The author, the late David Halberstam, whom I would characterize as a member of a vanishing breed of reasonable liberals, demonstrated with painstaking research but lively and readable writing the self-defeating management techniques of "the best and brightest" like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who was one of the "whiz kids" who went on to be president of Ford Motor Company post-World War II and then into the Kennedy administration.
Halberstam describes McNamara's quantification of the business of making automobiles a top down approach in which he tried to control the minutest functions of the vast Ford Motor Company through data collection and analysis. The remote facilities of the Ford Motor Company felt pressure quite naturally and, quite naturally, they began to Doctor the reports that were sent back to Detroit in order to maintain their jobs and even gain promotion and bonuses. The very controls which were put in place to streamline and gain efficiency resulted in the company's subordinates simply cooking the books.
Halberstam argues that McNamara replicated the process in Vietnam. We all know what happened in Vietnam and the metaphor for the whole business of self deception which occurred up and down the ranks in that war was the "body count." So notoriously had not been discredited as a viable management tool that the Pentagon, at least publicly, abandoned it in subsequent actions.
The parallel to what is happening today in the Veterans Administration is obvious and we should not be surprised that, if people of the candlepower possessed by Robert McNamara could be fooled, so could management in the Veterans Administration be fooled, or just as likely, be happy not to really know.
There are lessons to be learned from this and the first lesson is not to try harder to micromanage a huge and far-flung operation. The lesson is to go back to our founding fathers and set in place separation of powers and checks and balances which cause the machine to operate as its own gyroscope keeping the operation upright (in both senses of the word). That means we should privatize and set competing forces in motion.
