Free Republic

The controversy swirling around the F-35 joint strike fighter echoes previous battles fought over aircraft tasked with serving more than one master. Perhaps the central question in today’s debate is whether a single airplane designed to perform many missions adequately is a better and truly more affordable choice than several airplanes, each designed to perform a single mission flawlessly. In 1968, the Navy had an unequivocal answer: No. But were they right? In the early 1960s both the Navy and the Air Force were shopping for new combat aircraft. The Navy needed a carrier-based interceptor capable of engaging Soviet bombers...

At the peak of the 1965 war with Pakistan, India had asked the United States to covertly provide experts to work with Indian military officials to tackle the Chinese threat. This request was made to the US Embassy in Delhi by L K Jha, principal secretary to prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, on September 18, 1965, after India detected Chinese movements in battalion strength on the eastern border of Ladakh and in Chumbi Valley. Worried by indications that China was getting ready for military action against India to relieve the pressure on Pakistan, Jha stressed to the embassy that providing...

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. —An Ashland woman accused of walking onto the Framingham Police Department and throwing sausage and bacon says God told her to go "feed the pigs." Lindsay McNamara represented herself in court Friday after being arrested earlier in the day. "Somebody's out to get me," she said in court. "I don't know who it is, but somebody is out to get me." McNamara, 24, is now charged with disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property after the incident Friday morning.

As a combat pilot, Air Force Col. Jack Broughton was celebrated for bravery and tactical brilliance during the Korean and Vietnam wars. He received promotions and important assignments and seemed headed to become a general. But a high-profile court-martial during the Vietnam War for allegedly violating the rules of engagement that ruled certain targets off limits ended his career. After leaving the Air Force, Broughton was free to speak out about what he saw as the incompetence of President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in micromanaging the war. Pilots couldn't bomb an enemy outhouse without their approval, Broughton...

People generally buy a Chevrolet Corvette planning to drive the wheels off it, but examples with absurdly low mileage have to come from somewhere. Cars suffer a small breakdown and are parked for years, owners suddenly pass away and their children don't know what to do with the cars, vehicles get donated to museums... the list of usual suspects for something like this is pretty limited. But the story of this unrestored and completely original 1967 Chevrolet Corvette with just 2,996 miles on the clock is a new one for us. Here's what we know: Don McNamara turned 30 in...

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather.) “Fidel Castro is one hell of a guy! “You people would like him!” (Ted Turner to a capacity crowd at Harvard Law School during a speech in 1997.) “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly—even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (Andrea Mitchell.) “Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful, his presence is commanding.” (Barbara Walters.) “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Jesse Jackson while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.) "Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

The creators of “Tank McNamara,” a comic strip about a local TV sports anchor, are spending this week analyzing “the making of the Mike Vick decision” and skewering the National Football League. The six strips ... portray N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell as torn about how to handle Vick and two other African-American players in legal trouble... In Monday’s strip, former Vice President Dick Cheney suggests: “Kill him.”

His lack of integrity was deeply troubling, but it was the world-class arrogance that did the real military damage. It should be evident to all that Robert S. McNamara, to paraphrase a line from the 1940 book Guilty Men, was among the worst selections for high office since Caligula chose to make his horse a consul at Rome. He died July 6 at age 93. TodayÂ’s officials can profit from studying his career. McNamara, the Pentagon chief in the Kennedy and Johnson years, showed sketchy character on many occasions, but nowhere did he do this more baldly than in his...

July 27, 2009, 4:00 a.m. McNamara’s FollyThe road to failure in Vietnam. By Conrad Black The recent death of former U.S. defense secretary and World Bank president Robert McNamara, at 93, has raised again, in editorials and obituaries, the hoary head of the Vietnam War. Geeky in his thick, rimless glasses and slicked-back hair, expressionless, desiccated, fast-talking, and mechanically confident, McNamara was at the cutting edge of the managerial revolution—a business administrator, statistician, and efficiency expert. He was a mesmerizing figure for a time, especially after the Kennedy public-relations apparatus confected the myth of calibrated crisis management in the...

WASHINGTON -- The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three participants in Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the...

When McNamara -- the "Whiz Kid" from Ford -- was first named defense secretary, in December 1960, Time magazine gushed that he "reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W.W. Rostow's The Stages of Growth). . . . His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, 'is a beautiful instrument, free from leanings and adhesions, calm and analytical.'" Nearly 50 years later, the Associated Press would lead its obituary by describing McNamara as "the cerebral secretary of defense." In between, David Halberstam -- who was for the Vietnam War before he was...

THE death of Robert McNa mara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three participants in Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth...

Robert McNamara died Monday at the age of 93. Not a lot will be written about him because he is reviled by the left for his role in the Viet Nam war, and reviled by others for his mismanagement and failures. I am one of the latter. McNamara throughout his career held himself in higher regard than those around him did. He felt his intelligence trumped all, even when he was barking up the wrong tree. Prior to being tapped by Jack Kennedy for Defense Secretary, he was President of Ford. He came to Ford as one of a dozen...

Rather than absolving him of his sins, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s pseudo-mea culpa, “In Retrospect: Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” is a self-indictment. His lesser crime is self-indulgence. His arrogance and duplicity during the Vietnam conflict is echoed throughout his book as he recounts his mismanagement of the war. If as he admits, ignorance was his guiding light, then, it has grown to be a beacon today, proving that he has learned little about Vietnamese communism in the almost three decades that it took him to write his book. Besides the war, another tragedy is that McNamara seems...

LONDON: Former US defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, who has died in Washington aged 93, wanted America to attack China with nuclear weapons if it invaded India for a second time. Although he became a hated figure among the world’s Left for his role as an architect of America’s war on Vietnam, one of his chief aims when he became the head of the World Bank in 1968 was to leverage the Bank’s aid to persuade India to tackle poverty more effectively. McNamara was key to plans discussed by US President John F. Kennedy in May 1963 to defend India...

Mr. McNamara's last day at the Pentagon was a comedy of errors. A grand farewell ceremony was planned on the lawn near the river entrance, and thousands assembled in the freezing rain. Meanwhile, the elevator taking Mr. Johnson, Mr. McNamara and 11 others jammed between floors, and they were stuck for 15 minutes. "What's wrong with this thing?" the president asked. "Don't ask me," Mr. McNamara replied, "I don't work here anymore."

I can't stand media liberalism. From the article: ========McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some called "McNamara's war."========= Allow me to correct this. ========McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some liberal journalists called "McNamara's war."=========

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell. McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

The outrage and condemnation that have greeted Robert McNamara's In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam ignore two major scandals of that war which have led to continued pain, anguish, and suffering. McNamara, too, conveniently ignored them in his bloodless account of how he and his colleagues in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations were "wrong, terribly wrong" about Vietnam. A few months after McNamara told Lyndon Johnson that the war was unwinnable, McNamara did his part to make Vietnam America's greatest class war with his brainchild, Project 100,000. At the same time, McNamara knew but remained silent about the...