McNamara, defense chief during Vietnam War, dies

[Starglider]

On the other hand, he did put wankers like Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor in their place during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If I had a homicidal time machine with a single button, which if pressed would cause Robert McNamara to spontaneously combust in 1950, the only reason I would not press it would be because the cold war was a close thing, and replacing any of the major personalities has a nontrivial of leading to a nuclear exchange.

[MKSheppard]

If I had a homicidal time machine with a single button, which if pressed would cause Robert McNamara to spontaneously combust in 1950, the only reason I would not press it would be because the cold war was a close thing, and replacing any of the major personalities has a nontrivial of leading to a nuclear exchange.

Actually, the Cold War only became a close run thing from the 1970s onward.

In the 1960s, the US had an unassailable nuclear superiority in offensive firepower thanks to Eisenhower's buildup of the 1950s; and work was proceeding on making CONUS very unassailable with LRI-X (F-108) and later F-12B; plus the various proposed ABM deployments by the JCS, which McNamara kept killing, along with meaningful civil defense.

Basically, Strange was of the opinion, that if a defense was only 90% effective, it was wasted money, he demanded 100% effectiveness; which is you know, impossible to achieve.

[K. A. Pital]

Depends on the concept of "unacceptable loss". If 10% from the possible 100% of inflicted losses were still too much for the USA, it made little sense to spend the money on defence because it would constitute nothing but a form of crude damage control in Strange's view. And still, if the US would be "unassailable" that would inflate the threat of a nuclear war against my nation with a resulting tally of millions of dead. What's more important, US ABM being completed or the fact taht the US civil defence system was so bad that the USSR could easily inflict unacceptable damage to the US? The latter is a good deterrent in my view. The less vulnerable the US would be, the more prone to an escalation of war it would be. After all, risking Europe in a crusade is not the same as risking yourself.

[Shroom Man 777]

Shep simultaneously criticizes McNamara for causing the needless deaths of thousands of US soldiers in Vietshroom, but pontificates on randome altarnate realties of wasting millions of Soviet (and European) motherfuckers in a gleeful one-sided 1950s nuclear exchange. The dissonance can be measured by the megatons.

[Starglider]

the only reason I would not press it would be because the cold war was a close thing

Actually, the Cold War only became a close run thing from the 1970s onward.

In terms of who wins yes, but (virtually) any timeline in which a strategic nuclear exchange and the consequent millions of innocent deaths occurs is worse than the actual timeline, where we got through the second half of the 20th century with just a relatively small amount of conventional warfare. So by 'close run thing', I mean that the world collectively avoided a nuclear exchange by quite a slim margin, and even small changes would have a nontrivial chance of reversing that.

[hongi]

Screw McNamara. It's his idiocy that resulted in 58,000 deaths for NOTHING in the Vietnam War

What were the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who died, small change?

[K. A. Pital]

Screw McNamara. It's his idiocy that resulted in 58,000 deaths for NOTHING in the Vietnam War

What were the hundreds of thousands millions of Vietnamese who died, small change?

Last time I heard, the toll was higher. But that's Shep. Don't forget that.

[Master of Cards]

Screw McNamara. It's his idiocy that resulted in 58,000 deaths for NOTHING in the Vietnam War

What were the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who died, small change?

Ethnocentralism, we're all going to what hit us and ours the hardest. Stas goes to the millions saved in Russia, Shep goes to the American programs and lives, and everyone else goes to something that they can relate to. So we don't have anyone remembering the Vietnamese because we don't have any members from Vietnam.

[phongn]

Ethnocentralism, we're all going to what hit us and ours the hardest. Stas goes to the millions saved in Russia, Shep goes to the American programs and lives, and everyone else goes to something that they can relate to. So we don't have anyone remembering the Vietnamese because we don't have any members from Vietnam.

We do have people of Vietnamese descent, and at least some of us know how McNamara prosecuted the war.

