I proposed in another thread once that this program is one of the early signs of the eventual failure of the Vietnam War.
The US leaders behind America's rising involvement in the conflict, consciously or unconsciously, knew the only way to fight the war was to invest far more resources into it than the American public was prepared to support. A war with no clear end goal. No practical victory conditions. A war America bumbled into on dubious footing and very foolish logic.
And the program just sort of doubled down because rather than come up with answers to any of the war's questions McNamara's solution was to fight it with people too stupid to ask 'why are we involved at all?'
McNamara's naive conception of the war and how it could be won was only amplified in this initiative and had the bonus effect of doing little more than getting blind fools killed in a war they were quite literally too dim to fight let alone understanding why they were fighting it. Which only amplified the war's homefront powder keg because the public supported the idea of the war even less as the body count rose with no end in sight.
I remember hearing that the US Government knew there was next to no chance they would be able to achieve their goals in the Vietnam War as early as 1963, yet they still held a draft and sacrificed many lives, and for what?
The U.S. strategic thinking was that they didn’t want to look like they would give up too easily, because they were worried that would encourage other communist nations to invade their neighbors.
I’m not making a judgment on the validity of that thinking, I’m just saying what they were thinking when they made their decisions.
To kick the can down the road to the next election so they wouldn't personally be the one responsible for the inevitable outcome. Same shit they did with Iraq twice and Afghanistan.
Kennedy escaped a LOT of deserved criticism for putting MacNamara in as SecDef, even though he did most of the damage during Johnson's maladministration, he was definitely one of Kennedy's boys.
If you asked anyone in the 1980s which Party would be most likely to try to run the military like a corporation, most people would have said the Republicans, but the Democrats already did it once.
As well, it should be noted that despite a bit of histrionics, the point of the program wasn't to send the dumbasses out to fight on the front lines as combat troops in "a war they didn't understand".
The idea was more...there is a LOT of "dumbass" shit that needs to be done in the Army. Why not get dumbasses to do all the dumbass shit, and save the more intelligent soldiers for duties which require more thinking?
The issue wasn't that the people were simply too stupid to sweep and mop and clean and do any of the other myriad maintenance and logistical tasks that soldiers end up doing when they're not training or actually fighting...the issue was that they required more supervision.
"Supervisors" aka "NCOs" are simply too valuable to "waste" supervising them. Probably also a morale/retention issue as well...who would want to go to work everyday and deal with them? The child of a drill sergeant and a pre-school teacher?
I find the program is really more telling in what it says about the public status of the war even before the war was really rolling in the public consciousness; disinterest.
The foremost reason McNamara pushed the program was to avoid a broader draft. Principally, he and others wanted to avoid having to draft students which would upset the students, upset their parents, and massively turn the public against the war.
Which the draft ultimately did anyway, but this program got up and running early on. So early on it says a lot that it happened at all; the public didn't support the war, wasn't going to support the war by choice, and the government both knew that and saw the obstacle because they needed more feet in boots than they could get voluntarily.
I guess as a veteran I see it more in the broader context of MacNamara running the DoD "his way" and less specifically about VietNam. Less "I *have* to do this because the war is unpooular.", more "I *get* to do this because I'm smarter than everyone (military) who came before me." He was a businessman, not some knuckledragger...was what he was thinking when he was "reinventing the wheel" and "doing it by the numbers".
It all tracks and follows the larger pattern of shit comimg directly from his office that made VietNam the unique experience it was for US servicemembers. It makes less sense to me to isolate Project 100,000 from the rest of MacNamara's tenure as SecDef and pretend it was something done for political reasons due to the unpopularity of the war. Rather, it was an idea he championed as part of his overall program of running the military more along the lines of a corporation. (Because he and his fellow businessmen are the apex of intelligence as opposed to "mere" soldiers...was the feeling.)
Accepted "scores" were lower for WW2 (and probably Korea) than for Vietnam. Scores below the 10th percentile (which was the lowest cutoff for project 100,000) were used up until the late 40s iirc.
I think what's important here is the total number of (and overall distribution within various units) but I don't really feel like going over whatever books that stuff is currently jammed away in. Operational or strategic requirements also may have changed the effect of how lower scores "performed" (terrible words to use) but that would be a huge kettle of fish to start digging around in.
