Blame Robert McNamara?

Our wedding anniversary (number 45 this weekend) is the same date as the birthday of Robert McNamara, which I continue to find annoying. McNamara was the paradigm of almost all that has become wrong with America.

McNamara was extremely intelligent. He excelled at UC Berkeley and impressed at Harvard where he got an MBA. Before Harvard, he was an Army number cruncher in WWII, analyzing bombing efficiency. (I thought of him when watching AppleTV’s Masters of the Air as the airmen complained about being sent on virtual suicide missions that some planner thought vital.)

After the war, he was hired to bring modern managerial methods to Ford. He quickly rose to the top and pushed the development of the Ford Falcon. In his marvelous book The Reckoning (a parallel history of Ford and Nissan), David Halberstam excoriates McNamara for pushing a boring, simplified car model he believed the working man was supposed to want. Whether that is what the consumer actually wanted did not matter. Halberstam contrasted that with McNamara’s successor Lee Iacocca, who green-lighted the Ford Mustang, one of the most successful, popular model lines ever made. Iacocca knew that the working man wanted his new car (purchased maybe once every few years at most) to be special. His wife wanted to be seen by the neighbors when they drove it home. Those kinds of things did not have a column on McNamara’s spreadsheets.

As the Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara led the entry into the Vietnam War with the same overriding managerial approach—resource allocation as a strategy. It is perhaps not surprising that within that planning environment, Westmoreland’s strategy was seemingly based entirely on the body count metric rather than a more comprehensive view of how to achieve victory. McNamara’s Pentagon also regarded the aerial dogfight as an anachronism. Ideally, fighter aircraft would deliver ordinance from great distances as directed from the ground. The pilot was to be just a delivery driver. For the first time since the beginning of WWI, American fighter pilots had a losing record in aerial combat. Again, much of military culture, the intangibles of leadership, and the nature of combat did not have a column on the spreadsheet.

McNamara went on to head the World Bank where he implemented population control policies as the core anti-poverty methodology instead of an emphasis on large-scale industrialization. The possibility that high birth rates are a response to infant mortality and poverty rather than a cause did not find its way into the calculus. Incentives, human nature, culture, and history are unquantifiable annoyances. McNamara would have been a Davos man.

McNamara's career presaged the current prevailing sensibilities of modern governance: open hostility to consumer choice, the military as a bureaucratic arm, people as a quantified category rather than as people, and all acted upon with a thinly veiled arrogance and entitlement undiminished by demonstrable deficits of intellect and virtue or the complete absence of policy success.

To be fair, McNamara did introduce genuine efficiencies and his counsel during the Cuban Missile Crisis was sound. He was a highly capable, fundamentally decent guy. The problem is that his methodology seems at all times to have been accompanied by a weirdly sterile, almost anti-human filter opposed to the reality of incentives, human nature, and thus human dignity.

Planning is valuable and indispensable but not if it comes at the price of losing the ability to deal with inevitable uncertainties and complexities and the necessity of human virtues. All successful Plan Bs are born of the virtue of humility.

The modern administrative state is a pale imitation of McNamara’s — devoid of his actual talents, yet possessing an even more perverse anti-human, anti-normal sensibility. His generation of “whiz kids” were demonstrably smart, capable, and well-educated, unlike their current successors. The modern presumption that by deferring to the managerial class we will be led by the “best and brightest” has devolved into a vicious entitlement mentality on the part of a huge demographic hopelessly in debt to acquire credentials of dubious value. Because the solution would require a massive re-sorting and a virtual mass purge, even those within the class who recognize the problems are restrained in their criticisms, and instead usually call for (pointless) token correctives (Looking at you, RINOs) or are silenced altogether. The rhetoric of the campaign of 2024 is thus largely devoid of substantive, respectful policy debates by articulate leaders. Instead, it is cast as a battle of raw survival for the managerial class and its wannabes (AKA “our democracy”) versus the rights, freedom, and well-being of those over who they claim the right to rule. None of this fits on a spreadsheet anymore, as if it ever did.