[Stuart]

My views on McNamara are well known so I won't repeat them other than to suggest that the area over my house was a no-fly zone last night due to the number of champagne corks going skywards.

A clarification on defense policy. It's an absurdity to put Curtis LeMay and Maxwell Taylor in the same bracket since their whole outlook on warfare was completely opposed. Curtis LeMay abhorred war. He stated, repeatedly and emphatically that the government should decide to go to war only after long and grave consderation of the situation and after every possible alternative had been tried and exhausted. Only then, when absolutely no other alternatives were left, should a country go to war, but when it did so it should throw everything it had into the fight to win as quickly and decisively as possible. The advice that LeMay gave during the Cuban confrontation (stripped of its distortions mostly promulgated by Robert F Kennedy) was that if the United States really wished to go to war over Cuba, then this (insert plans) was what that decision would entail. LeMay was also strongly opposed to a U.S. entry to Vietnam since he could see no conceivable benefit to the United States from its involvement. Again, his advice was that if, for whatever reason, the United States did decide to get involved, the massive bombing campaign he recommended was the way it should win that war quickly and decisively. It was a key point in LeMay's outlook on these decisions that the civilian political authorities should make the decision on whether to go to war and that, in that decision, the only input from the military would be to tell them what would be necessary to win that war.

Maxwell Taylor's opinions were opposed across the board, he favored a flexible response policy with the U.S. becoming involved in situations early and then gradually escalating force commitment as the situation deteriorated. He believed that military input into the decision to make force commitments should be integral to the "go-to-war" decision rightf rom the earliest stages and should strongly influence that position.

In short, Curtis LeMay represented the "civilian control over the military" position, Maxwell Taylor the concept that the military should be part and parcel of the political process.

For more detailed insights into this try reading "The Uncertain Trumpet" by Maxwell Taylor and compare it with "Mission With LeMay" and "iron Eagle" plus the new and very good biography of Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak.

By the way, during his vice-Presidential campaign, LeMay was asked whether he "supported abortion, contraception and whether he went to church?" His reply was "Yes, Yes, No." Saint Curtis tended to be succinct in his answers.

[Stuart]

Depends on the concept of "unacceptable loss". If 10% from the possible 100% of inflicted losses were still too much for the USA, it made little sense to spend the money on defence because it would constitute nothing but a form of crude damage control in Strange's view. And still, if the US would be "unassailable" that would inflate the threat of a nuclear war against my nation with a resulting tally of millions of dead. What's more important, US ABM being completed or the fact taht the US civil defence system was so bad that the USSR could easily inflict unacceptable damage to the US? The latter is a good deterrent in my view. The less vulnerable the US would be, the more prone to an escalation of war it would be. After all, risking Europe in a crusade is not the same as risking yourself.

It was actually McNamara who killed off the civil defense programs. he actually stated that any attempt to reduce the carnage caused by a nuclear war was counter-productive. Up to his imbecility, the idea of a strong civil defense program and an ABM/Air Defense program were intimately linked. He completely failed to understand what the defensive systems were for. So do you by the way

The driving paradigm that lay (and still lies) behind ballistic missile and air defense systems is that nobody wants a full-scale nuclear war. Interestingly, both Eisenhower and Khruschev said the same thing in almost exactly the same words. Paraphrasing "the thought of nuclear war and all those nuclear weapons kept me awake nights. Then I realized that nobody would use them and I slept just fine."

The problem was that they both got the last sentence wrong. It should have read "Then I realized that nobody would deliberately use them and I slept just fine". That word deliberately is the whole key.

Nobody wanted a nuclear war, that was quite definate. The problem was that the danger existed that the world could blunder into a nuclear war by a series of mis-steps and mis-conceptions that would create momentum that led to a nuclear strike, even though nobody actually wanted one. Remember, most of teh strategists on both sides were scholars and historians and they looked back to World War One and saw how the world had blundered into that one. They looked back at World War Two and saw how the world had blundered into that (although Soviet and Western historians looked at different blunders). So, the real fear was not that one side or the other would launch a deliberate attack but that a situation would arise in which the world would blunder into one. The idea was that the defense systems would provide the safety catch, the last chance to stop before the world ended. This really was critical and the lack of that safety catch was nearly the downfall of us all.

