Didn’t read the book, but isn’t saying that in the movie admitting it to everybody?
Why? There was no real reason for the blockade, other than sabre-rattling. We’d already had nukes deployed to Turkey for years by that point- just as close to Moscow and St. Petersburg as the Cuba installations were to Washington and New York.
So everyone who ever took part in a war is going to Hell then?
People die in war, that’s what happens.
Robert McNamara revolutionized the American military.
By instituting a policy of lowering intelligence requirements, targetting those of low intelligence, in particular urban blacks and poor rural whites who were disadvantaged by woefully inadequate educational systems, lying about remedial education and skills training, and using them as cannon fodder where they suffered significantly higher casualty rates than the rest of the military.
All in order to keep middle class support for the war by ensuring richer, whiter kids could have college exemptions and would not have to go fight and possibly die.
Stand up guy, he was.
And they were quietly withdrawn later as part of the deal. But you are forgetting the Golden Rule.
Coups, invasions, assassinations, torture - It’s All Okay If America Does It.
No by creating a structure in the Pentagon whereby the various armed forces could be run from a single joint command rather than having their own individual high commands, buying weapons and organizing around separate principles.
But thanks for playing.
Was everything McNamara did bad? No. But nor was all of it good. And Project 100,000 weighs pretty heavily on the crappy side of the scale. And it is something that tends not to be addressed when he is discussed.
Fair enough, but Project 100,000 is not really the method by which he revolutionized the military and is irrelevant to his revolutionizing the military. It was a shady tactic used in an unjust war to keep troop levels up.
The branches still buy their own weapons individually without much thought for what the other branches are doing. The soon-to-enter-service F-35 is almost unique in that it’s been designed with the needs of three of four branches (and international operators) in mind rather than just one.
Not working in the Pentagon I am not going to comment on how well McNamara’s policies worked out in practice, but from everything I’ve read it was far worse prior to his taking the job.
Well, that’s certainly possible.
The book and movie is about the ‘fog’ of war, what we should have but didn’t know. McNamara’s decisions were based on this knowledge, like a kid who gets a C on a test but shrugs it off saying he answered the questions the best he could.
What, do you think it was a Risk game where we were the kind parents playing with single-digit children ho couldn’t understand thne rules? We were out to screw over the Russians and they us, for very strong reasons on both sides. It wasn’t about being nice, it was about winning.
Second, of course, I find your characterization insipid and naive.
And I find you a sociopath.
I love people who can’t play a game without having to moralize about it. They’re either the losers, or so controlled by their pathetic sympathies that they cannot use their human reason for anything. Usually both.
Because he wanted to beat the Russians? 
But IIRC, he states that if we had lost that war, he (and others) would have been tried for war crimes, and rightly so. Sounds like a confession of terrible deeds to me.
A very complex man, indeed. He did so much good and so much bad in this world, even the most understanding Higher Power will have trouble deciding where to put him.
I don´t know. I can´t hate the guy after watching the Fog of War. In fact movies like it and books like “The Guns of August” have made me realize that our leaders are only human after all and subject to all our failings.
He wasn’t an evil man. He tried to do his duty to the best of his knowledge, and that has to count for something.
I think McNamara was a generally decent person, caught up in times no person could be adequatly prepared for.
Bad grammer, huh?
I read your link and am unconvinced by your characterization. Their death rate was 1.1%, compared with 0.6% for your average Vietnam vet. They were 60% more likely to be assigned a combat role. They also received four times as much training time as the average recruit. Now I concede that Project 100,000 was a failed experiment. But those stats aren’t so overwhelming as to suggest that these men were being used as “Cannon fodder”. I don’t accept that adjusting test thresholds downwards is a priori evidence of nefarious intent. After all, the program was launched in 1966, before the antiwar movement had really hit its stride.