Vietnam will rightly dominate discussions of the legacy that Robert McNamara's seven-year tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense to Kennedy and Johnson left behind, but it's also worth looking at the impact of his decisions on defense technology - then and now.

Before Vietnam, McNamara's first war was with the Air Force, which was still trying to revive projects for high-speed bombers and interceptors that had been cut back in the later 1950s under President Eisenhower. The generals were campaigning to get the B-70 Valkyrie bomber reinstated as the "reconnaissance-strike" RS-70, designed to take out targets that had escaped missile launches. The CIA's A-12 Blackbird was leading to its own RS and interceptor versions. McNamara blocked all of them, as well as efforts to preserve the production tooling for the pure-reconnaissance SR-71. 

High-level lack of enthusiasm and the diversion of NASA funds to the space program also capped the development of hypersonic systems. Under McNamara, the progenitor of the Shuttle - the X-20 Dyna-Soar - was scrapped. Progress in the 1950s, which eventually saw a ramjet fly at Mach 4.31 in 1958, came to a halt. Only the CIA, which did not report to him, persisted with the development of the boost-glide Isinglass - but without Pentagon support it, too, withered. 

In all cases, the objection was the same: faster aircraft would get shot down by bigger missiles. It was a simplistic argument and given the two-decades-plus of operational experience with the A-12 and SR, it was probably wrong.

What did McNamara like? He backed one winner: the McDonnell Phantom, which was already in Navy service. Under McNamara, the F-105 and F-106 lines were stopped and the USAF adopted the Phantom. 

In one parallel to today's developments, the McNamara Pentagon backed a low-intensity warfare aircraft - the Light Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (LARA). It was intended to operate from carriers or from water, as well as almost any piece of flat ground, and do almost anything from air defense to troop transport. It resulted, however, in the rather mediocre OV-10. 

The biggest McNamara-era program, though, was the joint-service TFX. I was just looking through some old magazines and came up with Flying Review's first look at the prototype. After quite correctly pointing out that the design was going to have trouble with weights and inlet design, and that the Navy was already beginning to back away, the magazine concluded: "With so much at stake, how can the aircraft be anything but a resounding success?"

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