Introduction
Even during his lifetime he became one of the symbols of the era of wars and credits, periods which we observe even today. He was a member of the cohort of politics that determined ideology promoting the US interests for many decades. It was based not only and not so much on the army, but on the power of the dollar. “Over the past half-century foreign policy elites have argued about priorities and instruments of national security strategy, some focusing entirely on the dimension of military power, others on economic and diplomatic cooperation” (Betts, 2004, p.5).
Many historians have noted a huge role of McNamara in improving and military intelligence quality. Immediately after joining the Pentagon, he created the Defense Intelligence. In addition to providing information, intelligence and counterintelligence agency were responsible for special operations. “His education, which gave him all too hazy a notion of his civilization, taught him with absolute certainty that the world could achieve peace and progress only through collective security and “modem” analytical methods” (Codevilla, 1995, p.518).
Robert McNamara gained considerable popularity in this post for the proposed measures on the organization of the War Department. In the early 60's in the United States there was written much about the principle that the new head of the military department sought to implement in the work of the Ministry. This principle is "cost-effective" or, in other words, for every invested dollar there has to be achieved maximum output. It is on this basis the system of "planning – programming – budgeting" has been developed and put into service in the US Department of Defense.
Vietnam experience
The tragedy and lessons of Vietnam are characteristic of the personal tragedy of Robert McNamara. Having the system analyst mentality, he describes in detail the unfolding of the situation of the Vietnamese operations in the early 60s. “McNamara stresses many facets of policymaking: the ever-present divided counsels among his best and brightest colleagues, not so much over ends as over means; the highly constricted setting in which they found themselves; the manner in which they sought to solve their Vietnam dilemmas” (Ford, 1996, p.95). He recognized that Americans were unable to resolve properly the confrontational presence of "two Vietnams" that had developed after the withdrawal of the French from there – Northern Communists Vietnam and South Vietnam under the control of nationalists – familiar to Americans on the situation of two Koreas. During the stay in power of Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Khanh, the internal instability in South Vietnam (heated by anti-Buddhist repression of the authorities) was not appropriate to deploy the agents of urban guerrilla warfare of the North and the gradual accumulation of Communist forces in the border zone and inaccessible forested areas of the South, where they intended to go to a frontal attack on the regime. In such situation the secretary of State frequently upheld military answers for issues in Vietnam, while McNamara regularly called for conciliatory negotiations (Harrison and Mosher, 2007). Maybe, it depended on battles among Americans at home, most importantly on the advancement of the mind-set of American elites. “In short, the Vietnam War came to be less about what way of life would predominate in Southeast Asia than about who, and whose values, should rule in the United States of America” (Codevilla, 1995, p.517). The US attempts to change the South Vietnamese bickering state and squabbling corruption, instruct the military on the right path, to get the South Vietnamese leaders to attend to the problems of national defense – yielded nothing. As a result, the US regional strategy evolved quickly – from the bombing campaign of North Vietnam Air Force to the direct involvement of US ground troops in frontline battles and punitive actions.
Security and Development
In any case, however every one of these admonitions are sufficiently clear, the irreducible reality remains that the security is connected specifically to the security of the recently creating world. People don't generally get a handle on the importance of "security" in this connection. In a modernizing society, security implies advancement.
Security means not military equipment, however it might incorporate it. Security is not military compel, however it might include it. Security is not customary military movement, however it might include it. Security is improvement. Without advancement, there can be no security. A developing country can't stay "secure." It can't stay secure for the obstinate reason that its own citizens can't shed their human instinct.
In the event that security suggests anything, it infers a negligible measure of request and steadiness. Without inner improvement at least to an insignificant degree, request and dependability are just unrealistic. They are impractical on the grounds that human instinct can't be baffled past characteristic points of confinement. It responds in light of the fact that it must. “History of American and North Vietnamese policies in the 1960s, a catalogue of what McNamara calls “missed opportunities,” various explorations of how the prolonged conflict could have been abbreviated through more astute diplomacy, and (related to the theme of missed opportunities)” (Kuklick, 2000, p.157).
Presently, that is the main event is not generally comprehended, and that is additionally what administrations of modernizing countries don't generally get. But, by stressing that security emerges from improvement, an immature country can't be subverted from inside, or be aggressed upon from without, or be the casualty of a mix of the two. It can. Also, to keep any of these conditions, a country requires suitable military abilities to manage the particular issue. In any case, the particular military issue is just a restricted feature of the more extensive security issue.
Military power can give peace however just to the extent that a premise for lawfulness as of now exists in the creating society: a fundamental eagerness with respect to the general population to collaborate. The peace is a shield, behind which the focal certainty of security – improvement – can be accomplished.
Presently people are not playing a semantic amusement with these words. The inconvenience is that citizens have been lost in a semantic wilderness for a really long time. They come to distinguish "security" with solely military marvels, and most especially with military equipment. But, it is not so simply. What's more, they have to suit to the certainties of the matter on the off chance that we need to see security survive and develop in the southern portion of the globe. National security was inseparably connected to worldwide security and worldwide security to shutting that crevice. As the Nobel Prize–winning market analyst Amartya Sen would later mention, economic advancement is flexibility — and then again, without it, there is no opportunity (Rosenzweig, 2010).
Development implies financial, social, and political advancement. It implies a sensible way of life, and "sensible" in this connection requires nonstop redefinition. What is "sensible" in a prior phase of advancement will get to be "preposterous" in a later stage. McNamara in his Vietnamese campaign arranged the ground and planted the seeds of alternate points of view of the war one that was to convince the administration and afterward the President (Shapley, 1993).
As development advances, security advances. What's more, when the general population of a country have composed its own human and characteristic assets to give what they require and expect out of life and have figured out how to trade off calmly among contending requests in the bigger national intrigue then their imperviousness to turmoil and brutality will be hugely expanded.
Conclusion
The United States expect to be human and liberal in this exertion, however it is not an exertion it can convey only without anyone else's input. Furthermore, along these lines it looks to those countries that have achieved the purpose of self-maintaining flourishing to expand their commitment to the development and, in this way, to the security of the modernizing scene. Then again, the disastrous need of urgent men to depend on power to accomplish the inward objectives of human respectability will reduce. All the confirmation of history recommendations that man is for sure a discerning creature, however with a close interminable limit for habit. His history appears to be to a great extent a stopping, yet industrious, push to raise his reason over his animal character. He draws plans for ideal world. At last he plugs away stubbornly with the main building material truly nearby his own particular part-funny, part-lamentable, part-cussed, however part-great nature.
Reference List
CODEVILLA, A. M. (1995). McNamara and the civil war at home. Orbis. 39, 517-525.
KUKLICK, B. (2000). McNamara’s struggle for understanding. Orbis. 44, 166-174.
SHAPLEY, D. (1993). Promise and power: the life and times of Robert McNamara. Boston, Little, Brown.
HARRISON, B. T., & MOSHER, C. L. (2007). John T. McNaughton and Vietnam: The Early Years as Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1964–1965. History. 92, 496-514.
BETTS, R. K. (2005). U.S. national security strategy lenses and landmarks. [Princeton, N.J.], Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. HYPERLINK "http://www.princeton.edu/~ppns/papers/betts.pdf"http://www.princeton.edu/~ppns/papers/betts.pdf.
FORD, HAROLD P. (1996). Thoughts Engendered by Robert McNamara's in Retrospect. HYPERLINK "http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA525279"http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA525279.
ROSENZWEIG, P. (2010). Robert S. McNamara and The Evolution of Modern Management Revered and then reviled, the onetime defense secretary may be posthumously redeemed as an icon of management. Harvard Business Review. 86.