Robert McNamara’s mistakes as Secretary of Defense have eclipsed forever his other contributions, including his participation in the genesis of operations research. This important field at the intersection of applied economics, engineering and mathematics has affected the world more than most esoteric theories acknowledged by Nobel economics prizes. But McNamara’s passing prompts some thoughts on techniques to allocate scarce resources efficiently in the absence of any market forces.
How that knotty problem united economists, mathematicians and engineers on both sides of the Cold War also illustrates the role of government in fostering scientific and technological development. We would not have many of the innovations that underlie our material wealth if not for the fear that drove defense spending for the half-century starting in 1938. The precedents established in that era carry important lessons for government science policy going forward.
Most news stories about McNamara’s life pay scant attention to his role as one of the “Whiz Kids” in the U.S. armed forces who helped win World War II by applying mathematical and statistical analysis to military problems. One wire service story said he “taught Air Force officers cost-effective management techniques.” Another described him as helping develop “a new field of statistical control of supplies.”
In actuality, the contribution of what eventually became known as “operations research” was far broader than that.
It dealt directly with the scheduling and coordination of all the complex resources needed for modern military operations like bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan, “the Hump” airlift over the Himalayas to supply Nationalist Chinese forces fighting the Japanese or selecting optimal sizes of merchant convoys and assignment of escort ships to minimize losses to German submarines.
Complex coordination problems were not new to the military. European nations established general staffs and staff colleges in the 1800s precisely to solve such challenges. In “The Guns of August,” Barbara Tuchman’s classic history of the outbreak of World War I, she describes the complexity of railroad scheduling needed for France and Germany to mobilize armies of millions. Insiders joked that the very brightest graduates of the German general staff school went into the railway scheduling bureau from which, after a few years of mind-numbing calculations, they were sent directly to lunatic asylums.
Such complex coordination and scheduling was largely intractable until the birth of modern statistics between the wars. And Stalinist central planning fostered the application of mathematics to planning. Running an industrial economy without markets required enormous coordination.
In 1939, Leonid Kantorovich, a young Russian economist assigned to streamline plywood production, developed a mathematical technique called “linear programming” to find optimum ways to combine resources for maximum production. He won the 1975 Nobel in economics for this work. Kantorovich’s innovation came too late for wide use during WWII. But further work by mathematician John Von Neumann and especially by George Dantzig, a U.S. mathematician and McNamara’s fellow Air Force statistical analyst, turned linear programming into a tool for managing a wide range of Cold War defense programs including the Berlin Airlift, nuclear submarines, intercontinental missiles and massive troop movements like those in the first Gulf War. (As a young man, Dantzig solved some previously unsolved statistical problems, helping inspire the 1997 movie “Good Will Hunting.”)
Developing the Polaris nuclear missile submarine helped create analogous techniques for managing complex design and construction projects. CPM (Critical Path Method) and PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) became bread-and-butter tools for project management, embodied in software used today, even by managers who forgot ninth-grade algebra.
Large benefits spilled over to civilian business from Cold War military applications and the 1960s space race. McNamara was one of 10 Air Force analysts who sold themselves as a package to the Ford Motor Co. From Ford, several went on to lead major corporations, with McNamara himself moving upward to head Ford in 1960, only a year before John F. Kennedy nominated him to be defense secretary.
Yes, McNamara’s arrogant and erroneous application of numerical indicators to Vietnam was an integral element in our failure there. And yes, at the Pentagon, hidebound officers whose pet oxen were gored derided new techniques. But for better or worse, McNamara dragged the military establishment, kicking and screaming, into a new era.
More importantly, the application of operations research methods for planning, programming and scheduling to the business world contributed greatly to three decades of high productivity, from 1945 on, that dramatically boosted national output and incomes for most U.S. households. If only such growth had continued unabated to the present, we would face far fewer economic problems.
Advances in operations research, along with those in materials science, optics, electronics and computing, did not occur spontaneously. They grew out of programs of large federal financing of research and graduate education in basic and applied sciences. Such federal research financing has faded to a fraction of what it was 40 years ago. We, and our children, are the poorer as a result of this lapse.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.