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Robert McNamara dead at 93

On hearing of McNamara's death, I was reminded of this poem by Sigfried Sassoon.

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap,"
I'd say—"I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.
 
He was an interesting character in history. He was CEO of Ford prior to his stint in the Kennedy and Johnson administration.
 
One of my professors was McNamara's son in law. I was hesitant to tell Dad that I (by a roundabout path) own a small bookshelf once owned by Bob McNamara.

This same professor would pass around gratis copies of whichever book McNamara had written lately, including Fog of War. I gave a copy to Dad and his best friend (both men are decorated Vietnam Veterans). Said friend, who is also a distinguished academic, upon receiving the book, thanked me, then said "but **** on him. **** on him in big long squirts."

McNamara, LBJ, and Jane Fonda are the only people to generate such vitriol by my father or his friend.

I'll close with a quote from McNamara, during the Vietnam conflict: "Every quantitative measure we have shows we are winning this war."
 
He was CEO of Ford prior to his stint in the Kennedy and Johnson administration.

I'll close with a quote from McNamara, during the Vietnam conflict: "Every quantitative measure we have shows we are winning this war."

These two things are directly linked. He brought an MBA/CEO mindset to trying to run a war so looked at everything as if they were widgets.
 
These two things are directly linked. He brought an MBA/CEO mindset to trying to run a war so looked at everything as if they were widgets.

Yep -- JFK wanted "the smartest guys in the room" and all those statistics/numbers jockeys*, but nobody tempered that academic knowledge with guys who had combat experience -- I never understood why JFK (who at least had combat experience in the Navy) let these guys run the show.

This disparity between the academic and the pragmatic has affected my academic attitudes; I'm also fortunate that, in the same vein, my wife is doing something similar: she's spending a year on a Congressional staff so she can see how the sausage is made, before returning to a professor's office to teach the theory of the US government.


*disclaimer: I'm a statistics/numbers jockey.
 
These two things are directly linked. He brought an MBA/CEO mindset to trying to run a war so looked at everything as if they were widgets.

Yep -- JFK wanted "the smartest guys in the room" and all those statistics/numbers jockeys*, but nobody tempered that academic knowledge with guys who had combat experience -- I never understood why JFK (who at least had combat experience in the Navy) let these guys run the show. . . .

That reminds me of what I understand to be a quotation from George Orwell, that some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.
 
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Yep -- JFK wanted "the smartest guys in the room" and all those statistics/numbers jockeys*, but nobody tempered that academic knowledge with guys who had combat experience -- I never understood why JFK (who at least had combat experience in the Navy) let these guys run the show.

To be fair Westmoreland had a fair amount of combat experience and was as responsible as the DOD folks for what was going on.
 
To be fair Westmoreland had a fair amount of combat experience and was as responsible as the DOD folks for what was going on.

Having combat experience is, of course, no guarantee. It's often said that, during WWI, the German General Staff referred to the British infantry as lions led by donkeys. And yet, many of those donkeys had been pulling in their traces for a good many years in colonial wars. They still led thousands to their deaths. Was it despite or because of their experience? Unfortunately, the mechanisms that allowed so many mediocre or incompetent leaders to rise to positions of power and authority seem to keep functioning, from antiquity to the present. After that, it's up to ordinary people to pay the butcher's bill and replenish the treasury.
 
One of my professors was McNamara's son in law. I was hesitant to tell Dad that I (by a roundabout path) own a small bookshelf once owned by Bob McNamara.

This same professor would pass around gratis copies of whichever book McNamara had written lately, including Fog of War. I gave a copy to Dad and his best friend (both men are decorated Vietnam Veterans). Said friend, who is also a distinguished academic, upon receiving the book, thanked me, then said "but **** on him. **** on him in big long squirts."

McNamara, LBJ, and Jane Fonda are the only people to generate such vitriol by my father or his friend.

I'll close with a quote from McNamara, during the Vietnam conflict: "Every quantitative measure we have shows we are winning this war."
But didn't macca lose his position as SD because he pushed to withdraw from vietnam, well before it got to it's worst?
 