[Garibaldi]

Most of the hatred for McNamara on the left can be attributed to a purely emotional reaction to his strong association with Vietnam- regardless of the fact that he ultimately came to the correct conclusion, that Vietnam was unwinnable and not worth fighting, simply the fact that it took him so long does little to rehabilitate him. There is some merit in this view, I think, although the amount of hatred directed at him has always seemed overstated.

Of course, the right hates him because he's a convenient scapegoat to draw fire away from the real criminals of Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger, who accepted defeat in 1972 on the same terms they could have gotten several years and 40,000+ American lives earlier. Hating McNamara allows deranged right-wing lunatics to propagate crypto-fascist "stab-in-the-back" lies; that the glorious American armies could have destroyed North Vietnam if only they hadn't been held back by their civilian leaders.

[erik_t]

Of course, the right hates him because he's a convenient scapegoat to draw fire away from the real criminals of Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger, who accepted defeat in 1972 on the same terms they could have gotten several years and 40,000+ American lives earlier. Hating McNamara allows deranged right-wing lunatics to propagate crypto-fascist "stab-in-the-back" lies; that the glorious American armies could have destroyed North Vietnam if only they hadn't been held back by their civilian leaders.

Nixon took office in 1969; of the 58,000 US service members who were killed in Vietnam, a little over 21,000 were killed during his term.

Check your facts before you accuse individuals of being responsible for 20,000 deaths that happened before they started their watch.

[MKSheppard]

Here's an excerpt from Mission With LeMay. While much of the book was written by his ghostwriter, MacKinlay Kantor (in fact, there are multiple versions and transcripts of his interviews with LeMay in the Kantor file at the Library of Congress in DC); Kantor managed to capture the Essence of LeMay:

Actually I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more. If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle.

We have had the same situation all over again, both in Korea and in Viet Nam. I suggested informally, when the Korean flap started in 1950, that we go up north immediately with incendiaries and delete four or five of the largest towns: Wonsan, Pyongyang and so on.

The answer from Washington: "No, no, that's too utterly horrible! You'd kill a lot of noncombatants!"

Thus we went along, allowing ourselves to be cajoled into conducting a war under wraps, because the alternative was unacceptable morally. And what happened? We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both, including Pusan. That one was an accident. But we nearly burned all of it down just the same.

And during the three years of warfare we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue. The military casualties on both sides totaled nearly three and one-half million.

Over fifty-four thousand dead Americans. . . .

To expunge a few people to stop a war right at the start is unacceptable. Or a few hundred people, or a few thousand. Or—go all out on it—a few hundred thousand. But over a long period of time, wearily killing them off and killing them off, killing millions under the most horrible circumstances— That is acceptable. Mankind keeps on doing it.

Let's not also forget the best quote from LeMay on Vietnam:

"In Japan we dropped 502,000 tons and we won the war. In Vietnam we dropped 6,162,000 tons of bombs and we lost the war. The difference was that McNamara chose the targets in Vietnam and I chose the targets in Japan."

And that's not even counting the duds; even with a 2% dud rate; when you drop 6 million tons of bombs, that's a lot of duds waiting for decades to blow up farmers born decades after the war.

[Elfdart]

Of course, the right hates him because he's a convenient scapegoat to draw fire away from the real criminals of Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger, who accepted defeat in 1972 on the same terms they could have gotten several years and 40,000+ American lives earlier. Hating McNamara allows deranged right-wing lunatics to propagate crypto-fascist "stab-in-the-back" lies; that the glorious American armies could have destroyed North Vietnam if only they hadn't been held back by their civilian leaders.

Nixon took office in 1969; of the 58,000 US service members who were killed in Vietnam, a little over 21,000 were killed during his term.

