance of a Tet Truce wherein a formal truce for the holiday had been agreed upon by all parties on both sides. A deliberate deception from the highest level, and afterwards, after the battle, almost never again mentioned by the press.
Also, during the battle, the massacre of Hue, with five thousand hog-tied, systematically executed by bullet to the head, then covered with lime and shallow-buried, civilian middle class professionals, including several hundred Catholic nuns –found after the commies were pushed back out.
The administration’s response to such outrages was not to howl it to the heavens but to go docile and aquiesce to Uncle Walter. Incredible but true.
Still think that we (Western democracies) “won” the Cold War?
HOMESICK FOR A DICTATORSHIP
Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism
It is no longer sufficient to dismiss articles like this in major, and still very influential, Western media as the workings of a badly educated and indoctrinated leftist staff.
Progressivism has been the most enduring and consistent political and social philosophy for more than 100 years. What we call Conservatism today is a weak-wristed resurrection of 18th Century values that speaks only to how much is “too” much government.
The Left is not only inside Conservatism’s OODA Loop it’s spinning it like a maniacal dervish. When I start seeing MSM articles that promote the idea that individual liberty is harmful and undesirable then it becomes clear that a few Congressional seats are not going to kill this monster.
When even Solzhenitsyn’s voice can become muffled in the stampede to collectivism it’s time to start reading Jeremiah.
Took 40 years to figure out his quantitative analysis on jungle warfare sucked.
Would have been nice if he would have told somebody back in ’67′ it was a ‘quantitative’ teenage wasteland.
Instead of killing 4 of my good friends from the class of ’64-65′ and given me ‘quantitative’ nightmares.
Thousands of young teenage souls waiting to greet him in the hereafter.
Gordon 14:
The straight wing F-84E and G used in Korea (and I was just reading about that) was followed by the swept wing version F-84F. The early straight wing F-84s like the B model were terrible airplanes, having a tendancy to fall apart. One guy even said that he liked the E model better than the later G because it was lighter and more responsive.
TAC talked to Republic about building what became the F-105. Meanwhile, AF Systems Command was talking to North American about building the F-107 successor to the F-100. The F-105 won out, but neither it nor the 107 was designed to the kind of requirements that matched the way we used them. The requirements were based on taking the next technological step, not on what was needed.
McNamera at least addressed that kind of nonsense. But he did what is so often done in DC and thought the process he defined could fix everything. In the case of the F-111 he basically took direct control of the program in an attempt to make what he wanted work.
It was working on the F-111 that made me realize how very high level decisions can cause problems down at at the piece part level.
The thing about McNamara and his peers at FoMoCo was that THEY made the decisions based on what THEY thought was best for the company’s performance in the market. It mattered not that wrench-turners and engineer-heads had better, cheaper, faster, more practical ideas. Upper management’s personal taste ruled the day. With Ford it was a financial underperformance – except for those that bought the Pinto. But with DoD it was more deadly, and of course cost a lot more money.
Is it still that way today?
McNamara did tell someone. He told Johnson & Westmoreland. They didn’t agree, so in Nov 1967, he resigned. Total US Soldiers dead 19,558. Sure he had second thoughts. But it was not 1995, it was 1967.
I recall as a dumb kid seeing aerial photos of munitions and weapons being offloaded in Hanoi and streaming down the Ho trail wondering why we were not taking them out. I didnt know my father until he came back from northern Thailand and Okinawa serving with the 5th and 1st SF Groups. It never occurred to me to ask him what he thought of the ROE in the jungle or north of the border while we fished or put up hay after the “conflict”. It was probably better that we just didnt “go there”.
My sister read his book. Said it was infuriating to read about the Honolulu Conference – the big conference to decide on what the goals were in Vietnam, after how many years and lives? I don’t want to let Johnson off the hook too much, but I don’t think McNamera was the right man for the job he had.
During McNamera’s reign I remember someone commenting that McNamara knew the cost of everything, but not its value. The particular reference was to his insisting that new navy ships be oil powered rather than nuclear powered. Typical Liberal.
The story may be apocryphal, but it is said MacNamara questioned the need for two screws or propellors on naval warships.
If true, he knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Having been draft age during Vietnam I was lucky not be selected. That war was not fought to be won, but just to respond to enemy activity. It’s no different with Obama, who sees the War on Terror as being a law enforcement issue. Reactive, not pro-active.
McNamara served on LeMay’s planning staff, coordinating the strategic bombing of Japan.
The story goes that one day he remarked to LeMay that if Japan happened to win the war, LeMay and McNamara would be prosecuted as war criminals.
I don’t think that would have been fair.
This must be why he wasn’t put in charge of GM.
Both McNamara and Conkite make me wanna puke whenever I think about them.
NO ONE SHOULD BE ASKED TO FIGHT IF THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO WIN!!!
Salaam eleikum Y’all.
Perhaps the definitive book on the United States’s follies in Viet Nam is Harry G. Summers’s On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. In my opinion, this is the book that everyone should read about Viet Nam.
Short summary: At the Army War College, Summers was given the job of making sense out of the thousands of pages of studies written about the American failure. A lunch buddy suggested that he read von Clausewitz, long out of favor but now part of the ‘back to basics’ movement. Summers did, and reported that from the first page von Clausewitz was revealing mistakes. And it was first page, every page: to lose the war we had to make every mistake that could be found in the book.
Read Summers. Then, if you feel up to it, read von Clausewitz.
McNamara resisted the idea of chrome plating the receivers of M-16′s, because that would have resulted in a delay in deploying that weapon to Viet Nam, and increased cost, to boot. Experienced men in the Army knew that it was necessary to resist corrosion in a modern combat rifle, especially one used in the tropics.
