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The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam
In this groundbreaking book, James William Gibson shatters the misled assumptions behind both liberal and conservative explanations for America's failure in Vietnam. Gibson shows how American government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war -- what he calls "technowar" -- in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy's body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction, American leaders failed to take into account their enemy's highly effective guerrilla tactics. Indeed, technowar proved woefully inapplicable to the actual political and military strategies used by the Vietnamese, and Gibson reveals how U.S. officials consistently falsified military records to preserve the illusion that their approach would prevail. Gibson was one of the first historians to question the fundamental assumptions behind American policy, and The Perfect War is a brilliant reassessment of the war -- now republished with a new introduction by the author.
544 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1986
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February 8, 2023
In his book, James William Gibson persuasively argues that the American military strategy in Vietnam was limited and ineffective because it relied almost completely on high body counts and technology to win a guerrilla war for the hearts and minds of the people.
During the Vietnam conflict, body counts became an indicator not only of military victory, but of professional success, so commanders pursued them way too enthusiastically. As early as 1966, demands for casualty reports have already become widespread in the MACV. For instance, after the nine-day siege of the Pleiku Special Forces was lifted in late 1965, MACV's chief of staff immediately asked for a body count for the upcoming briefing. Major Charles Beckwith, the camp's commanding officer, snapped that he would not give any figures until he counted, but by the time he reported forty enemy casualties, a number five times that much had already been announced in Saigon.
Field commanders competed with each other for recognition and promotion. The MACV's evaluation reports associated high body counts with favorable performances, and so did ambitious officers. Since body counts were the only visible distinction that could make their unit seem better than other units, they felt pressured to kill more enemies to prove that they are skilled and worthy of promotion. Pacification became a lower priority as everyone focused on "attriting" the enemy and "attrited" their own soldiers in the process. Furthermore, the body count strategy led to an excessive use of firepower, which alienated the population and did not address the problem of countering the Communist political infrastructure in the villages. Body counts also influenced the commanders' understanding of progress and effectiveness. They began to worry that they were too cautious, their tactics were not clever, and their intelligence was not good enough when their units did not kill enough enemy soldiers.
Things were further complicated by the American field commanders' short tours of duty in Vietnam. The one-year-tour policy pressured them to deliver results quickly, but in counterinsurgency warfare, soldiers had to be slow and methodical, so progress could not be achieved that fast. This is why, instead of supporting pacification efforts, which required a lot of time, commanders relied on body counts to demonstrate their own effectiveness. In the words of one officer, "A lot of careers were made or ruined on short duty assignments," and everyone wanted his career to be made. The MACV, the government, and the media wanted to see signs of progress, so the commanders refused to let anyone stand in their way of delivering a spectacular performance, whatever this meant. They did not care about the soldiers, the people of Vietnam, and the ARVN, treating them not as the means for winning the war but as a nuisance. The population was not the purpose of security anymore – it was to be looked down on and called offensive names.
That General Westmoreland emphasized search-and-destroy missions only confirmed the commanders' belief that all they had to do to win the Vietnam conflict is kill the opponent and capture ground. Aggressive units who killed the enemy were considered effective, and few officers in the MACV questioned whether high body counts showed actual progress. Even fewer seemed to understand that before measuring success, the Americans had to make the hostile and indifferent parts of the rural population trust and support them. As New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr explained, in Vietnam, statistics were not even unreliable – they were meaningless. "Statistically, the war has been won several times already." However, the fact that there still were enemy soldiers in the countryside was way more important than body counts. Although Westmoreland was successfully keeping the Communists off-balance militarily, his pacification efforts were not achieving any significant improvement in the security of the people.
The pressure to demonstrate good battlefield performance also led to false body count reports. Since distinguishing civilian from guerrilla casualties was difficult, many units began to classify all dead as enemy soldiers, and this resulted in greatly exaggerated body counts. The American reliance on artillery high explosives and napalm bombing, which tore bodies apart, made the task of counting casualties and measuring progress even more challenging.
