And BTW, McNamara is an excellent example of just because someone is super smart, it does not necessarily mean they have good judgment or character, both of which McNamara was lacking.

I think it was on this forum that someone had quoted a book on McNamara that stated that he was in large part responsible for the disastrous strategy of escalation in the Vietnam War because he thought it worked so well in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

DUMBASS.

I was reading a book not about McNamara but JFK and it had plenty of examples of him doing dumb things and then just doubling down on them.

McMasters wrote a very good book about the idiocy of our leadership called Dereliction of Duty.

As for the low IQ soldiers, a friend of mine, a retired colonel of 88 years of age told me about this years ago and said it was a disaster all around

Quote:

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McNamara's Morons

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I thought you were referring to McNamara and his staff.

He was part of the Best and Brightest bunch that Kennedy brought in----so much Harvard and Yale, you know.

LBJ bragged to Sam Rayburn about how brilliant they all were and Rayburn told him he wished just one of them had ever run for sheriff somewhere.

We are still paying for their arrogance.

Boy, that is really crazy. The problem we had during the height of the Iraq War were the fat bodies getting shoved through the system. We had privates who had never, ever passed an APFT or a tape test who had been graduated from basic and AIT and sent to units. That's bad enough, but someone who mentally cannot process combat, that's just a disaster for everyone on the ground.

Gives you a whole new perspective on Forrest Gump.

Not going to dispute the original source, but I'll just say that this is nothing new. The "Greatest Generation" included a lot of really dumb people. Not bad folks, just very ignorant, as one might expect for people who grow up sharecroppers in Alabama or in some tenement house.

Even listening to the Easy Company veterans in Band of Brothers, you can tell they're not exactly endowed with high educational prowess. That being said, they performed extraordinarily well. That's because courage has little to do with intelligence (it may indeed have an inverse relationship more often than a correlation).

I doubt very seriously that we "lost Vietnam" because of the low IQ of our troops. Low IQ will show up on the battlefield in a few instances, and that might be part of the cause of things like the Mai Lai incident. It also becomes a bigger problem the more technologically advanced your military becomes. But there are so many diverse reasons for our failure in Vietnam that this sounds like a huge dodge, especially coming from someone who made key decisions.

It sounds like some of the cases here are extreme ones, like people with Down's Syndrome or something being in combat. I'm sure that's bad, but that's a relatively small piece of the iceberg. Flat out ignorant is much more common, and it STILL is. If anyone tells you that we're better now because we require a high school diploma, they're full of crap because a high school diploma now means nothing. A 9th grader in 1960 is probably smarter than a 12th grade high school graduate today. And ultimately, performance on the battlefield is about courage and doing the tasks assigned, few of which are tasks where a high school degree is relevant.

I'll just say as someone with the most recent on-the-ground battlefield experience (1.5 months ago), that there are quite a few morons in the military and they somehow manage to not die on a regular basis.

Trench55 said:

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I am a Vietnam Veteran. As a 2nd LT., I went over with the 2nd Battalion, 4th Artillery (105mm howitzer), 9th Infantry Division in January 1967. The 9th ID was reactivated at Fort Riley, KS, in 1966, getting bus loads of draftees directly from the reception centers, still in civilian clothes. The bulk of the lower enlisted troops were draftees. I later served with the 7th Battalion, 8th Artillery (8 inch howitzer/175mm gun) the last few months of my deployment. Based upon the troops with whom I served, I completely disagree with the idea that those troops were somehow intellectually inferior to the general population. Those men were smart, courageous, dedicated, and served with distinction.

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Did you watch the video? He is not claiming everyone was a moron just the ones given irregular clearance to join when in other times they would have been rejected.

Whether they're called "morons" or not, and may have been drafted, they did not run from their duty. They had the balls to wear the military uniform and die for the US. they are respected.

Presley OBannons Sword said:

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CanyonAg77 said:

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Not about to get in a branch vs branch fight. I will say a friend spent time commanding a company of ambulance drivers before the Army sent him to law school.

He claimed that his drivers were the guys too dumb to be infantrymen

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I was a truck platoon commander in Afghan as a lieutenant. Loved by boys, but God bless em, not the brightest crayons in the box.

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As Marines isn't the danger that they would eat those crayons?