Robert McNamara ...looking back at the Vietnam War

In an Opinion piece in the NYT Apr 21st 1999, Robert McNamara wrote about how post-mortem discussions with Hanoi revealed that the death toll and economic cost of the vietnam war could have been so much smaller - had each side not made very wrong assumptions about how much punishment or boldness the other side could tolerate, and about how open the opposing sides were to negotiations.

For example, in Vietnam each side miscalculated by repeatedly underestimating the costs and risks its adversary was willing to accept. The failure of the United States to anticipate the almost incredible losses absorbed by Vietnamese Communists, both north and south, is well known. But we learned in our dialogues that the North Vietnamese were prepared to absorb far greater punishment than was ever delivered by the American bombing. Likewise, the Hanoi Government, in a series of disastrous miscalculations made from 1961 to 1965, repeatedly underestimated America's willingness to prosecute the war in the South on the ground, and in the North via the bombing. In Vietnam neither side understood the bottom line of the other with regard to how South Vietnam should be governed, by whom and for how long. Each side, American and Vietnamese, discovered during the course of our dialogues that its former adversary was much more open to negotiations -- to a neutral, coalition government in Saigon -- than was believed at the time.

The point is this: These mutual misjudgments were not preordained by some process of escalation that, as is implied by many who see the Balkans through the prism of Vietnam, was beyond human control. Both the Americans and Vietnamese in the dialogues, who for the first time had access to one another's real intentions at the time, concluded that many opportunities existed along the way for leaders to do what they should have done -- lead! -- rather than ignore the Vietnam crisis in slow motion.

By the time Nixon ordered the withdrawal of US forces from South Vietnam, 3.5 million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans had lost their lives. He ends the opinion piece, which calls for the application of lessons from the Vietnam War to the Crisis in the Balkans, with this quote:

It was once famously said that the United States did not have 10 years of experience in Vietnam, but one year of experience 10 times over. Will we say the same about the Balkans?

During his military stint during WW2, during his time with Ford, and later as Secretary of Defence, McNamara applied systems analysis to bring about efficiencies, cost savings and support decision making. The systems approach supported his work well and the success it brought him set him up to trust them enough to apply them to the Vietnam War (source: wikipedia):

McNamara's plan, supported by requests from top U.S. military commanders in Vietnam, led to the commitment of 485,000 troops by the end of 1967 and almost 535,000 by June 30, 1968. The casualty lists mounted as the number of troops and the intensity of fighting escalated. McNamara put in place a statistical strategy for victory in Vietnam. He concluded that there were a limited number of Viet Cong fighters in Vietnam and that a war of attrition would destroy them. He applied metrics (body counts) to determine how close to success his plan was.

With hindsight, it is easy to see that even the best methods and processes for management, when supplied with incorrect data/assumptions, can generate tragic results. McNamara was definitely a brilliant man - a Harvard Associate Professor, President of Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defence who achieved great things during his lifetime. But the folly of the Vietnam War that he's credited with architecting is the one thing that he will be most remembered for. To his credit, though, he did have a change of heart about how the Vietnam War was being run, and tried to persuade President Johnson to take steps towards ending America's involvement in the war. But things had gone too far .... America's prestige was on the line and perhaps too many in big-business who stood to profit massively from continued hostilities were pushing hard on their lobbyists. His failure to change LBJ's mind led to his resignation and a new job with the World Bank in 1968 where he is credited with shifting the Bank's focus towards poverty reduction.

Robert McNamara passed away on 6 July 2009. The BBC carried this obituary on it's website.