Robert McNamara Dies. Question for the forum.

[warhawke]

R. S. McNamara was the kind of "Intellectual" who can do wonderful things in an academic setting but is incapable of tying his own shoes. He did do some intelligent things, but he did them without understanding how it effected the military systems overall.

One of the things he found when he became the Sec. Def. was that each service had different everything. Shoes, fatigues, planes, band instruments, all kinds of stuff. So he implemented a policy to streamline supply. The services had to have the same basic equipment and use the same vendors. Instead of half a dozen different footwear contracts all the services had to buy and issue the same boots, fine so far.

However, when it came to fighter planes, the Navy, Air Force and Marines all had different requirements. The Navy needed twin-engined fighters that could operate off of carriers and they needed to outclass enemy land-based fighters (better avionics, more power, etc.) and can do multiple jobs because a carrier only has so much space. The Air Force OTOH, uses air-bases so space is not as big a concern, the Air Force wanted cheaper dedicated units (Fighter, ground attack, bombers, interceptors, etc) so they could put more planes in the air. The Marines needed a dedicated ground attack/close support aircraft which had the ability to defend itself because the Marines aircraft are for supporting the ground troops not chasing the other guys around and establishing air superiority. 3 different missions, but McNamara wanted 1 plane, so everybody got the F-4, which was a good aircraft but it was a 'one-size-fits-all' design that didn't anything particularly well. It was a decent fighter, until it ran out of missiles as it had no gun. It did ground attack pretty well, but not as well as a plane designed for it, and it was too fast for really good close support (although many pilots did a yeomans work with it none the less).

McNamara didn't understand the problem and frankly, didn't care. He decided that the US could by thousands of F-4's, make everybody use them and save a fortune but reducing the cost of spare parts and training. he priced the trees and decided that the forest didn't matter.

the M-16 debacle was more of the same plus. The Air Force had a requirement for a new rifle as far back as 1956 (IIRC) for a rifle that had particular characteristics;
1) Effective range of 300meters  
2) Flat shooting  
3) More accurate than current service weapons
4) Size and weight comparable to the M-1 Carbine
5) Minimal penetration of hard targets

Number 5 was the kicker! The Air Force had learned the lesson from WWII that if the baddies get in amongst your aircraft and equipment your troops can do as much or more trying to defend them damage than the enemy will do trying to destroy them. The Air Force wanted something that would MINIMIZE the damage if rounds struck the aircraft or missiles or radar systems or whatever. The AR-15 and it's .223 Remington ammunition was just the thing for this as the bullets would tend to break up hitting the skin of the planes and the fragments were unlikely to do much damage to the internals. The fact that the AR-15 was known to be less robust than the M-1 or other battle rifles, or that the killing power of the weapon was reduced did not matter much since, at an airbase, armorers, spare parts and bunkers full of ammo are readily available.

McNamara saw the AR-15 at a firepower demonstration at an Air Force base (Lackland?) and thought it was neat. He was a big fan of high-technology and thought that the aluminum and plastic weapon was just that. At the same time the M-14 was having huge problems, it was more expensive than had been estimated, and was proving to be less useful than previously believed (remember it was supposed to replace the M-1, the M-3 submachinegun and the BAR). McNamara had Cyrus Vance (then Sec. Army) do further testing on the AR-15 and instead of telling him it was not what the Army and Marines needed, and exactly why, the brass simply fudged the tests and did everything in their power to fail the weapon, just as they had done in the late '50's. McNamara was tired of the services bucking him and thought that the fight over the AR was just more of the same. In 1963 he shut down Springfield armory and ordered the services to adopt the AR as is.
 

[warhawke]

cont. . .

McNamara saw everything in terms of numbers and systems, the whys and wherefores didn't matter. The M-16 was a weapon that fired bullets so it must be just like an M-14, the Air Force thought the AR was just what they needed so it must be just what everybody needed.