Nevertheless, the MACV continues to base its monthly evaluation reports on statistics of enemy casualties and kill ratios, and praise the success of the American war effort. Huge efforts in quantification replaced almost all attempts to analyze. No effective way to measure village security or even the population of South Vietnam was established. No one tried to determine how the statistics helped the American goals in Vietnam. The MACV knew that 40,660 rounds of naval gunfire were used, and 167 million leaflets were dropped in South Vietnam, but this meant little for their understanding of the war's progress because there was no one to interpret and draw conclusions from this information. Down the chain of command, officers continued to motivate the soldiers to produce high body counts. The 25th Infantry Division, for instance, made a "Best of the Pack" contest for all of its platoons. The commanders awarded ten points for each "possible body count," one hundred points for each enemy crew served weapon captured, and two hundred points for each tactical radio captured. The platoon lost five hundred points for each American soldier killed in action. The results were used to measure the effectiveness of all the platoons in the division and won the best of them official recognition. Unfounded optimism replaced critical analysis. The way toward a costly failure was paved.
THE PERFECT WAR is a well-written analysis of the American body count strategy in Vietnam, its drawbacks and results. This book will be of interest to anyone looking for a work focused on this topic.
During the Vietnam conflict, body counts became an indicator not only of military victory, but of professional success, so commanders pursued them way too enthusiastically. As early as 1966, demands for casualty reports have already become widespread in the MACV. For instance, after the nine-day siege of the Pleiku Special Forces was lifted in late 1965, MACV's chief of staff immediately asked for a body count for the upcoming briefing. Major Charles Beckwith, the camp's commanding officer, snapped that he would not give any figures until he counted, but by the time he reported forty enemy casualties, a number five times that much had already been announced in Saigon.
Field commanders competed with each other for recognition and promotion. The MACV's evaluation reports associated high body counts with favorable performances, and so did ambitious officers. Since body counts were the only visible distinction that could make their unit seem better than other units, they felt pressured to kill more enemies to prove that they are skilled and worthy of promotion. Pacification became a lower priority as everyone focused on "attriting" the enemy and "attrited" their own soldiers in the process. Furthermore, the body count strategy led to an excessive use of firepower, which alienated the population and did not address the problem of countering the Communist political infrastructure in the villages. Body counts also influenced the commanders' understanding of progress and effectiveness. They began to worry that they were too cautious, their tactics were not clever, and their intelligence was not good enough when their units did not kill enough enemy soldiers.
Things were further complicated by the American field commanders' short tours of duty in Vietnam. The one-year-tour policy pressured them to deliver results quickly, but in counterinsurgency warfare, soldiers had to be slow and methodical, so progress could not be achieved that fast. This is why, instead of supporting pacification efforts, which required a lot of time, commanders relied on body counts to demonstrate their own effectiveness. In the words of one officer, "A lot of careers were made or ruined on short duty assignments," and everyone wanted his career to be made. The MACV, the government, and the media wanted to see signs of progress, so the commanders refused to let anyone stand in their way of delivering a spectacular performance, whatever this meant. They did not care about the soldiers, the people of Vietnam, and the ARVN, treating them not as the means for winning the war but as a nuisance. The population was not the purpose of security anymore – it was to be looked down on and called offensive names.
That General Westmoreland emphasized search-and-destroy missions only confirmed the commanders' belief that all they had to do to win the Vietnam conflict is kill the opponent and capture ground. Aggressive units who killed the enemy were considered effective, and few officers in the MACV questioned whether high body counts showed actual progress. Even fewer seemed to understand that before measuring success, the Americans had to make the hostile and indifferent parts of the rural population trust and support them. As New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr explained, in Vietnam, statistics were not even unreliable – they were meaningless. "Statistically, the war has been won several times already." However, the fact that there still were enemy soldiers in the countryside was way more important than body counts. Although Westmoreland was successfully keeping the Communists off-balance militarily, his pacification efforts were not achieving any significant improvement in the security of the people.
The pressure to demonstrate good battlefield performance also led to false body count reports. Since distinguishing civilian from guerrilla casualties was difficult, many units began to classify all dead as enemy soldiers, and this resulted in greatly exaggerated body counts. The American reliance on artillery high explosives and napalm bombing, which tore bodies apart, made the task of counting casualties and measuring progress even more challenging.