Result? Many jammed weapons due to corrosion of the piece in the field, with greatly increased failure and jamming rates, right in the middle of a fire fight. Later (after McNamara departed DoD), the Army quietly introduced retro fit kits that rectified the problem, as well as going to stick powder from ball powder in the cartrdiges.
Result? Jammings and misfires just about disappeared after the refits and ammunition changes.
McNamara created starts, halts and pauses in the building of the UH-1 (Huey) in ’66 and ’67 due to “studies” of uneven production rates, just as the Air Cav units were ramping up activity.
Result? Shortage of parts and airframes to do the job that the troops were told to do.
And as was testified in open Senate hearings, “there was not enough horsepower in Christendom” to make the F-111 into the naval fighter it was supposed to be. And that killed the naval version of that misbegotten airplane.
Was McNamara a mole or just a useful idiot? Or was he the forerunner of the present generation of intellectual revisionists?
Limpet6 : (26)
“The story may be apocryphal, but it is said McNamara questioned the need for two screws or propellers on naval warships.”
That’s true, and it’s why the Perry class is configured as they are. The original design for a large class of frigates was done under the LBJ administration, then it lay dormant for years until the Perry class was finally based on that original design work and built, as I recall, by the Carter administration. Not only was the Navy upset over the single screw, they were also upset with the overall size and speed. By any normal standards, it was just too small to fulfill all the roles they were supposed to have the ship perform.
McNamara also championed aluminum armor for the M113, as well as shooting down the diesel engine the original spec called for. Aberdeen Proving Grounds had shown time and again that aluminum armor was inadequate for armored vehicles intended to protect troops even in non-FEBA roles. That is, even if they were “battle taxis” that would deploy the troops prior to coming into contact with the enemy rather than after contact with the enemy. Mac, however, “proved” that the savings to be had by using aluminum armor and an “off the shelf” gasoline engine, were worth the incremental cost in casualties that would occur due to the combination of aluminum and gasoline rather than steel and diesel (aluminum burns and gasoline is far more volatile than diesel).
I worked on DoD models for years, and one of the things regularly had to modify back then were the older models Mac had specified and overseen the development of. Almost all of them used data calculated somehow rather than based on field test from places like Aberdeen, Langley, or Dahlgren. Believe it or not, those models originally valued one additional death per 1000 in an infantry unit the same dollar amount as the difference in cost for steel armor v aluminum armor for a single M113, about $18,000 IIRC. Another little known fact is that he shot down better body armor when it was available in ’68 due to the fact that he didn’t consider the savings to be had by decreasing the number of deaths per thousand and the severity of wounds per thousand to be worth the additional $132 per vest. He was coming up with this sort of crap while people were actively engaged in combat in VN where $132 per minute was probably being spent to transport and treat those wounded in combat.
He and LBJ have their own little corner of hell for sure. McNamara acting like he was against the war or a good guy for turning against it just shows how completely loathsome he really was. People also forget that he and LBJ were “good liberals”. If Mac were in charge these days, he’d direct the Army to send people into combat wearing only Nikes and Haynes boxer shorts as a way to control costs.
Regards
RWE #11- “McNamara thought he could replace vision with bureaucracy”
A common theme within the Army, and I think parallels our country’s trajectory as well. You name the theme- good or bad – and our society wants to fix it with bureaucracy. Are there examples in history where the bureaucracy was peeled back without violence? I know that prior to WWII the Army had gone in cycles of large to small in between previous conflicts, but at a cost of much experience and tactical knowledge. But the prospect of peeling back our government’s bureaucracy is daunting. Didn’t Reagan say something about how:
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!
Yet if you look at the bureaucracy of our country, it’s been expanding continuously even through Republican years…
“in Vietnam we had met a foe who had bested us in the will department under the circumstances in question”
It would be more accurate to say that, in Vietnam, Congressional Democrats knowing snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, by denying continuing aid to South Vietnam after the direct US involvement was essentially over.
Remember that South Vietnam was over-run by a conventional very large scale foreign (North Vietnamese) military invasion. And let’s never forget the horrible consequences for so many South Vietnamese of that North Vietnamese invasion.
If the shameful acts of Congressional Democrats have for ever tainted McNamara’s name, so be it. At least he got to die in his bed.
“I was wrong. Americans are not hard men. Even the CIA has a soft heart. You want so much to achieve good and make the world better, but you do not have the stomach for it. And you do not know your limitations. You are innocence itself. You are the agents of innocence. That is why you make so much mischief…You convince people to put aside their old customs and allegiances and to break the bonds that hold the country together. With your money and your schools and your cigarettes and music, you convince us that we can be like you. But we can’t. And when the real trouble begins, you are gone. And you leave your friends, the ones who trusted you, to die.”
(ellipse mine)
Harsh, too harsh and not true in the broad global what-about-WWII sense.
But a viewpoint, and thus a point. There’s too many Hmong ghosts around to deny it. Innocently vile politicians in both parties –but we know, don’t we, which way the old 80/20 falls.
McNamara was the architect of the Ford Falcon
My family had a Falcon in the early ’60s. My dad used to call it the Foulcar because it spent so much time down at the local garage getting fixed for one problem or another. Doesn’t surprise me to find out that the Falcon was one of McNamara’s projects.
MacNamara and his “Whiz Kids” brought in the use of the idea of game theory to warfare. The idea of game theory is that you demonstrate to the opponent that you can hurt them more than he hurts you then he will give up. This stupid theory of course does not take into account national pride, patriotism and just plain pig headedness.
In game theory one also starts out with the minumum exenditure that would “prove” this. Increase force in small amounts until the other player “enemy” concedes. Unfortunatly this just served to convice the North that they could withstand whatever the US threw at them.
