But the strategy that worked at Ford had a flaw when applied at the Department of Defense. Edward Lansdale, head of special operations at the Pentagon, once looked at McNamara’s numbers. He said something was missing. “What?” McNamara asked. “The feelings of the Vietnamese people,” Lansdale replied. You couldn’t reduce that to a statistic or a chart. This was a central issue with managing the Vietnam War. The difference between battle statistics brought to Washington and the feelings among those involved could be a million miles apart.