Nevertheless, the MACV continues to base its monthly evaluation reports on statistics of enemy casualties and kill ratios, and praise the success of the American war effort. Huge efforts in quantification replaced almost all attempts to analyze. No effective way to measure village security or even the population of South Vietnam was established. No one tried to determine how the statistics helped the American goals in Vietnam. The MACV knew that 40,660 rounds of naval gunfire were used, and 167 million leaflets were dropped in South Vietnam, but this meant little for their understanding of the war's progress because there was no one to interpret and draw conclusions from this information. Down the chain of command, officers continued to motivate the soldiers to produce high body counts. The 25th Infantry Division, for instance, made a "Best of the Pack" contest for all of its platoons. The commanders awarded ten points for each "possible body count," one hundred points for each enemy crew served weapon captured, and two hundred points for each tactical radio captured. The platoon lost five hundred points for each American soldier killed in action. The results were used to measure the effectiveness of all the platoons in the division and won the best of them official recognition. Unfounded optimism replaced critical analysis. The way toward a costly failure was paved.
THE PERFECT WAR is a well-written analysis of the American body count strategy in Vietnam, its drawbacks and results. This book will be of interest to anyone looking for a work focused on this topic.
December 3, 2015
Most of my Vietnam War book reviews include the phrase "Vietnam was fractally fucked up". In The Perfect War, Gibson identifies the mathematical seed of that fractal; an ideology that he deems Technowar, and traces its ramifications across Indochina in one of the best general histories of the war, which covers the choice to enter Vietnam, the ground war, the air war, and development and corruption.
Any honest accounting of the Vietnam War has to engage with the fact that Vietnam was a defeat, despite the overwhelming superiority of the American military on paper. Theories on this defeat fit into two major paradigms. Quagmire theory, as exemplified by The Best and the Brightest, argues that a series of decisions which individually seemed like the best alternative at the time, added up to an strategic error. Revisionist theories, as in Summer's On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argue that the full weight of American power was never applied due to perfidy in the Johnson administration and a stab-in-the-back from the anti-war movement. Gibson takes a third path. The military and strategic apparatus of the United States did exactly what it was supposed to, destroying Vietnam with a level of brutality that stopped short only of nuclear weapons. But despite this violence it could never win because of fundamental intellectual flaws.
Technowar, as described by Gibson, is a war of technologically sophisticated industrial systems directed by officer-managers. Victory is achieved through qualitative and quantitative margins of superiority in armament. Cost efficient application of key military inputs (tanks, bombs, ships, soldiers) would modulate strategic outputs (victories), and the United States, by virtue of have the best military inputs, would always achieve the best outputs. The logic of technowar, adapted from operations research and industrial management, is evident in strategic statements from military planners across the political spectrum, including Robert McNamara (the arch-technowarrior), Henry Kissinger, Maxwell Taylor, and General William Westmoreland.
More than a strategy, technowar was also a closed intellectual system. American capitalism and democracy is 'natural', so Communism is an 'unnatural Other' that infiltrates society. The enemy can only be conceived of as a flawed and inferior mirror image of the American military. The Maoist People's War strategy and tactics used by the Vietcong and NVA could not be contained within the system. Further, the closed intellectual system of technowar contained it's own justification. Unable to locate victories on the ground, technowar took to measuring it's own inputs: sortie rates, hamlets fortified, and above all the body count. The need to produce statistics falsified the war at all level, the lies "legitimated" in a process of institutional doublethink through medals and promotions for the most productive officers, and new names and propaganda for civilian programs.
This closed intellectual system made victory impossible, since strategy was generated in a kind of fantasy world. On the ground, with the soldiers and pilots who were the labor force of technowar, this fantasy generated demoralization, fragging, and atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. The Perfect War cites Lt. Calley of My Lai heavily, not as an exemption, but as an example typical of how the war was fought that happened to rise to public awareness. The My Lai massacre was a natural outgrowth of a strategy that could only measure success through bodycounts, and demanded quotas of the dead from officers.
