CIAO DATE: 10/07
The National Interest
Field Marshal McNamara
Andrew J. Bacevich
Full Text
Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. Landa and Edward J. Drea, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. V: The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961–1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), 664 pp., $49.00.
AFTER TEN days in office President John F. Kennedy reported to the American people on the state of the union. Outlining the "harsh enormity of the trials" lying just ahead, the president minced no words. "Our problems are critical. The tide is unfavorable." Already dire, the situation was rapidly getting worse. "Each day the crises multiply. Each day their solution grows more difficult. Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger."
This emphasis on looming disaster—implying a need for fresh, bold leadership—had helped get Kennedy elected. Now it was becoming something more. Not for the last time in American history, promoting an atmosphere of unprecedented crisis served as a ploy to enhance executive authority while leaving the Constitution nominally intact. Crying havoc provided a rationale for concentrating political power in the Oval Office and in the hands of a few trusted lieutenants.
Among those the president turned to, no one was more important than Robert Strange McNamara, Kennedy’s choice for secretary of defense. After all, the crises ostensibly multiplying daily came in the form of threats to national security. Danger lay abroad. If the nation had any hope of survival, it lay in erecting more effective defenses to prevent the dogs of war from slipping their leash.
A promise to reinvigorate U.S. national-security policy had defined Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Making good on that promise meant transforming the armed services, making them more flexible and responsive—in a word, useable. In that same State of the Union address, Kennedy emphasized the necessity of having at hand "forces to respond, with discrimination and speed, to any problem at any spot on the globe at any moment’s notice." Yet transformation required that his administration first gain effective control of the Pentagon. These twin tasks—establishing jurisdiction and then spurring reform—defined Secretary McNamara’s mandate.
Nearly forty years after he left office in 1968, opinion about McNamara remains sharply divided. Some Americans, especially Vietnam veterans or aging anti-war activists, see him as genuinely malignant. Others, especially those keen to keep alive the myth of Camelot, view him as a tragic figure—a brilliant, well-intentioned public servant brought down by events beyond his control. This volume—the first of two on the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) during the McNamara years—tells a different story. Although the authors seem only dimly aware of the indictment that they hand down, it reveals McNamara to have been merely incompetent, someone spectacularly ill-suited for the responsibilities with which he was charged.
GRANTED, THE challenges facing the Kennedy Administration were real enough, especially when it came to asserting authority over the Pentagon. Since the end of World War II, civilian control of the military had become an iffy proposition.
By 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) had emerged as a de facto fourth branch of government. For public consumption, the chiefs carefully conveyed the appearance of being deferential to their civilian masters. For their part, presidents made a show of being really in charge. The reality was much more complicated. During the Truman and Eisenhower years, as the United States had committed itself to maintaining a permanently large, globally deployed military establishment, the JCS had evolved its own national-security agenda, overlapping with, but by no means identical to, the president’s. In pursuit of that agenda, the chiefs had carved out broad prerogatives, their writ extending well beyond strictly military matters. Faced with policies to which they objected, they became adept at going around the president to cut deals with Congress. They ignored or re-interpreted directives not to their liking. They leaked and lobbied with impunity. More often than not, and especially on matters related to weapons procurement and overall spending, they got what they wanted.
In his farewell address—well-regarded today, largely ignored when first delivered—Eisenhower tacitly acknowledged that the "military industrial complex" had eluded his control. McNamara took his post intent on bringing the chiefs to heel. He would not permit them to obstruct or undermine the president’s agenda. When it came to questions of basic policy, he, not they, would call the shots.
The animating spirit of the New Frontier emphasized pragmatism, flexibility and centralization. To these McNamara added his own fillip. A product of Harvard Business School who by 1960 had become president of Ford Motor Company, he saw truth as a quantifiable commodity. To McNamara, numbers and their manipulation held the key to wisdom. Combine enough data with the right analytical tools and sound decisions would result. "To this day", he wrote years later, "I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world."1
Immediately upon taking office, the new secretary acted on this conviction. He began by imposing on the Pentagon a stringent new management system. Admirers hyped this "McNamara Revolution" as a device to improve efficiency and enhance cost-effectiveness. Yet the revolution’s underlying purpose was to shift power from the military services to the OSD.