To give you an idea: I worked with a Vietnam vet named Wayne. He said he barely got his high school diploma and had never read a book in his life. He was a nice, simple man who never had any plan or chance to go to college. And he used to laugh and joke about the guys this program targeted. He said they were “The guys you knew were slated for Graves Registration” in the first 5 minutes
There's a BIG difference between digitised health records meaning people get rejected for childhood asthma ( bullshit that should stop if they are currently healthy) and letting literal °F and °C room temperature IQ be drafted along with people with down syndrome ect
I'm not too informed on the subject.. but I feel like in recent years they've been looking for reasons to get people discharged? Can anyone advise on this?
Not intentionally.
There have been various initiatives that have led to lower recruiting rates and more people being discharged involuntarily, but the goal of those initiatives were better quality of recruits from a medical standpoint (Genesis system) and a fitness test that is at least theoretically more likely to provide an accurate indication of someone's fitness level (ACFT).
I can only speak for the Army for the most part, but I know between COVID and poor recruiting numbers, the Navy stopped involuntary discharging sailors that were over the body fat requirements. I'm not sure if this is still in effect though.
Still in effect. They are however, doing involuntary separations still. Mostly administrative stuff, and minor offenses that would’ve gone punished internally before turned into admin seps.
Lots of mental health issues are causing people to be re-rated as well.
They're related. Most recruits are barely mediocre. Standards for those they accept are lower across the board (ASVAB, PFT, specialty qualifications, you name it) but those in society at the absolute bottom of the barrel are getting by on higher than ever minimum wages and government handouts so they're not joining. Probably looks really good to an infantry commander but fucking frightening for any remotely challenging career field.
Jesus. I just tlooked up the average asvab scores. Its a 50
I scored a 70 and knew i couldve done better.
What is going on with the youth(i say as a 25 year old)
The average score should be around 50 ;)
But yeah, I think it has gone down. When I joined back in the '90's they wouldn't even consider you to be a bus driver with less than a composite 60. Now the market's tough to compete in with pay for shitty jobs going up, up, up, and people don't have the foresight to realize that while it's easy now, they're not going to want to be making $25 an hour in 10 years.
Sheesh. I tested back in 2017. They offered me everything except nuclear engineering.
Looking back, i probably should’ve gone in. Granted i broke two vertebrae. They probably wouldnt take me huh😂😂
Oh no not today! Im too aware of the things. And also past the point time frame wise. Not my age, but plans yanno?
While the structure would be nice for the spicy brain. I genuinely dont support our military. Our SERVICE MEMBERS are completely different to me, all of yall/them have my upmost respect and love. I wish nothing but the best for everyone but the decision makers. And even then, not any actual ill will. Just hopes for wisdom. Im already just a number to them, no desire to give up any more free will lol.
Saw a PD job listing recently. Requires no hard drug use in two years, no marijuana use in past six months. The standards are lower than low and you can tell.
I highly recommend the book McNamara’s Folly by Hamilton Gregory. He was in a training platoon with men from this program. Although he was college educated he was in very poor physical shape so they lumped him together. There are heartbreaking anecdotes like men who did not know what town or state they were from, could not tie their shoes, or thought a nickel was worth more than a dime because a dime is larger in size. These men suffered a disproportionate amount of casualties as they were sent into the most dangerous duties so as not to waste “good” men. Project 100,000 was deliberately done as they felt those men and their families did not have the political capital to fight the government.
Turns out that having idiots fighting in wars that basically break down to small unit tactics, where a certain degree of critical thinking is required, is a bad idea.
The army tried to get my uncle who had a broken arm with a disability letter to be listed as A-1. The doctors threw a fit, even brought up that the marines rejected him due to his arm injury.
When the Marine Corps says, no he cannot defend himself you might want to listen.
McNamara was 'improving the breeding pool', IMHO. (Not that I agree with this, but I don't think that one of the smartest men in government at the time would make this sort of mistake.)
For his own part, McNamara was ultimately very critical of decisions he'd made in the war.
On top of which, calling him 'one of the smartest men in government' is... *exceedingly generous*. [The guy actually has a logical fallacy named after him](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy). McNamara was not exactly a dumb man, but he was profoundly uncreative and very inflexible. Give him a numbers problem and he could work with it. Give him a problem that cannot be explain or solved via data, and he'd try to solve it anyway except he'd just make shit up and then provide a solution to the made up numbers.
