Those Young Men in Mufti

Early one morning last week, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and other top Pentagon officials flew out of Washington in two separate planes for a quick, unannounced trip to North Carolina's Fort Bragg. Their mission: to get a close-up view of Army aircraft going through their paces and confer with members of a special Army panel that is taking a new, hard look at the problem of moving troops fast in battle. Among the men with stars on their shoulders and scrambled eggs on their hats flew young men in mufti whose schooling in warfare took place not on the beachheads of Normandy or Inchon but on the blackboards of universities and Government-contract think factories. The men in mufti exert a powerful and controversial influence in the Pentagon these days--and they often have more to say about cold war military planning than the generals.

Second Generation. They are known--sometimes disparagingly--as "the Whiz Kids," the tag originally hung on McNamara and nine fellow Army Air Forces officers who sold themselves to Ford as a team after World War II. Today's second-generation Whiz Kids share many of the qualities of the old McNamara group.

They are young (mostly in their 30s), intellectual, aggressive, forever questioning. They bring to the Defense establishment, along with their slide rules, a fresh, imaginative approach to the increasingly intricate problem of turning dollars into deterrence: just how much should go for M-14 rifles, how much for ICBMs. Before McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were accustomed--as one New Frontiersman puts it--"to render advice as though it were engraved on stone." Today, the Whiz Kids assemble the facts and the alternatives--including unorthodox possibilities--so that the Secretary of Defense can grasp the whole problem and make up his mind for himself.

Computers v. Clausewitz. This unusual new breed of analysts and planners, more learned in computers than in Clausewitz, is dedicated to the belief that the demands of defense in the thermonuclear age have outdated the methods as well as the armor that served in past wars. Says Dr. Alain C. Enthoven, 31, a key man in pulling together and evaluating military information: "There are many things that simply cannot be calculated--the reliability of an ally, or the psychological and political consequences of a military operation. But there are also many things that cannot be done intuitively or based entirely on experience. Intuition and experience unaided by calculations will not tell us how many ICBMs are needed to destroy a target system, or how many C-141 transports are required to move a division."

Free of ingrained military prejudices--as well as lacking in military experience--the Whiz Kids delight in finding new and often totally unexpected solutions even to conventional military problems. While working on guerrilla warfare, one of them remembered reading books by British-born Author John Masters, whose The Road Past Mandalay described his World War II experiences with Orde Wingate's Chindits behind the Japanese lines in Burma, got Masters to write several valuable reports on guerrilla warfare. Enthoven calculated that one Chinook helicopter could do the job--at less expense in men and money--now performed by 15 to 20 of the Army's workhorse "deuce and a half"' (2 1/2-ton) trucks. And Dr. Merton Joseph Peck helped design the celebrated McNamara blueprint for reorganizing the Army National Guard and reserves.

Waffled Disagreements. While the Whiz Kids acknowledge in principle the usefulness of long experience in uniform, they give the professional soldiers poor marks at paperwork. Says one: "The military too often are inarticulate. In papers, they resort to the all-purpose sentence that doesn't recommend anything, but merely waffles over disagreements within their ranks." They think that the military too often fall back on tradition and intuition rather than clearheaded analysis. After Whiz Kids studies, the RS-70 bomber program was curtailed, though Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay is thoroughly convinced that the bomber's promised ability to fly farther and faster will be an essential ingredient in future U.S. aerial superiority.

As a result, the Whiz Kids are often disliked and distrusted both in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. One Air Force officer complained that their computers, rather than common sense, cut back the RS-70. Complains another: "These guys have never fired a shot in anger. And yet they try to come in here and suggest what experienced military men should do."

There is no open warfare in the Pentagon, but among the uniformed ranks there is a resentment based not only on the fact that the Whiz Kids are not members of the club (West Point or Annapolis); the military men feel that they are being passed over and disdained, that their hard-won knowledge is dismissed as obsolete and service pride taken for sentimental partisanship, that their inability to talk the new Whiz Kid lingo is taken as stupidity. The best of the old soldiers long ago tried to get sophisticated themselves in developing and using the advanced weapons, and planning the strategy and tactics of modern warfare. These men think that they will be the ones who, even in a pushbutton war, will have to do the fighting, and that the military tradition they are imbued with--of courage, stubbornness, independence, imagination, and self-respect--will be required of them and those who serve under them. All this, they believe, the new young men regard too lightly.

As for the Whiz Kids, they take pains to insist that they make only analyses and never policy, but their influence is wide if only because they work in terms that McNamara understands. The military are getting the message. Says one Army planner: "It's an entirely different way of doing business. But we've just had to adjust to it. No longer can you prove a point with civilian defense leaders by saying it's so because you know as a professional military man that it's just so. You've got to prove it now." To help prove it, the military are belatedly paying the Whiz Kids the most familiar form of flattery: they themselves are now bringing in younger, university-trained soldier-scientists to act as the military equivalent of the Whiz Kids.

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