What happens when the only thing you can count becomes the only thing that counts?
In 1942 the Army Air Forces did not know how many airplanes it owned.
Not approximately. At all. Aircraft came off the lines faster than the service could record them and scattered across depots and forward strips on three continents. The officers who allocated them worked from memory and the telephone. A wing commander short of engines called a friend.
Robert Lovett, the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, understood this as the thing most likely to lose the war and found a young man to fix it.
Charles Bates Thornton was twenty-eight, out of a New Deal statistical office, gifted at organizing information and unimpressed by rank. Lovett liked that he showed no awe of authority.
Thornton went to the Harvard Business School, where the Army had set up a program to teach its officers the analytical methods of business, and recruited from the faculty running it. Among them was an assistant professor of accounting named Robert Strange McNamara, turned down for active duty over his eyesight, who taught in the program through 1942 as a civilian and entered the Army Air Forces as a captain in early 1943. He was twenty-six.
The instrument was the punch card. A clerk sat at a keypunch and struck holes into a rectangle of cardboard seven and three-eighths inches long, each hole a fact: this aircraft, this base, this engine, this many hours. The cards went into a sorter that ran them at four hundred a minute with a sound like heavy rain on a metal roof. Out the other end came a number nobody had ever had before. How many B-17s were flyable this morning. How many aborted yesterday and why. How many gallons it took to put a ton of high explosive over a target in Germany.
The Office of Statistical Control grew to about fifteen thousand people. It found aircraft lost on paper for months and cut the abort rate. Assigned to XX Bomber Command, McNamara worked out that the B-29s supplying China over the Hump burned more fuel getting there than they delivered, and rebuilt the schedules. Men came home from missions they would otherwise have flown into weather.
That is the part most often skipped, and it should not be. Statistical Control corrected a real disorder in an enterprise that had never worked as well as it believed, and the disorder was killing people. The officers who resented these men — who had flown missions and been shot at and did not care to be told by a professor of accounting that their logistics were wrong — were, on the merits, mistaken.
It was also, in the spring of 1945, turned on the cities of Japan.
McNamara did not choose the tactic, and it is worth being exact, because the popular version gives him more credit than the record does. Curtis LeMay took over the B-29 force in the Marianas, concluded high-altitude precision bombing was not working — the jet stream carried the bombs off target and the abort rates were ruinous — and decided to strip the guns, come in low at night, carry incendiaries. McNamara’s section measured. Abort rates. Fuel loads. What was expended against what was destroyed. They made the machine run better.
On the night of March 9, 1945, the Twentieth Air Force burned the center of Tokyo and killed something near a hundred thousand people in a few hours.
McNamara said in 2003 that LeMay had told him they would have been prosecuted as war criminals had the war gone the other way. McNamara said he thought LeMay was right, and included himself.
He was right to include himself. He did not order the raid; he made the force that flew it more efficient, the commoner form of complicity and much harder to see from inside. The instrument answered a narrow question correctly. Nobody asked about the other one.
* * *
After the war Thornton offered the whole section to industry as a package. Ford was in such disorder that some invoices were estimated by weighing the stack of paper on a scale. Henry Ford II hired all ten in 1946, and Ford was profitable within two years. The men in sales and product called them the bean counters, and meant it, and were also glad the company still existed. For thirty years afterward the argument at Ford ran between the people who knew what a car should be and those who knew what it cost, and the second group generally won because their case could be written down.
McNamara became president of Ford in November 1960. Five weeks later came the call from Kennedy.
What he found at the Pentagon was the 1942 problem again, larger.
Planning was done by mission and weapon system, budgeting by appropriation category, so that the documents describing what the military meant to do and those describing what it meant to spend could not be laid against each other. Each service assembled its own program and decisions got made by seniority and bargaining.
For the fix McNamara took Charles Hitch out of RAND, where he had run the economics division for thirteen years and published, with Roland McKean in 1960, a book the New York Times would call the bible of defense budgeting. Hitch became Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) with nine months to produce a program-oriented, five-year defense budget. He met the deadline. Out of it came the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS) — every dollar sorted by the purpose it served rather than the account it came from.
This too was an improvement. It made tradeoffs visible that had been invisible for forty years and forced a service to argue for a weapon in some language other than wanting it. Parochialism survived, and so did politics and the appropriations committees. But the argument now had to be made on paper.
To run the comparisons McNamara stood up an office for systems analysis, staffed with young economists, a good many out of RAND. Alain Enthoven was barely past thirty when he came in. The shop was small, with authority to ask any admiral or general to show on paper that the force he wanted was the best use of the money.