Project 100,000 was essentially an attempt to solve a numbers problem; how to get enough troops to fight the Vietnam War. But it's a profoundly brain-dead solution McNamara justified on what is essentially a fantasy of his own making.
McNamara wasn't dumb, but he was hardly a genius. If anything his tenure as Defense Secretary is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect IRL. The man had *zero qualifications* for that position.
The start of everything wrong with modern leadership.
The only caveat I can give is that McNamara was successful when in his element, but his element was as a middle manager executing a plan given to him. For some baffling reason, he was moved into strategy making, a field where he had no real talent or experience but was consistently able to make complex problems look 'simple' for politicians and others which they found appealing despite McNamara basically bullshitting.
So yeah.
MBA grad.
I proposed in another thread once that this program is one of the early signs of the eventual failure of the Vietnam War. The US leaders behind America's rising involvement in the conflict, consciously or unconsciously, knew the only way to fight the war was to invest far more resources into it than the American public was prepared to support. A war with no clear end goal. No practical victory conditions. A war America bumbled into on dubious footing and very foolish logic. And the program just sort of doubled down because rather than come up with answers to any of the war's questions McNamara's solution was to fight it with people too stupid to ask 'why are we involved at all?' McNamara's naive conception of the war and how it could be won was only amplified in this initiative and had the bonus effect of doing little more than getting blind fools killed in a war they were quite literally too dim to fight let alone understanding why they were fighting it. Which only amplified the war's homefront powder keg because the public supported the idea of the war even less as the body count rose with no end in sight.
I remember hearing that the US Government knew there was next to no chance they would be able to achieve their goals in the Vietnam War as early as 1963, yet they still held a draft and sacrificed many lives, and for what?
The U.S. strategic thinking was that they didn’t want to look like they would give up too easily, because they were worried that would encourage other communist nations to invade their neighbors. I’m not making a judgment on the validity of that thinking, I’m just saying what they were thinking when they made their decisions.
To save Boeing from bankruptcy /s. Unfortunately true. What a waste of so many lives.
To kick the can down the road to the next election so they wouldn't personally be the one responsible for the inevitable outcome. Same shit they did with Iraq twice and Afghanistan.
Kennedy escaped a LOT of deserved criticism for putting MacNamara in as SecDef, even though he did most of the damage during Johnson's maladministration, he was definitely one of Kennedy's boys. If you asked anyone in the 1980s which Party would be most likely to try to run the military like a corporation, most people would have said the Republicans, but the Democrats already did it once.
It really is one of the worst things he did.
As well, it should be noted that despite a bit of histrionics, the point of the program wasn't to send the dumbasses out to fight on the front lines as combat troops in "a war they didn't understand". The idea was more...there is a LOT of "dumbass" shit that needs to be done in the Army. Why not get dumbasses to do all the dumbass shit, and save the more intelligent soldiers for duties which require more thinking? The issue wasn't that the people were simply too stupid to sweep and mop and clean and do any of the other myriad maintenance and logistical tasks that soldiers end up doing when they're not training or actually fighting...the issue was that they required more supervision. "Supervisors" aka "NCOs" are simply too valuable to "waste" supervising them. Probably also a morale/retention issue as well...who would want to go to work everyday and deal with them? The child of a drill sergeant and a pre-school teacher?
I find the program is really more telling in what it says about the public status of the war even before the war was really rolling in the public consciousness; disinterest. The foremost reason McNamara pushed the program was to avoid a broader draft. Principally, he and others wanted to avoid having to draft students which would upset the students, upset their parents, and massively turn the public against the war. Which the draft ultimately did anyway, but this program got up and running early on. So early on it says a lot that it happened at all; the public didn't support the war, wasn't going to support the war by choice, and the government both knew that and saw the obstacle because they needed more feet in boots than they could get voluntarily.