That was until 1972 when Linebacker II was unleashed on North Vietnam. The nearly unlimited targeting then allowed the North’s infrastructure to nearly be destroyed. It is now evident that that nearly defeated North Vietnam in and of itself. So much for incrimentalism. One would think they never looked at airpower in WW II!
MacNamara doesn’t take all the blame though. I have seen pictures of LBJ crawling around on the floor on a map of North Vietnam picking individual targets for US bombers.
Madness.
I’ve always thought of McNamara as a peculiarly American success story. He had the Midas touch in reverse — everything he touched turned to doo-doo — yet he never seemed to suffer for it in terms of income, prestige, or the ways in which normal human beings suffer when they make bad decisions.
The Edsel story is one for the ages. They knew how many Fairlanes they could build in an hour. They Simply upped that by one, and made the auto builders work another one in for free; then, they simply told the workers that every nth car would be an Edsel, so they must re-tool their thinking and follow the Edsel instructions, and then flip back to making Fairlanes until the nth car comes around again. Upper management thought they could get a free car. What they got was a market dud and a public relations nightmare, as Edsels arrived at the dealerships with parts laying in their floorpans, unassembled — and stayed at the dealerships, unpurchased.
The rest, as they say, is history. McNamara was declared a genius anyway, and then ran the Vietnam war. Then the World Bank. After a career like that, what do you do for an encore? Make sows’ ears out of silk purses? Turn wine into water?
He seemed like a decent man. I hope he’s with the Lord, who doesn’t care if one of His people was a failure in life, even a colossal failure, as long as he loved Him and tried to obey His commandments. I’m just glad nobody ever mistook me for a genius and put me in a position to have my worst ideas, or maybe even my best ideas, put into practice on a large scale. Whatever you can say about McNamara, he was a player, not a spectator, and tried to make a positive difference.
The brain boys are back, and smarter than ever. We’re going to apply this in Iran, now. How did we ever manage these past 40 years without the big brained smart guys? I’m sure glad that we have a smart guy returning science to it’s proper place.
RT/39; –that’s a good point –he came from a different time –forty years ago Americans were walking on the moon.
E. Nigma #32:
What I read was that the Army decided to up the required muzzle velocity for the M-16, which “just happened” to require the replacement of the low residue powder used in the original weapon with the same powder used in 7.62 NATO, made by the same company, Olin.
The increased muzzle velocity led to a higher automatic fire cyclic rate and that, combined with the dirtier powder, led to the weapon becoming unreliable. Various fixes were introduced to correct the problem and Eugene Stoner, the AR-15 designer, said they were all stupid and they should just go back to the ammo the gun was designed to use.
In Congressional testimony the source of the requirement for the higher muzzle velocity was never identified. It “just happened” – and happened to benefit a certain contractor that officials were friendly with.
njcommuter: you’re right on the money. I knew Walt Rostow pretty well. He was probably the most intelligent man I’ve ever met. He once told me that he never stopped telling LBJ that the war could be won if the U.S. would fight it the right way.
He was not, however, bitter that LBJ didn’t listen. He also told me that he was well aware that if he was wrong, all he would need to do was say, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, I was wrong,” and resign. It was LBJ who would have to deal with the consequences of failure.
He never knocked LBJ once but I know it must have deeply saddened him to know how many good men died in a war that was lost because we ignored the lessons we so painfully learned only 20-25 years before.
Of course, one also has to consider the issue of domestic treason. I’ve always figured it was a blessing I never got within arm range of George McGovern, the man who said he protested against the Vietnam War because it “was a war we didn’t want America to win.”
Now we’ve got a man sitting in the White House who was from early youth pickled in the virulent America-hatred of the anti-Vietnam war left. Stalin, Brezhnev and Andropov are undoubtedly laughing in Hell someplace thinking they finally won.
PS- I wanted to ask our host Wretchard if he had any thoughts yea or nay regarding setting up Twitter accounts like Linbeck suggested for local meetings. I would certainly defer to our host on this.
Also, I still haven’t been able to locate the Twitter account that Linbeck set up. Has anyone else tried?
44 MTL
I think a gmail account would be a good backup. Not everyone who might be interested in a meetup has Twitter.
Mac, we did not lose that war on the ground. We lost the political war at home.
The same forces where at work here then tha are at work sabotaging the WOT.
Can we stop pretending that the US forces were defeated on the field, please?
Also note that after Nixon came in, the whole battle plan changed and it was working. Let us not internalize the propaganda of the Left, and turn it into our understanding of the history of that war.
Fascinating stuff on here, as usual.
I wonder about the McNamara’s of the world, the “Whiz Kids.” Having never been subjected to the intellectural rigor of an Ivy League education, I somehow ended up not nearly as stupid as I might have been.
What on earth goes on in those places that they take all those high IQ kids and morph them into village idiots? Not just dumb, but crazy stupid ignorant destructive dumb?
It all starts with arrogance: the number one emotion inculcated at the Ivy League.
46. Mongoose: You are so right. We are repeating that in the Middle East. The press daily counting how many lives lost in Iraq (Bush’s war). Don’t hear that about Afganistan (Obama’s war). The press is what is actually winning or loosing a war. They either report favorably or negatively. Then those that watch, are influenced to call their reps and complain (few call to commend), thus the pressure to rule from on high.
If you read Tommy Frank’s book “American Soldier”, you would see that the Iraq war was being run by the Generals, not the politicians. Rumsfeld got caught in the middle so he was the favorite punching bag for the liberal press.
Viet Nam was like Iraq and other wars(War between the States) in that the key to success was finding the right generals. Creighton Abrams tactics won the war on the ground, only to be lost by the exhaustion of the American people which was enhanced by the ideological left and its fellow travelers.
