Russian analyst remembers McNamara as key U.S. military reformer

Robert McNamara, who was U.S. defense secretary during the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, played an important role as a reformer of the U.S. Armed Forces, a Russian analyst said on Tuesday.

MOSCOW, July 7 (RIA Novosti) - Robert McNamara, who was U.S. defense secretary during the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, played an important role as a reformer of the U.S. Armed Forces, a Russian analyst said on Tuesday.

McNamara, the defense secretary for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, died on Monday at his home in Washington at the age of 93.

"He had a profound, multifaceted personality. But he showed his brightest side as a military reformer when he served as secretary of defense," Vitaly Shlykov, a former Russian intelligence officer, said in an exclusive interview with RIA Novosti.

"He was the first to establish real civilian control over the military," the political and military analyst added.

McNamara maintained that U.S. arms had to always be under civilian control, and the nation's defense posture had to be "designed to reduce the danger of irrational or unpremeditated general war."

"He did not have a large staff, and he could not count on the military and industry people telling him the truth. So, he hired Rand Corporation economist Charles Hitch as comptroller and he, in turn, brought in hundreds of whiz-kids. He also hired an assistant secretary in charge of systems analysis, who also had a staff of several hundred people. These systems analysts were asking the military why they think that what they were doing would serve a particular purpose, why it would be done in this time frame and at this price, and then presented an independent evaluation for the defense secretary."

The planning-programming-budgeting system (PPB) system proposed by McNamara became such a success that by 1967 it was being implemented in other U.S. departments and in many foreign defense ministries.

"In our country, we realized that we needed it and a number of books on PPB were translated. The 1960s were a period in which military thought flourished and there was a real desire to learn from foreign experiences," Shlykov said, adding that the Soviet government unfortunately did not have the time or expertise to implement it properly.

The analyst defended the ongoing reforms in the Russian Armed Forces and the appointment of a civilian as Russia's defense minister by drawing parallels between McNamara and current Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

"Now we have a manager similar to McNamara, who had been a top manager at Ford Motor Company prior to his appointment. Serdyukov was in the furniture business. Serdyukov's huge advantage is that he doesn't know the military world, he doesn't come from within this hopeless system."

"If we do not reform our system today - not the production and not the procurement, but the system of the development of new weapons - Russia will have no new weapons. It will never have the fifth generation fighter jet or something like that because today we produce what was developed in the Soviet era. If the new minister does not introduce PPB and system analysis, we will forever be behind," the analyst concluded.

Colonel (Ret.) Vitaly Shlykov, 75, spent 30 years as a career officer with Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), Russia's largest intelligence agency. In 1988, he retired from the GRU after completing his doctoral dissertation, which challenged the entire system of Soviet military planning. From 1990 to 1992 he was Russia's deputy defense minister. In 1992, he co-founded the Council for Russia's Foreign and Defense Policy, a political and security think-tank that he still belongs to.