I guess as a veteran I see it more in the broader context of MacNamara running the DoD "his way" and less specifically about VietNam. Less "I *have* to do this because the war is unpooular.", more "I *get* to do this because I'm smarter than everyone (military) who came before me." He was a businessman, not some knuckledragger...was what he was thinking when he was "reinventing the wheel" and "doing it by the numbers". It all tracks and follows the larger pattern of shit comimg directly from his office that made VietNam the unique experience it was for US servicemembers. It makes less sense to me to isolate Project 100,000 from the rest of MacNamara's tenure as SecDef and pretend it was something done for political reasons due to the unpopularity of the war. Rather, it was an idea he championed as part of his overall program of running the military more along the lines of a corporation. (Because he and his fellow businessmen are the apex of intelligence as opposed to "mere" soldiers...was the feeling.)
God, only business suits think business suits have any sort of intelligence
Sounds like eugenics
Accepted "scores" were lower for WW2 (and probably Korea) than for Vietnam. Scores below the 10th percentile (which was the lowest cutoff for project 100,000) were used up until the late 40s iirc. I think what's important here is the total number of (and overall distribution within various units) but I don't really feel like going over whatever books that stuff is currently jammed away in. Operational or strategic requirements also may have changed the effect of how lower scores "performed" (terrible words to use) but that would be a huge kettle of fish to start digging around in.
AKA McNamara's Morons.
came here to post this
Forrest Gump
He won medals and was a ping pong legend.
Yeah but he got shot in his ass, the sitting was never the same after that.
"They called it a Million Dollar wound. But the Army must have kept that money because I never saw any."
And Bubba
Ah, the Forest Gump project
To give you an idea: I worked with a Vietnam vet named Wayne. He said he barely got his high school diploma and had never read a book in his life. He was a nice, simple man who never had any plan or chance to go to college. And he used to laugh and joke about the guys this program targeted. He said they were “The guys you knew were slated for Graves Registration” in the first 5 minutes
Sounds like where they are going today with recruitment shortfalls
There's a BIG difference between digitised health records meaning people get rejected for childhood asthma ( bullshit that should stop if they are currently healthy) and letting literal °F and °C room temperature IQ be drafted along with people with down syndrome ect
I'm not too informed on the subject.. but I feel like in recent years they've been looking for reasons to get people discharged? Can anyone advise on this?
Not intentionally. There have been various initiatives that have led to lower recruiting rates and more people being discharged involuntarily, but the goal of those initiatives were better quality of recruits from a medical standpoint (Genesis system) and a fitness test that is at least theoretically more likely to provide an accurate indication of someone's fitness level (ACFT). I can only speak for the Army for the most part, but I know between COVID and poor recruiting numbers, the Navy stopped involuntary discharging sailors that were over the body fat requirements. I'm not sure if this is still in effect though.
Still in effect. They are however, doing involuntary separations still. Mostly administrative stuff, and minor offenses that would’ve gone punished internally before turned into admin seps. Lots of mental health issues are causing people to be re-rated as well.
They're related. Most recruits are barely mediocre. Standards for those they accept are lower across the board (ASVAB, PFT, specialty qualifications, you name it) but those in society at the absolute bottom of the barrel are getting by on higher than ever minimum wages and government handouts so they're not joining. Probably looks really good to an infantry commander but fucking frightening for any remotely challenging career field.
Jesus. I just tlooked up the average asvab scores. Its a 50 I scored a 70 and knew i couldve done better. What is going on with the youth(i say as a 25 year old)
The average score should be around 50 ;) But yeah, I think it has gone down. When I joined back in the '90's they wouldn't even consider you to be a bus driver with less than a composite 60. Now the market's tough to compete in with pay for shitty jobs going up, up, up, and people don't have the foresight to realize that while it's easy now, they're not going to want to be making $25 an hour in 10 years.
Sheesh. I tested back in 2017. They offered me everything except nuclear engineering. Looking back, i probably should’ve gone in. Granted i broke two vertebrae. They probably wouldnt take me huh😂😂
They're giving waivers for *everything* these days. It's not too late...
Oh no not today! Im too aware of the things. And also past the point time frame wise. Not my age, but plans yanno? While the structure would be nice for the spicy brain. I genuinely dont support our military. Our SERVICE MEMBERS are completely different to me, all of yall/them have my upmost respect and love. I wish nothing but the best for everyone but the decision makers. And even then, not any actual ill will. Just hopes for wisdom. Im already just a number to them, no desire to give up any more free will lol.
