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Adapting to Flexible Response: 1960-1968. By Walter S. Poole. Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2013. Pp. xvi+503. $19.58.
Like America as a whole, U.S. defense procurement passed through a period of great turbulence in the 1960s, and it is still affected by the controversial legacies of that decade. In both cases, much of the turbulence was generated by the war in Vietnam, but defense procurement was roiled even more by the seven years Robert S. McNamara served as secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. This period is covered in Walter S. Poole's Adapting to Flexible Response: 1960- 1968, the second in a series of official histories of U.S. military procurement in the years since 1945. The title refers to the doctrine implemented by the Kennedy administration that moved U.S. military strategy away from the Eisenhower administration's focus on nuclear weapons to a greater emphasis on conventional arms.
More jarring than flexible response for the military services were McNamara's aggressive moves to centralize and...