Robert McNamara

[DMZ-LT]

While in Viet Nam , for awhile , I served around a place called Con Thien , which I heard was the HQ for the McNamara Line a high tech system that was to stop NVA from entering the south . It sucked and didn't work. Robert McNamara died last night in his sleep. He was 93. Thirty eight years ago I lost several men along his line , they were about 20 years old

[82Rigger]

Have you ever noticed that the people who make the life-costing "plans of war"

are seldom actually in the places where lives are being lost?

[1CAVCCO15MED]

When President John F. Kennedy put McNamara in the Pentagon, he gave him two orders: strengthen civilian control of the military and make the nation's armed forces work better. McNamara, educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the Harvard Graduate School of Business, tilted power away from the uniformed Joint Chiefs, who had held sway during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and toward his own team of brainy young civilian experts. McNamara's "whiz kids" engaged in the kind of "qualitative analysis" he had used to turn Ford around and which he believed would lead to a better and less costly military. But their approach didn't work so well during peacetime — McNamara spent a lot of time developing a "flexible response" strategy for nuclear war — and, combined with overly compliant military leaders during Vietnam, his team failed miserably.