Don’t Want No Rich People `Round Here
Randy Newman
The study suggests setting a uniform international cap on how much carbon dioxide each person could emit in order to limit global emissions; since rich people emit more, they are the ones likely to reach or exceed this cap, whether they live in a rich country or a poor one.
For example, if world leaders agree to keep carbon emissions in 2030 at the same level they are now, no one person’s emissions could exceed 11 tons of carbon each year. That means there would be about a billion “high emitters” in 2030 out of a projected world population of 8.1 billion.
EACH PERSON’S EMISSIONS
Rich people got no reason
Rich people got no reason
Rich people got no reason
To live
I agree with peterike(as well as many others) in that I learn more from all American walks of life than I will ever from the intellectual Ivy League citiots.
Mac might have been honorable and may have done what he believed was right. I don’t know about the details, however, I lay 58,000 men and millions of others’ service related issues squarely on his hands. Generals answer to SecDef – not the other way around as I’ve read many progressive writers talk about. He simply was not smart enough to listen to the men that were in the field. Aside from ‘never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t’ that is the American Fighting Man’s first rule of leadership: ‘properly evaluate what your men are reporting’.
To you Vietnam Vets: I walked in a @!#$am parade after the Gulf in 1991. All of us that had actually studied any history thought ‘we are grateful for those who trained us because we know what that patch on their right shoulder means – we need to listen and apply’
You trained us and I, and my young family, are forever grateful. I would like to think that we passed it on to the current Iraq vets – men and women who are extraordinarily – American!! We honor all of you daily.
Progressives like MacNamara refuse to understand and accept what makes America truly unique – why? I think I know. You?
Dano
Lindstrom, MN
47. peterike:
What on earth goes on in those places that they take all those high IQ kids and morph them into village idiots? Not just dumb, but crazy stupid ignorant destructive dumb?
…..
Philosophy and rhetoric without a thorough grounding in ethics turns people into gibbering idiots. But that’s what elite education is all about.
A remarkable stream of comments. Lots of pain, lots of wisdom, and much else. At this hour of Mr. McNamara’s death I direct your attention to an elegy for President Kennedy:
Limousine, Midnight Blue in which the following lines occur:
“Before you tapped him / for Defense, McNamara ran Ford Motor Co., / and if we’re lucky, he’s got more bold new ideas.”
…as well as these lines:
“Ask not what the tolling bell can do for you, / ask what it matters in eternity. / Consider the dying stars, / how they bring unfinished business to a perfect end.”
For 8 sample poems, each with its own little video, see the site above (http://www.jameyhecht.com/Site/HOME.html). Thank you.
Follow Daniel Ellsberg trajectory on the matter. JFK- LBJ; war=good. If RMN; then war=bad. Time to leak to the press. You will never win a war when the enemy is behind your lines.
Even if we had never had the Vietnam War we would know what McNamera thought of the uniformed military.
McNamera initiated Project 100,000, designed to induct 100,000 mental cases and people who could not pass the entrance exams into the military each year. Think about that! People who could not pass the entrance exams in a Draftee military! And their shortcomings would be kept from their commanders.
McNamera clearly thought that the uniformed military was a job suitable for people who could not do anything else.
John Kerry famously joked that if you were not smart enough to get into an Ivy League college then you might end up in Iraq. But McNamera did not just joke; he worked to make it a reality.
This was in the same timeframe that the Earl Warren Supreme Court ruled that the mentally ill could not be kept in mental institutions intended for just that purpose unless they had committed a crime worthy of incarceration. They were dumped out into the street where even today they make up most of the homeless, commit all sorts of crimes, and are a burden on their families, neighbors and everyone else. Lately they have even have been sent to assisted living centers where they prey upon the elderly.
McNamera’s contempt for the military extended far beyond his choice of weapons systems and micromanagement of bad ideas.
I’m working on locating the Twitter thing.
39. RT: Re: the Edsel, Wikipedia has RSM opposing the line pretty strongly and finally winning the internal battle to scrap it. Of course his “planning” might have been the tactic you described that poisoned it forever. But give him his due on this one little point, even if he lived a Teflon life vis-a-vis everything else.
I’ve always thought of McNamara as a peculiarly American success story. He had the Midas touch in reverse — everything he touched turned to doo-doo — yet he never seemed to suffer for it in terms of income, prestige, or the ways in which normal human beings suffer when they make bad decisions.
Are we sure he’s not related to Jamie Gorelick?
What on earth goes on in those places that they take all those high IQ kids and morph them into village idiots? Not just dumb, but crazy stupid ignorant destructive dumb?
It all starts with arrogance: the number one emotion inculcated at the Ivy League.
Given that Wretchard has an Ivy degree, should I understand that others of us who did time in an Ivy grad school are now personae non gratae at BC? I have my faults, but arrogance isn’t one of them. Nor was it true of my close friends in the department.
60. PA Cat:
What on earth goes on in those places that they take all those high IQ kids and morph them into village idiots? Not just dumb, but crazy stupid ignorant destructive dumb?
It all starts with arrogance: the number one emotion inculcated at the Ivy League.
Given that Wretchard has an Ivy degree, should I understand that others of us who did time in an Ivy grad school are now personae non gratae at BC?
……….
Oh heck no. I got a degree there too. I had a great time too. But man it took me decades to unlearn a lot of the trash that passed for knowledge.
Given that Wretchard has an Ivy degree, should I understand that others of us who did time in an Ivy grad school are now personae non gratae at BC? I have my faults, but arrogance isn’t one of them. Nor was it true of my close friends in the department.
