Rumsfeld and McNamara

I am struck by the similarities as Secretary of Defense between Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara. Both believed that business principles could be applied to war fighting, and both were led by that belief into serious errors.

McNamara succumbed to the belief, common in business, that one ought to have objective measures to gauge progress. The measure he chose was the number of enemy killed, and so of course everyone under his command maximized body counts by whatever means they could, including double-counting and just plain invention. Unfortunately, he measured the wrong thing. What mattered was the level of determination of his opponents, not body count. But determination is hard to measure objectively, while things like body counts are easy to measure, so he picked something easy to count.

Rumsfeld succumbed to the belief, common in business, that one ought to minimize production resources – one ought to do the job with the minimum possible expenditure of resources. This led him to overrule his military commanders and fight the Iraq war with too few ground forces. Once again, his business focus led him to attend to the wrong thing – total resources invested. What military commanders know from long experience is that the way to shorten a war (reducing its cost) and minimize casualties is to attack with overwhelming force, so that the enemy quickly senses the futility of further resistance. Our failure to do that, and to have enough troops in place to provide adequate security for the average Iraqi immediately following the war, led to the long and expensive insurgency we now face. What Rumsfeld should have focused on was the state of mind of his opponents, not resources invested.

The lesson here is one of hubris. Just because one is an expert in one field doesn’t mean that expertise transfers wholesale into an entirely different field. If either of these men had valued the military expertise around them, they probably wouldn’t be remembered now as the architects of disaster.