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*Phil*
Opinionated Interventionist
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Posted: Sat Jul 11th, 2009 11:21 pm |
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From The Economist
Obituary
Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara, systems analyst and defence secretary; died on July 6th, aged 93
OUANTIFICATION was a word Robert McNamara loved. Numbers could express almost any human activity. Well, perhaps not beauty, honour, love. But certainly the rigours of a youthful trip to sea (19 bed-bug bites on one leg), and the pleasure of climbing Mount Whitney, all 14,495 feet. Five or six bullet points, reinforced when you saw him with vigorous hand-chops, summed up any argument. There were four McNamara steps to changing the thinking of any organisation, including the Pentagon: state an objective, work out how to get there, cost out everything, systematically monitor progress against the plan. There were lessons to be learned from the war in Vietnam, but most of them occurred to him too late.
Things you could count, he said, you ought to count. At the Ford Motor Company, where he was one of the ten "Whiz Kids" brought in in 1946 to shake things up, all the components of each new Chevy (made by GM) would be laid out on a table to inspect. This was not cheating, but competitive evaluation. At the Air Force Office of Statistical Control, where he worked in 1943-45, he counted the firebombing sorties made by the B-29s, at what height, with what percentage hits on target (58% of Yokohama, 51% of Tokyo). System and data together helped win that war. In the Pentagon in 1965, again by applying metrics—targets hit, captives taken, weapons seized, the enemy's body-count—he could tell with equal certainty that America was losing.
The South Vietnamese, America's allies, were cavalier with numbers. Hence his frustration with them. The enemy Vietcong made each person count. After saturation American bombing in 1965, Mr McNamara found they were still getting 200 tons of supplies a day along the Ho Chi Minh trail, and had scattered the country with a secret stash of oil in hundreds of 55-gallon drums. The importance of tiny peasant efforts to the health of a nation struck him again when, from 1968-81, he headed the World Bank, shifting its focus and its money to rural development.
He saw himself as an "enlightened rationalist", and looked the part, with his oiled hair and boffin's glasses and strict attention to time. If business had not called, in the shape of Henry Ford, and if public service had not called later, with John Kennedy asking him to take first Treasury and then Defence, he might have stayed at Harvard teaching economics. Not long after joining Kennedy's White House, he drew the president a little graph of his authority: power on the vertical axis, his putative two terms on the horizontal, with effectiveness a declining line between them. Sadly, his horizontal axis proved too long.
It was often his fate to be saddled with bad numbers. At Ford it was the Edsel, a clunker-car with contrasting tail-fins and unlovely squarish styling, which sold only 68,045 in 1958, its first year, and 47,496 in its second, until he killed it in favour of the smaller, cheaper Falcon. At the Pentagon, where he arrived in i961 with 99 topics for evaluation, he found a budget of $55 billion that had to be trimmed by bringing in systems analysis and five-year plans. He forced cuts in bases and procurement on the outragedjoint chiefs, only to find some money mysteriously restored again.
But the worst numbers appeared from the mid-i96os, in a series of ever-increasing demands from General William Westmoreland in Vietnam: a force of 4o,000 by the end of 1965, 325,000 by July 1966, 41o,000 by that December. Vietcong numbers smoothly kept pace, despite losses estimated at 60,000 a year. Figures for Americans killed in action ran at 400-5oo a month, ever upwards. Mr McNamara, ordered to win the war and clinging to his statistical strategy of attrition, approved the troop increases. But his company-man efficiency was often rattled. At cabinet meetings, especially with the "rough", Lyndon Johnson, he would nervously hitch up his trousers, sigh, bury his head in his hands. It was all unravelling. When in 1968 "Westy" asked for 200,000 more men, he left. He had once been happy to take responsibility for "McNamara's war". But as he admitted later, in penitent memoirs and interviews, he had not understood the variables of war itself.
The limits of reason
At the height of the conflict, he was called a baby-burner. His son marched against him. Jackie Kennedy once pummelled his chest with her fists, crying at him to "stop the slaughter". All this was difficult. He was an instinctive liberal, driving a battered Ford, living in university suburbs, where his recommended book for the reading group was Camus's "L'Etranger". Warmongering was not in his nature.
He was haunted by the thought that amid all the objective-setting and evaluating, the careful counting and the cost-benefit analysis, stood ordinary human beings. They behaved unpredictably. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which he had lived through at cabinet level, "Kennedy was rational. Khrushchev was rational. Castro was rational." Yet between them they had pushed the world to the brink Rationality, he concluded, "will not save us." Perhaps what would were the little quirks that had made him love John Kennedy: the president's sudden capacity to be empathetic, surprised, intuitive, and ready to jettison his most confident calculations.
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Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Sun Jul 12th, 2009 08:34 pm |
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What McNamara had was not rationality but a rational, organized way of going about a task.
Whether the task was worthwhile or not is not a totally "rational" decision, at least as modern-day egocentric Cartesians see it.
A task, an objective come from where? A value system? And where do values systems come from?
McNamara could have just as easily taken those methods of evaluation of procedures and tactics and worked for the North Vietnamese or the Mafia.
Beyond that, lacking the insight of Edward Luttwak in his book on the Roman Empire, called The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire.
I was the personal trainer of an Italian math professor who had taught at Rutgers in New Jersey and when I expressed worry about the Warsaw Pact forces, he told me not to worry and gave me that book to read.
Geez, what a book!
What you learn is stuff such as the Roman roads had 12 layers to support the seige machines that they moved to areas in rebellion on those roads, and, without the 12 layers, the siege machine would have sunk into the spring mud, even on the road.
The entire Roman army was designed to support the infantry. They moved about 7 or 9 miles a day, travelling half a day, and using the other half to reconstruct their essentially inpenetrable camp, where they could rest, eat breakfast and relax.
When they arrived, the infantry deprived you of food, clothing and shelter. Faced with death, you surrendered.
Infantry were Romans or Italian allies, people completely trustworthy. Cavalry might be Numidian, but they didn't really guarantee victory.
The problem is to project force. The borders are the limits on your capacity to project force. Germans could just retreat into the woods and resupply themselves. You could not really defeat them.
Same with Palestine. One Roman legion could easily threaten a country and client states made it easy to rule, but when the Herod line screwed up too much, the Romans decided to directly administer Palestine and that was expensive. The legion was then tied down to one area, instead of economically threatening any number of states in the region.
After getting the vision, i got it right away why we couldn't win in Vietnam and why the Russian couldn't win in Afghanistan.
How come Robert McNamara could not get it? Did he fail to study history? Did he think like a nerd, and that would be that whoever had the better organized project won?
The French in Indochina, the Russians in Afghanistan and we in Vietnam failed to gras these essential and very rational aspects of war and peace.
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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