Quantification was a word Robert McNamara loved. Numbers could express almost any human activity. Well, perhaps not beauty, honour, love. But certainly the rigours of a youthful trip to sea (19 bed-bug bites on one leg), and the pleasure of climbing Mount Whitney, all 14,495 feet. Five or six bullet points, reinforced when you saw him with vigorous hand-chops, summed up any argument. There were four McNamara steps to changing the thinking of any organisation, including the Pentagon: state an objective, work out how to get there, cost out everything, systematically monitor progress against the plan. There were 11 lessons to be learned from the war in Vietnam, but most of them occurred to him too late.

Things you could count, he said, you ought to count. At the Ford Motor Company, where he was one of the ten "Whiz Kids" brought in in 1946 to shake things up, all the components of each new Chevy (made by GM) would be laid out on a table to inspect. This was not cheating, but competitive evaluation. At the Air Force Office of Statistical Control, where he worked in 1943-45, he counted the firebombing sorties made by the B-29s, at what height, with what percentage hits on target (58 per cent of Yokohama, 51 per cent of Tokyo). System and data together helped win that war. In the Pentagon in 1965, again by applying metrics — targets hit, captives taken, weapons seized, the enemy's body-count — he could tell with equal certainty that America was losing.

... contd.