On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 9:31:17 PM UTC-4, John B. Slocomb wrote:
On Tue, 26 Aug 2014 09:02:42 -0500, Richard

wrote:

On 8/26/2014 12:57 AM, John B. Slocomb wrote:

In actual fact the "powers that be", at least in the case of the

F-111, was not the Air Force, it was the civilian portion of the DOD

that was dreaming of an "all purpose" airplane. It might also be noted

that the airplane was built by General Dynamics and one might think

about who was president at the time and where G.D. was based :-)

For pete sake, guy.

That was Robert Mcnamara's doings.

Initially, the basic policies outlined by President Kennedy in a message

to Congress on March 28, 1961, guided McNamara in the reorientation of

the defense program. Kennedy rejected the concept of first-strike attack

and emphasized the need for adequate strategic arms and defense to deter

nuclear attack on the United States and its allies. U.S. arms, he

maintained, must constantly be under civilian command and control, and

the nation's defense posture had to be "designed to reduce the danger of

irrational or unpremeditated general war". The primary mission of U.S.

overseas forces, in cooperation with allies, was "to prevent the steady

erosion of the Free World through limited wars". Kennedy and McNamara

rejected massive retaliation for a posture of flexible response. The

U.S. wanted choices in an emergency other than "inglorious retreat or

unlimited retaliation", as the president put it. Out of a major review

of the military challenges confronting the U.S. initiated by McNamara in

1961 came a decision to increase the nation's "limited warfare"

capabilities. These moves were significant because McNamara was

abandoning President Dwight D. Eisenhower's policy of massive

retaliation in favor of a flexible response strategy that relied on

increased U.S. capacity to conduct limited, non-nuclear warfare.

During the Kennedy administration, the U.S. military advisory group in

South Vietnam steadily increased, with McNamara's concurrence, from 900

to 16,000.[22] U.S. involvement escalated after the Gulf of Tonkin

incidents in August 1964, involving an attack on a U.S. Navy destroyer

by North Vietnamese naval vessels.[25]

But declassified records from the Lyndon Johnson Library indicated that

McNamara misled Johnson on the attack on a U.S. Navy destroyer by

withholding calls against executing airstrikes from US Pacific

Commanders. Instead, McNamara issued the strike orders without informing

Johnson of the hold calls, constituting a usurping of the president�s

constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.[26]

McNamara was also instrumental in presenting the event to Congress and

the public as justification for escalation of the war against the

communists. The Vietnam War came to claim most of McNamara's time and

energy.

Yup. The illustrious McNamara. And General Dynamics was a Texas
company :-)

I don't know. The Wall Street Journal has a bad habit of doing that too, I think. Ascribing a location like where its headquarters is with the company itself. I've always felt that unless most of the company's controlling executives, board and other owners all live in that city as well, then how can you associate the company name with the place its in?

Like with Sony Pictures. If most of its owners live in California or someplace, then how can you say its a Japanese company?

But, I'm not sure how much blame actually should be attributed to

McNamara personally, other than of course he was the captain of the

ship and thus responsible for everything that happened.

Personally, he summed the whole effort up himself by writing in his 1995 memoir "In Retrospect" that it was: "Wrong, Terribly Wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
-- http://content.time.com/time/special...913022,00.html