Comments for Heh

Heh

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:58:03 -0600

My mother told me to always say something nice about somebody, especially if you were about to slam them.Okay. In his later years, he spent a lot of time trying to make up for his earlier years. And the auto company he ran for a while is the only American maker not currently owned by the US government.Fortunately, I missed Mom's lecture about "Don't speak ill of the dead."My feet quit hurting this morning. I wondered why.Then I found out. They were celebrating the fact that former Defense Secretary McNamara is dead. Him and his bleeping ORSApods (*koff* did I...

Comment from Barb on 2009-07-09

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:27:31 -0600

To further hijack the thread - Actually, Cricket, Reloading is a better way of getting consistency ;-) When we were prepping for hunting season a few years ago, the Hubster very carefully determined the loads that he wanted for our rifle ammo, and we loaded our own to those specific measurements.
Of course, it would have been nice to be able to report that the hard work paid off with a punched elk tag, but we never actually saw an elk while hunting. *grump*

Comment from Cricket on 2009-07-08

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:40:06 -0600

I wanna add something here...and that is I am learning the 'noble profession' of bean counting. I have a different motive for it, but ultimately, you seek to get the best value for your dollar. If I can protect my family for X dollars, I will do that. Guns, ammo. Reloading versus factory-made? If I want consistency, I will get the factory stuff. However, cost being a factor I might reload as there are Kewl Things on the market to assist in variations with powder, etc.

But, since I am a neophyte to the Gun Ownership/Maintenance Group, I will stick with factory rounds. Knowing your limits is also key in the accounting equation. Sometimes, you have to pay a higher cost to protect your people, and be willing to do so.

Comment from fdcol63 on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:11:33 -0600

He was a number cruncher who obsessed over the bottom line, but his formula was fundamentally flawed because he never knew the value of X - people's lives.

Comment from Cricket on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:59:23 -0600

I got the reference. Seems that Robert Bruce did the same thing...offed an enemy in a cathedral but I digress.

I chortle in my joy.

Group hug?

Comment from ry on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:04:09 -0600

Gee, Chief, how many things have we seen where the first iteration didn't work so well? NOw the Navy just *raves* about commonality. THat's why all jobs are done by the Super Bug. McNammarra may have be a son-of-a-witch, but he wasn't evil(at least, not intentionally).

And, truth be told, and I'm sure this'll get a oh so many attaboys around here, if we all understood the people who went to war we'd never send them and you'd never go of your own volition either. YOu could apply that same crit on entropy based conflict, and all it's offshoots including network centric(rather central to current doctrine dontcha know).

I may lob a spit ball at the man's grave, but there's a limit to what I think is fair. There's a major boneheaded play(if not more) by all secdefs. Mc had more than his share of 'em. There's many instances where commanders ordered men to do stupid stuff, like hoard ordanance(had some idiot named Longstreet done so at Gettysburg either the assualt never would've happened or the arty could've supported poor Picett a whole lot better). Mc was extreme in this, but the military is better for the change in understanding about its logistics that came after. Just like the lasting changes that Rumsfeld instituted will pay divdends long after I'm dead so too did a few of the things Mc did bear useful fruit----like the commonality thing.

No, I'm standing by the parochial statement. Making it more like a business, which ruined it in some ways to be sure, saved it. An organization that was run along the 'insiders club' wasn't going to last very much longer. He killed that right dead. It needed doing, and he did it. As John poionted out, the Byzantine nature of procurement was WORSE pre-McNamarra. It's gotten even worse because of congressional pork projects(I grew up in B-1 Bob Dornan's district, I have first hand knowledge of that in play). What that did was change it from a camp of Spartans sitting in an enclave in Athens to a group of rather warlike Athenians sharing the commons with the rest of us, playing by the same rules---which, apparently, don't always work to everyone's satisfaction(or survivability). BUt, a necessary move.

Comment from AW1 Tim on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:17:29 -0600

That line will be endless, and both here and in the hereafyer, I suspect. :)

And yes, it was Henry who lamented the life of Beckett, inthat Beckett was still alive and "meddling" in the King's affairs... There was a time when politics was a little more 'cut 7 dried" than it is today.. heh.

Comment from Marine6 on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:21:42 -0600

Those of us who bore the burden of his Project 100,000 will neither forget, nor forgive. Most of us have heard the line that 10 percent of your people will give you 90 percent of your problems. Not so in this case. His Project 100,000 was, perhaps 1 percent of our people, and 99 percent of our problems.

Once his final resting place is announced the line to use that particular urinal will start forming, and it will be endless.

