Defense: 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in computers than in Clausewitz, is dedicated to the belief that the demands of defense in the thermonuclear age have outdated the methods as well as the armor that served in past wars.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."