Check your facts before you accuse individuals of being responsible for 20,000 deaths that happened before they started their watch.

Nice job of letting the point sail right over your empty head, peckerbreath. Nixon, Kissinger, Chennault and others sabotaged the Paris talks in 1968. They dragged the war out for another five years, then settled for the deal they ruined. Whether it's 50,000 or 20,000 or 1,000, every life lost from January of 1969 to the end of the war is on the hands of Tricky Dick and his willing executioners.

So fuck you.

[erik_t]

By extension, I can honestly and accurately blame Clinton for ten thousand US special forces deaths in Somalia, right? Since the actual number doesn't matter? Since we can blame Nixon for tens of thousands of deaths that occurred prior to the 1968 talks?

Can you do math? You know that he said Nixon was responsible for 40,000, and 40,000 - 20,000 = 20,000?

Dipshit.

[Darth Wong]

By extension, I can honestly and accurately blame Clinton for ten thousand US special forces deaths in Somalia, right? Since the actual number doesn't matter? Since we can blame Nixon for tens of thousands of deaths that occurred prior to the 1968 talks?

Can you do math? You know that he said Nixon was responsible for 40,000, and 40,000 - 20,000 = 20,000?

Dipshit.

You're right that the number is incorrect and that matters in some sense, but at the same time, the actual number was not the point he was making, so it's a nitpick. If he were more than an order of magnitude off, then maybe you could say that he's grossly exaggerating, but I don't think you can seriously say "oh, it's only 20,000, so your point is moot or greatly exaggerated". Especially when the entire American casualty count in that war was insignificant compared to the vast numbers of innocent civilians they maimed or killed (and continue to maim and kill to this day, since they don't even bother to help clear the unexploded ordnance they left all over the region).

[erik_t]

You will note that I never said that Nixon and Kissinger do not bear great responsibility for many US service deaths (and, as you point out, untold numbers of Vietnamese).

[Sea Skimmer]

You're right that the number is incorrect and that matters in some sense, but at the same time, the actual number was not the point he was making, so it's a nitpick. If he were more than an order of magnitude off, then maybe you could say that he's grossly exaggerating, but I don't think you can seriously say "oh, it's only 20,000, so your point is moot or greatly exaggerated". Especially when the entire American casualty count in that war was insignificant compared to the vast numbers of innocent civilians they maimed or killed (and continue to maim and kill to this day, since they don't even bother to help clear the unexploded ordnance they left all over the region).

Actually we do, the US funds mine clearance operations in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam among other countries. Not nearly enough but the amount spent does run into the billions now. Our efforts have gotten rather distracted by the huge needs for demining in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and now Iraq.

[Axis Kast]

Most of the hatred for McNamara on the left can be attributed to a purely emotional reaction to his strong association with Vietnam- regardless of the fact that he ultimately came to the correct conclusion, that Vietnam was unwinnable and not worth fighting, simply the fact that it took him so long does little to rehabilitate him. There is some merit in this view, I think, although the amount of hatred directed at him has always seemed overstated.

Well-stated. Dislike of McNamara is de rigeur, and there is, of course, a certain amount of self-congratulations of the same type that explains much of the gleeful propensity with which the left assails George Bush, and the right, Obama: everybody likes to contend that they "know better" than the individuals who actually sit in the halls of power. It's indirect evidence of one's own tragically misunderstood genius, so to speak.

Crying over McNamara's failure to "see the light" years earlier ignores the fact that he obviously had very different attitudes at two different points in history. Worse, it is patting oneself on the back for being correct largely by coincidence. Nobody in 2003 "knew" that Saddam did not possess Weapons of Mass Destruction. In fact, the smart argument in dissent was, "We don't know if he has them. We have evidence that he did have them. Some credible signs point to the degradation of stockpiles still unaccounted for. It is difficult to see what valuable targets he could hold at risk even if we've missed an ongoing program. Ergo, we do not need to spend blood and treasure on an invasion." But even that wasn't foolproof. One was for or against the war depending on how much risk one considered acceptable.

