The 10 Lessons of Robert S. MacNamara

Robert S. Macnamara, on either side of a glittering career at the Ford Motor Company, was a man of the American wars. During the Second World War, he served with the Lieutenant Colonel for the Army Air Force based in the Pacific, under the formidable Major General Curtis LeMay, architect of the devastating, ultimately nuclear, aerial bombardment of the Japanese mainland. His statistical approach, based on simple numbers like targets destroyed vs. aircraft lost, underpinned his entire career, and he is recognised as the institutor at the highest levels of Statistical Analysis. It is feasible, if unproven, that his presentations based on statistics to General LeMay encouraged to implementation of low level fire bombing (utterly catastrophic for the largely wooden Japanese cities) and the use of atomic weaponry. Fast forward a couple of decades, and we find MacNamara installed as U.S. Secretary of Defence as the crisis in Vietnam escalated. His application of statistical methods expedited the enormous logistical challenge of conducting such a war. A genuine, honest appraisal of the situation was buried deep beneath a mountain of statistics, a famous example being the chilling ‘Body Count’. With the upcoming U.S. election, I though I would share MacNamara’s conclusions. This man of the American wars, this machine of logic with the might of Hades in his pen, condensed his experience into ten lessons:
Lesson 1
The Human Race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war – the level of killing – by adhering to principals of a “Just War”, in particular to the principal of “Proportionality”.
Lesson 2
The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
Lesson 3
We are the most powerful nation in the world – economically, politically and militarily – and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient.
If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of our proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
Lesson 4
Moral principals are often ambiguous guides to foreign policy and defence policy, but surely we can agree that we should establish as a major goal of U.S. foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policies across the globe: the avoidance in this century of the carnage – 160 million dead – caused by conflict in the 20th century.
Lesson 5
We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
Lesson 6
Corporate executives must recognise there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers and to society as a whole.
Lesson 7
President Kennedy believed a primary responsibility of a president – indeed “the” primary responsibility of a president – is to keep the nation out of war, if at all possible.
Lesson 8
War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court – that the U.S. has refused to support – which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
Lesson 9
If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy – I don’t mean “sympathy”, but rather “understanding” – to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
Lesson 10
One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.