CURIOSITATIS CAPTIVUS thesauri sapientiae et quisquiliae

The Fog of War – Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong

The USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy both claim to have made contact with North Vietnamese water craft and to have drawn torpedo fire from these vessels.  It turns out that the Maddox did, indeed, successfully evade North Vietnamese torpedo fire.  (Shell fragments were recovered from the deck of the Maddox which were proven to be North Vietnamese.)  The reports made by the Turner Joy, on the other hand, have not been verified to this day.  McNamara holds that "we were wrong" about the incident involving the Turner Joy.

After the Maddox incident, the President refused to respond to the act of aggression.  The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and retaliatory bombing attacks, proceeded from the reports of the Turner Joy's encounter with North Vietnamese aggressors.  The decision to retaliate and seek congressional approval of military action in Vietnam was made based on the observed pattern of escalating aggression in the Tonkin Gulf and Johnson':

"belief that it was a conscious decision on the part of the North Vietnamese political and military leaders to escalate the conflict and an indication they would not stop short of winning.  We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy costs. We see incorrectly or we see only half of the story at times … Belief and seeing, they're both often wrong."

"Let me go back one moment. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war."

McNamara travelled to Vietnam in 1995 to discuss "what might have been" with a former Foreign Minister.

"The former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, a wonderful man named Thach said, "You're totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us." We almost came to blows. That was noon on the first day.

"Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you, when you lost 3 million 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese killed, which on our population base is the equivalent of 27 million Americans? What did you accomplish? You didn't get any more than we were willing to give you at the beginning of the war. You could have had the whole damn thing: independence, unification."

"Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.""

The Fog of War – Lesson #6: Get the data

McNamara joined Ford as an executive in 1946.  Ford did not have a market research organization when he joined, so he established one.  First, he tasked market research to determine who was buying the Volkswagon.  The buyers of these vehicles were clearly able to afford more and it occurred to McNamara that there was a segment of the market not being addressed by US auto manufacturers.  Ford introduced the Falcon as a more economical car which was highly profitable to Ford.

Next, McNamara tasked the market research group to obtain data and conduct analysis on accidents.  It was determined that the primary causes for accidents were human error and mechanical failure.  Cornell Aeronautical Labs advised Ford that the primary problem was packaging.  Anecdotally, they suggested that eggs are protected from breakage when placed on the kitchen counter due to intelligent packaging.  Ford determined that if they could package people in cars as intelligently as eggs were packaged they could save lives.  In the 1956 model, Ford introduced seatbelts which, ultimately, revolutionized automobile safety.

The Fog of War – Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war

McNamara suggests that General LeMay's defense of his decision to firebomb so many Japanese cities would ask whether it would have been better to not have firebombed these cities and sent American soldiers to the shores of Japan to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands.

LeMay firebombed many other Japanese cities. The table below lists the city, the percentage of the city destroyed by fire, and the size equivalent US city.  (Source:  http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html.  Accessed 2 Jan. 2009.)

McNamara noted that these fire-bombings occurred before the nuclear bombs were dropped, and that the bombs were dropped under LeMay's command.

"Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."

"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.—Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history -- kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time -- and today -- has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, "the rules of war." Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?

LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

The Fog of War – Lesson #4: Maximize efficiency

Early in World War II, the B-29 bomber was developed to remedy some of the shortfalls of the B-17 and B-24. It was thought that this plane could destroy targets much more efficiently and effectively. Planes were flown from bases in Kansas to India. The bombers were then loaded with fuel in India and flown into China to Shang-tu to build up fuel stocks there. (Shang-tu was to be used as a mounting point for attacks against Yawata, Japan.) It turned out that, due to a lack of personnel training on maximizing efficiency, many of the B-29s were loaded with fuel for the return trip from Shang-tu to India. The entire effort "wasn't worth a damn" and General Curtis LeMay quickly figured this out and transferred the operation to the Mariana Islands.

LeMay was, according to McNamara, focused solely on target destruction.

"He was the only person that I knew in the senior command of the Air Force who focused solely on the loss of his crews per unit of target destruction."

It was LeMay who oversaw the horrific firebombing of Tokyo which killed more than 100,000 civilians. LeMay took the B-29s down to 5,000 feet and decided to bomb with firebombs -- greatly increasing the effectiveness of these planes and their incendiaries. McNamara shared an anecdote of a pilot who returned from the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 and complained that, by flying the mission so low to the ground his wingman had been lost to enemy fire. LeMay rebutted the pilot's complaints by explaining that, while he lost one wingman, the mission had destroyed Tokyo.

"Tokyo was a wooden city, and when we dropped these firebombs, it just burned it."

(Emphasis added.) Incidentally, the choice to use firebombs was also specifically LeMay's decision -- a further indication of his focus on maximized efficiency.

The Fog of War – Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self

While attending university, McNamara found himself excited to learn philosophy.

"I never heard of Plato and Aristotle before I became a freshman at Berkeley … I couldn't wait to go to another class!"

A focus on philosophy, logic and ethics stressed values and a responsibility to society -- "something beyond one's self" -- and rooted McNamara. He delighted in his marriage and family, and declared the early years of his new family as "some of the happiest days of our lives."