Robert McNamara hit it off with Enthoven as well as he had with Hitch. Even more than Hitch, Enthoven was a numbers man. He was thirty when he took charge of Systems Analysis in the Pentagon and had the systems analyst’s obsessive love for numbers, equations, calculations, along with a certain arrogance that his calculations could reveal truth. And so Enthoven and McNamara got along splendidly, seeing each other nearly every day, an honor that McNamara bestowed to no other Pentagon official below the rank of assistant secretary.
For the same reasons that McNamara liked him, Enthoven drove most military officers, especially Air Force officers, half crazy. First, it was his arrogance that bothered them. Arguing with one general about nuclear war plans, Enthoven finally stated, “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have.” To another, one of the senior generals in the U.S. Air Force Europe, who started to give Enthoven a briefing one day, he sharply said, “General, I don’t think you understand. I didn’t come for a briefing. I came to tell you what we have decided.”
It wasn’t just Enthoven who angered the military; it was McNamara’s whole entourage of young, book-smart, Ivy League, think-tank civilian assistants, who soon earned the appellation given to McNamara’s band of statisticians in the Army Air Corps and at Ford Motors—the “Whiz Kids.” Hitch and Enthoven, with the assistance of Kennedy’s Budget Director, David Bell, revamped the entire defense budget. Before, each service was dealt with separately, little attention paid to overlap or lack of coordination among them. Henceforth, the budget would be organized by “mission” categories—Strategic Nuclear Forces, General Purpose Forces, Research & Development, Operations & Maintenance, and so forth—cutting across the separate branches of the armed forces. For the first time, then, Air Force bombers and missiles were compared directly with Navy Polaris submarines and missiles. And everything was scrutinized with the cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis that Charlie Hitch had done for years at RAND, asking the questions, “What weapon system will destroy the most targets for a given cost?” or “What weapon system will destroy a given set of targets for the lowest cost?” assuming that the Soviets have first launched a preemptive strike attempting to destroy those forces.
Using this sort of analysis, McNamara’s Whiz Kids, only weeks into their occupancy of the Pentagon, started to whack away at such precious Air Force projects as the B-58 and B-70 bombers, the Skybolt, Snark, Jupiter, Regulus and Hound Dog missiles. Their analysis told them that bombers were less “survivable” than ICBMs in hardened silos, and that the Minuteman ICBM was, by most standards, more “cost-effective” than other alternatives. At the same time, while they expanded the Minuteman production line beyond that of the Eisenhower plan, they decided to buy at first only 1,200, then 1,300, then 1,400, and finally 1,000 Minuteman missiles, instead of the 3,000 that the Air Force wanted, to say nothing of the 10,000 on which SAC was counting. They also gradually phased out all of the 1,500 B-47 bombers that, in early 1961, comprised the backbone of SAC, reasoning that B-52s were better than B-47s and missiles better than bombers.
Moreover, the Whiz Kids tended to favor accelerating the Navy’s Polaris submarine program and putting more money into the Army’s conventional forces—an effort that was especially pushed when Kennedy appointed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs his favorite military man, Army General Maxwell Taylor, who had been frustrated in his attempts to strengthen the Army during Eisenhower days.
During the first couple of years of the Kennedy Administration, the Air Force could not win a single battle with McNamara. And all the blame fell on the Whiz Kids, who, except for the relatively low-keyed and gentlemanly Charlie Hitch, practically shoved their victories and their youthful civilian power in the military’s face.
General Tommy White, now retired Air Force Chief of Staff and once an enthusiastic supporter of RAND when its analysts worked strictly for the Air Force, wrote a cutting piece in The Saturday Evening Post, which began, “In common with many other military men, active and retired, I am profoundly apprehensive of the pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls type of so-called professional ‘defense intellectuals’ who have been brought into this nation’s capital. I don’t believe a lot of these often overconfident, sometimes arrogant young professors, mathematicians and other theorists have sufficient worldliness or motivation to stand up to the kind of enemy we face. War is a brutal, dirty, deadly affair. Our enemy is a coarse, crooked megalomaniac who aims to kill us…. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of American strategy-making today is that military influence is so disparaged by the so-called intellectuals.”
General Curtis LeMay, who succeeded Tommy White as Air Force Chief of Staff, absolutely despised the Whiz Kids. He was horrified when Harold Brown, McNamara’s thirty-four-year-old R&D director, tried to tell him which bomber the Air Force should really want, “Why, that son of a bitch was in junior high school while I was out bombing Japan!” LeMay said. After McNamara killed the B-70 and a host of other Air Force weapons, and then stopped building Minuteman after reaching 1,000 missiles, LeMay would often ominously inquire of his Air Force friends, “I ask you: would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?”
The Whiz Kids were well aware of their low popularity among military officers; indeed, they thrived on their reputation, seeking battle with the Joint Chiefs whenever they felt it appropriate to do so. Once, Charlie Hitch, Harry Rowen, Alain Enthoven and Bill Kaufmann were flying back to Washington from Army Headquarters at Fort Leavenworth. Suddenly Kaufmann started to chuckle, turned to his friends and said, “What would the Air Force do if they knew we were all in the same airplane together?” They laughed uproariously.
From the Whiz Kids’ point of view, military officers were riled because they were being outsmarted. The military had never before been pressured to justify its weapons programs; the President, especially Eisenhower, had cut or modified their budgets on the margins, but they had pretty much been left alone to devise their own independent plans. They wanted more, bigger, better—setting their “requirements” at whatever levels their budgetary wish lists could absorb, never asking how much was enough to perform a certain mission, and certainly never comparing their own forces with those of the other services. The politics of the defense budget was composed almost entirely of the internecine warfare waged among the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, with the Secretary of Defense almost powerless to step in and impose ultimate authority.
McNamara could absorb, memorize and synthesize vast arrays of numbers, facts, analytical concepts with amazing speed and comprehension, and frequently embarrassed colonels and even some generals by knowing more about the weapons under discussion than they did. So McNamara, with the help of his Whiz Kids, told them what to do. And Jack Kennedy, who was enamored of McNamara’s brilliance, almost always backed him up.
In December 1961, some of the brightest Air Force officers met at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to figure out what they were doing wrong, how they could deal with McNamara and win a few bureaucratic battles. They concluded that they would have to work up their own analytical corps. No longer could they justify a weapon merely by saying, “There’s a military requirement for it.” They too would have to learn the lingo of “scenarios,” do “cost-effectiveness” analysis, become their own “systems analysts.” Smart colonels were assigned to “murder boards,” which tried to pick apart Air Force rationales before McNamara and his assistants could. In short, they would try to beat McNamara at his own game.