What “the fog of war” means is: war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily. Wilson said: “We won the war to end all wars.” I’m not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon. It isn’t that we aren’t rational. We are rational. But reason has limits.

McNamara, choking on emotion, shares the following in the last scene of the film:

There’s a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love:

We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Now that’s in a sense where I’m beginning to be.

“How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it.”

McNamara recounts having read that General Sherman, during the Civil War, rebuffed the Mayor of Atlanta’s plea to spare the city from burning by saying ” War is cruel. War is cruelty.”

” That was the way LeMay felt. He was trying to save the country. He was trying to save our nation. And in the process, he was prepared to do whatever killing was necessary. It’s a very, very difficult position for sensitive human beings to be in.”

What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.

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.”"

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.

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?”

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.

“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.”

“I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.”

Poignantly, McNamara notes:

“The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is this: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.”

• The first message said that if the US was to guarantee that it would not invade Cuba, the USSR would withdraw the missiles
• The second message said that if the US attacked Cuba, the USSR would respond with devastating military power

Thomas “Tommy” Thompson, a former ambassador to Moscow, was in the room. He urged Kennedy to respond to the first message. He saw that Kruschev would capitulate if he was presented a deal in which he could say to the Russian people that he saved Cuba from a US invasion.

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.”

Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self.
Lesson #4: Maximize efficiency.
Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Lesson #6: Get the data.
Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Lesson #10: Never say never.
Lesson #11: You can’t change human nature.

For each of the lessons listed above, over the coming eleven days, I will share a synopsis of Robert McNamara’s thoughts as portrayed in the documentary. (It is certainly worth purchasing a copy of the film for yourself!)

I should note that all quotes related in the forthcoming posts have been taken directly from the transcript of the documentary provided by the director, Errol Morris, on his website. I will indicate any grammatical modifications made to this text, or any emphasis added.