Word: mcnamara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Early one morning last week, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other top Pentagon officials flew out of Washington in two separate planes for a quick, unannounced trip to North Carolina's Fort Bragg. Their mission: to get a close-up view of Army aircraft going through their paces and confer with members of a special Army panel that is taking a new, hard look at the problem of moving troops fast in battle. Among the men with stars on their shoulders and scrambled eggs on their hats flew young men in mufti whose schooling in warfare took place...
Second Generation. They are known-sometimes disparagingly-as "the Whiz Kids," the tag originally hung on McNamara and nine fellow Army Air Forces officers who sold themselves to Ford as a team after World War II. Today's second-generation Whiz Kids share many of the qualities of the old McNamara group...
...young (mostly in their 30s), intellectual, aggressive, forever questioning. They bring to the Defense establishment, along with their slide rules, a fresh, imaginative approach to the increasingly intricate problem of turning dollars into deterrence: just how much should go for M-14 rifles, how much for ICBMs. Before McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were accustomed-as one New Frontiersman puts it-"to render advice as though it were engraved on stone." Today, the Whiz Kids assemble the facts and the alternatives-including unorthodox possibilities-so that the Secretary of Defense can grasp the whole problem and make...
...guerrilla warfare. Enthoven calculated that one Chinook helicopter could do the job-at less expense in men and money-now performed by 15 to 20 of the Army's workhorse "deuce and a half"' (2½-ton) trucks. And Dr. Merton Joseph Peck helped design the celebrated McNamara blueprint for reorganizing the Army National Guard and reserves...
...Whiz Kids, they take pains to insist that they make only analyses and never policy, but their influence is wide if only because they work in terms that McNamara understands. The military are getting the message. Says one Army planner: "It's an entirely different way of doing business. But we've just had to adjust to it. No longer can you prove a point with civilian defense leaders by saying it's so because you know as a professional military man that it's just so. You've got to prove...