I am sure that many professors would see our illustrious host as a failure of their system, in that he didn’t drink the swill. Of course not everyone comes out of an Ivy as a brain-dead nincompoop like John Kerry. They haven’t yet perfected their indoctrination techniques. The strong minded can still resist.
And of course it matters a lot what you’re in for, whether it’s a hard science or one of the mushier sorts of learning experiences.
I don’t mean to slag off anyone and everyone that’s been through that mill, but it’s pretty clear that the Ivys have produced a significant number of vultures, misanthropes, psychopaths, jackasses and degenerates.
I suppose all universities produce such dreck to some degree, but the Ivy grads find themselves in positions of power far beyond what they deserve. Hence, we find ourselves in a heap of trouble.
Really, if you could pass a law that no Ivy League graduate could have any political office in America, on average would we be worse off or better off?
I know my answer to that question.
61 Charles
Sorry about the tetchiness, as my grandmother would call it. But I get tired of ducking “friendly fire” directed at baby boomers on some threads and Ivy graduates on others. BC is a great place to blow off steam but overgeneralization can be the very devil.
I may have been one of the lucky ones– I didn’t have to take out any mental trash after getting through school. One reason I always valued Fred’s contributions to BC is that his journey from left to right was so different from mine. I’m an example of Gilbert and Sullivan’s lines from Iolanthe;
“That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!”
I must have been a born conservative. Kept reading, kept growing, kept studying the issues, but never found the Left attractive.
I worked as a civil service Physicist for the US Navy for a career that started in 1960. McNamara was my distant boss for many years. During those years, he was omnipresent in our work, philosophy, motivation, bitching, and professional life. As a conservative, I rarely was sympathetic and we fought him at every turn on weapons design and procurement matters. But the only time I came close to meeting him was occasion stranger than I could have possibly imagined.
We had backpacked into Sixty Lakes Basis in the middle of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. This was in the middle ’60s and I was in the best shape of my life and a very good hot shot rock climber. As an afternoon adventure, we decided to have a go at Fin Dome, a somewhat difficult rock tower beside the lakes. We hiked completely around it, looking for a route that could be safely climbed without ropes, as we had brought none on the mostly peak bagging outing. We couldn’t find any route that could be climbed safely without a rope or artificial aid. We did however find a cairn at the bottom of a possible route, a route that might be climbed if you were extremely skillful and a little crazy. There was a note there saying amazingly that the route had just been exuberantly climbed without ropes. One of the climbers was “Robert S. McNamara.” With renewed passion, we really then gave it a shot, but retired in the face of its obvious insanity.
When I returned to work in a few days, I checked with some contacts and found that McNamara had been away from Washington for a few days hiking in the Sierra Nevada. My opinion of him was never the same.
63. PA Cat:
There is an inborn discipline I think that some people have for drinking just so much wine and then they stop. I marvel at that discipline more than I marvel at the bouquet.
Why? I don’t have it. When I had my come to Jesus moment it was because of alcohol. So I have to stay away from the stuff. Heck there was a time in the early 90′s when the marketers first came out with those fancy looking green red and blue creamers for coffee. I couldn’t get enough of them. I put on 25 lbs before I figured out I had a problem.
I’m not sure I understand what it is to be naturally liberal or naturally conservative. But I do understand a bit about what it is to be naturally addictive or naturally disciplined.
In the end we fly on two wings. Discipline and faith. Clip either wing and we go down. But hold the balance and individually and collectively we can go quite high and far.
To McNamara, men, bullets, bombs, aircraft, civilians were all the same; just so many widgets to be acquired, accounted for, and expended on some dry balance sheet under the heading “War”.
May he rot in hell.
I urge everyone to read ” Dereliction of Duty” by H. R. McMaster. You will end up with NO sympathy for McNamara. It’s about the ramp up to the war and reading about his contempt for the military drove me to say “WTF”? a lot.It has a little bit about his career at Ford and how he wanted to change the US military to a more business like model. One of the most eye opening ,informative books I’ve ever read.
McNamara started a war he was not able to win and did not want to win. He caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in a war he did not want to win. Then he blamed it on other and said that it was immoral, unwinnable and illegal. That is a lie. Victory was possible, but he did not want victory. His name will forever be shameful and he will go down in history with the likes of Benedict Arnold.
Alas poor McNamara. He internalized his critics world view and they were completely wrong. The US won the Vietnam War. We signed a peace treaty and went home. After we pulled out, North Vietnam attacked the South, and the US Congress betrayed the South Vietnamese by refusing them any aid or support. A fair criticism of McNamara, and his General William Westmoreland, is that they did not correctly perceive the need for counter insurgency tactics at the beginning of the US engagement. But they were not the villains. The black hats were worn by the American left from Teddy Kennedy to Bill Ayres.
Mongoose,
I’m sorry if I gave the impression we lost the war on the ground. Believe me, I know–as do the North Vietnamese–that we won the war militarily. Where we lost was in the streets and the homes of the U.S., and we lost because we failed to make the country understand why the war needed to be fought and won. We did that against the Axis in WWII. THAT was the lesson we failed to apply.
Halberstam, Cronkite, McGovern, Ayers, Rubin…the list of traitors goes on and on. In WWII they would have been imprisoned if they were lucky; they might have just been beaten to death by an angry mob of outraged regular American citizens.
For the left, there is no wrong unless Americans do it.
One of Mac’s lower points was when he ordered the destruction of the engineering plans of the SR-71 Blackbird, our greatest photo spy plane, once the initial batch of aircraft had been delivered. This meant that no more of that incredible plane could ever be produced. I don’t know if he ever explained his actions — I always hoped that someone at Lockheed defied him and kept a backup set. Mac’s crime was as great as Clinton’s in taking that bird out of service. We could sure use it now!
