The Whiz Kids was the name given to a group of experts, largely from the RAND Corporation, who U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara conferred with in his effort to modernize the management of the Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960s. The objective was to shape an updated defense strategy in the Nuclear Age by bringing in economic analysis, operations research, game theory, and computing, along with implementing modern management systems to coordinate the massive, complex operations of the DoD with a set of techniques known as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). They were dubbed the "Whiz Kids"", an allusion to the group at Ford Motor Company that McNamara himself had been part of in the 1940s and 1950s.
Personnel The group included, among others Harold Brown, nuclear physicist Alain Enthoven, economist Steven Fenster Patrick Gross William Kaufmann, nuclear strategist Jan Lodal J. Edward Lundy, financial analyst Howard Margolis, journalist (later a social scientist) Frank Nicolai Merton J. Peck, economist Charles O. Rossotti, systems reformer Henry Rowen, national security expert, economist, and academician John H. Rubel, engineer Willis H. Sargent Ivan Selin, research engineer Robert (Bob) Schneider, Pierre Sprey, defense analyst David Staiger Adam Yarmolinsky, academic, educator and author Richard Zeckhauser, economist Thomas Nicholson John M. Deutch, physical chemist and civil servant Charles F. Baldwin, economist
References
Further reading Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.