In policy debates, generals and admirals habitually relied on assertions of professional judgment and expertise as their trump card. McNamara’s Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) removed that option. Henceforth, decision-making about buying or scrapping weapons, about expanding or contracting forces would employ a new logic. For the JCS, PPBS was so much mumbo-jumbo. Yet until old soldiers and old salts learned to crunch numbers, their votes wouldn’t count for much.
McNamara promised to provide "aggressive leadership—questioning, suggesting alternatives, proposing objectives, and stimulating progress." PPBS put him in the driver’s seat. Where exactly did he drive?
The McNamara Ascendancy offers two answers to this question. The first answer relates specifically to nuclear strategy, an abiding preoccupation for McNamara. The second relates to the various crises in which he served as a key presidential advisor. Regarding the former, the hapless McNamara drove around in circles, his principal achievement being to stir up angst among America’s allies. Regarding the latter, after several failed attempts, he managed to fling himself and the U.S. military off a cliff.
At the moment when the Kennedy Administration took office no issue loomed larger than the perceived threat of nuclear war. On the campaign trail, Kennedy had charged that the United States was fast falling behind the Soviets, especially in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Democrats derided Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation as crude and obsolete. Kennedy promised to strengthen the U.S. nuclear arsenal and to provide a persuasive new rationale for America’s nuclear posture.
In fact, the so-called "missile gap" was non-existent. In both missile technology and overall striking power, the United States in 1961 enjoyed a substantial advantage over the Soviet Union. Just a week after Kennedy’s January 30 State of the Union address of that same year, McNamara himself acknowledged this publicly, to the considerable embarrassment of the White House.
Still, expressing the administration’s activist bent required a further expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, with priority given to accelerating the deployment of solid-fueled Minuteman ICBMs and increasing the number of missile-launching Polaris submarines. U.S. nuclear forces were strong, but making them stronger still was an imperative. Nor was this all for show: In 1961, McNamara explicitly expressed his conviction that those forces were eminently usable. "Our nuclear stockpile is several times that of the Soviet Union", he bragged in September, "and we will use either tactical weapons or strategic weapons in whatever quantities wherever, whenever it’s necessary."
Such saber-rattling aside, McNamara wanted it known that the new administration’s nuclear policies marked a sharp break with the past. The whole concept of massive retaliation was "useless", he insisted. Intent on providing the president with a wide array of options for employing American military might, McNamara set out to think his way through the unthinkable.
Uniformed officers, especially those assigned to Strategic Air Command (SAC), had a fairly straightforward concept for waging nuclear war: Whenever the president gave the word (or earlier if need be), they were going to blow the Reds to smithereens. Appalled by SAC’s cavalier approach, McNamara took it upon himself to devise an alternative that would give the Soviets a stake in avoiding a world-ending holocaust while ensuring above all that he and the president retained ironclad control over the actual employment of U.S. forces.
Immersing himself in projections about accuracy, survivability, destruction, aftereffects and Soviet intentions, he endorsed or toyed with a wide range of permutations, each one intended to make nuclear war more calibrated, discriminating and humane. As Lawrence Kaplan and his collaborators write, "controlled response had an almost mantra-like ring to McNamara and his circle, as if through appropriate incantations it might solve all manner of strategic issues." Each incantation came with its own distinctive label: "finite deterrence, flexible response, graduated response, controlled response, counterforce, counter-cities, no-cities, full first strike, first strike, second strike, negotiating pauses, assured destruction, damage limiting." None of these withstood close scrutiny. Each proved to have a shelf life of about six months.
Apart from giving NATO fits—Western Europeans became nervous at any hint that Washington was backing away from its commitment to respond without reservation to Soviet aggression—these Strangelove-ian exertions yielded next to nothing. After much hand-wringing, McNamara came to the same conclusion that Eisenhower had reached a decade earlier: As instruments of war, nuclear weapons possess no practical utility. According to his own subsequent testimony, McNamara eventually urged both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that "they never, under any circumstances, initiate the use of nuclear weapons." The essence of nuclear strategy returned in the 1960s to what it had been in the 1950s: posture a willingness to go to the mat—and pray that the other side never calls your bluff.
In his memoirs, McNamara wrote that, "I had always been confident that every problem could be solved."2 Here, however, was a problem for which no amount of data could provide a solution.
