Especially in the first few years of this experiment, their analyses were usually pretty bad, often blatantly tendentious. Not that McNamara’s squad always analyzed with total objectivity, either. On many occasions, McNamara first came up with the conclusion and then ordered analysis to support it. The initial decision to build 1,200 Minuteman missiles, for example, was essentially a political compromise. With the aid of analysts in the Budget Bureau and the President’s Science Advisory Committee, NSC analyst Carl Kaysen, using Enthoven’s brand of systems analysis, demonstrated that the U.S. could get along just fine with only 600 Minutemen. Kennedy found Kaysen’s arguments persuasive, but McNamara told the President that 1,200 was the least he could get away with and still maintain a credible relationship with Congress and the Joint Chiefs. Kennedy, the cautious politician, went with McNamara.
As a result of the McNamara-Hitch-Enthoven years, systems analysis became accepted as the buzz word, the way that decisions were rationalized, the currency of overt transactions, the lingua franca inside the Pentagon. In his Saturday Evening Post diatribe, Tommy White wrote, “The term ‘defense intellectual’ conveys a nice, cozy, unwarlike and non-military feeling, as though modern war could be settled on a chessboard in an ivy-covered Great Hall.” General White had a point more profound than he might have known. The Whiz Kids had 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. In this dimension William Kaufmann and his counterforce briefing made their deepest marks.
17
TWO BRIEFINGS
FROM THE BEGINNING of his tenure in the Pentagon, Robert McNamara was fascinated with nuclear weapons—horrified by their awesome destruction, yet eager to find a way to bring them under some sort of rational control.
One week into the Kennedy Administration, he heard about a report by the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) called WSEG-50, its full title Evaluation of Strategic Offensive Weapons Systems. It had been completed just one month earlier, and those officials in the White House and the Pentagon who had seen it briefed were full of praise for it. McNamara figured he should make some time to listen to this briefing himself.
On January 26, George Contos, a weapons scientist who had supervised WSEG-50, and a few of his colleagues who had co-authored the study presented a briefing to McNamara that was scheduled to last for ninety minutes. McNamara grew so fascinated with their report, however, that the briefing lasted all day. It was just the sort of analysis that would appeal to McNamara. Every long-range bomber and missile program that the U.S. military wanted as of 1964–1967 was systematically and mathematically evaluated and compared for their cost-effectiveness, given likely Soviet nuclear forces during the same period. The study also examined the feasibility of a counterforce targeting strategy.
It was a huge report, ten thin volumes in all, the product of thirty WSEG analysts working for just over a year. Its chief conclusions, buttressed by hundreds of charts, graphs and tables, were that the B-47 and B-58 bombers should be scrapped; that the newly proposed B-70 bomber was too costly, too vulnerable on the ground and too easily shot out of the sky by surface-to-air missiles that the Soviets could readily develop; that the new, smaller Minuteman ICBMs were more cost-effective than their huge, bulky Atlas and Titan predecessors; that missiles were better than bombers generally; that great emphasis should be placed on the Navy’s Polaris submarine and missile, since their underwater mobility made them least vulnerable of all to Soviet attack.
McNamara emerged from the briefing excited. This was just the handle that he had been looking for, the integration of all the strategic weapons programs that the military was requesting into a single overall perspective. He told Charlie Hitch and Alain Enthoven that he was very impressed with the WSEG-50 study. Hitch and Enthoven looked dismayed; they hadn’t cared for it at all. On most of the points concerning specific weapons systems, they agreed. But WSEG and RAND differed radically on one critical point, and that was on the question of counterforce.
Counterforce occupied only one section of WSEG-50, but its conclusion was that such a strategy would not be effective, would not significantly limit the damage that the Soviets would wreak on the United States in a retaliatory strike. The key problem, according to WSEG, was that the Soviets would have substantial strategic forces that the U.S. simply could not target—perhaps a few missiles and bombers on bases that our reconnaissance intelligence could not find, and several submerged submarines. WSEG calculated that, even if the U.S. destroyed all of the targetable forces, the non-targetable weapons could, depending on the circumstances, deliver 1,000 to 2,000 megatons, killing at least half of the American population. Even if the people were fully sheltered by a comprehensive civil-defense system, around sixty million Americans would still die if the Soviets released all of their remaining weapons. Furthermore, the WSEG team argued, an attempt to gain a counterforce advantage would only spark an arms race that the U.S. could not win. It takes more than one weapon to destroy another one; therefore, for every missile that the Soviets add, the U.S. would have to add more than one.
In the end, WSEG recommended a strategy that harkened back to Bernard Brodie’s earliest formulation of deterrence in The Absolute Weapon, a strategy similar to that emerging from the Navy[4]—a doctrine of “finite deterrence,” stating that “once an effective basic force level consisting of the more promising weapons systems is deployed, it does not make much difference whether increments of one system or another are added in the retaliatory force.” One of the analysts on WSEG-50, an engineer named Larry Deane, privately referred to counterforce as “dynamic disarmament.” Since they had concluded that counterforce and other war-winning and damage-limiting strategies were essentially futile, the only alternative was to maintain a strategic retaliatory force so invulnerable and so horrifying in its destructive power that no aggressor would dare launch a first-strike. That was the essence of deterrence. To the WSEG analysts, any effort to minimize the destructiveness of the retaliation would weaken the deterrent power of the strategic arsenal.
This philosophy went deeply against the RAND tradition that Hitch and Enthoven represented—not so much because it hurt the Air Force (Hitch and Enthoven were no longer working for the Air Force), but because Hitch had been seriously convinced from the days of the RAND Strategic Objectives Committee, and Enthoven persuaded after hearing Bill Kaufmann’s counterforce briefing, that all-out city destruction was immoral and strategically unwise. However difficult the effort might be, it would be worthwhile to try to control the escalation of nuclear war, to restrict attacks to military targets, to withhold a reserve force with which to coerce the Soviets to do the same, to end the war before cities were destroyed. Hitch and Enthoven told this to McNamara in very brief terms, and urged him to hear Kaufmann’s briefing too. McNamara agreed.
The meeting was held on Friday, February 10, at 3 P.M., with McNamara, Kaufmann, Enthoven and Marvin Stern attending. McNamara was the only one who had not heard it before. By this time, Kaufmann had perfected the briefing. It contained fifty-four charts and, for most audiences, took four hours to go through. With McNamara it took only an hour. He grasped the meaning of nearly every chart at once.
4
This was no mere coincidence. WSEG’s director in 1960 was John “Savvy” Sides, an extremely shrewd Navy admiral.