Robert McNamara, former Defense Secretary, dead at 93
July 6th, 2009 | Defense | Posted by Steve Losey
Robert McNamara, the controversial former Defense Secretary who spent his twilight years apologizing for escalating the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, died early this morning in Washington. He was 93 years old.
McNamara was a top manager at the Ford Motor Co. and had just taken over the company in 1960Â when President John F. Kennedy tapped him to run the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, McNamara used his considerable management skills to tame the military’s massive bureaucracy:
At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his own stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management revolution. He centralized control, broke down the traditional fiefdoms of the individual services, and imposed multi-purpose, multi-service weapons on the brass.
According to an account published in The Washington Post at the time, “he shook all five floors of the Pentagon in his search for the tools he needed to get a firm grip on the biggest military establishment in the world . . . McNamara brought in computers to help with the spade work, hired systems analysts to comb through the technical points and then list the pros and cons for the generalists, reassessed the war plans, regrouped weapons into programs.”
McNamara greatly expanded the United States’ nuclear arsenal and helped Kennedy manage the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But McNamara’s skills weren’t enough to secure victory in Vietnam, and the conflict cost 58,000 American lives and, in many ways, tore the United States apart.
Tags: Defense
Senate approves deputy defense secretary
February 11th, 2009 | Agencies Congress Defense | Posted by Rebecca Neal
The Senate voted 93-4 Wednesday afternoon to confirm William Lynn as deputy defense secretary.
During his January confirmation hearing, several senators questioned Lynn’s past as a senior lobbyist for Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., a top Pentagon contractor. President Barack Obama had initially taken a hard line against lobbyists, saying they would have no place in his administration, but later softened his position.