The basic issues of the average Vietnamese civilian; land reform, honest government, an end to the violence, could not be addressed because they did not exist within the 'target space' defined by technowar. If anything, the chapters on corruption in rural development are some of the best writing I’ve seen on the war. Victory, if it were possible at all, could only mean a stable South Vietnam, in the model of South Korea or Taiwan. Due to the unique political and geographic circumstances that created South Vietnam, its government was defined by corrupt cliques of minor warlords, with nominal Vietnamese sovereignty requiring US officials to look away from the diversion of nearly all aid into private accounts of senior officials. The situation with the Piaster, and the 5x figure between official and black market exchange rates is fascinating. Somebody in the United States must have been getting immensely wealthy with the ongoing currency spread, and given that the official numbers were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, it was directly at taxpayer expense.
This is not quite the perfect book. It’s long and somewhat difficult reading for someone less interested in the topic and the theory. There are some rough edges where the Foucauldian and Marxist theory components meet technowar, which itself could use a little more historical development. The sources lean heavily on The Pentagon Papers and Lt. Calley’s testimony, although I agree that these are sufficiently representative of official and on-the-ground thinking in the war; and other sources back up these primary accounts. On the whole, however, Gibson ably covers as much of a very complex war as I’ve seen in a single volume, and does so with a theory that continues to have explanatory power, in this age of drone strikes and international terrorism.
Put this one at the top of your Vietnam War bookshelf.
Any honest accounting of the Vietnam War has to engage with the fact that Vietnam was a defeat, despite the overwhelming superiority of the American military on paper. Theories on this defeat fit into two major paradigms. Quagmire theory, as exemplified by The Best and the Brightest, argues that a series of decisions which individually seemed like the best alternative at the time, added up to an strategic error. Revisionist theories, as in Summer's On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argue that the full weight of American power was never applied due to perfidy in the Johnson administration and a stab-in-the-back from the anti-war movement. Gibson takes a third path. The military and strategic apparatus of the United States did exactly what it was supposed to, destroying Vietnam with a level of brutality that stopped short only of nuclear weapons. But despite this violence it could never win because of fundamental intellectual flaws.
Technowar, as described by Gibson, is a war of technologically sophisticated industrial systems directed by officer-managers. Victory is achieved through qualitative and quantitative margins of superiority in armament. Cost efficient application of key military inputs (tanks, bombs, ships, soldiers) would modulate strategic outputs (victories), and the United States, by virtue of have the best military inputs, would always achieve the best outputs. The logic of technowar, adapted from operations research and industrial management, is evident in strategic statements from military planners across the political spectrum, including Robert McNamara (the arch-technowarrior), Henry Kissinger, Maxwell Taylor, and General William Westmoreland.
More than a strategy, technowar was also a closed intellectual system. American capitalism and democracy is 'natural', so Communism is an 'unnatural Other' that infiltrates society. The enemy can only be conceived of as a flawed and inferior mirror image of the American military. The Maoist People's War strategy and tactics used by the Vietcong and NVA could not be contained within the system. Further, the closed intellectual system of technowar contained it's own justification. Unable to locate victories on the ground, technowar took to measuring it's own inputs: sortie rates, hamlets fortified, and above all the body count. The need to produce statistics falsified the war at all level, the lies "legitimated" in a process of institutional doublethink through medals and promotions for the most productive officers, and new names and propaganda for civilian programs.
This closed intellectual system made victory impossible, since strategy was generated in a kind of fantasy world. On the ground, with the soldiers and pilots who were the labor force of technowar, this fantasy generated demoralization, fragging, and atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. The Perfect War cites Lt. Calley of My Lai heavily, not as an exemption, but as an example typical of how the war was fought that happened to rise to public awareness. The My Lai massacre was a natural outgrowth of a strategy that could only measure success through bodycounts, and demanded quotas of the dead from officers.