The uniformed services hated it, and not simply from wounded pride. An officer’s judgment is the accumulated residue of things that happened to him and to men he knew. It is real knowledge and it cannot be written as a ratio. The story that survives has Enthoven telling a general who invoked his experience that he had fought exactly as many nuclear wars as the general had.
He was right, on that ground. Nobody had fought a nuclear war. The trouble was that the ground kept widening.
I began this series believing the widening started here, in this building, with these men, and that everything downstream of it was inheritance. I no longer believe that, and the essays that follow are the record of finding out otherwise. But the Pentagon is still where I have to start, because whatever the method’s parentage, this is the place it acquired the one thing it had always lacked — the prestige of the most serious organization in the American government.
Then the method went to a war where nobody could say what winning would look like.
There were no lines on a map in Vietnam. Ground was taken and left the same week. The strategy MACV settled on was attrition: kill the enemy faster than he can be replaced, until he passes what the analysts called the crossover point and his strength must decline whatever he does.
It is a clean idea and it can be graphed. The graph requires one input: the number of enemy dead.
The count did not start as a target. It started as a description — what a unit had encountered, reported up so somebody could see the shape of the fighting. Then attrition became the strategy, the description became the definition of success, and an officer’s performance a function of it.
The instrument was built to describe.
It was promoted to decide.
* * *
Much of what follows is in the words of the men who did it.
In September 1974, Douglas Kinnard — a general officer who had served there — sent a questionnaire to the 173 Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam. Sixty-one percent said the body count had often been inflated. The verbatim comments are harder than the percentage. One wrote that the scale of the false reporting was a blot on the honor of the Army. Another attributed it to the appetite for the number at the top.
The mechanism was ordinary and required nobody to be corrupt. It went, by the accounts of the men who lived it, something like this.
A battalion commander held his command six months, and his fitness report was written by a man reading weekly summaries. A patrol made contact, the artillery came in, and afterward there was brush and no time and a helicopter waiting. He estimated in the direction his career pointed. Civilians killed in a firefight were hard to tell from combatants in a war where the enemy wore no uniform, and the rule of thumb — if it is dead and Vietnamese, it counts — appeared in no directive. It did not have to. Marine lieutenants and Army colonels have both put it on paper afterward, and the accounts agree.
Each afternoon in Saigon, MACV briefed the press corps on what the day had produced: sorties flown, tonnage dropped, enemy killed. The correspondents named it the Five O’Clock Follies. The Associated Press bureau chief called it the longest-running tragicomedy in the theater.
Here I want to slow down, because the standard version is tidier than the evidence.
The tidy version says the command fixed on one number and went blind. Gregory Daddis, who has done the closest work on Army assessment in Vietnam, argues that this is wrong and has the reports to show it. MACV tracked more than a hundred and eighty indicators — force ratios, incidents, sorties, weapons losses, base security, hamlet defense, population control.
The command was not starved of measurement. It was drowning in it. Daddis locates the failure in the inability to say what any of it meant, and he locates the worst damage where I have just put it: not at headquarters, where everyone knew the count was soft, but at the level where the officer producing the number was also graded on it.
Consider what you answer to. Not what your organization says it values — what gets reported upward about you, monthly, in a form somebody can put in a column.
Then consider how much of what you do is in it.
* * *
The clearest account of what the instrument could not see comes from a man who spent four years trying to make it see.
Lt. General Victor Krulak took command of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, on the first of March, 1964, and held it until he left active duty four years later. In February 1962 he had become the Joint Chiefs’ first Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities, a billet created that month. By one accounting he made fifty-four trips to the theater.
His early reporting deserves fair description.
In September 1963, as a major general, he spent four days in Vietnam with a Foreign Service officer named Joseph Mendenhall and came back to brief Kennedy. Krulak had sampled ten locations across four corps zones and reported the shooting war going ahead at an impressive pace. Mendenhall had spent his days in the cities among Vietnamese he had known for years and reported a government coming apart.
Kennedy heard them both out and asked whether they had gone to the same country.
Krulak’s answer was better than the question.
Mendenhall was reporting metropolitan attitudes, he said; he was reporting national ones. He was right about that, and not uniformly rosy. The same report conceded a great deal of war left to fight, particularly in the Delta where the Viet Cong remained strong, and dissatisfaction among Vietnamese officers with their own government.
His error was the last of his six conclusions, and it is exactly the error this series is about. The Viet Cong war would be won, he wrote, if the current American military and sociological programs were pursued — irrespective of the grave defects in the ruling regime. He had measured the military trend lines carefully and reported them accurately, and he had put the political question outside the boundary of the thing being measured.
Two years later he had abandoned that boundary entirely.
What Krulak concluded, going back and going back, was that the United States was killing the wrong people in the wrong places on ground the enemy had chosen.
He was not against killing, and he was not against counting.
