Wasn't that the biggest problem we had in Vietnam?
Well no.
McNamara was a civilian who tried to run a war using the statistical evaluation of numbers. Systems analysis became the trendy guiding principle. Young systems analysts became heros
Not a correct analogy at all. It’s one thing to listen to your commanders on the ground and to defer to their military expertise, quite another to defy your Commander in Chief over an administrative matter that is railroading a decorators SEAL. Either way, the military defers to the civilian leadership in all cases. That is what makes our military different from that of a dictatorship or a banana republic.