There's a long and interesting obituary in today's New York Times, FYI. I assume it's available on the website.
 
But didn't macca lose his position as SD because he pushed to withdraw from vietnam, well before it got to it's worst?

I think he didn't quit as Secretary of Defense until the war was already at a nadir (or zenith, depending on how you look at a war's intensity and US involvement), but McNamara oversaw a huge increase in "advisors" and then combat personnel (up to half a million GIs before he left). At some point a few years before he left, he did, indeed, conclude that the war couldn't be won as the US wanted, or at least, as the US was willing to fight such a war. I think he bears the responsibility for the "quagmire", even if -- too late -- he concluded that the only way forward was out of South Vietnam. McNamara oversaw a huge US commitment to fighting in Vietnam from 1963 to early 1968. Johnson shares a lot of blame here, and more -- he micromanaged field commanders, even picking some targets, rather than letting the military prosecute the war.
 
On hearing of McNamara's death, I was reminded of this poem by Sigfried Sassoon.

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap,"
I'd say—"I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.


Sums my feelings up perfectly.
 
I think McNamara's story is more a cautionary one - warnng us of the limits of military power, and how even the best of intentions can go dreadfully wrong. McNamara may certainly have had his faults, but he was a highly skilled organizer who dedicated a large portion of his life to public service.

Starting in WWII, it was McNamara and his team of statistical analysts who transformed the B-29 raids on Japan from a costly disaster into a war-winning strategy. (The morality of fireboming Japanese cities, with the ensuing civilian deathtoll, I'll leave for discussion elsewhere.)

As an executive at Ford he helped reorganize the firm, turning it from a basically 19th-century autocracy in the wake of 40 years of Henry Ford's increasingly manic rule, into a modern functional corporation.

In his role as Secretary of Defense, he helped changed the formation of the US armed services from the "massive retaliation" mode of the Eisenhower years - into the flexible warfighting machine it is today. The fact that the US Government has a range of military options - from pinpoint bomb or missile attacks; small special forces raids; teams of military advisors; all the way to today's highly mobile, highly professional air/sea/land forces - is, in no small part, a legacy of the changes McNamara started.

We may scoff at McNamara's RAND corporation studies, with the daily computer printouts of X's and O's supposedly showing commanders if they were winning or losing in Vietnam. But it was an attempt to create order out of the inevitable chaos that is war. For good reason McNamara had learned to distrust "gut" feelings from military commanders.

The US would have lost in Vietnam no matter what McNamara had done. If he had stood up in 1965 and told Lyndon Johnson the war couldn't be won he would have been replaced by someone who said differently.
 
I think McNamara's story is more a cautionary one - warnng us of the limits of military power, and how even the best of intentions can go dreadfully wrong. McNamara may certainly have had his faults, but he was a highly skilled organizer who dedicated a large portion of his life to public service.

Starting in WWII, it was McNamara and his team of statistical analysts who transformed the B-29 raids on Japan from a costly disaster into a war-winning strategy. (The morality of fireboming Japanese cities, with the ensuing civilian deathtoll, I'll leave for discussion elsewhere.)

As an executive at Ford he helped reorganize the firm, turning it from a basically 19th-century autocracy in the wake of 40 years of Henry Ford's increasingly manic rule, into a modern functional corporation.

In his role as Secretary of Defense, he helped changed the formation of the US armed services from the "massive retaliation" mode of the Eisenhower years - into the flexible warfighting machine it is today. The fact that the US Government has a range of military options - from pinpoint bomb or missile attacks; small special forces raids; teams of military advisors; all the way to today's highly mobile, highly professional air/sea/land forces - is, in no small part, a legacy of the changes McNamara started.

We may scoff at McNamara's RAND corporation studies, with the daily computer printouts of X's and O's supposedly showing commanders if they were winning or losing in Vietnam. But it was an attempt to create order out of the inevitable chaos that is war. For good reason McNamara had learned to distrust "gut" feelings from military commanders.

The US would have lost in Vietnam no matter what McNamara had done. If he had stood up in 1965 and told Lyndon Johnson the war couldn't be won he would have been replaced by someone who said differently.

