Robert McNamara: he fought a war of attrition
The news comes today that Robert McNamara, famous as Kennedy and then Johnson’s Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 93.
Those of us who are of a certain age remember him well, as one of those responsible for what I have since termed “the first act” (that is, the poorly run, poorly conceived, Johnson portion) of the Vietnam War. McNamara lived to later repudiate the war and his part in it, in a series of mea culpas that made the once-reviled man somewhat more popular among the antiwar Left, at least as an object lesson in repentance.
McNamara’s public life was defined by his failure on the war. But if he’d never been connected with Vietnam, he probably would have been considered a resounding success. He certainly was effective in his early years as a businessman with Ford; would that he’d stayed there. But Kennedy promoted him to the Cabinet (he was also offered Treasury—a post for which he’d have been far better suited—but unfortunately he turned that down) and he was kept on as Johnson’s Defense Secretary after the Kennedy assassination.
McNamara had served in World War II and done statistical analysis of bombers’ effectiveness, but his major expertise was in business. He used that business acumen to implement general changes in defense policy and weapons and organizational matters in the armed forces. But, faced with Vietnam, he met his match (or rather, mismatch), coming up with the idea of a deadly and misguided numbers game:
McNamara put in place a statistical strategy for victory in Vietnam. He concluded that there were a limited number of Viet Cong fighters in Vietnam and that a war of attrition would destroy them. He applied metrics (body counts) to determine how close to success his plan was.
I’m no military expert, and hindsight is 20/20, but on the face of it this makes no sense, when faced with a tenacious enemy motivated by an extreme and deeply held ideology and the support and largesse of Communist China. Quite early on, McNamara became convinced that the war was unwinnable, and he left office in 1968. Despite the fact that under Westmoreland’s successor General Creighton Abrams, the “second act” of Vietnam (see this and this) reversed some of McNamara’s errors, the attitude of the public and especially the press was set: it was McNamara’s war, and it could not be won.
The career of McNamara is a cautionary tale, wherein a man of great achievement and intelligence applied that brainpower to an area he did not sufficiently understand, and to which he was temperamentally unsuited. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to make up for it. I hope he’s found his peace at last.
I think your last paragraph would apply to Herbert Hoover as well. High intelligence in itself is but one trait among many that have to be balanced against the task at hand. I can’t imagine Einstein leading an army or founding a business. There is a reason academics are a protected species.
Neo,
It almost seems as if you don’t think “on the job training” is a good idea….lol.
Vietnam, our imperialistic war, which is not the fault of the young men who fought — JFK (Johnson inherited this mess) Nixon and Kissinger were the culprits in this war.
I’m happy that America, over the new millennium’s first decade, can demonstrate and show that we have rounded the corner and disengaged from this sort of past … it’s a source of immense pride.
Remember that JFK was elected on the “Missle Gap” with Vietnam just a minor issue. Kennedy knew we were ahead of the Russians on ICBMs but he chose to portray it as them well ahead. The whole strategic nuclear issue was one to be managed by the numbers. The cost was astounding to meet the goals set by JFK. McNamara was well suited to help keep those cost tolerable. He screwed up with things like the F111 bomber later.
Vietnam was not a numbers game and none of the leadership was well suited for this.
nyomythus: you have given yourself an apt name. You have bought the myth of the Vietnam War hook, line, and sinker.
I will not rehash it here. But go to the right sidebar and click on the category “Vietnam” and start reading.
As I have previously mentioned, I was a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War. The genocide in Cambodia convinced me of the error of my ways.
If fighting to prevent the horror of Communism from being imposed on a people is called “Imperialism,” so be it. I grew up with too many refugees from the Iron Curtain and from Hitler to adopt a sanguine view of those ideologies.
Another interesting point regarding Vietnam is that, toward the end, the military adopted an early version of “Clear, Hold, Build.” It was too late, of course, the home front was already lost. Clausewitz’s trinity in action.
“JFK (Johnson inherited this mess) Nixon and Kissinger were the culprits in this war.”
That children is exhibit A on how the Left couldn’t pass the Dummies guide to history.
Vietnam, our imperialistic war,
nyomythus — I’m not sure who the “we” is behind that “our” but I don’t see myself there and I suspect many others who post here don’t either.
