Too Little McNamara?

By Lawrence I. Barrett

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? by Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith. 364 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

Critics like David Halberstam and former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay have attacked him from left and right. Senators Proxmire and Fulbright have assaulted obvious flaws in the Pentagon he left behind. Adam Yarmolinsky has demonstrated the problems and agonies his former boss endured. Now come Alain Enthoven and Wayne Smith, far less ambitious and partisan, far more technically expert, too. How Much Is Enough? examines the Robert McNamara Pentagon from the authors' special perch in the Systems Analysis office--one of the former Defense Secretary's showpiece creations. With cool precision, Enthoven and Smith make a strong case for McNamara's approach to his job and present a convincing list of his considerable accomplishments. Perhaps without even intending to do so, they also show how McNamara sometimes failed in what seemed to be his area of greatest strength: running the Pentagon according to reason and research.

As head of Systems Analysis, Enthoven (Smith served as his aide) was charged with supplying much of the necessary objectivity. With two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and economics degrees from Stanford and M.I.T., plus a four-year Rand Corp. stint as background. Enthoven at age 30 became the prototype McNamara Whiz Kid when the new secretary began building S.A. into a powerful administrative tool. Its basic mission: to estimate the required quantity and performance of forces and weapons in relation to their mission and costs.

Enthoven and McNamara soon ran afoul of service leaders, whose basic idea was "more of everything." How Much Is Enough? offers new evidence, if any were needed, that the military bureaucracy must have strong civilian leadership to prevent waste and duplication, and that competing interests among and within the services tend to stifle innovation. Elements in the Navy, for instance, resisted the Polaris submarine project, fearing that it would divert resources from other Navy programs. In 1961, when imaginative Army thinkers devised the airmobile concept, they got a cool reception from their own superiors until McNamara's office offered encouragement. Only after the techniques of Systems Analysis established the real differences between American and Russian military capability in Europe was it possible to make a realistic comparison between the strength of NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. Until then, the Army simply counted divisions one to one, ignoring U.S. superiority in firepower and support elements.

The search for comparative facts was often discouraging. They had great difficulty in determining the actual strength of the Tactical Air Command and other tactical air elements. Incredibly, it took from 1961 to 1966 for military and civilian planners to agree on how to take inventory at all.* Even now, the authors complain, the true cost of an infantry division is "not really known anywhere in the system."

While admitting that the famous F-111 TFX "has not been a success," the book offers a novel explanation: it was not a case of McNamara's forcing the military to accept his whim, but his failure to follow his own precepts closely enough. He simply allowed the Air Force and the Navy to hang more specific performance requirements on the F-111 than one aircraft could possibly deliver.

Pooh-Poohed Studies. A similar failure of analysis, on a much grander scale, occurred in Viet Nam. The essentially technical role of Enthoven's staff kept it out of the major decision making on the war. When Enthoven did offer informal studies, the Joint Chiefs of Staff pooh-poohed them. "No one," say the authors, "insisted on systematic efforts to understand, analyze or interpret the war." They do not blame McNamara explicitly. They note his desire to obtain more reliable information, and point out how difficult it was to get accurate data through the regular chain of command.

Without quite saying we told you so. Enthoven and Smith report that their office produced "pilot studies" debunking the body-count syndrome and showing how, even if the inflated figures were taken at face value, the enemy still had enough manpower to fight on for years.

So much for the attrition strategy. Another study stressed the ineffectiveness of bombing North Viet Nam: Hanoi was able to replace its losses with less strain than Washington had expected. But this information was produced after the crucial policy had already been embarked upon.

McNamara, the great quantifier, the executive of enormous will and intellect, the eternal challenger of conventional military wisdom, in the end proved unable to apply his own techniques effectively to the greatest military enterprise he undertook. Why? Enthoven and Smith offer no satisfactory explanation. The reader is left with two depressing possibilities. McNamara may simply have been too human to resist the political inertia around him. Or his case may demonstrate that no one man seems able to master the entire technology of modern war and modern politics.

Lawrence I. Barrett

* Originally, only aircraft officially assigned to combat units were counted, a method that ignored large, readily available reinforcements.

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