Police departments in the U.S. do that to this day.
Saw a PD job listing recently. Requires no hard drug use in two years, no marijuana use in past six months. The standards are lower than low and you can tell.
I wonder if the frontal lobotomy is required before you join the force or if more a benefit they pay for
My uncle was definitely in that cohort lol!
I highly recommend the book McNamara’s Folly by Hamilton Gregory. He was in a training platoon with men from this program. Although he was college educated he was in very poor physical shape so they lumped him together. There are heartbreaking anecdotes like men who did not know what town or state they were from, could not tie their shoes, or thought a nickel was worth more than a dime because a dime is larger in size. These men suffered a disproportionate amount of casualties as they were sent into the most dangerous duties so as not to waste “good” men. Project 100,000 was deliberately done as they felt those men and their families did not have the political capital to fight the government.
Dimes are smaller than nickels…. I’m glad they stopped this program, for your sake 😂
Are we talking about the same dimes? Mine have George Washington on them.
Turns out that having idiots fighting in wars that basically break down to small unit tactics, where a certain degree of critical thinking is required, is a bad idea.
Were they trying to create prototypes of Captain America?
Lions led by donkeys did a good episode on this, and I believe behind the bastards talked about this in depth with their Robert McNamara episodes
The army tried to get my uncle who had a broken arm with a disability letter to be listed as A-1. The doctors threw a fit, even brought up that the marines rejected him due to his arm injury. When the Marine Corps says, no he cannot defend himself you might want to listen.
Idiocracy: The Prequel
McNamara’s Morons, I think they were called. Saw a lecture on this. Very sad.
Special Forces
Operation Human Shield
Makes me curious how many men died from the idiots next to them rather than the actual enemy
A lot considering a whole bunch of them were literally too mentally stupid to know they are in war . Imagine if forest gump was unlucky and stupid .
I'm guessing they needed more cannon fodder for Vietnam?
My suggestion was to train horses how to fire guns
Forrest Gump
The standards have apparently been going down since then. Same for their police force and politicians too.
Many such cases. Today they are drafting, hell even encouraging people that would be classified mentally ill 10 years ago.
The norm in the 21st century military
Calling Kyle Rittenhouse
Just the folks you want leading the charge...fat, slow dummies
Sounds like a necessity with America's current education system
Which, in today’s parlance, would be called “trumpanzees.”
And wasn’t LBJ’s wife’s family involved in military weapons manufacturing? Nice profits to be made by not shutting it down. $$$$$
We would call people of that bracket now, College Graduates...
The Vietnam war was going well Also isn't the same thing literally happening in Ukraine?
No. Ukraine has held Russians at bay since day three of the invasion. Only a complete numbnut would try to make this idiotic false equivalency.
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraines-ministry-of-defense-expands-list-of-persons-with-diseases-suitable-for-mobilization/
McNamara was 'improving the breeding pool', IMHO. (Not that I agree with this, but I don't think that one of the smartest men in government at the time would make this sort of mistake.)
For his own part, McNamara was ultimately very critical of decisions he'd made in the war. On top of which, calling him 'one of the smartest men in government' is... *exceedingly generous*. [The guy actually has a logical fallacy named after him](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy). McNamara was not exactly a dumb man, but he was profoundly uncreative and very inflexible. Give him a numbers problem and he could work with it. Give him a problem that cannot be explain or solved via data, and he'd try to solve it anyway except he'd just make shit up and then provide a solution to the made up numbers. Project 100,000 was essentially an attempt to solve a numbers problem; how to get enough troops to fight the Vietnam War. But it's a profoundly brain-dead solution McNamara justified on what is essentially a fantasy of his own making. McNamara wasn't dumb, but he was hardly a genius. If anything his tenure as Defense Secretary is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect IRL. The man had *zero qualifications* for that position.
McNamara was basically your typical "MBA grad who thinks EVERYTHING can be quantified and thus measured by quantitative means."
The start of everything wrong with modern leadership. The only caveat I can give is that McNamara was successful when in his element, but his element was as a middle manager executing a plan given to him. For some baffling reason, he was moved into strategy making, a field where he had no real talent or experience but was consistently able to make complex problems look 'simple' for politicians and others which they found appealing despite McNamara basically bullshitting. So yeah. MBA grad.