HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? by Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith. 364 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.
Critics like David Halberstam and former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay have attacked him from left and right. Senators Proxmire and Fulbright have assaulted obvious flaws in the Pentagon he left behind. Adam Yarmolinsky has demonstrated the problems and agonies his former boss endured. Now come Alain Enthoven and Wayne Smith, far less ambitious and partisan, far more technically expert, too. How Much Is Enough? examines the Robert McNamara Pentagon from the authors' special perch in the Systems Analysis office—one of the former Defense Secretary's showpiece creations. With cool precision, Enthoven and Smith make a strong case for McNamara's approach to his job and present a convincing list of his considerable accomplishments. Perhaps without even intending to do so, they also show how McNamara sometimes failed in what seemed to be his area of greatest strength: running the Pentagon according to reason and research.
As head of Systems Analysis, Enthoven (Smith served as his aide) was charged with supplying much of the necessary objectivity. With two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and economics degrees from Stanford and M.I.T., plus a four-year Rand Corp. stint as background. Enthoven at age 30 became the prototype McNamara Whiz Kid when the new secretary began building S.A. into a powerful administrative tool. Its basic mission: to estimate the required quantity and performance of forces and weapons in relation to their mission and costs.
Enthoven and McNamara soon ran afoul of service leaders, whose basic idea was "more of everything." How Much Is Enough? offers new evidence, if any were needed, that the military bureaucracy must have strong civilian leadership to prevent waste and duplication, and that competing interests among and within the services tend to stifle innovation. Elements in the Navy, for instance, resisted the Polaris submarine project, fearing that it would divert resources from other Navy programs. In 1961, when imaginative Army thinkers devised the airmobile concept, they got a cool reception from their own superiors until McNamara's office offered encouragement. Only after the techniques of Systems Analysis established the real differences between American and Russian military capability in Europe was it possible to make a realistic comparison between the strength of NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. Until then, the Army simply counted divisions one to one, ignoring U.S. superiority in firepower and support elements.
The search for comparative facts was often discouraging. They had great difficulty in determining the actual strength of the Tactical Air Command and other tactical air elements. Incredibly, it took from 1961 to 1966 for military and civilian planners to agree on how to take inventory at all.* Even now, the authors complain, the true cost of an infantry division is "not really known anywhere in the system."