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:11:23 -0600

I think you're pretty close to the mark, Sean. And it's a disease which still lingers in the body military, the love for things technical and easy to understand, vice things human and messy.

Comment from JimC on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:44:27 -0600

Don't let JFK off the hook on this one. He picked him and asked Ford not to fire Robbie because it would embarass the incoming administration. Robbie kept his Ford job a few months longer to prevent a president-elect from being embarassed for having selected a business failure, put forward as a business genius, as SECDEF. At least, that's the way I heard it.

Comment from Sean Maloney on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:18:17 -0600

I interviewed him once. The word that comes to mind is "technocrat." He had no understanding about human beings and how they behave on the battlefield. That's why nuc'lar war stuff and anything related to bombing something held strong appeal for him-it wasn't about people, it was about tech and how that tech could be used to influence people-who he didn't understand. Get the circular illogic? He could not get his head around the irrational or the ambiguous. So the big question is, how did he deal with his WIFE, let alone the North Vietnamese???

Comment from Matt Linn, Sr on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:51:30 -0600

So, lets have a big hymn for the "honorable" (not) secretary Mc. Him, him, f--k him!

Comment from BillT on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:34:54 -0600

Some bone....

That's like saying, it's better to be run over by a Greyhound SceniCruiser than Bubba's Backwoods School Bus because the driver of the SceniCruiser has a CDL.

Either way, you're under the bus, but the Greyhound driver is *educated*...

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:16:29 -0600

Okay, Ry - I'll toss him another small bone. He broke the back of the Ordnance Board.

That was a good thing.

Of course, he didn't really replace it with anything useful... see Bill's comment about the procurement system.

Of course, Congress gets to share the blame for that, too, making procurement as much about pork as anything else.

Kevin - you've been reading around here long enough to know that this space hasn't been all that hospitable to Secretary Rumsfeld, either, and, interestingly enough, that love has broken along similar lines. All of us guys here, Ry over there... 8^ D

To better answer your question... define "accountability."

I know - I'll throw McNamara another bone. He was an improvement on Louis Johnson.

Comment from Mitch Miller on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:50:49 -0600

Why were we surprised he was a fool about Vietnam? His other contributions to the world were the Edsel and Mutual Assured Destruction.

Comment from BillT on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:37:48 -0600

Non-classicly edu-macated persons are scramblng to Google their way to enlightenment on the references...

Why? Don't they read Willy in High School Englitch classes any more?

Comment from Grumpy on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:24:53 -0600

I have no words, at least, the type that you'll print. I hear the line is long, from heaven and hell, itself, to come and pith on his grave. He won't be the first and he won't be the last. Ready, Aim, Fire!

Comment from BillT on 2009-07-07

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:16:12 -0600

He didn't "challenge the culture", ry -- he insisted it could only be run properly by applying the Holy Principles of Bean-Counting to it. Principles of a particular school that even the bean-counters stated were flawed.

Examples? He insisted that by making the TFX -- the F-111 -- an all-service fighter/bomber, astounding savings would be achieved through the miracles of aircraft commonality. When the Navy's engineers told him the aircraft, as designed, would be too fragile to take the pounding associated with carrier landings and, if upgraded, would be too heavy to operate from a carrier deck, he told them to STFU or hit the pike, and when Grumman's engineers *showed* him the numbers, he still insisted the Naval variant be built to the original specs. After several landing fiascos -- landing gear exploding, wings falling off at the roots, etc. -- he ranted that the Navy had sabotaged the tests, but authorized the necessary strengthening for the Navy version. The result was an aircraft too heavy to fly with any armament, too heavy to operate from a carrier, and too expensive for the Navy's budget (each one cost as much as a fleet of Mike-boats), so the USAF had to suck them all up -- and foot the bill for all of 'em, too.

Bottom line is that his push for "savings through commonality" resulted in the most-expensive aircraft we had ever bought until the B-1 arrived on-scene, and one that only the Air Force could use -- half the F-111s made were flown one-way to Davis-Monthan right off the assembly line, because they were too heavy for combat ops and USAF manning was insufficient to put them all in squadrons anyway.

Ol' Robert Strange was also the driving force behind the notion that a gun was unnecessary for a modern fighter -- dogfights were a relic of WWII and missiles would sweep the skies of any enemy aircraft. Then the sumbitch instituted a set of ROE which made it impossible to use missiles at their optimum range, which resulted in F-4s getting into gunfights over North Vietnam without having a gun. Ask the survivors of those encounters how that worked out for 'em -- you'll recognize them because they got the POW medal. The ones who didn't survive are on The Wall.

