George Will’s obituary of Robert McNamara here is especially relevant to those of us who were in college during the heyday of behavioral revolution in the social sciences and the Vietnam War. As Will points out, McNamara represented behavioral theory in practice.
Two of behavioralism’s reinforcing assumptions were: Things that can be
quantified can be controlled. And everything can be quantified. So,
pick a problem, any problem. Military insurgency in Indochina? The
answer is counterinsurgency. What can be, and hence must be,
quantified? Body counts, surely. Bingo: A metric of success.
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite would dutifully report the number of US and enemy soldiers killed that week. After months and years of this, many began to realize that if added up, the enemy body count was greater than the entire population of North Vietnam. Behaviroalists missed the fact that since commanders at all levels knew that their boss, Defense Secretary McNamara, was measuring their success by the number of enemy killed, they had a huge incentive to inflate the numbers.
Did the behavioral theory work?
The behavior of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did not respond as
expected to America’s finely calibrated stimuli, such as bombing this
but not that, and bombing pauses. Behavioralists were disappointed, but
not discouraged. They would give nation-building another try.