Of course, the right hates him because he's a convenient scapegoat to draw fire away from the real criminals of Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger, who accepted defeat in 1972 on the same terms they could have gotten several years and 40,000+ American lives earlier. Hating McNamara allows deranged right-wing lunatics to propagate crypto-fascist "stab-in-the-back" lies; that the glorious American armies could have destroyed North Vietnam if only they hadn't been held back by their civilian leaders.

Except for that part about crypto-fascism, we are in agreement.

[Surlethe]

Well-stated. Dislike of McNamara is de rigeur, and there is, of course, a certain amount of self-congratulations of the same type that explains much of the gleeful propensity with which the left assails George Bush, and the right, Obama: everybody likes to contend that they "know better" than the individuals who actually sit in the halls of power. It's indirect evidence of one's own tragically misunderstood genius, so to speak.

To be fair, while much of the difference between politicans and their detractors lies in values, there is evidence that it is, to put it delicately, not difficult to "know better" than Bush during his presidency - consider, e.g., the response to Katrina. There's also a certain moral argument that the values of the right are reprehensible, while the (American) left at least has its heart in the right place.

[Axis Kast]

To be fair, while much of the difference between politicans and their detractors lies in values, there is evidence that it is, to put it delicately, not difficult to "know better" than Bush during his presidency - consider, e.g., the response to Katrina.

If Katrina occurred right now - today, at this moment - would the outcome be any different? We blame Bush primarily because, "It happened on his watch," but it is often easier to "know better" than public officials because much of the time they can deal with only a fraction of what is "broken." Necessarily, they skip from crisis to crisis, cultivating shallow knowledge, at best.

It's easy to complain that Jimmy Carter's fumbling "lost" Iran. Yet this was the president who became famous for trying to read the details, rather than just the briefs. The Shah's erratic behavior was in part due to the effects of illness, carefully concealed. Carter's decision not to dictate to the Shah was a mistake: Iran's putative leader was waiting, desperately, for guidance. Yet the principle of permitting all countries to decide their own destinies was perhaps a good one.

In other words, there are just some things that one can't reasonably have known as the shit was hitting the fan.

There's also a certain moral argument that the values of the right are reprehensible, while the (American) left at least has its heart in the right place.

A certain moral argument based on very specific definitions of "right" and "left."

[Shroom Man 777]

George W. Bush put a crony who's only prior experience was managing Saudi Arabian whorse races in charge of FEMA.

[Samuel]

George W. Bush put a crony who's only prior experience was managing Saudi Arabian whorse races in charge of FEMA.

Patrick Degan has this all saved on speed dial. If you want to bring up the details ask him.

[Axis Kast]

George W. Bush put a crony who's only prior experience was managing Saudi Arabian whorse races in charge of FEMA.

How would FEMA's response have differed under a different administrator? I'm not asking Deegan, I'm asking you, but if he wants to come forward and put up information, then please - by all means.

Clearly, placing Brown in a position with that magnitude of responsibility was a mistake. However, I think you overestimate the ability of even the FEMA head to substantially prepare for a storm the magnitude and impact of Katrina, and underestimate the amount of time needed to get things rolling when it comes to disaster-response.

This is symptomatic of a wider tendency which relates back to McNamara: assigning individual personalities buckets of blame for situations which are best described as complex systems of systems.

And don't forget that McNamara was to a large degree "polishing turds" - pursuing a war that, after a while, he may not have been able to stop. Heck, much later, Kissinger would replace the domino theory as the major problem experienced during Vietnam with a suspected credibility gap between the United States and the rest of the international community. Just read his interpretation of Angola.

And if anyone thinks that other nations don't seek precedents, just look at the Falklands. Argentina predicted a passive British response based on Portugal's inability to defend Goa, and India's success at avoiding blame.