This paper develops a new approach to band subset selection (BSS) for hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) which selects multiple bands simultaneously as a band subset, referred to as simultaneous multiple band selection (SMMBS), rather than one band at a time sequentially, referred to as sequential multiple band selection (SQMBS), as most traditional band selection methods do. In doing so, a criterion is particularly developed for BSS that can be used for HSIC. It is a linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) derived from adaptive beamforming in array signal processing which can be used to model misclassification errors as the minimum variance. To avoid an exhaustive search for all possible band subsets, two numerical algorithms, referred to as sequential (SQ) and successive (SC) algorithms are also developed for LCMV-based SMMBS, called SQ LCMV-BSS and SC LCMV-BSS. Experimental results demonstrate that LCMV-based BSS has advantages over SQMBS.