KENNEDY AND those around him came to power reveling in the ostensibly dangerous waters into which the previous administration had allowed the ship of state to drift. Soon enough, they discovered real crises in numbers sufficient to confirm their fevered depiction of a nation besieged. Some of those crises came stamped "Made in the U.S.A." For starters, Eisenhower had bequeathed to his successor a rapidly maturing plan to overthrow Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro, using a "brigade" of CIA-trained Cuban exiles. All Kennedy had to do was to say go. But would the plan work?
In this one instance, McNamara, new to his job, did defer to the collective wisdom of the top brass, much to his subsequent regret. Asked by the president to assess Operation Zapata’s prospects, the chiefs hedged: "timely execution of this plan has a fair chance of ultimate success and, even if it does not achieve immediately the full results desired, could contribute to the eventual overthrow of the Castro regime." By remaining silent, McNamara tacitly endorsed this artfully crafted assessment. In fact, members of the JCS had major reservations about the CIA plan. But they suppressed those doubts, assuming that if the exiles faltered the president was certain to order a full-scale U.S. invasion—their preferred course of action—even though Kennedy had plainly stated that he would not do so.
When the landing at the Bay of Pigs ended in a debacle, Kennedy publicly assumed full responsibility. In private, however, he blamed the chiefs. In his eyes, they had proven themselves unworthy of trust. For his part, McNamara vowed that henceforth he personally, not the generals, would always represent the views of the Department of Defense. After the Bay of Pigs, he never again hesitated to intrude into operational matters.
To be sure, going through the motions of consulting the JCS remained necessary for political reasons. For real guidance, however, McNamara relied increasingly on the defense intellectuals and brainy young Ph.Ds with whom he surrounded himself. In essence, these so-called "Whiz Kids" comprised what one observer called a "civilian-military general staff in OSD." To control the chiefs, McNamara effectively superseded them. He, not they, became the principal conduit of military advice proffered to the president. It was the inverse of a military coup.
The Bay of Pigs thus revealed and also exacerbated pre-existing civil-military dysfunction. In the years that followed, this dysfunction produced a cascade of defective policy recommendations. In subsequent crises, the United States avoided disaster in considerable measure because Kennedy, despite having promised to pay any price and bear any burden, showed an increasing aversion to risk. After Kennedy, however, came the deluge.
Faced with a possible communist takeover of Laos, for example, with even the normally bellicose chiefs unable to devise a plausible military option, McNamara urged intervention with U.S. troops. Should China or North Vietnam counter by sending in their own troops, the defense secretary coolly expressed a willingness "to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in order to prevent the defeat of our forces." Kennedy rejected this counsel and opted to neutralize Laos. "Thank God the Bay of Pigs happened when it did", he later remarked. "Otherwise we’d be in Laos by now—and that would be a hundred times worse."
October 1962 brought the Cuban Missile Crisis. McNamara fancied that the U.S. strategic build-up he was engineering "would send a message to the Soviets that emphasized deterrence rather than a second strike." The Kremlin read the message differently, however. Soviet leaders did not cotton to U.S. defense officials crowing about Soviet strategic inferiority. Converting Cuba into a Soviet military base appeared to offer an easy way to correct the imbalance.
Throughout the famous 13 days, McNamara, doubtless with Kennedy’s approval, marginalized the joint chiefs. General Maxwell Taylor, a Kennedy loyalist brought out of retirement after the Bay of Pigs, was the only JCS member to participate regularly in secret White House deliberations. During the crisis, the president met with the other chiefs exactly once. They tried goading their commander-in-chief into attacking Cuba. He ignored them.
If the generals were downright bloodthirsty, the advice offered by OSD was not much better. Along with key subordinates like Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, McNamara himself initially favored pre-emptive air strikes to destroy the Soviet installations and likely nuclear storage sites in Cuba. The president resisted such suggestions, instead ordering a naval blockade to prevent additional Soviet personnel and equipment from arriving.
But how to secure removal of the missiles and bombers already in Cuba? The JCS favored an ultimatum followed by the use of force. When the Soviets shot down a U-2 over Cuba, they urged retaliation. McNamara joined them, calling for "a major air strike." Once again, Kennedy demurred. Using his brother Robert to open up a secret negotiating channel, he offered inducements for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to back down. If the Soviets withdrew their offensive weapons from Cuba, Kennedy promised not to invade the island and to remove U.S. Jupiter missiles threatening the Soviet Union from Turkey. This was the deal that averted Armageddon.
THROUGHOUT THE missile crisis, Kennedy’s military and civilian advisors gave him plenty of opportunities to cross over the brink. He repeatedly deflected their advice, choosing compromise instead. When it came to Vietnam, however, the hawks—with McNamara in the vanguard—finally got their way.
In South Vietnam, the Kennedy Administration inherited both a commitment and a mess. The OSD’s principal achievement was to make things worse.
McNamara saw Vietnam as an attractive venue in which to test the administration’s ideas for devising new ways to employ U.S. non-nuclear military capabilities. With the chiefs keen to invade North Vietnam and be done with it, the Whiz Kids conjured up various alternatives, all based on the expectation that the United States could prevail through cleverly conceived half-measures: nation-building, counterinsurgency, covert activities and reprisal air attacks to "signal" U.S. resolve. Among the techniques attracting McNamara’s personal attention was defoliation—killing vegetation to deny sanctuary to Viet Cong guerrillas. According to the authors of this volume, the defense secretary "found its possibilities intriguing, particularly its susceptibility to measurement."
Never, apparently, did the supremely analytical McNamara question whether South Vietnam actually deserved to rank as a vital U.S. interest: That remained a given. The challenge was to devise the right formula for turning things around in Vietnam the way that McNamara had turned things around in Detroit during the 1950s. In the words of journalist David Halberstam, the pursuit of victory found "the quantifier trying to quantify the unquantifiable."
He was nothing if not tenacious. With the situation in Saigon fast unraveling after the successive assassinations of November 1963—first President Ngo Dinh Diem, then Kennedy—McNamara remained adamant that "we can still win, even on present ground rules." The JCS vehemently disagreed: "We are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile", complained General Curtis LeMay, the air force chief of staff.
In fact, it gave the chiefs no little satisfaction to see the defense secretary get his comeuppance in Vietnam. As General Wallace Greene, the Marine Corps commandant, sniffed in May 1964: "Up until now, McNamara has pretty much field-marshaled the entire effort in Southeast Asia, and, with the place starting to fall apart, his whiz-kid-Ford-Motor-Company management techniques apparently aren’t paying off." In place of management techniques, the chiefs argued for marching on Hanoi the way that American armies had once marched on Richmond or Berlin. Real war—one in which soldiers called the shots—implied a shift in the overall balance of civil-military authority. Achieving victory in Vietnam on the generals’ terms held the promise of repealing the McNamara Revolution back in Washington.
The defense secretary was no more inclined to give in to the chiefs than to Ho Chi Minh. If American soldiers were to fight in Vietnam, they would do so on McNamara’s terms. Such a war would be calibrated, discriminating, humane and under his direct control.
In January 1965, with Lyndon Johnson elected president in his own right, the moment to initiate such a war had arrived. Along with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, McNamara urged the president to send U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam. To persist in playing an "essentially passive role", they wrote in a co-authored memo, "can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances."
McNamara prevailed. Shortly thereafter, the folly of "McNamara’s War" ensued. His efforts to manage the war—regulating the tempo of escalation, limiting the range of operations, even selecting targets to be bombed—failed in every respect, except in ratcheting up the level of violence. Defeat and humiliation were the eventual result.
Fresh from the agonies of Vietnam, American officers embraced the conclusion that failure there came as a direct consequence of civilian meddling. Success in future wars required allowing the generals a free hand.
The agonies of Iraq might tempt today’s U.S. military to reach a similar conclusion—to attribute their predicament to the meddling of Donald Rumsfeld, another uber-manager, who like Robert McNamara, evinced little regard for military advice and fancied himself playing the role of field marshal.
But to charge McNamara and Rumsfeld merely with botching their respective wars—which they did—is to miss a larger point. Both McNamara and Rumsfeld subscribed to a common proposition: They confused the management of the Pentagon with the management of war. They assumed that taming the former put you in a position to control the latter. Both were disastrously wrong, although others end up paying for the consequences of their error.
In his execrable apologia, McNamara complained that "we often did not have time to think straight."3 More accurately, he chose not to think. Analysis displaced thought. In today’s Pentagon where fantasies of making war manageable persist among soldiers and civilians alike, that failing continues to be evident.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.