In the last week of December 1965 he put it on paper in a seventeen-page strategic appraisal, and the striking thing about that paper is its method. Krulak took the enemy’s pool of military-age manpower — something near two and a half million — set it against the Pentagon’s own kill ratio of 2.8 to 1, and showed on the arithmetic that attrition could not get there.
Then he proposed four things.
- Protect the population.
- Put pressure on the North’s ports, rail, power, fuel, and heavy industry.
- Put the full weight of both governments into pacification.
- Press Saigon into land reform.
He was not asking the Secretary of Defense to stop using numbers. He was handing him a number the Secretary’s own department had produced and telling him what it meant.
The village part the Marines called Combined Action: a rifle squad and a Navy corpsman living with a Popular Force platoon, night after night, in one hamlet. Krulak’s headquarters also built the system for measuring whether any of it was working — by his own account, MACV’s Hamlet Evaluation System came along afterward as a follow-on to what Fleet Marine Force Pacific had done.
He was not the man who could not count.
He was the man whose counting took longer to mean anything.
He was not freelancing either. The Commandant and the Pacific commander both blessed the appraisal. He took it to Averell Harriman, who was interested. He took it to McNamara.
By Krulak’s own later account, the Secretary told him the ink blot was a good idea but too slow. The official Marine Corps history hedges it that way — according to the Marine general — and George Herring, working from the same recollection, records only that McNamara made brief comment.
Not wrong. Too slow.
I do not know what McNamara meant by it and I will not put words in his mouth. North Vietnamese regiments were coming south, Westmoreland believed they could cut the country in half, and too slow may have meant too slow against them.
But there is a second case with the same two men, and it went the other way.
Earlier that year Krulak had wanted an expeditionary airfield laid on sand at a place he named Chu Lai, and nobody in the Pacific command wanted it. He got it by telling McNamara, in front of a room full of people, that the Marines could put it in inside twenty-one days. They laid a million and a half square feet of aluminum plank and took the first arrested landing that June.
He won that argument with a number. Twenty-one days is a promise a man can be held to, and it was kept.
The December appraisal had a number in it too, and this is where I want to be exact, because the easy version of the sentence is wrong. The arithmetic in that paper was the critique. The manpower pool set against the department’s own kill ratio, attrition shown on paper to be unreachable — that part was as quantitative as anything Systems Analysis ever produced, and nobody rebutted it.
What the arithmetic could not do was carry the proposal. Protect the population. Pressure the North’s ports and rail and power. Put both governments into pacification. Press Saigon into land reform. Not one of those converts into a figure a Secretary can hold a man to, and the ink blot’s whole claim was that you would not know for years whether it was working.
So he came in with a number that said stop and no number that said this instead. I am not claiming McNamara noticed the difference. I am saying the difference was there and that it did not require anybody to notice.
He went to Johnson last. On 1 August 1966 he got forty minutes in the Oval Office and got as far as the ports. In his own account the meeting did not go well.
He left active duty on 31 May 1968.
Nobody suppressed him, and there were two reasons he lost, only one of which belongs to this article.
Westmoreland wore four stars and Krulak three.
Westmoreland held the command in Vietnam and Krulak a force-provider billet in Hawaii. That is an ordinary and sufficient explanation for who prevailed, and any Marine will give it to you before he gives you mine.
But rank explains who won the political argument. It does not explain why the argument could not be had.
Krulak hoped to be Commandant, and inside the Corps it was less a hope than an expectation. He commanded Fleet Marine Force, Pacific — every Marine in the theater. Lew Walt held the other pole, senior Marine in Vietnam itself. The Corps read it as a race between the two, with Krulak the lead horse. He had reason to be. He had Kennedy’s confidence and then McNamara’s, Wallace Greene’s, CINCPAC’s, CINCPACFLT’s, and the Secretary of the Navy’s. Behind all of it stood Choiseul and Korea and thirty years of a record that needed no explaining.
The paperwork is thinner than the expectation.
On 17 August 1967 Greene, retiring, formally recommended his Assistant Commandant, Leonard Chapman.
On 5 September the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs proposed Krulak instead, and McNamara endorsed him. The man who had told him his idea was too slow put his name forward for the top job in the Corps. On 16 September Paul Nitze recommended Krulak to the President.
Krulak’s own account has Greene calling him that same month to say he had just helped draft the Navy Secretary’s letter, that it was pro forma from here on, that it would be public in forty-eight hours. His wife bought the four-star insignia.