Likewise, if North Vietnam had 'X' number of troops and we could kill 'Y' then we would win. So all we had to do is figure out how much it would cost us to kill 'Y' and we would know what it took to win. Well, "Men are not potatoes", and systems analysis has little to do with the battlefield. McNamara "Knew" he was smarter than any soldier, and he hired a bunch of "Whizkids" that he "Knew" were just as smart as he was. He laid out his grand plans and pushed for things he didn't understand.

Another example. NASA "Cooperates" with the military and the Air Force has their own launch systems. In the late '60's a group of engineers went to McNamara with a plan. Instead of building rocket motors for space systems to scientific specs (one one millionth of an inch .0000001) they would make them to engineering specs (one thirty seconds of an inch .32). They showed a design for a rocket motor as large as the one on a Saturn 5 but which cost $150,000 (about 1/10th the cost). McNamara threw them out, explaining that the space program was there to impress the world with American technological superiority, not to build some kind of "Space Truck" to put things in orbit cheaply. American space vehicles have suffered from this mentality ever since.

The list of his sins goes on. McNamara was an elitist and an intellectual, he never understood the real world and the real people in it. He got millions killed pursuing his vision of how things "Should" work instead of attempting to find out how things really work. He didn't think he needed to. He never apologized for being wrong, he didn't think he was, it was the rest of the universes fault for not conforming to the ideal he envisioned. In later life he wondered around pontificating and pointing fingers at the rest of the world for his failures and adding insult to the injuries he inflicted.

That is why I hate the bastard.         

[twyacht]

He got millions killed pursuing his vision of how things "Should" work instead of attempting to find out how things really work. He didn't think he needed to. He never apologized for being wrong, he didn't think he was, it was the rest of the universes fault for not conforming to the ideal he envisioned. In later life he wondered around pontificating and pointing fingers at the rest of the world for his failures and adding insult to the injuries he inflicted.

That is why I hate the bastard.   

Thank you warhawke. The level of effectiveness, over a prolonged conflict, reveals the character of a person, and the span of time
where things went from bad to worse with McNamara shows that.

Hindsight being 20/20, would his own admission of a "total mistake" be worthy of anything? Did he "get it" after it was too late?

Thanks again,

[tombogan03884]

Thank you TomB. this is where my point is going, and I appreciate the clarification.

History can be a double edged sword,written by biased people. We have tributes to Teddy Roosevelt at Sam Hill, but mistakes were made along the way that cost lives.

"Remember the Maine" was good for the public morale, but many troops died from faulty arms, equip. lack of planning, "cheapskates", and flat out idiots.

The whole political machine is a problem when the military is involved to do what they do best. No POTUS has just unleashed the military without "strings". The strings have become more "web-like" to this day, starting big time in the days of McNamara.

Politically correct warfare spells failure.

Even the political monster effected Patton, cause he wanted to keep kicking ass, MacArthur also wanted to keep going into the Korean and Vietnamese peninsula in 1945, instead just "faded away".

Politics "f" ed things up. Not the commanders or soldiers that actually had to carry out the orders. THAT in and of itself is the problem.

and IMHO, relating back to history and McNamara, is where it all went wrong...

Thanks again TomB. as you are the consumate historian,  good to have the "record" is straight without any bovine scatology...

The sad part of it, (except for the Cuban revolutionaries ) Was that the USS Maine was not destroyed by the Spanish or Cubans, but by her own designers and bad luck. Coal under certain circumstances can spontaneously combust, this was well known at the time and there were many documented cases of this happening aboard ships. The designers of the Maine placed an ammo magazine ( Bagged black powder, an explosive, unlike Smokeless powder which just burns really fast) so that it shared a bulkhead (wall) with a coal bunker. Research done since the end of the war, especially in the last couple of decades has proven fairly conclusively that an undetected fire in the coal bunker caused the magazine to blow up.

[Big Frank]

Google "mcnamara apologizes" and you'll find out that he did finally apologize for the Vietnam war. I think it wasn't until 1995 but it's better late than never.

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