You used “our” as in “kiss our ass” in the latest Palin topic too. I wasn’t fond of that one either.
All these years he was like a ghost, but alive. Now the ghost is dead.
McNamara personified the contemporary businessmens’ rather pathetic attempt to ape the sciences by trying quanitate things, in the business context by using “metrics” of little or no value.
I once was told that accountants prefer a number that is firm, albeit meaningless (e.g., historical price) over one that is soft, but relevant (e.g., present value).
McNamara was the high priest of that intellectually rather down-at-heel tendency. Can’t factor in morale, fighting spirit, motivation, or other intangibles? No problem – ignore them. Madness.
Btw, it seems my prayers have been answered, and we have indeed been blessed with a higher quality apparatchik.
Greetings:
Back in my Army days, my favorite Platoon Sergeant told me the following:
There’s a statue of an infantryman with his back pack and bayoneted weapon in the infantry training center at Fort Dix, NJ. The name of the statue is “The Ultimate Weapon.” In this business, you don’t have nothin’ till some 20 year old with a long rifle tells you you have it.
Nyomythus: Nonsense. Everybody knows the Spanish-American War was “our imperialistic war.”
OB, who is this “higher quality apparatchik” of whom you speak? It can’t be nyomythus; he’s been around for a while, and I think he is riding his own hobby horse, not one that belongs to someone else.
Poor McNamara suffered from his guilt in this life as few public figures have. I wonder whether this Eagle Scout was ever “inner-directed,” as they call it. Did he always crave approval from the Establishment? And when the Establishment had a crack-up over Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Cold War, who was left to grant absolution?
Poor man.
Oblio, I stand corrected.
McNamara was a Harvard grad. I reminded of your recent article about Palin saying that an education at an elite institution may mean nothing more than you are book smart.
His decision was to order the recall of the carrier planes going to the rescue of the USS Liberty in 1967, because he was afraid of US forces getting into a fight with the USSR needs to be remembered too. It marked a new period of Soviet adventurousness that might of cost us the Cold War. The saw extreme cowardness and took advantage of it.
McNamara never got it right, not as SecDef nor in the decades after.
Some relevant throughts from Peter Drucker on abstraction vs experience, in business and government: management mentalities
McNamara lived to later repudiate the war and his part in it, in a series of mea culpas that made the once-reviled man somewhat more popular among the antiwar Left, at least as an object lesson in repentance.
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I am wondering if the same may occur eventurally with Cheney or Bush.
onomar:
Only if they are a damned fools, which I don’t think they are.
In terms of repentance: what about Obama, who in January 2007 proposed the withdrawal of US combat troops by March 2008. That would have stopped the Surge dead in its tracks, and handed Iraq over to Al Qaeda. If Obama had any balls he would express repentance over THAT.
When you fight a war of attrition–all wars are wars of attrition at bottom–you ought to arrange so that the kill ratio is hugely, monstrously, incredibly one-sided.
If you have to, you have to trade down one for one, say. But it’s infinitely better to kill a hundred for one of your own. A thousand is better still.
When i got home from Infantry OCS in 69, I was trying to explain no-fire zones, restricted fire zones, restrictions on artillery and air support, to my father, who’d been an Infantry officer in the ETO. Finally, he snapped, “What traitors made those up?” Johnson and McNamara. I don’t think he ever quite believed it because he didn’t think the US government would do such things to its soldiers.
Read Jack Broughton, “Thud Ridge” and “Going Downtown” about the air war in SEA. The restrictions not only made the pilots’ job much more dangerous, the US made sure the other side knew what they were. So the defenses against our guys could be concentrated where our guys were going to be, not wasted spread around defending all those military targets which were off limits because some pencil-neck sillyvilians were getting their rocks off playing target planner in the basement of the White House.
Nope. I hope the bastard burns in hell forever.
I’ve never understood the whole “Nixons War” – I can at least buy JFK’s but I think it is clear he never intended what came (and given his military career would have been irate at the idea of a war of attrition and escalation). Nixon finally fought for a bit while pulling troops out – as he promised he would do – yet gets the blame for the whole escalation thing.
