Such strategies have been referred to as hydraulic missions (Allan 2003), "high modern style" policymaking (Swatuk 2008), and "water resources engineering" (Magalhães, and Glantz 1992).
What we ultimately learned from McNamara is not only how this style of policymaking worked but also its many shortcomings.
Barack Obama the president has been more comfortable with a close group of advisers, a largely advisory and deferential style of policymaking and message crafting that, while still suspicious of Washington, isn't quite populist either.
An MBA and former president of the Ford Motor Company, McNamara pioneered an analytical style of policymaking that relied on the collection of empirical data and the application of statistical models to inform public choice.
His technocratic style to policymaking had some advantages, especially when making decisions about defence acquisitions, but it could also lead to grotesque excesses, such as the use of body counts as a measure of success and failure in the Vietnam war.
The European style of policymaking fundamentally diverges from the US model which shows a preference for command-and-control measures with 'technology-forcing' features.
One of his early decisions as prime minister was to scrap Delhi's Planning Commission, a relic of Soviet-style centrist policymaking.
To say the least, policymaking in this way is wrong.
The White House counsel's disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as "quaint" opened the way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic of the Administration's management style, no one in a policymaking position has been held accountable.
That habit of impromptu policymaking was integral to Mr Chavez's style, right from the start of his 14 years in power.
