The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held -- holds; it is a hardy perennial -- that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.
Two of behavioralism's reinforcing assumptions were: Things that can be quantified can be controlled. And everything can be quantified. So, pick a problem, any problem. Military insurgency in Indochina? The answer is counterinsurgency. What can be, and hence must be, quantified? Body counts, surely. Bingo: a metric of success.
LBJ, not behavioralism, was behind the idea of body counts, as H. R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty pointed out on page 248:
"On March 15 [1965] the president called the JCS to the White House for consultation. ... He told his military officers that he wanted them to employ any means necessary to "kill more Viet Cong." He expected a weekly report totaling the Viet Cong dead."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment