Bookshelf: War Lessons from Robert McNamara

While reviewing how to streamline operations, he noted that to avoid being shot down, US bomber pilots were flying at high altitudes and often missed their targets. Pilots were subsequently ordered to fly much lower, which compromised safety but enhanced efficiency in terms of ‘units of destruction’.

During his Pentagon years, McNamara had to deal with widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War. The authors describe in fascinating detail how McNamara was caught between Johnson, to whom he felt great loyalty; the administration’s hawks, led by secretary of state Dean Rusk, and senior generals in the Pentagon; and critics of the war, including John Kennedy’s influential widow, Jackie, and brother, Robert Kennedy, who were also McNamara’s close family friends.

Prioritizing loyalty, McNamara stayed on as secretary of defense long after he had lost faith in the war. Ultimately Johnson had to ease him out of the Pentagon and into the World Bank, where he could focus on what he by then saw as more socially deserving challenges. Interestingly, at the World Bank McNamara set about tackling poverty reduction with the same relentless focus on numbers and targets that he had applied at both Ford and the Pentagon.

The book’s most valuable chapters discuss McNamara’s own perception of his mistakes, and of the lessons that the United States learned from Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis, which also took place on his watch. The US’s experience in Vietnam marked a turning point in its strategic thinking about putting boots on the ground far from its own borders. And it taught US leaders about the limits of military power and the importance of public opinion.

McNamara was also keenly aware of the impact of the nuclear threat on military decisions. In what he dubbed McNamara’s law, he highlighted the difficulty in the nuclear age of predicting the effects of the use of force ‘because of the risks of accident, misperception, miscalculation and inadvertence’.

As secretary of defense, McNamara came to realize how little US decision-makers actually knew about Vietnam. In retrospect, he stressed the importance of understanding local conditions and having an exit strategy: ‘Before each operation there should be a paper on how to get out. And if you can’t get out, don’t do it’.

McNamara spent his retirement reflecting, writing and lecturing about his lessons from Vietnam, and was frustrated that they generated only limited interest among US leaders. With Russia mired in its war on Ukraine with no clear way out, McNamara’s lessons remain relevant today and deserve to be revisited.

Robert Wihtol is an adjunct faculty member at the Asian Institute of Management and former Asian Development Bank country director for China and director general for East Asia. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute  (ASPI).