There were a few things that really cemented my idea that the left was crazy. One of them was Vietnam. I grew up (born in 1975) hearing all this stuff about “Nixon’s War”, how horrid it was, etc. Then, in school, I slowly learned how horrid what happened there was (and now know some of that was lies too and the true horror was hidden as it was institutional, but the epiphany had already occurred so that was just more dung to pile on the heap) – OK, nice reinforcement there. Yet other things *really* didn’t jive – how could the troop buildup, deaths/casualties, all the bad stuff not only escalate but peak under Johnson term yet be Nixon’s fault? Further as I studies tactics and strategy I couldn’t help but notice how … badly Johnson and McNamara prosecuted the war. In short I noted they took a kernel of truth and warped it to such an extent that it was intelligible. On top of that you *only* got that real truth if you noted something that didn’t add up and went back to the original sources (which, at the time, was hard to do).
It was one of three things that really cemented my views on the hard left and the soft liberals. The others were expecting something *really* bad from Watergate and being .. underwhelmed (it was so bad in fact that it wasn’t until High school that we were even told what it was – which by that point the scandals coming out of Washington were MUCH worse – we had been told Nixon tried to shut the country down and take over everything and, well, he recorded campaign strategy meetings and tried to cover it up) and the other was watching C-span and noting how different the live broadcast was from the reporting the next day. Indeed, I distinctly recall during the “Republicans shutting down the govt” of the mid 90’s watching Kennedy give a speech for the Democratic party refusing to give anything at all and the republicans had to do all they wanted or face their wrath. The next day was “republicans refuse to negotiate”. Turns out – yep that was true and the R’s faced the wrath and *still* to this day have many who are more recently conservative rant about that shutdown.
Much of what we see today is mild compared to then, they didn’t even have Fox News let alone blogs – they are largely confused today because what they are doing is simple/small compared to then. Sadly instead of this making more people seek truth it just made then become nihilistic. The two political parties have followed suit as no one that truly cares and truly tries is believed and taking a stand usually results in a myriad of attacks. I had thought Palin may be one that rises above it (as to a large extent Reagan did) but am disappointed by her resignation. I suppose the hunt is still on and hopefully we will find the person for the voting revolution before a bloody one is our only choice.
Perhaps McNamara believed he had atoned for his errors with his public mea culpas, but the tenor of the comments in the NYT obituary belie that. I don’t think I have ever read a nastier collection of send offs to a living person, much less a dead one. It is instructive of the type of person who buys the political philosophy of the paper, I guess, so why should it surprise me? Only because of the vitriol expressed. I recall right after Molly Ivins died I posted a comment on a conservative blog that was not only uncomplimentary, it was downright cruel. I was blocked from posting there again, as I should have been.
May God, in his infinite love, have mercy on the soul of the man, who, with LBJ, was responsible for the death of many thousands of American soldiers, Marine, airmen, & sailors. The vietnam war could have been won by 1966. It is criminal to send our young men & women to fight “political” wars that can not be won. General Lemay said it best, and I paraphrase “kill the enemy and keep killing them and then kill them some more until they finally surrender. This is the way to win.
I’m a little surprised no one on this thread has mentioned McNamera’s flamboyant filmed mea culpa The Fog of War. It’s very painful viewing for a variety of reasons, but the worst for me was how this bright man just stumbled into an incredibly important job that he had no business accepting. Kennedy no doubt thought he was making a grand gesture by offering it, but the film — rather unintentionally, I think — points out that we was hopelessly out of his depth. Though it’s largely an anti-war polemic, I’m weirdly grateful to it for that. It explains almost everything you need to know about how clueless an ex-Ford executive was in prosecuting a modern war.
Rest in peace, Mac. You taught us that quantitative tools cannot win a war. ‘Hearts and minds’, you know — hey, remember those days?
When I was young, I totally agreed with all the anti-war sentiment. Mac, Kissenger, LBJ, Nixon — all war pigs! (ah, more 60’s nostalgia!) But in my old age, I am having second thoughts. The average southerner in Vietnam was probably not in favor of a takeover by the VC and the northerners.
But as in Iraq, the locals didn’t like Americans running the place either. In the end, they decided that they liked a US-dominated military government less than an NVN-dominated military government. But yes, once the USA cut and run, there were very savage, bloody consequences. And our press chose to mostly ignore them, so as to let our American college youth and liberal activists “heal”, after all their anti-war angst.