The basic issues of the average Vietnamese civilian; land reform, honest government, an end to the violence, could not be addressed because they did not exist within the 'target space' defined by technowar. If anything, the chapters on corruption in rural development are some of the best writing I’ve seen on the war. Victory, if it were possible at all, could only mean a stable South Vietnam, in the model of South Korea or Taiwan. Due to the unique political and geographic circumstances that created South Vietnam, its government was defined by corrupt cliques of minor warlords, with nominal Vietnamese sovereignty requiring US officials to look away from the diversion of nearly all aid into private accounts of senior officials. The situation with the Piaster, and the 5x figure between official and black market exchange rates is fascinating. Somebody in the United States must have been getting immensely wealthy with the ongoing currency spread, and given that the official numbers were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, it was directly at taxpayer expense.
This is not quite the perfect book. It’s long and somewhat difficult reading for someone less interested in the topic and the theory. There are some rough edges where the Foucauldian and Marxist theory components meet technowar, which itself could use a little more historical development. The sources lean heavily on The Pentagon Papers and Lt. Calley’s testimony, although I agree that these are sufficiently representative of official and on-the-ground thinking in the war; and other sources back up these primary accounts. On the whole, however, Gibson ably covers as much of a very complex war as I’ve seen in a single volume, and does so with a theory that continues to have explanatory power, in this age of drone strikes and international terrorism.
Put this one at the top of your Vietnam War bookshelf.
July 21, 2017
Magnificent!
Gibson provides what is essentially a Marxian critique of the Vietnam War to give the clearest, most honest explanation you are likely to get for why the US lost that war.
Technowar is the name for the "scientific" application of management skills and technology to warfare. The thinking goes that proper management and advanced weaponry won WWII - therefore all foreign policy questions could ultimately be solved by the proper combination of high tech killing machines and economic science. By this standard the US had virtually unlimited power to control the globe and defeat in any form became unthinkable.
In the case of Vietnam war became a product managed by the generals and civilian leadership. Success or failure could be measured quantitatively using - science! Enlisted men were the labor force and officers the bosses. Productive capacity was measured in dead enemy bodies. The cost-benefit analysis requires killing lots more Vietcong (credit) than was spent in ammunition, lost tanks, bombs, and dead and wounded Americans (debit). Since the Vietnamese could never match us bomb for bomb in this productive measurement system there was literally no way we could lose - according to the logic of technowar.
But there were problems with running the war this way. The constant pressure to produce high body counts led to search and destroy missions where every dead person, man, woman, or child was counted as Vietcong. This had the side effect of helping Vietcong recruitment efforts. "... when A Company goes into a friendly village, if it's not VC when they go into it, it's VC when they leave" one soldier is quoted.
The pressure of the production quota - maximizing productivity - also led officers to juke the stats. Career advancement was impossible without producing the numbers - so officers created the illusion of high production in their reports. Such padding continued up the chain of command helping convince those at the top that victory was within sight continuously throughout the war. It was insane.
Obviously running a war is not the same as running a soup factory. Gibson's critical analysis of the failure of the American war machine is inspired. He goes beyond what the generals wrote and develops convincing conclusions by listening to what the grunts and the low-ranking officers and even the Vietnamese had to say.
This kind of criticism is unheard of but also desperately needed. To this day the standard explanations of "errant judgement" and "self-imposed restraint" still have currency as serious explanations for what happened in Vietnam. Gibson pokes holes in these facile analyses. To admit the need for reform, he says, is to admit military defeat. Since technowar does not allow for the possibility of defeat "error" and "restraint" are the perfect answers. The US lost because we didn't go hard enough. If that's true than the only answer is bigger military budgets, more advanced weaponry, and more bombs. So that is what we did.
I have no doubt that technowar lives on in today's military - especially in places like Afghanistan. The lessons we need to learn are right here in this book should we ever decide to heed them.
Gibson provides what is essentially a Marxian critique of the Vietnam War to give the clearest, most honest explanation you are likely to get for why the US lost that war.
Technowar is the name for the "scientific" application of management skills and technology to warfare. The thinking goes that proper management and advanced weaponry won WWII - therefore all foreign policy questions could ultimately be solved by the proper combination of high tech killing machines and economic science. By this standard the US had virtually unlimited power to control the globe and defeat in any form became unthinkable.
