Enthoven Tells of Life In McNamara's Defense Dept.

"We're not doing anything new -- the difference is that we're doing it," Alain C. Enthoven, Assistant Secretary of Defense, said yesterday of the Pentagon regime of Robert S. McNamara.

Enthoven, a Ph.D. who joined the Defense Department as a 29-year-old "whiz kid" in 1960, described McNamara's approach to Pentagon planning and management at the Business School's Public Affairs Forum.

Before McNamara, Enthoven said, there was a lack of coordination between the Pentagon's military planners and budget planners. In the past this had led to conflicting points of view between the two groups and prevention of "systematic rational ways of making choices," Enthoven explained.

Five-Year-Plans

McNamara reformed this situation with a five-year-plan which Enthoven calls "a powerful tool in integrating all points of view." The program approaches whole areas of defense planning as units, so that within one area a military force requirement automatically becomes a budget requirement.

Everyone involved in the decision process is aware of the objectives, assumptions, and study results of each program. "This is the best protection against error," Enthoven said. "McNamara's emphasis is on what's right, not who's right.

Two Basic Objectives

The two basic objectives in defense planning, Enthoven said, are the minimization of damage to ourselves and our allies in case of enemy attack, and the insurance of adequate capacity to retaliate.

In analyzing individual problems, Enthoven continued, the most difficult part is the treatment of uncertainties, such as determining the probability of a given situation actually occurring. For this he relies more on "slide rules and pencils" than on computers, Enthoven said.

Enthoven has participated in studies of projected ICBM requirements, non-nuclear NATO defense strategy, and rapid deployment of troops. The approach to all these problems is what Enthoven calls a simple marginal analysis: determining how much better one alternative will serve long-range objectives than another alternative under various conditions. "It's quantitative common sense," he explained.