Compass Points - Ghost of Whiz Kids

Heed the warning of Jacob Marley

Compass Points - Ghost of Whiz Kids

Heed the warning of Jacob Marley

December 17, 2024

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In Charles Dickens' great Christmas classic, A Christmas Carol, the protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser who focuses only on money and efficiency, is visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley warns Scrooge that there is more to life than just money and efficiency.

Perhaps in a similar way, as the incoming administration approaches the Christmas season, Elon Musk may experience his own, A DOGE Christmas Carol. Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, run the new Department of Government Efficiency. What will the DOGE fixation on efficiency mean for the future of the US military? No one knows for sure. Perhaps as Christmas approaches, late one night, alone in his bed chambers, Elon Musk may be visited by the ghost of government efficiency. Is there a ghost of government efficiency? Yes, the ghost's name is Robert McNamara.

Robert McNamara was widely regarded as one of the most brilliant men of his time. He earned an MBA from Harvard and later became the President of Ford Motor Company, where he revolutionized its business processes. He became friends with President Kennedy who appointed him as the Secretary of Defense, giving him a mandate to bring Ford Corporation efficiencies to the Department of Defense. Upon his arrival in the Pentagon in 1961, McNamara unleashed a swarm of his “whiz kids." These young RAND Corporation analysts, mathematicians, and economists saw every military challenge as something that could be easily solved by applying complex mathematical models, along with rational choice theory, game theory, and microeconomic models.

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McNamara’s challenge, after being appointed secretary of defense by newly elected President John F. Kennedy, was to impose order and rationality on a chaotic and conflict-ridden Department of Defense bureaucracy. Using the enhanced powers the Office of the Secretary of Defense received under defense reform legislation passed in 1958, McNamara quickly moved to impose his will on the Pentagon.

. . . The most infamous failure of this analytical approach came in Vietnam. The Office of Systems Analysis was officially put in charge of evaluating progress in the war effort in 1966, but McNamara’s methods had been influencing the way the Johnson administration weighed costs and benefits throughout the conflict. The problem, as noted by the preeminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis in his classic Strategies of Containment, was that systems analysis required quantitative metrics that could be easily manipulated.

. . . The promise of McNamara’s economic approach to defense planning was supposed to be the rational pursuit of greater efficiency, and thus more “bang for the buck.” . . . But McNamara’s approach to defense planning was wielded as a political weapon as much as it was an analytical tool. As one biographer wrote, the secretary of defense relished bombarding members of Congress with statistics to impress upon them the precise nature of his analysis . . . McNamara fought them with heaps of statistics.

-- Matthew Fay

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Despite the brilliance of McNamara and his whiz kids -- and some process related successes -- they badly damaged US warfighting capability with their unbalanced focus on efficiency.

Two projects were particularly damaging, Project 100,000 and the DEROS policy.

Project 100,000 required the military to accept into the ranks civilians who were not qualified to serve, often due to mental deficiencies. As the years went on, Project 100,000 fractured the military.

The DEROS policy was even more harmful. The term DEROS stands for Date Expected Return from Overseas. Military units throughout history were sent to fight together and came home together. But under the individual rotation policy, each service member was on his own 365-day countdown.

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During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army used a personnel rotation policy that at first blush defies military logic. The Army rotated soldiers through Vietnam on one-year tours. Officers also spent a year in country, but only six of those months were in a troop command.

In a profession where unit cohesion, combat experience and competent leadership mark the difference between victory and defeat, the Army’s rotation policy made little sense to those who lived through it. Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army, written by Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lt. Col. Paul L. Savage, was one of the more thoroughgoing and insightful indictments leveled against the Army in the years following the war. ‘The rotation policies operative in Vietnam,’ Gabriel and Savage argued, ‘virtually foreclosed the possibility of establishing fighting units with a sense of identity, morale, and strong cohesiveness….Not only did the rotation policy foreclose the possibility of developing a sense of unit integrity and responsibility, but it also ensured a continuing supply of low quality, inexperienced officers at the point of greatest stress in any army, namely in its combat units.’

-- Mark DePu

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The ghost of Jacob Marley warns Scrooge there is more to life than just money and efficiency. The ghost of Robert McNamara warns Elon Musk there is more to the military than just money and efficiency.

In, A Christmas Carol, after Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by Jacob Marley, Scrooge becomes a new man. His outlook on life is completely transformed. He realizes that life is much more than just money and efficiency.

If Elon Musk this Christmas is visited by the ghost of military efficiency, Robert McNamara, will Elon Musk become a new man? Will he understand that a military fighting force is about more than money and efficiency? Will he understand a fighting military force is fueled by honor, cohesion, courage, and sacrifice? All these military virtues, and more, may not be efficient or easily quantifiable, but each one is vital for the defense of the United States. If battles were simple matters of efficiency, they would be fought by MBAs. Battles are much more complex, however, than what can be tallied in a spreadsheet. The life and death struggle of war in all its complexity, chaos, and creativity cannot be solved by a mathematical model, but only by warriors.

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Niskanen Center - 08/05/2024

Rationalizing McNamara’s Legacy

By Matthew Fay

https://www.niskanencenter.org/rationalizing-mcnamaras-legacy/

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History.net - 11/13/2006

Vietnam War: The Individual Rotation Policy

The individual rotation policy was, in hindsight, clearly one of the worst ideas of the Vietnam War. At the time, however, military planners had few options.

By Mark DePu

https://www.historynet.com/vietnam-war-the-individual-rotation-policy/?f