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