ECM arty shells ????

[Highspeed]

McNamara was an idiot, but I think it only takes about a paragraph to explain why

[Aesop]

Why is easy; it's the how that would comprise a series of books from the likes of an equivalent to William Shirer or Will and Ariel Durant.
If someone at Ford had simply gone postal on the guy, they could have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars.

[Langenator]

:jacked:
The DoD under the reign of Robert McNamara is the prototypical clowncarnucopia of fail. Igloo White was only one small memento.
This was the man who'd pioneered the Edsel for Ford, before breaking the World Bank and bankrupting/crippling most of the Third World.
In between those two forays into devastation, his sojourn at the Pentagon gave us Vietnam; the initial M-16 clusterfuckation; and the F-111, the original joint-service fighter. For most people any one of those would be a career-ender. For Mac, those are just the highlights. To properly plumb the depths would strain existing archaeological instrumentation, if not the human imagination.
It's what happens when you take a man of no discernible intelligence except political survival, co-blessed by a wholly unmerited personal sense of intellectual infallibility, and hand him the keys to the American defense budget at the height of the Cold War. If anything, he prolonged the standoff with Russia by 10-20 years.

When they make an American museum dedicated to such people, it should be named the Robert McNamara Museum of Utter Jackassery, his lifesize bronze statue should be out front, and he deserves no less than an entire wing of the establishment in perpetuity. He is Courtney Massengale's spiritual father.
When "McNamara" means to intelligence and wise leadership what "Benedict Arnold" means to patriotism, and "Adolph" means to megalomania, it will be a step in the right direction.
In the taxonomy of human family names, his jersey needs to be retired.

Congress should partially fund the venture, put it up across from the Pentagon (there's a lovely lot by the Marriot on Army-Navy Dr. that would be perfect), and every presidential candidate should be required to submit a hand-written 20 page thesis paper on his [strike]contributions to[/strike] unfathomably reckless harm to American defense, with the results published online prior to the primaries.

A serious genealogical investigation would probably determine that the customs officer in charge in Sicily in 1347, the lookout on the RMS Titanic, the night watchman on DeKoven Street, the CFO of the 1929 NYSE,the safety officer on the LZ Hindenburg, the design engineer of the South Fork Dam, and the OOD and/or damage control officer on the U.S.S. Indianapolis were all his relatives.

He's that bad, and I've only glossed it.

I'm guessing you would probably get on pretty well with the soon-to-be 3-star who will take over at ARCIC (and thus be the boss of my boss's boss) next month...

[Aesop]

I dunno, but if he has a similar visceral hatred of McNamara and everything he touched (probably including Mrs. McNamara, but IDK), he can't be all bad.

[MiddleAgedKen]

He is Courtney Massengale's spiritual father.

Heh.

[Langenator]

I dunno, but if he has a similar visceral hatred of McNamara and everything he touched (probably including Mrs. McNamara, but IDK), he can't be all bad.

He wrote this: http://www.amazon.com/Dereliction-Duty- ... .+mcmaster