In the case of Vietnam war became a product managed by the generals and civilian leadership. Success or failure could be measured quantitatively using - science! Enlisted men were the labor force and officers the bosses. Productive capacity was measured in dead enemy bodies. The cost-benefit analysis requires killing lots more Vietcong (credit) than was spent in ammunition, lost tanks, bombs, and dead and wounded Americans (debit). Since the Vietnamese could never match us bomb for bomb in this productive measurement system there was literally no way we could lose - according to the logic of technowar.
But there were problems with running the war this way. The constant pressure to produce high body counts led to search and destroy missions where every dead person, man, woman, or child was counted as Vietcong. This had the side effect of helping Vietcong recruitment efforts. "... when A Company goes into a friendly village, if it's not VC when they go into it, it's VC when they leave" one soldier is quoted.
The pressure of the production quota - maximizing productivity - also led officers to juke the stats. Career advancement was impossible without producing the numbers - so officers created the illusion of high production in their reports. Such padding continued up the chain of command helping convince those at the top that victory was within sight continuously throughout the war. It was insane.
Obviously running a war is not the same as running a soup factory. Gibson's critical analysis of the failure of the American war machine is inspired. He goes beyond what the generals wrote and develops convincing conclusions by listening to what the grunts and the low-ranking officers and even the Vietnamese had to say.
This kind of criticism is unheard of but also desperately needed. To this day the standard explanations of "errant judgement" and "self-imposed restraint" still have currency as serious explanations for what happened in Vietnam. Gibson pokes holes in these facile analyses. To admit the need for reform, he says, is to admit military defeat. Since technowar does not allow for the possibility of defeat "error" and "restraint" are the perfect answers. The US lost because we didn't go hard enough. If that's true than the only answer is bigger military budgets, more advanced weaponry, and more bombs. So that is what we did.
I have no doubt that technowar lives on in today's military - especially in places like Afghanistan. The lessons we need to learn are right here in this book should we ever decide to heed them.
January 5, 2020
Gibson has an excellent analysis of how the very structure of the US military and civilian intervention into Vietnam was blinded but its own conception of how things worked and thus incapable of actually engaging with things as they were leading to a disaster for the Vietnamese people. His analysis of how the concept of war as practiced by the West, and especially by the business influenced "war managers" (as he calls them, not inaccurately), led to immense self-deception and a system that produced data that actually meant nothing but a license for more destruction and pouring in more men and material to try and solve a problem partly created by the first wave of men and material.
It does have a few flaws, Gibson called this conception of war "Technowar" as uses the term incessantly sometime it shows up multiple time on one page even when another term would be more accurate, it gets wearing. The same with describing the North Vietnamese as "the foreign Other". Nor does Gibson really look at the few, and ultimately failed, attempts to change the system from within, the war managers were the predominant faction but there were dissenting voices and attempts to break free of the spell of "Technowar". It is a technical book and, at times, very dense going especially with Gibson tendency to belabor certain points.
However, his analysis of how the US Government became blinded to the truth from the ground is even more relevant today with the release of the "Afghanistan Papers" showing how little the US Government has changed in its approach to war fighting against insurgents and how the same mistakes keep being made as the US Military seems unable to learn from its past mistakes as it refuses to acknowledge that it made any.
I
It does have a few flaws, Gibson called this conception of war "Technowar" as uses the term incessantly sometime it shows up multiple time on one page even when another term would be more accurate, it gets wearing. The same with describing the North Vietnamese as "the foreign Other". Nor does Gibson really look at the few, and ultimately failed, attempts to change the system from within, the war managers were the predominant faction but there were dissenting voices and attempts to break free of the spell of "Technowar". It is a technical book and, at times, very dense going especially with Gibson tendency to belabor certain points.
However, his analysis of how the US Government became blinded to the truth from the ground is even more relevant today with the release of the "Afghanistan Papers" showing how little the US Government has changed in its approach to war fighting against insurgents and how the same mistakes keep being made as the US Military seems unable to learn from its past mistakes as it refuses to acknowledge that it made any.
