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Charles J. Hitch, 50, comptroller, is being studied warily by most of the salty admirals and brass-hatted generals in the Pentagon. A mild-mannered, scholarly economist, Charlie Hitch has the self-confidence to insist that the comptroller should actively help shape military decisions. Hitch's thesis: only by using the economist's complex tools of analysis to judge the cost and efficiency of each alternative course can military commanders choose the best solution. Son of the head of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Mo.. Hitch graduated from the University of Arizona in 1931. spent a year at Harvard and then, like many another New Frontiersman, became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. During World War II, Hitch worked with the OSS in England. In 1948 he became head economist of California's Air Force-sponsored Rand Corporation, which ponders the darkest problems of defense. There Hitch crammed his theories into a book published last year called The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Harvard University Press. $9.50), a brain-numbing tome filled with such concepts of his trade as isoquants and exchange curves.*
When he was looking for a comptroller, McNamara was quickly impressed by the high praise high officials gave Charlie Hitch, and hired him with the comment: "Your dossier is the fullest." As proof of his faith in the economist, McNamara gave Hitch the job of heading up a task force on strategic warfare.
* One Hitchian term: "minimax," i.e., how to minimize the maximum the enemy can do.