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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

He sounds like Robert McNamara, wonderkind of business in his time, relatively inexperienced in politics and military.

Then came Vietnam. Eventually McNamara would admit

> "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

You can read more in "McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam" https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/world/mcnamara-recalls-an....

Besides military problems, we face environmental catastrophe, which Silicon Valley's ethos that technology will solve it, when it's mostly exacerbating it, and I expect Schmidt will end up more than "wrong, terribly wrong."

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That idiot ordered to kill president Ngo only to complain later:

> By the mid-1960's, Mr. McNamara says, it was clear that "political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved"

You can not call this just an incompetency. He is a type of a person who can not be entrusted with lacing his own shoes, let alone statecraft.

People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.

I think there were two huge systemic/structural problems with Vietnam (aside from whether or not we should have even been there). First, McNamara had the wrong mental model of what war is. He thought like a GM chairman, where you want to outproduce and out-deliver a competitor, ie, that it's a numbers game. That was never ever going to work. Second, and this is even more serious, top brass at DoD never called the civilians on the fact that they had their heads stuck up their asses. Instead, oddly enough, they acted like little division chiefs in a large organization: don't make waves, get face time with the boss, make sure the TPS cover sheets are attached, and so forth. This meant that not only were we wrong, we had no system in place to learn from it. There were several new ideas that look quite effective created in the lower ranks. They were all shot down before word got out too far, though. It didn't make the rest of the system look good.

Same thing happened under Rumsfeld. It was, "get on board or get a different job." Many, but not all, just went along hoping to make the best of it from the inside rather than resign and complain (and have their careers cut short).

Interesting that both of those problems could be summed up as "fighting the last war".

WW2 was about outproducing and out-delivering competitors - the U.S. won largely because its collective industrial might built weapons that the Axis powers couldn't match. And it was directed largely through top-down control: FDR and the War Department had broad control over large swaths of the American economy, high-ranking generals and admirals directed huge military operations, and the public trusted their authorities enough to play their part.

I wonder how much of the structure of modern-day nation-states stems from WW2, and how much is misaligned to current technology and problems. Military technology has a way of dictating political organization, and military technology is pretty different now than in 1945.

Good points, but I do think the aside that is invading a country on the other side of the world and murdering a ton of people, all in service of a globe-spanning game of ideological chess, is worth emphasizing a little extra!

The same goes true for the powers-that-be of the fourth estate. Iraq war is an illustrative case in point https://www.mediamatters.org/war-iraq/where-are-medias-iraq-...

What an oversight, strange that there is no personal accountability for journalists.

Is this because the journalists reported in line of thought of the outlet they were working for?

>People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I contend that McNamara, Kisinger, and Dulles were smart calculating types, but STILL the wrong person for the job.

Miss-characterizing past statesmen idiots paves the way and lowers the bar the next round of statesmen, who only need to differentiate themselves by not being idiots.

> Miss-characterizing past statesmen idiots paves the way and lowers the bar the next round of statesmen, who only need to differentiate themselves by not being idiots.

This is exactly what is required, isn't it?

You had no shortage of people from the field of policy studies who got hired to the white house not passing even that low bar.

May I know, who are you?

I don't understand what you are asking and think you may have missed my point . Not being idiots is a necessary requirement but not the only requirement set to be a good statesmen.

Claiming that McNamara, Kissinger, and Dulles were all idiots and above that low bar will do better is a recipe for failure.

Errol Morris' documentary on McNamara, The Fog of War is well worth your time to watch.

The parallels with Donald Rumsfeld's time as Secretary of Defense are remarkable - it seems Rumsfeld was making all the moves and mistakes that McNamara made. I fully expect Eric Schmidt to suffer the same fate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

You wouldn’t happen to know how to watch it outside the US? Amazon doesn’t allow that, and I can’t find it on Apple TV.

If you don't mind a terribly distracting background and poor resolution, here is a YouTube link

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5LsRRTvPigY

Interestingly, Morris also made a similar documentary on Rumsfeld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known

It's (IMHO) not as good as The Fog of War, but it's still very much worth a watch.

Great Film, an absolute must watch for any CEO, CTO, CHO, etc.

I wonder who the Roman or Byzantine McNamaras are? Surely our foolishness extents deep into the past.

Also recommended:

"The Best and the Brightest" (https://www.amazon.com/Best-Brightest-David-Halberstam/dp/04...)

The title refers to individuals who at the time were widely admired -- including of course Robert McNamara. These individuals were of keen intellect, and had been educated at Ivy League and equivalent schools; many had PhD's. They had a reputation as successful managers and leaders who prided themselves on straight talk. And yet, these "uber-men," working together as a team with the best of intentions, gradually managed to entangle the US into the hell of the Vietnam war, by many accounts mismanaged the war, and, last but least, deceived the public about it.

Schmidt and McNamara are similar, but not alike enough to warrant prediction, I think.

Reading through their Wiki pages briefly, the thing that stands out to me the most are the ages. McNamara was 42 when he became SecDef. Schmidt is currently 65. Those 23 years matter on the back end. Schmidt may have the dynamism still, but his career is set and his life's trajectory is on the downslope. McNamara's career apexed with the SecDef role. He was at the height of his working life. Sure, Schmidt is smart and hard working, but that fire doesn't seem to be there like it was with McNamara, understandably.

McNamara’s Folly is a great book on one of his more idiotic policies, and a great meditation on the dehumanizing cruelty that results from basing policy on false but ideologically pleasing assumptions.

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