entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 159 ]
described his policy of strategic hamlets that removed tens of thousands of
peasants from ancestral homes as "forced-draft urbanization and modernization"
(quoted in Sheehan, 1988, p. 712).
McNamara, the number cruncher from World War II, become President
John F. Kennedy's secretary of defense. He hired Charles Hitch, the analyst
of firebombing, and latter economics division director at RAND and president
of the Operations Research Society of America, to be the Pentagon
comptroller. Hitch, in turn, hired Alain Enthoven, another former RAND
analyst, to be the deputy assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis, a
new position. Other RAND analysts hired by the Pentagon included Harry
Rowen as deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security
affairs; Frank Trikl, to work for Enthoven on strategic offensive forces
(replaced by Fred Hoffman in 1964); and Bill Kaufman and Daniel Ellsberg
(a Harvard bargaining theorist like McNamara before him and Kissinger) as
consultants (Kaplan, 1983, pp. 252-254).
Fred Kaplan says of Enthoven, "He . . . had the systems analysts obsessive
love for numbers, equations, calculations, along with a certain arrogance
that his calculations could reveal truth" (p. 254). Kaplan concludes that
these "whiz kids"
transformed not only the vocabulary and procedural practices of the
Pentagon, but also the prevailing philosophy of force and strategy—not
only the way that weapons are chosen, but also the way that war should
be fought, (p. 256)
One young whiz kid, Barry Bruce-Briggs, enthused:
Most real military innovation is made over the feelings of the uniformed
officers by the so-called whiz kids and defense intellectuals. We've performed
this role and for that reason our senior staff people are received at
the highest level in the Pentagon like the Jesuit advisers who walked the
courts of the Hapsburgs. (quoted in P. Dickson, 1971, p. 93)
This comment reveals a number of things about the whiz kids, including their
hubris and affinity for priestly status. There is also something childlike about
the assurance of such experts, especially in the light of their paucity of
experience and their ignorance of the real cost of war, and considering their
dismal successes. Also, such a claim underestimates the commitment many
uniformed officers have made to innovation, whether for its utility in war,
help in career advancement, or both.
Vietnam was supposed to be fought as a political war, "for the hearts and
minds of the people." Instead it became the war of the electronic battlefield,