After McNamara
by Joseph Kraft
Vietnam has dulled the luster of the McNamara revolution at the Pentagon. But does the war argue a return to a simpler and less ambitious scheme for ordering this country’s defense arrangexnents? Or is the lesson instead that the McNamara approach must be democratized to encompass all the foreign operations of the United States government, including particularly the armed services?
The pre-McNamara approach rested on mobilizing overwhelming force behind clear-cut and well-demarcated American commitments: the doctrine of “massive retaliation” and the diplomacy of “brinkmanship.” Because the amount of force threatened or applied was not supposed to be congruent with the issue immediately at stake, weapons choices and general military posture could be left, within crude budgetary limits, to higgling and haggling among the different services and their clients in the Congress and the private sector of the economy.
By no mere chance, that system was proof against a slow, invisible entanglement. Indeed when the possibility of direct American engagement in Vietnam first came up after Dienbienphu in 1954, two checks asserted themselves. For one thing, the Army, improperly equipped for such a venture, was opposed. More important, given a clear choice, political leaders in the Congress and the White House shied away from a major ground war in Asia.
But the pre-McNamara system had its own share of idiocies. Nuclear war was threatened over Quemoy and Matsu. When the American lead seemed imperiled by Sputnik, this country felt obliged to promise a sharing of nuclear weapons with allied countries in Western Europe. Reliance on such weapons, moreover, combined with the relatively free hand given the services on choice of weapons, made it virtually impossible to wind down the arms race. Hence President Eisenhower’s pathetic cri de coeur about the “military-industrial complex.”
The McNamara system tailored military posture to meet a wide variety of hostile challenges: the doctrine of “flexible response.” Sophisticated forms of analysis were used by civilian experts in the Department of Defense to crack the resistance of the military services and their allies. In two major ways the system proved itself. In the Cuban missile crisis, it offered the President a way to turn back a severe challenge. In the limited-testban agreement, it provided an overpowering rationale, against service resistance, for a major step toward arms control.
But the system has proved particularly vulnerable to the challenge posed by Vietnam. The McNamara approach provided the rationale, the budgetary resources, and the forces which brought the country, almost without realizing it, into the midst of a major engagement. More important, the McNamara revolution, and particularly its success in the missile crisis and the test ban, fed the special hubris of the educated upper-middle class in this country — the belief in manipulated solutions, the illusion that cool managers thinking hard about hard problems could contain and control the irrational forces of violence.
As it happened, Prospero could not handle Caliban. In the atmosphere of war, power steadily reverted to the chiefs of the military services and their sympathetic allies in the Congress. In Vietnam, they carried the level of violence well beyond the McNamara prescription. In the general strategic field, moreover, they have upset the balance in a way which threatens a new arms race.
The lesson, of course, is not that simple solutions are appropriate to complicated problems. Even if it were possible, a return to the pre-McNamara approach is not desirable. Still, if complicated arrangements are required, if experience has to be replaced by analysis, the new approach cannot be something put over on the rest of the country by a handful of elite civilians working in the office of a most remarkable Secretary of Defense. The discipline of ceaselessly looking for the relationship between what is being done and overall objectives, of constantly measuring ends against means and costs against gains, needs to be generalized. It needs to be practiced, as it is now not practiced, throughout the Department of State. It needs to be practiced, as it is now not practiced, in the Central Intelligence Agency. Above all, it needs to be practiced, as it is now not practiced, by the commanders in the military establishment. The great task of the new Secretary is to convert the Joint Chiefs to the religion of the Whiz Kids.
To propagate that faith, there is perhaps first required an act of contrition. The Vietnamese war is now being fought in their way by the military commanders and their friends in the White House and the Congress. But in a peculiar way it is not their war. The war is peculiarly the war of the Whiz Kids and their friends and supporters in the liberal, business, and academic community. It is the war of those of us who thought we could manage force, and tune violence finely. Those of us who believed these things have been wrong; and the price for a wider acceptance of an outlook and technique which remain valid is probably to step forward and take the blame.