he Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 American documentary film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film was directed by Errol Morris and the original score is by Philip Glass.

The title is a reference to the military phrase fog of war, a concept of battlefield uncertainty during the fighting. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature.[1] It was screened out of competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival

Concept

Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from his birth during the First World War remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to his being employed as Secretary of Defense and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of defense, despite limited military experience.

In a 2004 appearance at U.C. Berkeley, Errol Morris said his inspiration for the documentary derived from McNamara's book (with James G. Blight), Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (2001).[3] Morris interviewed McNamara for some twenty hours; the two-hour documentary comprises eleven lessons from In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). He posits, discourses upon, and propounds the lessons in the interview that is The Fog of War. Moreover, at the U.C. Berkeley event, McNamara disagreed with Morris's interpretations in The Fog of War, yet, on completion, McNamara supplemented the original eleven lessons with an additional ten lessons; they are in The Fog of War DVD.

When asked to apply the eleven lessons from In Retrospect to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, McNamara refused, arguing that ex-secretaries of defense must not comment upon the incumbent defense secretary's policies. He suggested other people could apply the eleven lessons to the war in Iraq, but that he would not, noting that the lessons are generally about war, not a specific war.
[edit] R.S. McNamara's eleven lessons of war

   1. Empathize with your enemy
   2. Rationality will not save us
   3. There's something beyond one's self
   4. Maximize efficiency
   5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
   6. Get the data
   7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
   8. Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning
   9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
  10. Never say never
  11. You can't change human nature

 Ten additional lessons from R.S. McNamara

These supplement the documentary; they are in the DVD's special features.

   1. The human race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war—the level of killing—by adhering to the principles of a "Just War," in particular to the principle of "proportionality."
   2. The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
   3. We [the U.S.A.] are the most powerful nation in the world—economically, politically, and militarily—and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
   4. Moral principles are often ambiguous guides to foreign policy and defense policy, but surely we can agree that we should establish as a major goal of U.S. foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policy across the globe: the avoidance, in this century of the carnage—160 million dead—caused by conflict in the 20th century.
   5. We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
   6. Corporate executives must recognize there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers and to society as a whole.
   7. President Kennedy believed a primary responsibility of a president—indeed the primary responsibility of a president—is to keep the nation out of war, if at all possible.
   8. War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
   9. If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
  10. One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.