Both records can stand: the institutional recommendation in August, the man’s actual preference in September. What is not in dispute is that Johnson then sat still for eleven weeks. Westmoreland, who had been on the receiving end of Krulak’s argument about how the war should be fought, broke the convention that a general of one service stays out of another’s promotions and wrote in favor of Walt. Krulak had already been escorted to the door of the Oval Office. Johnson did not fire him. He nominated Chapman on 4 December, and the Senate confirmed him on the thirteenth.
Chapman was the dark horse, and the wire services called him one at the time. He was also an artilleryman. Krulak’s son, who would hold the office himself a generation later, puts the significance plainly: the Corps had never made an artillery officer Commandant, and it has not made one since.
Infantry command in the field was the road, and Chapman’s field time was correspondingly thin. What he had instead was the institution — three and a half years as Chief of Staff at Headquarters, then Assistant Commandant. A decade spent operating the Marine Corps rather than arguing about the war it was in.
The official history records no presidential explanation and I am not going to invent one. But the two men were legible in different ways. Chapman’s qualifications could be read off a personnel file in an afternoon. Krulak’s case for himself was an argument about the nature of the war, one he had been making, correctly and without success, for two years, to men who needed something they could act on this quarter.
The Corps got the officer whose record could be read.
The Corps didn’t get the officer who got it right.
The invisible thing was concrete enough. A particular hamlet, held or not held, and whether the people in it would say where the mines were.
That got a form, and Krulak’s people wrote the form.
What no form settled was how long you had to wait before the entry on it meant anything, and the answer – the right answer – took longer than the reporting cycle.
* * *
McNamara’s reckoning, when it came, was more particular than he is usually given credit for.
In 1968, still in office, he was arguing the case in print: reality can be reasoned about, and declining to quantify what can be quantified leaves a man content with something less than the full range of reason.
In 1995 he conceded the war — they had been wrong, terribly wrong, the assumptions unexamined, the analysis never touching the political and national character of the thing they fought.
He never quite conceded the method.
Errol Morris drew eleven lessons out of him for the 2003 documentary, and they do not all point one way: rationality will not save us sits beside get the data. The labels are Morris’s. But a man who had spent thirty-five years learning what the numbers cost him let get the data stand among the things he wanted said.
I was commissioned in 1964 and reported to the fleet while Hitch was Comptroller and the whole Navy was learning to justify itself in program terms. After my service aboard the USS Ray (SSN653), I taught at the Prospective Commanding Officer school in Groton, and there I built a tracking method — the Geographic Plot — because the displays we had could not show a man what he most needed to see when two submerged boats were maneuvering close aboard.
It could reconstruct the maneuvers of a Soviet submarine, but mainly it kept two ships from colliding in real time.
I know the impulse. It is Thornton’s in 1942: this could be made legible, and lives depend on it.
The difference is what happened next, and it was luck rather than virtue. The Geographic Plot answered one question — where is he, where he might be, right now — for a man with thirty seconds to act on the answer.
It never answered how are we doing. Nobody in Washington saw a number from it and no officer’s record turned on it, and so it stayed honest.
The body count began as a description too. The whole distance between those outcomes lies in what an institution decides to do with a description once it has one.
The count did not blind the Army by itself. The objectives were contested, the ally was weak, the enemy adapted, and nobody in that generation knew how to read a war of that kind. But it corrupted what assessment there was, and it cost a great many Vietnamese their lives twice — once in the killing and once in the arithmetic that made them evidence.
The number was not false because someone lied. It was false because it was asked to carry a weight no number could carry, and the men who asked were serious men solving a real problem.
An instrument only ever asked what happened will go on telling the truth. Ask it what to do, and it will answer that too, in the one vocabulary it has.
On the morning of August 25, 1965, at a breakfast with his Cabinet and the heads of the federal agencies, Lyndon Johnson directed that a new and revolutionary system of planning and programming and budgeting be introduced across the government. Seven weeks later the Bureau of the Budget sent out Bulletin 66-3. Twenty-two departments and agencies were required to comply, seventeen more encouraged to. Each had ten days to name a responsible official. Program structures were due the first of February, multi-year plans the first of April. The bulletin acknowledged that this was a tight schedule.
Budget Director Charles Schultze sent it under a covering letter. To the Director of Central Intelligence, whom he addressed as Red, he wrote that the thing would fail if taken for a routine change in budget paperwork.
Buried in the fourth page is the instruction that matters. Agencies were to express their objectives and planned accomplishments, wherever possible, in quantitative non-financial terms.
The bulletin gave examples. The number of youths to be trained in Job Corps camps. The hours of Voice of America broadcasts in Spanish. The number of children to receive preschool training. The number of patients in federally supported mental hospitals.
Then it conceded that for some programs, adequate measures might not be obtainable.
And directed that they be developed wherever feasible.
* * * * *
Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where he developed the Geographic Plot, a contact-tracking method for submarine operations. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.