Then he instituted the policy of limiting combat expenditures by limiting the amount and type of ordnance we were authorized to use on any given mission, which resulted in F-105s attacking AAA sites with a single 500-pound bomb under one wing and 500 pounds of cinderblocks under the other. And which resulted in the idiocy of telling us we could only fire 500 rounds of ammo per machinegun per day while still engaging in combat assaults onto the Bad Guys' front lawns -- I did a post on that bit of insanity a while back, but I'm too lazy to link it.

All of RSM's goofball decisions -- and there were so many, I don't have time to recount them all -- were based on one thing, the bottom line, with a dollar sign. He had *zero* knowledge of the military, yet f*ucked over the military for the sole purpose of producing accounting-trick savings. Remind me to tell you about "McNamara's 100,000 Program" one of these days, which convinced everyone in the Army that he was actively trying to kill us...

BTW, don't even *think* of giving him credit for today's military being "less parochial" -- Nixon did that when he went the All-Volunteer Military route, which was *years* after McNamara left -- McNamara's legacy is our farked-up *procurement* system.

Comment from ry on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:33:39 -0600

While not really a fan, I gotta stick up for the guy a little. He wasn't the devil incarnate. He did do some things right. He challenged a culture, a way of doing things, that so obviously needed it. THe country is obviously better that the military as a whole is a lot less parochial than it was before him and his 'Wiz Kids' showed up. His sins for his actions regarding Vietnam are a lot harder to forgive for me, but the man was wrong---on a great many things---- and not evil.

And McNamarra not lamented? In what circles? The only circles I know of that find him unlamented are those who came to love him for throwing people like Unk under the bus once he was no longer responsible for anything relating to the military once he was over at IMF(or was it world bank?). The Berkely and Evergreen University crowd, essentially.

Comment from Wallace on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:30:22 -0600

Read my good friend Joe Galloway's final analysis of McNamara for a sampling of what many of us directly affected think....

www.mcclatchydc.com/galloway/story/71328.html

Comment from KEVIN on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:55:43 -0600

Er, wow.... just.... wow.... I can soooo feel the love here on this forum.... And I can soooo smell the familiar and pungent earthy aroma, of a muggy, waaaaay to-the-F-ing early Saturday morning WTF am I doing on Bourbon Street at 3 AM in August..... kinda scent....

Sooo, my pertinent, or perhaps, impertinent question to be asked and hopefully answered is...

When do we hold present (and past) administrations and their cronies in the same high esteem as the deeply unlamented McNamara? Is anyone to be held accountable or not?

Just curious and just sayin'.....

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:29:25 -0600

Heh. Tim, if the site is as popular as you think... it might reek of urine.

And don't you mean a "Henry-minded" fellow?

Which, of course, would put the Secretary into undeserved company.

Heh. Non-classicly edu-macated persons are scramblng to Google their way to enlightenment on the references...

No, Mike, Jim - it's too easy for you guys.

Comment from AW1 Tim on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:39:44 -0600

I was worried that i might be alone in my feelings about the dearly departed. Oh frabjus day, kaloo! Kalay! That man did more to destroy our military than anyone else, save perhaps the carter and Oboma folks, but I digress.

We suffer to this very friggin' day from his meddling, and it is, to my mind, more the pity that some 'Beckett minded fellow hadn't rid us of this meddling politicrat before now.

It's likely that the Devil was steeling himself to put up with him as to why he's lived this long.

I hope someone mentions where he's going to be buried. Might be a popular stop. :)

respects,

Comment from 11thACR Trooper on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:57:01 -0600

Finally, finally, finally. The no-good rat-bastard should burn in hell for all eternity. We bravely and honorably answered the call and he and that whole administration failed us.
Allons Brothers

Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:28:37 -0600

Hee! Your grip of the obvious is impressive, Argent!

8^ D

Comment from Argent on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:15:53 -0600

Good gracious he was widely loved wasn't he?

Comment from BillT on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:16:25 -0600

The only comments on the VietHeliVet forum has been "Happy Dance! Happy Dance!" repeated by each of about 250 of us.

At last count. The rest haven't chimed in yet because they're still celebrating...

Comment from MAJ Arkay on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:43:59 -0600

Oh, it's definitely dance time. On a grave. For joy.

Yeah, it's personal here, too...

Comment from og on 2009-07-06

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:40:11 -0600

I'm happy to see this. It means the demons who have been preparing his special pit in hell have completed their task, and they can go help dig the hole for Dick Daley.