Nicely put. I tend to agree with you, though I wouldn't give him as much credit for transforming the military -- they had learned a lot from both WWII and Korea, and the field commanders learn new tactics during war that mandate/affect long-term strategy. For instance, WWII saw the creation of Regimental Combat Teams because of the difficulty of coordinating large (division-level) assets, and the desire for flexibility. The idea continued into Korea. For a while, the concept lay dormant because of improvements in radio communications and other factors (perhaps a lack of need for so much armor in Vietnam?) but now we see a return to the same idea, the Brigade Combat Team. I know McNamara was a capable and even visionary person, but man he called it really wrong about Vietnam. I won't lay 58,000 dead at his feet either (neither the 2.5-3.5 million Vietnamese who died), but a late-in-life apology for his mistakes didn't soften attitudes towards him, in my experience.

I suppose as the years roll on it will be interesting to see how "History" judges him.
 
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Nicely put. I tend to agree with you, though I wouldn't give him as much credit for transforming the military...

My understanding is that the Kennedy administration had wanted to separate the military's conventional warfighting capability from the nation's ability to fight a massive nuclear war.

In the 1950's, in the wake of the Korean War, army divisions (to cite one example) had been organized into so-called "Pentomic" divisions, each with five (hence the name) battle groups commanded by a Colonel. Attached to some divisions was also a tactical nuclear artillery (rocket or tube) unit.

In practice these divisions were found to be impractical: Five battle groups, plus artillery and supply formations, were too many for the division commander and staff to keep track of - and the nuclear artillery made the divisions unsuitable for all except a very few scenarios.

"Pentomic" Divisions were eventually scrapped - the army leadership had wanted to do this, but it required the support and approval of McNamara as Sec. Def. to accomplish this. Obviously, the Army has gone through many organizational changes since this time. But I feel that McNamara's insistence of a scientific, studied, "systems analysis" -type approach has helped pave the way for the superb military implement the US has today.
 
My understanding is that the Kennedy administration had wanted to separate the military's conventional warfighting capability from the nation's ability to fight a massive nuclear war.

In the 1950's, in the wake of the Korean War, army divisions (to cite one example) had been organized into so-called "Pentomic" divisions, each with five (hence the name) battle groups commanded by a Colonel. Attached to some divisions was also a tactical nuclear artillery (rocket or tube) unit.

In practice these divisions were found to be impractical: Five battle groups, plus artillery and supply formations, were too many for the division commander and staff to keep track of - and the nuclear artillery made the divisions unsuitable for all except a very few scenarios.

"Pentomic" Divisions were eventually scrapped - the army leadership had wanted to do this, but it required the support and approval of McNamara as Sec. Def. to accomplish this. Obviously, the Army has gone through many organizational changes since this time. But I feel that McNamara's insistence of a scientific, studied, "systems analysis" -type approach has helped pave the way for the superb military implement the US has today.

I suppose it is difficult to overestimate the reliance upon, and fascination with, the destructive power of the atomic weapons during the 1950s-- the air force quit putting cannons on their fighter craft after Korea because it was assumed they'd all be running bomber intercept duties (cue the Vietnamese MIGs, but I digress). My father's unit in Germany had nuclear demolitions to destroy important bridges (near the Fulda Gap) as late as the early 1970s.

Again, I do agree with your evaluation of McNamara as a good analyst, and that he put his position as SecDef to good use influencing the re-shaping the armed forces.

I think McNamara's story is more a cautionary one - warnng us of the limits of military power, and how even the best of intentions can go dreadfully wrong. McNamara may certainly have had his faults, but he was a highly skilled organizer who dedicated a large portion of his life to public service.

I think this statement is a great summary.
 
Starting in WWII, it was McNamara and his team of statistical analysts who transformed the B-29 raids on Japan from a costly disaster into a war-winning strategy. (The morality of fireboming Japanese cities, with the ensuing civilian deathtoll, I'll leave for discussion elsewhere.)

Well, in The Fog of War, McNamara himself says that if US had lost the war he'd have been tried as a war criminal.
 
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