ABSTRACT
In 1960, shortly after his election, President Kennedy asked Robert McNamara to become secretary of defense in his new cabinet. McNamara, known as a star and a whiz-kid, had been president of the Ford Motor Company for all of five weeks, so it took a bit of cajoling. But he eventually joined the administration in 1961, taking with him the high modernism of Ford’s production lines – with traces of Taylor’s measurement and scientific management still starkly present. A few years into his tenure, with Vietnam taking up ever more resources and political space, he wanted to know from his top generals how to measure progress in the war. He told General Westmoreland that he wanted to see a graph that would tell the defense secretary whether they were winning or losing (McMaster, 1997). Westmoreland did as he was asked, although he produced two graphs:
One graph showed the enemy body count. Under pressure to show progress (and knowing that political fortunes of their masters, promotions for themselves and their comrades, decorations, rest and recreation decisions and resourcing all depended on it), those who did the accounting made sure that not a single dead enemy body was missed. Soon, the lines between soldiers and civilians had blurred completely: all dead bodies became enemy personnel. Implausibly, the total number of enemy dead soon exceeded the known strength of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army combined. Civilian casualties mounted, the frustrations and incentives even leading to some massacres. In the field, of course, the ‘enemy’ was nowhere near all dead, and certainly not defeated.
The other graph showed a measure of civilian sympathies for the United States and against communism. It tracked the effects of the so-called Winning Hearts and Minds campaign (or WHAM), which had divvied up Vietnam into 12,000 hamlets, each of which was categorized into ‘pacified,’ ‘contested’ or ‘hostile.’ Pressure to show McNamara progress here was relentless too. Militias on the side of the Americans were invented on paper. Incidents of insurgent activity or hostile takeovers of hamlets were ignored. In an ambiguous, messy and protracted war, it wasn’t difficult to skew numbers in favor of making the graph look good. It soon seemed that the entire countryside had become pacified.
76The progress charts demanded by McNamara produced a monstrous auditing system (Scott, 2012). It was an example of the synoptic legibility of authoritarian high modernism, callously erasing all meaningful difference and distinction: a dead body was a dead body. It could be counted, and that was all that counted. And a pacified hamlet was a pacified hamlet – with all the cross-currents, fluidities and complexities of a shredded social order collapsed into a single number on a chart. McNamara’s system may well have played its own small part in contributing to the continuation of war and the stifling of meaningful, rational discourse about its merits and demerits. The political back tapestry, for instance as painted by McMaster in Dereliction of Duty (1997), was one of civilian leaders who were obsessed with domestic reputation and who had leaned further into military operational matters than turned out to be healthy. It took authority from those who would have had the knowledge and experience to adapt to local circumstances, instead sending them on missions to supply a desirable number up the chain – whatever it took.