McNamara was a really good auto company executive. When Kennedy hired him to run the Defense Department, he stayed a really good auto company executive. Unfortunately, the understanding of strategy and its implications eluded McNamara, and he blindly insisted on continuing to implement his program of trying to kill lots of enemy soldiers, thinking that this was the key to victory. Unfortunately for McNamara (and Rush Limbaugh, who’s famous for his “kill people and break things” definition of the army), killing soldiers isn’t the *goal* of the army, it’s one of the things the army does in furtherance of its objectives. Just killing soldiers mindlessly doesn’t really help any. That unfortunately is what we learned in Viet Nam, with a lot of pain for the participants (on both sides) thrown in so that we don’t forget the events quickly.
McNamara wasn’t an evil man, he just wasn’t able to see outside his sphere of influence and experience, and it cost him and the country a lot learning this.
Thank God he is gone!.
To bad he didnt hit the road 50 years ago.
I sure in the hell hope he has to meet every GI he killed for NO GOOD DAMN REASON!
He n lbj should be doing each other in the B*TT for ever.
Without criticising anyone for the decisions made on and in Vietnam, ( I was not there,) I have to say that I visited Ho Chi Minh last week and wonder just why a supposedly communist country is such a threat.
I understand the domino theory, I don’t even necessarily disagree, that is a whole other argument.
The Vietnam I visited may be communist but it seems awfully like a far more capitalist country than the USA just now. Millions of people run small family businesses struggling to make a living. No one appears to be directing them to factories, taking their wages and distributing income or wealth as necessary ( to those who need.) There is no apparent heavy handed big brother micro managing the economy, over taxing the wealth creators, no hint, even, of the suppression of free speech and I heard no one at all grumble about their political masters.
I would say, looking at all the small enterprise going on, that short of a Pol Pot intervention it would be pretty well impossible to create a traditionally communist country in S Vietnam in less than thirty or forty years, even if they wanted to or would tolerate it.
I do not believe in revisionism, currently after the Dresden and Dams debate one of my pet hates, but I am obliged to wonder just what and why was the Vietnam War?
By the way, I loved it there, and even more in Cambodia, What is with that?
Galloway on McNamara Reading an obit with great pleasure
ChirsVJ #74:
I have not been there but I understand that the saying in South Vietnam is:
“Our past is French.”
“Our present is Soviet.”
“Our future is American.”
They have that future because we lost that battle but won the much larger war.
Just a note on Rush Limbaugh. He did not originate the “kill people and break things” definition of the military. That has been around for a long time. It is also true if you add “and convince the enemy you can do that before the war begins.” They do much more of course, but that is the reason that militaries exist. They don’t shoot marshmallows after all.
Re: 58 49er — I see your point, but it could well be the planning, as you say. I suppose I should give McN the benefit of the doubt, however, so I concur that I shot too hastily.
McN apparently spent little time as president of Ford, but a lot of time as a very powerful VP. The links I have found describe him as personally very frugal and opposed to the whole concept of a gussied up quasi-luxury barge like the Edsel — he wanted cars in the Falcon mode, simple little econoboxes. I would point out, however, that when he left Ford to go to work for JFK, they went back to exploring the large car market with considerable success throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The Galaxie and LTD lines cut deeply into the bread and butter of GM, namely the Chevy Impala and bigger Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles.
So he may have been against the Edsel from the beginning, but he was against the concept and no doubt had a hand in the execution. A couple of sources indicate that he slashed the marketing budget and ixnayed the choice of platforms, forcing them to use existing platforms, such as the Fairlane — which was a much better buy.
So the question is, was it a project doomed from the start, and McN did his best to avert disaster? Or was there an internecine struggle and McN did his best to sabotage the effort? After all, it’s one thing to say, “This is a doomed project,” another to say, “This is a doomed project because I will make sure of it.” I don’t know which it was. Regardless of the concept, however, the execution doomed it.
My best friend, who was never as old as my youngest daughter is now, was a better man. I don’t doubt that most of our casualties in Vietnam were better men. My thoughts on this monster would result in comment being deleted, so I will leave them to your imagination.
As another product of the Ivy League, I’ll try to explain why products of the Ivy League over the last have century have been such disasters.
First, you are repeatedly reminded you are the elite and your professors and instructors are the cream of the crop with impressive resumes to prove it. The resumes tend to be self-love Ivy League cross-pollinization. Faculty members are coached in gamesmanship so they know when they take the occasional real world position, they should insulate themselves from any hint of failure.
You learn to craft word-clever critiques of whatever policy is in vogue and being implemented. Since all policies get embroiled in the human element, all policies fail to meet the mark in some way and as a consequence all criticism appears valid. Moreover you develop a vocabulary. You are a walking catalog of the theories of the past century which you can explain with distain. You are therefore a genius with gilt edged educational credentials.
You are also encouraged to plunge into the ethereal areas where results are beyond measurement. You find yourself given responsibility not on the basis of practical results, but on the basis of a “break through” thesis and familiarity with the buzzwords.
The Ivy League graduates word clever folks who gravitate toward areas where practical experience is regarded with skepticism, even distain.
Floggin’ bean counter was what he was.
Michael,
You are correct. In my Code of Conduct lecture. Captain Dick Stratton, who had been a guest in the Hanoi Hilton for over 5 years, asked us what our job was and then made it clear it was not anything in the corporate worded Mission Statement and it was not painting orphanages, it was “To kill people and break things.” His other most memorable line from that talk was “That whore Jane Fonda.”
limpet6 @ 26,
You are correct. McNamara pushed the Navy to build Destroyer Escorts (DE), since reclassified as Frigates (FF). With only one screw the one that gets screwed is you. Reports were that with the wind onsetting they could not get off the pier. The follow on to the Knox class is the Perry. It was built after McNamara was gone but reflects his design legacy. It has two small bow thrusters, had a single SM-1 launcher, since removed, and a worthless Oto Melara 76 mm (3″) gun that has limited arc of fire. Basically these were floating helo platforms that the Navy is getting rid of.
desert rat said…
Reading the WSJ led me to this cut and paste .…. about unbridled intellectualism.
“McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama.
Whatever else distinguishes JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society from Barack Obama’s “New Foundation,” this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems
– the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate.
These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase “the best and the brightest” has been scrubbed of its intended irony.
When McNamara — the “Whiz Kid” from Ford — was first named defense secretary, in December 1960, Time magazine gushed that he “reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Growth). . . . His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, ‘is a beautiful instrument, …
Mr Campbell was not yet being commercially published and Bill Moyers, he had not started at the White House. Together they had not begun preaching the intellectual benefits of secular humanism to the masses.
Exceptionalism had not yet been displaced by equivalency.
I was in ROTC during the Vietnam War. When they taught us the 9 principles of war, I applied them to Vietnam. I concluded that we were violating 8 of the 9 as a matter of policy, or lack thereof.
I also remember reading an explanation by McNamara for why they were building oilburning ships instead of nuclear. Even I could see he was stacking the deck — comparing lifetime costs of a conventional and a nuclear carrier, but the nuke carried twice the number of aircraft while costing only slightly more. However, the upfront cost of the oilburner, which would happen on his watch, was lower, and the recurring costs, which would happen on later watches, were much higher. Nice to know where your priorities are, Mac.
I dropped out of ROTC after 2 years.
Universities do not produce fools. They were fools before they arrived. Some people are apparently fools by nature and some have to learn to be fools. In all cases the foolishness can be reversed and wisdom learned but this is not easy and for many is the work of a lifetime. The basis for foolishness begins in the family with the parents as the single most important source. Of course foolish parents don’t always raise foolish children just as wise parents don’t always raise wise children. But the chain of cause and effect is consistent in the majority of cases.
David Halberstam, describing McNamara’s trips to Saigon, wrote in “The Best and the Brightest” that McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was “a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie.”
In Halberstam’s judgment, McNamara “did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.”
‘don’t forget that it was Col John Boyd who broke out of that system to develop the F-16, and by association, the F-18.’
Yes, and more directly the F-15, and indirectly the A-10 Warthog!
Certainly Boyd must have been skeptical of McNamara’s War. He wrote almost nothing about Vietnam, but I am finding clues here and there as I write my dissertation on how Boyd would have fought the war on terror. Blue skies! — Dan Ford
Who is the fool, the fool, or the fool’s boss –?
Related (oh my achin’ head related).
a new “whiz kid” if ever there was one –he will offer you his understanding of the “cost/benefit ratio” (Yipee!) while behind you he will organize a prey-animal legal-rights movement, which in time will ban hunting, which ban in time will claim your 2nd Amendment.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Sarah Palin says she’s not a quitter, she’s a fighter — but adds that, politically speaking, “if I die, I die. So be it.”
—Sarah is bible literate
Esther4:16
Go, gather together all the Jews who are in Susa, and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will fast as you do. When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.”
Oldpilot 87:
You know, the guys who crunched the numbers and helped Col Boyd develop his energy Manuverability concepts were “whiz kids” of a sort too, but basically different than those associated with McNamera.
In a sense, Boyd’s kids got in the other Whiz Kids six o’clock position and shot them down. The way McNamera wanted to design airplanes went down in flames.
Halberstam’s book about Ford and Nissan recounts how McNamara monitored daily unit production at Ford in order to punish Ford plants that did not meet their daily quota. In response some of the plants created a “bank” of off-the-books completed autos that would be added to or drawn down each day in order to make sure that each day’s production target would be met.
Halberstam suggested that this make-believe success of McNamara in mandating daily production may have presaged his later initiatives in the body-count business.
My academic adviser was a WWII mustang who left the army when McNamara came in because of changes in promotion polcies. He was whip smart and had tons of experience but no college degree. He found a university that admitted him directly into their graduate program and then taught at a college that cared more about what was between his years than the number of intials after his name. He loathed McNamara with a passion as an elitist who had read all the texts and balanced the checkbooks but whose ability to understand the mission and command people was nil.
In some ways McNamara was to the warrior culture what Bauhaus architects were to the urban inner city dwellers they sought to house in effecient modern concrete highrises. The massive disregard for the human element guaranteed disasterous results.
What I am struck by is the restrained tones
of those who comment here as compared to the insane polemics found elsewhere.
It seems that those who paid a direct price
for the McNamara era feel no need to indulge in rhetorical vengeance, especially ex post mortem.
Those who sat to one side and were offended, I tell you, OFFENDED, tend to be a different story.
I am pleased to be able to associate with the former via these pages and elsewhere. The latter shall keep a civil tongue in their heads should they and I meet face-to-face.
I put McNamaras problem down to a personality disorder. Looks like he suffered from a compulstion to torpedo the functional and impose the dysfunctional.
Witness his refusal to even file charges against the joker who tried to murder him. Stands in contrast to how he treated those Generals and others who dissented from his hubris. WE all do that from time to time, but Strange made a career of it, and then went into denial for the rest of his days.
Oh well, I imagine that our friend Fred will
get McNamara off with a Heavenly Horsewhipping
a few few centuries in purgatory.
RWE #76: Recently I met two women from DaNang, locale of my 3rd tour. Way they started teasing me reinforces what you said above.
Also met an older couple. She had worked for VietNam Airline: “Air Nuoc Mam”? inquired I.
Chuckles all around.
