Robert McNamara Dies

Robert S. McNamara, one-time Whiz Kid and secretary of defense for both JFK and LBJ, died this morning here in Washington.

McNamara's relevance to a blog about scenarios is that his obsessiveness about numbers and straight-line projections, so useful to him in relatively predictable environments such as Ford Motor Co., drew him to disaster as SecDef.

McNamara can be seen as the Anti-Scenarist, someone who believed his basic model of the Vietnam War was correct and that better input (more troops and bombing) would assure better output (North Vietnam knuckling under). He seemed unwilling to consider that a World War II model of warfare might not apply to post-colonial Vietnam.

Only later in life did McNamara wrestle with his responsibility for escalating the war, and I can't recommend Errol Morris's The Fog of War enough for its window into McNamara's thinking and repentance.