Thread by @notcomplex_

McNamara’s Folly and The Denial of Individual Differences 🧵

The utmost importance of Intelligence in war, and the grim reality of what happened when the Military drafted over 300,000 low IQ men.

Robert McNamara, the eighth Secretary of Defense, was a genius.

At different points in his life was an Eagle Scout, the youngest and most highly paid assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and a president at Ford Motor Company.

He had mastered quantitative analysis by running the B-29 Bomber schedules and statistics in WWII and then later at Ford. In the 1960s, as Sec. of Defense he attempted to apply a similar process to the military.

However, in the late 1960s with the Vietnam War raging and becoming a 'meat grinder,' he took this approach to the soldiers themselves. McNamara, used to working with interchangeable parts of bombers and cars seemingly applied the same logic to humans.

Seeing that the military rejected a good fraction due to aptitude he reasoned that they could ramp up recruitment by loosening the requirements.

This was not a cynical endeavor McNamara genuinely believed that he could raise the IQ of these men and end 'cycles of poverty.'

So, the program was born; standards were lowered and tens of thousands of new men were recruited. Of those about 91% were admitted due to the lowered IQ requirements.

The initial results weren't promising it became evident that McNamara had a better grasp on the physical standards necessary for war than the mental standards.

"The median number of years of school completed by New Standards Marines was 10.5. However, their median reading level was only 5.8 years, and their median arithmetic ability was only 6.1 years."

In training, for each task they needed:
-2 to 4 times as much time
-2 to 5 times as many trials
-2 to 6 times as much prompting

Or comprehension:

"In desperation, the brass hats have revised their training manuals down to junior high school levels and have even used comic books to simplify instructions."

This isn't much of a wonder when you consider that these men were mostly between the 10th and the 30th percentile of intelligence.

Before this, the military did not recruit anyone below the 30th percentile or an IQ of 92.

Due to their low abilities, these men had little other fit in the military and were sent as infantry to war.

The results were tragic, of the total ~350,000 a staggering 5,478 died and over 20,000 were wounded. About a third went AWOL or were discharged.

Take Freddie Hensley, a man who despite being gifted with good looks was not gifted with much of any mental ability.

He was drafted into combat despite being unable to react to practice targets or tell you that thunder comes after lightning.

Appearing on the outside capable, he was tragically killed in combat.

McNamara had predicted that after they returned to civilian life, Project 100,000 men would have an earning capacity “two to three times what it would have been if there had been no such program.”

Sadly, these veterans made about what someone of their intelligence would typically make.

Since then the enlistment requirements have become and remain law.

Reflecting on the ordeal, a lieutenant colonel under McNamara:

“We Pentagon planners resisted Project 100,000 because we knew that wars are not won by using marginal manpower as cannon fodder, but rather by risking, and sometimes losing, the flower of a nation’s youth.”

Indeed, it is uncommon for wars to be fought by the unintelligent.

In WWI Europe's absolute best and brightest fought, died, and killed each other in the trenches and the air, almost half of the deaths among Britain's nobility were violent ones.

This number surpasses that of the 100 Years war (1337 to 1453).

Of those who served, 29 percent of Oxford matriculates and 26 percent of Cambridge matriculates were killed. A horrid, devastating loss.

While McNamara ought to have known his history it is not immediately obvious why intelligence is so important for war. Why not raw determination or physical prowess?

The answer is adaptably and generality.

After WWII the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld analyzed a plethora of soldier data and noted a few interesting things about peoples' assumptions.

Here are a few interesting ones, especially the first:

Fascinatingly these are all wrong!

You might expect Southerners to handle heat better, and you might even deploy soldiers based on that presumption but you would find that the particulars of war are more nuanced than that; ergo, the need for adaptability.

Here's another example, could you guess what position's skill in the military is the most related to IQ?

Maybe some specialist or a mechanic?

It's actually a Machinegunner!

Possibly nearly the opposite of many people's prediction. In fact, there is no combat role without a significant relationship to IQ.

(Note: The reason positions like air traffic control and others on the low end is because they only recruit smart people for those positions. If you gave all recruits an ATC test the coefficient would be substantially higher)

This is the case for really any task in war:

In identifying faults and troubleshooting, the smartest soldiers are successful 97% of the time while other groups are below 80%

Or take patriot missiles, often costing around $4 million efficiently is key.

Here, smarter soldiers get more kills with fewer hits.

This translates to more than a doubling in the likelihood of success for an overall mission.

Overall, the role of IQ has been well established in the military though many in the civilian sector seem oblivious to these individual differences.

Let us hope it isn't a matter of life and death.

Sources:

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi…
rand.org/content/dam/ra…
law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10…
law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/32/66…

vvaveteran.org/36-3/36-3_moro…
usmcu.edu/Portals/218/Da…
files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED366…