Posted on 07/06/2009 6:21:18 AM PDT by DFG
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has died.
McNamara, 93, died at home in his sleep Monday morning, his wife Diana told The Associated Press. She said he had been in failing health for some time.
Known as a policymaker with a fixation for statistical analysis, McNamara was president of the Ford Motor Co. when President John F. Kennedy asked him to head the Pentagon in 1961.
McNamara worked for seven years as the defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, longer than any other person in that post. He headed the war department during the build-up of forces in Vietnam.
He is considered the architect of the concept of "mutual assured destruction," a key feature of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Your reply is one of the most perceptive about the Viet-Nam War that I have seen. The after-effects are continuing, and will for many years to come.
I wouldn't go around touting that bit of madness. Nor would I go around touting his conduct of Vietnam.
You cannot begrudge men who faced death, and saw their friends die, a visceral reaction to Bob McNamara.
Vietnam was a political war, not a military one, screwed up by incompetents at many levels. Our military did everything it was asked to do, and won militarily.
The war at home was a different story.Hawks and doves weren’t just birds in that era.
We were losing an average of 220 men A WEEK in that war even as late as 1971.
If you think this thread is “bad”, just wait until Jane Fonda kicks off her mortal coil.
Today under Obama they are attempting to get rid of the Air Force using a similar rational.
The historians here will tell you my namesake had rigid standards of proper behavior. I’m absolutely certain the Peer would agree that McNamara is a man whose name will deservedly be scorned for centuries to come among warriors.
I am not a veteran but during the Vietnam War my academic advisor told me an earful about Robert McNamara.
McNamara treated warriors the way he treated that car he tried to weld together to save money: They were nterchangeable and readily replaced spare parts. Traditional notions such as valor, unit pride and cohesion and brotherhood were a nuisance to him. The idea that military leadership is something quite different from business management was simply alien. He was clueless that you adapt the weapons the fit the circumstances, not the other way around. Thus he repeatedly sent bands of strangers into battle with the wrong tools and then blamed them when they could not perform to his unrealistic expectations. The man was simply odious, a technocrat who might serve as an adequate technical advisor but who was way out of his depth as a commander. Lacking the insight to know his own limitations and the humility to admit that his plans did not work, he repeated all his mistakes, killing more and more young men in the process. Even in his dotage, he could readily say the war was a mistake but he never could admit that he had been an utter and complete failure.
McNamara was also a supercilious elitists who knew that having gone to Harvard was far more important that what you had actually done afterwards. My advisor was a W.W.II mustang who had taught himself several foreign languages and had taken enough courses over the years to have earned an MA in foreign policy had they all been at one university. But he didn’t have a college degree, so he knew he would never get another promotion with McNamara as Sec of Defense. “The Colonel” had the last laugh. When he resigned from military service, a decidedly non elite university saw how smart he was and awarded him an advanced degree in record time. He then got tenure at a decidedly non elite college. He never did get that bachelors degree McNamara thought was crucial in turning a man into a proper officer.
May this dirtbag ROT IN HELL for the damage he did to the military and the country!!!!!!
They ignored their generals, actually ordered initiating points on bomb runs up north, and tried to get the other side to the table by upping the ante incrementally. And, oh yeah, McNamara kept his draft age kid OUT of the draft, and went on to tell us how the war we fought was WRONG.
So YOU offer thoughts and prayers to his family. I hope he rots in hell. Keep your class. I have my memories.
CPT ARMOR
MACV 1971
In four pages the author recreates the tension in the room as the Joint Chiefs pitched the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong--only to be cursed and thrown out by Johnson.
The picking of targets, the allowance of sanctuaries, the incrementalism--had it been left to the warriors, Giap would've been dead rather than writing a memoir.
I was privileged to assist in a small way Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam. A treason indictment by the authors using transcripts of radio broadcasts archived in Colorado Springs. A road not taken by Nixon for fear of the power of Hollywood and the rest of the Leftist propaganda industry.
Two million more slaughtered in Cambodia, all thanks to arrogant fools conducting the effort, abetted by such vermin as Fonda, Kerry, Cronkite.
A victory by our warriors over the enemy's Tet Offensive spun as our defeat--
Johnson, MacNamara, Cronkite, Kerry, Fonda et al are accountable here for their actions here.
Now we suffer the treason and lies of Obama who disarms for the KGB assassin, who dismantles missile defense for the Rat Boy Holocaust Denier, who kills the F-22 for the Butchers of Tiananmen.
Gates, coauthor with Zbigniew Brzezinski of the 2004 CFR paper "Iran: Time for a New Approach" thinks it fine to lay down arms and parley with the nutcase creating the chaos to coax the Twelfth Imam from the well near Qum.
The Republic will survive because of the brave whose fight purifies the nation of the abomination of the few.
I hadn’t thought about McNamara in years. Then I mentioned him in a post just yesterday because he immediately came to mind in relation to the flakiest leaders in my lifetime.
He won’t be tripping over the bodies of the good who died young on the way to where he’s going.
Oh, please. Don’t suppose to speak for me and others. The man deserves to burn in Hell. Dying doesn’t sanctify him. If God wants to forgive him, fine. But I don’t have to.
He won’t be seeing them where he’s going. Their paths will not cross again.
Amen. Agree 100%.
But that those whose deaths he caused got so much attention then as his does now.
I think the best way to properly disrespect him is to completely shut up about him, which I will now do.
Whew! Finally got that old SOB in the ground. Harsh, but humour me, I met him on campus in the 60’s. He had small balls then, but in later life, he cut them completely off all by himself.
You.re 23. Pardon me while I chortle a bit.
We’ll see how much “better” you are after about 30 years of paying rat tax policy, putting up with rat bed-wetter programs and the tyranny of the minority and minorities.
I thought he was a joke until I read a bio. He really was the real deal. When he was offered command in the Army after resigning as Secretary of the Navy, he declined. Said he didn't know enough about the Army to be a Colonel. So he served under Colonel Leonard Wood until Wood was promoted. Then Teddy stepped up. He fought the War Department too over leaving his men in the malaria ridden swamps after the battle. Really a class act.
What I recall is that engineers wanted a bigger tank because the one they had was not big enough to do corrosion treatment for the larger cars they wanted to build. McNamara wanted them to treat the two halves separately and then weld them together later. (Having exposed welds defeats the purpose of the corrosion treatment.)
Whenever someone touts O’s Ivy league education, I remind them it was the Ivy trained eggheads that lost Vietnam by fighting according in to a newfangled theory of “limited war” instead of actually going all in to win in as short a time as possible
I smiled when I read this yesterday…then I asked the Lord’s forgiveness.
15 months at Portcall (Tactical Radar Control) near Nha Trang gave me a chance to see RSM’s work up close and personal.
I stole a line from one of his speeches years later for my Master’s Thesis at AF ACSC/Auburn, “People were drowning in data, while thirsting for knowledge”.
Years later I was sitting in a room with Westmoreland and five other folks talking. Westy said stopping the BUFF’s going downtown was the biggest mistake of the war. He was certain we had’em on the ropes but let them escape.
Interesting, over 250 posts and not one word about his time at the World Bank. Just shows you one build a thousand railroads and suck one time and you’re known as that for the rest of your life.
As a former BUFF radar navigator we knew how to end the war in weeks. Bomb the Red River dikes, flood the entire country.
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