I
December 23, 2019
Good explication of the faulty explanations of the war and its failure with a brief overview of the Vietnamese history of anti-colonialism. Written to emphasize the perspective of the reality on the ground/oral instructions instead of the formal written rules/regulations. The war wasn't a mistake but totally logical in terms of the defence intellectuals, they didn't understand their enemies thinking so couldn't even do propaganda right. A production line concept of "limited war" which aims at maximizing kills, quantitative falsification and alienating your ostensible "allies" could only lead to internal collapse of morale.
August 24, 2013
Cybernetics has taken hold of management, firms, government and even the military by the end of WWII.
April 5, 2015
An interesting book, very similar in content to Daniel Ellsbergs "Secrets" even though written very differently.
December 5, 2023
An entirely reasonable and well argued case for why the Vietnam War was such a mistake. The author focuses on the 'technowar' aspects where military statistics were the criteria used to determine progress. The problem being these statistics were firstly always exaggerated to help officers careers, and to determine rewards to soldiers, and secondly blinded the military to the abuse and murder of vietnamese civilians who were included in the body count figures. This inevitably led to tactics that alienated the local population and did not support the strategic objectives of being in Vietnam.
The book has an excellent start in looking how attitudes to the war have changed over time but unfortunately these reflections are not followed through and the text becomes bogged down in the analysis of the statistics themselves. The book also does not fully look at the other fundamental reasons for failure such as the position the USA took in support of an inherently unstable and corrupt government that owed its existence to the money and military might the USA lavished upon the country. Also not covered in detail was the critical error the USA made to allow and even enable the coup against the Premier Ngo Dinh Diem that the North Vietnamese saw as a key milestone towards meeting their objectives.
It would have been useful for the book to have looked at the consequences of the USA failure in Vietnam. Laos, and Cambodia ended up under communist rule as a direct result of USA actions, whilst Vietnam was clearly a nationalist republican country from the start that was artificially divided due to colonial influences and could instead have evolved into a dual model capitalist country through diplomacy and free trade.
The book has an excellent start in looking how attitudes to the war have changed over time but unfortunately these reflections are not followed through and the text becomes bogged down in the analysis of the statistics themselves. The book also does not fully look at the other fundamental reasons for failure such as the position the USA took in support of an inherently unstable and corrupt government that owed its existence to the money and military might the USA lavished upon the country. Also not covered in detail was the critical error the USA made to allow and even enable the coup against the Premier Ngo Dinh Diem that the North Vietnamese saw as a key milestone towards meeting their objectives.
It would have been useful for the book to have looked at the consequences of the USA failure in Vietnam. Laos, and Cambodia ended up under communist rule as a direct result of USA actions, whilst Vietnam was clearly a nationalist republican country from the start that was artificially divided due to colonial influences and could instead have evolved into a dual model capitalist country through diplomacy and free trade.
February 26, 2024
Incredible book, the best I’ve read on the Vietnam War so far. Feels like an x-ray in laying out the different relationships that drove the war (and just as importantly, drove the systematic misunderstanding of what was happening at any given time).
Even more damning than when it was written in the 1980s, since we can see the same patterns persist through to the contemporary “War on Terror” and other military endeavors.
Even more damning than when it was written in the 1980s, since we can see the same patterns persist through to the contemporary “War on Terror” and other military endeavors.
May 11, 2019
This book was handed down to me by a more militant-minded friend, and after rather lukewarm and cautious preconceptions I was baffled how captivating this opus was. The thorough research done by Gibson, backed with his impeccable writing style with personal touch deliver the prolonged, slow motion train wreck of the Vietnam farce in all its tragic detail.
October 15, 2017
Unlike the current PBS Vietnam 2017 television, this work is not memorial but analysis. It is as relevant, perceptive, and helpful as it was when originally published that then republished. The American intrusion into Viet Nam was a technocratic one that bore no meaningful or humane relationship to the history of Indochina. The accounts of battles in this study are as moving as those in other histories of the war but remain analytically clear. In spite of a well formed accumulation of new histories and studies, this one remain vital.
April 15, 2010
A fantastic review of why we're STILL not getting it with respect to foreign policy.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews