Most of the book is relatively sparse; but I skimmed it and put together the key tidbits in summarized form for you screwballs. Don't you all just love me?
Okay, basically during his reign, the view of "technological stability" was espoused by Herbert F York and Jerome B Weisner in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. This view held that "technological surprise" isn't a threat to national security and that major breakthroughs aren't to be expected. Basically, they held that efforts to construct a workable ABM system were implausible, and provocative -- that they merely spurred offensive technology onwards.
By the way, McNamara at no time during his tenure as SecDef felt that the USSR had an effective and operational ABM capability.
Certainly this was the case early on in his reign in 1961, but by 1967 and 1968; enough of the ABM-1 system was in place to constitute a thin shield over Western Russia against a few ICBMs.
His support for the Aboveground Test Ban was because he felt that US technical superiority would be prolonged by limiting the USSR to testing in an underground environment, an environment where we had more experience; which would retard their progress towards more efficient weapons.
The cancellation of SKYBOLT appears to have been part of his effort to ensure that there would be no "independent" national deterrents; e.g. other people at the Nuclear Table who upset his nice theory of stability being best served by having only one finger on the nuclear trigger within NATO -- and because the British had centered their entire deterrent on obtaining SKYBOLT, cancelling it staked the heart through the UK deterrent.
However, cancelling it really, really, really pissed off the British -- I've found myself wondering if there are any transcripts of the meeting between Macmillan and Kennedy at Nassau where they hammered out the Polaris agreement.
McNamara used fallacies after fallacies to prevent ABM deployment -- he basically said in 1965:
Basically; it was "it won't work well enough to be worth spending money on", never mind the fact that losing 10 million is a lot less damaging than losing 50-60 million....there is no system or combination of systems within presently available technology which would permit the deployment now of an anti-ballistic missile defense capable of giving us any reasonable hope of keeping U.S. fatalities below some tens of millions in a major Soviet nuclear attack upon our cities.
Some more gems (this time from 1966)
McNamara and the manned bomber is harder to pin down. While he was opposed to systems like the B-70, terminated B-52 production early (congress appropriated money for about 45 more H models, but he refused to release the funds), retired the B-47 fleet early, and terminated B-58 production early, and then phased it out, he did call for 200~ FB-111s in 1966.the offense still is the key to our entire program . . . Letting the offense lag is suicide. Our continuing research and development work on Nike X assists in keeping the offense from lagging. In preparing experimental defense systems we learn more about penetration aids to our own offensive missiles to foil the enemy defense. That, I think, is a principal value of our Nike X research.
I've been able to pin down his strains of thought:
1.) Standardization above all (hail the JSBB - Joint Services Belt Buckle; an idea which was defeated).
2.) Missiles will get through easier than a bomber (and faster, see #4)
3.) Missiles would be cheaper to maintain than a bomber
4.) The Manned Bomber was irrevelant -- calculations done by OSD showed that 75% of the USSR industrial base and 50% of the USSR's population would be destroyed by whatever programmed ICBMs in the US that survived a USSR first strike. Any manned bombers would arrive hours after such a missile strike and their megatonnage would only "bounce the rubble".
With those strains in mind, and when you consider his underlings' view of AMSA -- basically of an aircraft where the pilot didn't do anything except "except to check the gas tanks and punch a few buttons," in the words of Herbert F York, and that the flexibility of manned bombers was essentially irrevelant -- all it meant to was that aircraft could get off the ground before the missiles arrived -- you begin to understand his decisions affecting the bomber fleet.
B-47: The fleet's by this point, over a decade old, and it's been so frankensteined by all the various modifications carried out to them to accomplish their mission, plus the fact that airframe problems are starting to crop up, along with it's limited range makes it an inefficient weapons system. Retiring it frees up a lot of money.
B-52: A capable system; but too Frankensteined with the B/C/D/E/F/G/H models in service. In January 1966; he called for 345 B-52s (C-F models) to be retired by 1971. This would leave just 255 G and H models in service; achieving much needed standardization and commonality.
B-58: Why do we need a plane that can out-climb fighters and out-run enemy defenses at Mach 2 when even at those speeds, ICBMs will have arrived hours earlier and blown the USSR to dust? Eliminating them standardizes the bomber fleet further.
B-70: Huge and enormously wasteful, and would only get to the target after the ICBMs had blown it to dust; and the missile men claimed they would be able to kill it at a reliabul rate.
FB-111: In his mind, while the stretched Strategic TFX was "hotter" than what the requirements of penetrating a USSR blown to dust by ICBMs required; it had commonality with the other USAF and USN TFX models, resulting in cost savings.
So, the idea was to go from
----------------------
B-47 Swarm
B-58 Hustlers
B-52B/C/D/E/F/G/H
B-70A
Four Systems, and tons of subvariants (particularly in -47 and -52 models)
-----------------------------------
To:
--------------------------------
B-52H
FB-111A
Two Systems, one of which shares commonality with F-111A, F-111B, etc.
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Yes; you heard me right, Strange envisioned the FB-111 as a replacement for the B-52B/C/D/E/F/G series. It's mentioned so in the book, and that throws light onto why he wanted 200~ of them.
The book then goes on to cover the CVA/CVAN-67 issue.
The book raises an interesting point about the Navy's conservatism, which led me to check nuclear powered unit order dates.
While the Navy ordered the Nautilus and Seawolf successively in 1951 and 1952; they didn't order mass produced nuclear submarines until the four Skates in 1955, which is one year after Nautilus commissioned incidentally.
Same thing with the nuclear surface fleet; after the order for Long Beach in 1956 and then Bainbridge in 1958, there's no desire for mass production of nuclear surface ships until the Eisenhower Administrations proposed FY62 budget, which appropriated money for seven DLGNs.
Of course, McNamara cancelled all seven upon taking office; but the House added the USS Truxtun, DLGN-35 against his wishes to the budget in May 1961.
Basically, the Navy was taking the "wait and see" approach to nuclear propulsion for each major class of warships, and actually did go on record as opposed to a second nuclear carrier until CVAN-65 had been evaluated throroughly. It's why none of the proposed Enterprise and Long Beach sister ships got laid down, even though they were bandied around in "dream books", and why CVA-66 was conventionally powered.
After the first experience rolled in with CVAN-65 through 1961 and 1962, capped off with it's excellent performance in a near-hot environment during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Navy did an about face and strongly supported nuclear propulsion for all major combatant ships.
Additionally, by this time, further development had reduced the cost of nuclear propulsion -- while CVAN-65 had eight reactors, the proposed CVAN-67 would have only four.
However, McNamara began to bollix things up, with his proclaimation:
In April 1963, the "First Navy" study was given to McNamara. It concluded that "nuclear propulsion does permit a significant increase in the beneficial military results for a given expenditure," and that CVA-67 and all other future major warships should be nuclear powered.As a general guide, I am interested in achieving the most efficient possible naval forces, defining efficiency as achieving the most beneficial military results for a given expenditure.
Of course, Strange took that report and shoved it into his desk and ordered another study to be done.
The "Second Navy" study arrived on his desk in September 1963 and was quite detailed and focused on the lifecycle cost differential between oil and nuclear powered task forces. It concluded that there was only a 3% cost differential in favor of the oil burning task force; but the advantages of a nuclear task force were so great as to outweigh the slightly increased cost.
Advantages? Well...in the words of the Navy in 1964:
So what does Strange do?"a nuclear CVAN-67 is designed to carry ammunition, aircraft fuel, and propulsion fuel for conventional escorts sufficient to deliver at least 60% more airstrikes than a conventional CVA-67 before replenishing."
Why of course he rejects it totally, gins up some supporting data of his own from OSD, and asserts:
He then continued to reject any further analysis of the CVA(N)-67 issue by the Navy and ordered it to be constructed as a oil-burner in a memo to SecNav Korth on October 9, 1963."I am absolutely certain of one thing, that the six conventional task forces are superior to five nuclear task forces."
You may be curious as to what data he ginned up with the help of OSD and his cronies.
Well, for the scenario of a high speed run across the Atlantic the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (Mr. Harold Brown) assumed that the conventionally powered carrier had 100% availability and absolutely perfect positioning of underway replenishment ships, keeping the oil-burning CV only 4 hours astern of the CVN after five days.
Alas, Admiral Hayward, who actually did do high speed runs on both a CVN and CV, reported that during his transit of the Atlantic on a CV; that the sea was so rough that underway replenishment wasn't possible, nor could he bring his escorts alongside for refuelling from the carrier. This led to the carrier burning aviation fuel in it's boilers to make it's destination.
As a side note to the CVA(N)-67 issue, while McNamara when he first arrived as SecDef, leaned towards a stunted 29-boat program for POLARIS, he eventually backed the full Eisenhower-era 41-For-Freedom Program.
Why?
This comment by him on nuclear power for CVAN-67 helps explain.
Basically, he viewed POLARIS as a better way of giving the Navy a Strategic role. In his mind, 41 SSBNs with hundreds of missiles were of greater strategic power than fifteen or so carriers, even if each carrier had a thousand tons of nuclear ordnance in their holds....they still suffered from the same problem that manned bombers did -- they would either fly into defenses that the ballistic missile bypassed, or would arrive hours and hours too late, and would just "bounce the rubble" left over from ICBM and SLBM attacks.the substitution of a nuclear-powered carrier for the conventional would not strengthen us vis-a-vis to the Soviets [sic], I say this because with the total force we have available we are in our opinion, completely protected against Soviet military and political pressure and we don't need additional force.....
....
The aircraft carrier is not going to help us counter the Soviet submarine fleet. It is the Soviet submarine fleet that we have to be concerned with, not the Soviet surface fleet or not the Soviet forces that an aircraft carrier would attack.....
Oh by the way, you'll love his absolute gem of an idea to save money....Amusingly enough, this crazy idea didn't originate at all within the Navy -- read, with ZERO input from the navy -- but was forwarded to SecNav from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis).
Strange suggested that the traditional 1-1 relationship between carriers and air wings be changed, and submitted a plan where there would be 15 carriers, but only 12 air wings. He actually went on the record as stating that "significantly more useable combat power" could be obtained under this screwball idea.
What do we do with the extra carriers? Don't worry, he explains it below:
Naturally, the Navy thought the "Forward floating airbase" idea was bullshit and didn't take much note of it.Carriers would normally deploy with less than the maximum complement of aircraft and additional aircraft would be flown to the carriers as needed. In effect, we would be treating the aircraft carrier as a forward floating air base, deploying the aircraft as the situation requires.
which resulted in local ABM systems in the US and USSR, but no gigantic pan-encompassing shield since foreign territory, space and sea based ABM elements were banned and somehow neither nation really attempted to do it in earnest while the treaty was in effect.
