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While admitting that the famous F-111 TFX "has not been a success," the book offers a novel explanation: it was not a case of McNamara's forcing the military to accept his whim, but his failure to follow his own precepts closely enough. He simply allowed the Air Force and the Navy to hang more specific performance requirements on the F-111 than one aircraft could possibly deliver.
Pooh-Poohed Studies. A similar failure of analysis, on a much grander scale, occurred in Viet Nam. The essentially technical role of Enthoven's staff kept it out of the major decision making on the war. When Enthoven did offer informal studies, the Joint Chiefs of Staff pooh-poohed them. "No one," say the authors, "insisted on systematic efforts to understand, analyze or interpret the war." They do not blame McNamara explicitly. They note his desire to obtain more reliable information, and point out how difficult it was to get accurate data through the regular chain of command.
Without quite saying we told you so. Enthoven and Smith report that their office produced "pilot studies" debunking the body-count syndrome and showing how, even if the inflated figures were taken at face value, the enemy still had enough manpower to fight on for years.
So much for the attrition strategy. Another study stressed the ineffectiveness of bombing North Viet Nam: Hanoi was able to replace its losses with less strain than Washington had expected. But this information was produced after the crucial policy had already been embarked upon.
McNamara, the great quantifier, the executive of enormous will and intellect, the eternal challenger of conventional military wisdom, in the end proved unable to apply his own techniques effectively to the greatest military enterprise he undertook. Why? Enthoven and Smith offer no satisfactory explanation. The reader is left with two depressing possibilities. McNamara may simply have been too human to resist the political inertia around him. Or his case may demonstrate that no one man seems able to master the entire technology of modern war and modern politics.
Lawrence I. Barrett
* Originally, only aircraft officially assigned to combat units were counted, a method that ignored large, readily available reinforcements.