Whiz Kids was a name given to a group of experts from

RAND The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is finan ...

Corporation with which

Robert McNamara Robert Strange McNamara (; June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth United States Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He remains the Lis ...

surrounded himself in order to turn around the management of the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

(DoD) in the 1960s. The purpose was to shape a modern defense strategy in the Nuclear Age by bringing in

economic analysis Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyz ...

operations research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has appli ...

, computing, as well as implementing modern

management system A management system is a set of policies, processes and procedures used by an organization to ensure that it can fulfill the tasks required to achieve its objectives. These objectives cover many aspects of the organization's operations (including ...

s to coordinate the huge dimension of operations of the DoD with methods such as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (

PPBS Output budgeting is a wide-ranging management technique introduced into the United States in the mid-1960s by Robert S. McNamara's collaborator Charles J. Hitch, not always with ready cooperation with the administrators and based on the industrial ...

). They were called the Whiz Kids recalling the group at Ford Motor Company that McNamara was part of a decade earlier. The group included (among others): * Harold Brown * Alain Enthoven * Steven Fenster * Patrick Gross *

William Kaufmann William Weed Kaufmann (November 10, 1918 – December 14, 2008) was an American nuclear strategist and adviser to seven defense secretaries, who advocated for a shift from the strategy of massive retaliation against the Soviet Union in the ...

* Jan Lodal *

Howard Margolis Howard Margolis (1932 – April 29, 2009) was an American social scientist. He earned a BA in Government from Harvard University in 1953 and a PhD in Political Science from MIT in 1979. From 1990 to 2009, he was on the faculty of the University o ...

* Frank Nicolai * Merton Joseph Peck * Charles O. Rossotti * Henry Rowen * John H. Rubel * Ivan Selin *

Pierre Sprey Pierre Michel Sprey was a record producer and a defense analyst. Working with John Boyd and Thomas P. Christie at the Pentagon, he was associated with the self-dubbed ' Fighter Mafia', which advocated the use of energy–maneuverability theor ...

* David Staiger *

Adam Yarmolinsky Adam Yarmolinsky (November 17, 1922 – January 5, 2000) was an American academic, educator and author, as well as a political appointee who served in numerous capacities in the Kennedy, Johnson and Carter administrations. Besides serving in t ...

Richard Zeckhauser Richard Jay Zeckhauser (born 1940) is an American economist and the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, BA (''summa cum laude'') and a PhD in econo ...

* Thomas Nicholson

References

Further reading