alertken said:
Positive: McNamara's whizz-kids introduced "cost-effectiveness...biggest bang for the buck", which are now normal metrics for any investment. Posters here bewailing loss of a preferred piece of kit want to buy the possible, not the affordable.
The problem here is he and his "whiz kids" were wrong, a lot.
They overruled the military and source selection board four times on the selection for the TFX, citing a pointless criteria that they considered the end, rather than the means to the end. They ended up with an aircraft that eventually gave good service, but failed to meet it major criteria for one service, and failed miserably for the other.
They overruled the selection board on what became the C-5, ending up with a very expensive and unreliable aircraft.
They also told all bidders on the above to design their aircraft's wingbox around the use of a 1,000,000 lb. press, despite the fact that no such press existed in this county. This, BTW, is the root of the C-5's wingbox problems.
They didn't follow their own rules on selecting winners.
Because neither Congress nor USAF would accept his beloved F-111 as an ADC interceptor, he ordered teh Blackbird tooling not just mothballed, but destroyed, not only killing any possibility of a weapons carrying version being developed, but also ended SR-71 production early and precluded any restart of production should tat become necessary
Once we were in the War (which he looked on as a testing ground for his pet theories) they failed to provide our forces with needed supplies. When reality didn't match their models and estimates, they ignored reality and operated under the models.
He adamantly refused construction of any more nuclear carriers for most of his tenure. In fact, nuclear carriers are the only major system that he admitted he was wrong and reversed himself.
Regarding cost effectiveness, examination of the records shows that the amount and size of overruns and late programs was about the same under McNamara as it was before he introduced his "efficiencies".
Note that with the exception of shortages, I haven't even gone into his personal mismanagement of the war, for which he bears major responsibility for its duration and the consequent loss of lives and treasure on both sides.