NEWSWEEK: What of Kosovo reminds you of Vietnam?
MCNAMARA: We don’t have–and we’re not going to have–500,000 American soldiers at risk in Kosovo, which we did in Vietnam. We’re not going to have, in any scenario that I can visualize, 58,000 dead Americans in Kosovo as we did in Vietnam. And we’re not going to have 3.5 million enemy dead in Kosovo as were killed in Vietnam. So the order of magnitude is different. The similarities are there in the sense that we’re trying to use foreign military force in a very, very ambiguous environment to achieve political and military ends. My concern is that later we’ll learn that mistakes were made over a period of years in Kosovo, as they were in Vietnam–and that they could have been avoided. The purpose of my first book on Vietnam, “In Retrospect,” and even more the purpose of this new book, “Argument Without End,” is to identify precisely those errors so they won’t be repeated again in such situations as Kosovo. But it is totally inappropriate for an ex-secretary of Defense, in the middle of a war that we haven’t yet won, in which there are great difficulties ahead, to be talking about mistakes or to be offering advice, for that matter. My question is: why don’t we learn more from experience?
Yes, some do say that we can never apply military force in support of political or diplomatic ends. I think that is, in fact, the wrong lesson. The issue in Kosovo now is whether we are getting the right lessons from Vietnam and from other wars. Consider air power. Kosovo is being largely run by a generation that was not shaped by the lessons of World War II. I spent three years in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and it happened that my responsibility was to analyze the effectiveness of U.S. bombing. I know a little about that from those three years and from the seven years I spent as Defense secretary. The current generation just hasn’t absorbed that. I was on the island of Guam one night in March of 1945 when the unit I was with killed 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo in one night. And we didn’t break their will. I had been with the Eighth Air Force in Britain. I had been in India and China with the Air Force. Bombing has distinct limitations. I don’t think the current generation–either in the capital or in the country at large–fully understands that.
Basically the new challenges are conflicts within nations that are so extreme and involve such danger–humanitarian standards are not being met–that it calls possibly for the military intervention of foreign powers. Those are extremely difficult situations to deal with, both politically and militarily. At the same time, we must still recognize the risk of wars among great powers. I don’t think we’re putting nearly enough attention on that, avoiding the risks of war in the 21st century, learning at last how to forestall wars. Why haven’t we been able to learn that?