He was ARVN officer who had survived 10 years in re-education camps. Before leaving, he wrung my hand and thanked me for trying. Now that was a humbling experience.
Yes, we did manage to win something substantial in spite of the geo-political outcome not to mention our winsome ways. Or was that because of our winsome ways?
Hmmm?
ChrisVJ,
The War in Vietnam was from 1949 onward, about containing China, not North Vietnam. The first Indochina War followed directly on the heels of Korea, which itself directly followed the absorption of Eastern Europe by the Soviets. Off to one side were the Malayan Emergency and the Huk insurgency. It was unquestionably regarded as a proxy war against the West. This is why Robert McNamara et al refused to defeat the North Vietnamese. They did not want to “bring China in” as MacArthur had brought China into the Korean War. Inflicting defeat, in the context of containment, was too risky. What the policymakers were aiming for was a kind of stalemate in which China would quit because it had been ‘punished’ enough. Hence, the gradualism of Vietnam; hence the idea that the war was about “sending signals”. One classic line from the 1960s was that if “Johnson wanted to send a message, why not use Western Union”. Western Union sent telegrams, a popular form of communication at the time.
So, the story goes, LBJ fought a war he had no intention, never had any intention, of winning. To send a signal. To send a message. Now this narrative is a simplification, but it appears to be true in many essential respects. However it may be, this is the strategy that found in Robert Strange McNamara the perfect vessel for its implementation. He was the ultimate bean counter in a world where blood was money and lives were currency to send “signals”.
The first American serviceman to die in Vietnam was killed by Viet Minh in September 26, of 1945 an OSS officer Major Peter Dewey, working with resistence fighters against the Imperial Japanese Empire.
http://lonestar.50megs.com/vietnamvet/casualty.html
Macnamara’s beauty was the M-16 rifle it’s 5.56 x 45 mm bullet made hunting the enemy simple, first ya shot him, since he did not die quickly ya followed his blood trail back to his buddies and called in arclights to kill them.
E-nigma/RWE: Read David Hackworth’s book About Face where he talks about the M-16. He was one of the testers given the AR-15, and it seems it jammed under any and all circumstances, with the jungle just making it worse. In the same book, he tells the story of finding a buried NVA trooper while they were scraping up a berm around a firebase. Hack said to his men, “Watch and see how a REAL infantry weapon works.”, jumped into the hole to grab the buried AK-47 and fired off the whole clip.
I recommend the book to everyone. Hackworth’s experiences in the Army during the time being discussed here are sure to resonate.
@Brutus #98
As much as I liked Hackworth, he was known to embellish things more than a little bit.
Most “jams” in the M16 were caused by magazine failure when the twin ends of the spring slid to one side because the floorplate had no receptacle to stop them.
Other problems were related to a failure to chrome the chamber and by a change in gunpowder after overly-restrictive specifications had mated the weapon to previous propellants.
All of these were a direct result of the incessant micro-managing associated with the McNamara regime. As was maintaining the delicate plastics used in the stocking and the side to side foregrips instead of top-to bottom.
The latter exaberated the one real design weakness in the M16; using a long thin gas tube instead of a piston.
The decision to make the 5.56 round general issue may have been on McNamaras watch or it may have come in the closing days of the Eisenhower Administration. I have learned that the decision to replace the .45ACP pistol with a 9mm (eventually) came on Ike’s watch.
Can’t blame everything on Strange, you know—–as tempting as that may be.
PS: The NVA may have buried a body outside Hack’s perimiter. But they certainly did not deliberately leave a weapon behind.
PPS: While the Kalishnikov was a vast improvement over the PPSH41 and PPSH43 submachine guns common in the WWII Red Army,
neither I nor the late Jeff Cooper (among others) consider it inherently desirable.
Me, if I had my way I believe I would issue our guys a Ruger Mini-14 chambered for the new 6.8mm SP and loaded with a Mannlicher en bloc clip. Then you would have a sturdy weapon with the rapid reload of the Garand,
the weight of the M16, superior handling characteristics and the ballistics of a Winchest 270. FWTW.
lot of folks seem to be coalescing (on the interchangeability principle) around the .308 –in case of that unfortunate situation coming back.
(wonder if this Bobby Horton is kin to Johnny “You Fought All the Way” Horton ?)
What is the obligation of a free country towards its soldiers once the country engages in war? The operational term here is a “free country” as it means that in that country every citizen is entitled to what we normally would call life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but because of the decision of engaging in war, some of them will be deprived of all and some will return with handicaps that will deprive them of the full enjoyment to which they are entitled. Given this circumstance, it is obvious that a free country’s responsibility is to attempt to win the conflict in as short a time as possible, and to use every means at its disposal in order to minimize casualties among its citizens.
But is this what we did in Korea, or in Vietnam, or is it what we are presently doing in the Middle East or Afghanistan? I think not. Instead for political or other reasons, in each of those conflicts we have ignored the rights of those citizens that are placed in harms way, and endowed our enemies and those in the area of conflict with rights which per force should belong to our soldiers. We have done this by enacting rules of engagements that create constraints on our soldiers which are at odd with the responsibility which the country has to them.
I for one firmly believe and declare that the life of one American soldier is priceless, and thus, worth more than the life of any enemy regardless of the place he chooses to fight from or run to. There should not be any sanctuary when an enemy attacks our soldiers, and if collateral damage happens so be it! To think and act otherwise is to discriminate against our soldiers by assigning more value to the enemy or to those caught up in the fog of war than to our fellow citizens, and no one has or should have that right.
If we are not willing to adhere to the above principle, we should not fight a war.
Does anyone know the name of the guy who tried to throw McNamara off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry? Because I would like to buy that Hippie a drink.