The jury will be out for a while on this, but it might be the case that the USA successfully applied in Iraq some of the lessons it learned in Nam. The biggest lesson, IMHO, is that you need to allow indigenous political figures to rise who aren’t perceived as American patsies. And to do that, you’re going to have to tolerate figures who actually AREN’T American patsies. Our forces are going to have to quietly support rising leaders who make speeches about kicking the American invaders out. You have to relinquish control of the political process, hoping that with a few nudges and unholy deals, you can promoted a “less worse” alternative.
Recall that in Vietnam, we first had Diem. He was certainly home-grown, but as an elite, cosmopolitan Catholic in a rural Buddhist world, he couldn’t keep his grip. I’m not going to get into the question of whether JFK and co. were responsible for his assignation, but after Diem, the leaders were almost all military guys. I.e., “our guys”; loyal US supporters. Ky, Thieu, etc — they were easy to work with, but not leaders who could win the “hearts and minds” of the people.
(Can’t forget that ironically humorous cartoon with Nixon next to a Vietnam map singing “this land was made for Thieu and me”.)
Also, from what I’ve read, Americans did a terrible job of recognizing and relating to the Buddhist social network. Had we recognized the Buddhists as the potential source of an indigenous anti-VC movement, perhaps things might have gone differently. In Iraq, we were able to co-opt the Sunni tribes who at first were anti-US, but whose anti-foreigner sentiments were deftly turned against the Saudis, Jordanians, etc. in the al-Qaeda factions. Ditto with the local Shia factions that don’t want to be dominated by Persians.
The saddest of words — what might have been. I.e., had we figured out how to exploit anti-northern sentiment without putting down such a big American footprint. Had we allowed the Buddhists to put a viable political structure together. Had we tolerated their nominal shows of anti-western independence in return for their cooperation in driving out the VC and NVN forces . . . .
Today, we DON’T hear much about Iraq. I would not suggest that the USA try another preemptive invasion in the name of democracy and weapons of mass destruction anytime soon. BUT, much as I hate to say it — Bush’s people (esp. the US military) DID eventually get the hang of the political roadmap in Iraq.
We’re now leaving behind a very imperfect nation, not exactly a place most Americans would be comfortable with (no strong tradition of individual rights, women’s equality, etc.). But admittedly, Iraq is a whole lot better today; and perhaps ‘the new Iraq’ will remain viable (if we and they can keep Iran’s spreading tentacles in check).
So, give McNamara credit for seeing that his approach was not working. It’s ironic that 35 years later, Mr. Bush (in spite of himself) may have shown in Iraq that there is an approach that possibly could have worked, back in what is still fashionably known as the ‘war that America could never have won’.
Jim G.
The lessons were learned and applied some time ago. See, for example, El Salvador.
Rest in fear, Mac. You are facing with tens of thousands of Japanese, Vietnamese and Americans who were systematically killed because of you.
Heck, military history Mark Moyar argues that Diem probably would have achieved early victory in the South if had not been for JFK’s wrong-head agrarian reform policies dictated to Diem in exchange for US aid. Further, “Moyar contends that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who has been incessantly depicted as an obtuse, tyrannical reactionary by some historians, was in reality a very wise and effective leader”. According to Moyar it was New York Times war correspondents David Halberstam (a red diaper baby from the Upper Westside of Manhattan I think) and former U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge (and Old Line liberal Republican rival to JFK) who destroy our early victory in Vietnam. Some argue that elite American WASP anti-Catholicism played a role in undermine Diem. In any case it seems likely that Lodge arranged Diem’s assassination.
You might want to read:
Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, by Mark Moyar
Hmmmm, well Gringo you are not the only Vietnam era Conscientious Objector I’ve come across who observed the horror of the Fall of Vietnam and came away changed and repentant. Most of the Left continues steadfast in denial. And now within living memory of the Holocaust, and in the face of another grave evil, a second peace movement has emerged. On occasion I wonder if the only reason we were able to maintain unity and achieve victory during WWII is because the Old Left needed FDR to defeat Hitler and thus save Stalin after the collapse of the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact. But perhaps I am too jaded by my own days on the Left. Today Gringo, you give me hope.