What? Are we doing homework for you?
way before my time and everything i know about RM i learned from the documentary The Fog of War, which i would highly recommend.
Short Answer: David H. Hackworth...the story of McNamara and his failures is straightforward and not very
complicated. He had a number of character flaws that made him unsuitable for directing U.S. national security policy. He was hard-wired to produce disasters. It was unfortunate that he was at the pinnacle of power when his country was deciding whether to escalate the Vietnam War. One can never be sure what would have happened in Southeast Asia if a more able person had been at the Pentagon helm in those years, but a good case can be made that we might have avoided the disastrous policy that McNamara championed...
...the story of McNamara and his failures is straightforward and not very complicated. He had a number of character flaws that made him unsuitable for directing U.S. national security policy. He was hard-wired to produce disasters. It was unfortunate that he was at the pinnacle of power when his country was deciding whether to escalate the Vietnam War. One can never be sure what would have happened in Southeast Asia if a more able person had been at the Pentagon helm in those years, but a good case can be made that we might have avoided the disastrous policy that McNamara championed...
The Russians had experienced three major invasions over a long history: Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler.
way before my time and everything i know about RM i learned from the documentary The Fog of War, which i would highly recommend.
Good post. To be clear, I have no problem with using certain business models and practices in warfighting. I have a huge problem with using body count to determine whether you are winning, and adapting your methods on that basis. To be accurate, it wasn't just body count; tons of rice captured was also counted, as were captured or recovered weapons. But by the McNamara theory of warfighting, the Germans were whipping the Soviets' asses right up until they had strategically advanced backward to their own capital.Actually, I think it oversimplifies things to judge that running a war using business logistical models or ideas of "costs and benefits" is a bad idea.
Not long ago -- around 2007 when it was revealed that Halliburton had scammed the Defense Department for upwards of $8 billion -- Congressman Issa of Orange County remarked that waste, fraud and abuse occurs in all wars. But war is no less an economic contest than one of will or "ideological commitment."
World War II was actually an impetus to the development of digital computers, management science and/or operations research. We were waging war on two fronts. It required careful planning.
There is a concept in the economics of business of "sunk cost." Sunk cost is the amount that had been cumulatively invested in a business enterprise shown to be failing. The temptation -- and the trap -- would be to continue spending money hoping to recoup the accumulated investment.
But the problem with war in that view is that sunk cost also includes a cost in lives -- if only the lives of one side in the equation. The families and friends of those lost will not see decisions of reversal as justifying or validating those losses.
So it is the initial decision to go to war that counts.
With Vietnam, we were supporting a post-war French ally with a colonial outpost, and the French dropped out after Dien Bien Phu. Lansdale had been prominent in establishing the American "Saigon Military Mission" before the fateful battle. Afterward, the assessment about elections concluded that Ho Chi Minh -- a hero in the war against the Japanese -- would win hands down. A relocation of some 1.6 million Vietnamese from the North would serve as an electorate for the outcome CIA and Lansdale wanted.
But neither Truman nor Eisenhower wanted to engage in another major military conflict on the Asian mainland. Whether those opinions reflected "business" attitudes or not -- I leave to the reader. Yet, it was CIA's war, after successes in Greece and other places at stemming the tide of communist insurgencies.
The approach of "Vietnamization" had been the approach all along, inserting small numbers of advisors, which had grown to some 16,000 men before November, 1963.
And all of the eventual escalation derived from a strict adherence to George Kennan's white-paper written for the JCS in the late '40s, together with the idea of a "Domino effect." The only domino effect that arose after the exit of US troops and the fall of Saigon around 1975 occurred about 4 years later: The Vietnamese invaded Cambodia; the Chinese invaded Vietnam some 20 miles inside the latter's border to get the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia. They did -- and the Chinese withdrew their own troops.
I have a personal suspicion that Americans coming out of World War II and Korea had some sort of subliminal "Yellow Peril Myth" operating in the logic. The Japanese had actually obtained a foothold on certain Australian islands before MacArthur's New Guinea campaign, propelled by the concept of a "Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."
We transferred our perception of that experience to the Chinese -- who had in turn suffered Japanese occupation and the Rape of Nanking.
Moreover, the notion of a monolithic Monster Plot of international communism was a myth. While it would seem from a distance that the Russians and the Chinese were working in unison to unify a partitioned Korea, the original, blustery Elder Kim had lobbied with them separately, and they were reluctant. The arrangement with the Chinese involved insertion of Chinese troops only if the Americans crossed the 38th parallel, which occurred when we had all but captured the entirety of North Korea with our soldiers merely miles from the Yalu River. From the Chinese view, unifying Korea even in response to North Korean aggression was tantamount to violating the original agreement. The Russians had merely furnished war materiel.
And it is likely that the Korean War would not have occurred but for a public misstatement by Dean Acheson about the limits of America's defense perimeter.
In the end with Vietnam, losing 59,000 men and many times that in disabling casualties was the human cost to the US in a psy-war or propaganda outcome which can never be proven in its effectiveness. It totally ignored the long-standing enmity between Vietnam and the Chinese, and the North Vietnamese view that it was a civil war -- not part of an international conspiracy.
If Kennedy had lived, McNamara would've been demonized for pulling out of Vietnam. But it was Johnson who determined the policy, and it was a hawk faction in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who influenced Johnson.
But there is now little doubt that Kennedy would've extricated us from Vietnam following a successful 1964 election, and taken the heat because of it. The plan for the initial withdrawals had been splashed across the front page of the military newspaper "The Stars And Stripes" Pacific Edition about the time of the trip to Vietnam with Maxwell Taylor.
The notion of sunk cost with it's trap of human losses suggests that a more careful use of military power is always more prudent. Don't engage in military conflicts that are high in risk without a significant coalition of the willing; don't attempt to "prove" you can wage war on two fronts if your homeland isn't threatened directly -- immediately, or an ally hasn't been attacked. And avoid using military power to simply stifle a bad idea that appears to take hold in some third-world country.
You can't kill an idea, but an idea can fail on its own. If the notion of the Idea one is trying to defeat derives from Cold War hysteria and a mythology of past experience, a more careful assessment of options should leave military intervention as a last resort. And then, the issue arises as to just what actual risk is being addressed.
The Russians had experienced three major invasions over a long history: Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler. The Chinese had the curse of the Japanese. By comparison, we had the War of 1814, which seems minor by comparison.
Muscovy was not a state when Genghis Khan or Kublai Khan were invading Central Asia, Siberia, or Europe. They did however conflict with successor states that were already established by the time Muscovy came around. The Crimean Khanate was one of these successor states. They also had to deal with a few other wars than just Napoleon and Hitler, as they had wars with the Teutonic Knights and Swedish.
Russia is as much a part of "The West" as you could see from the origins of the word "Tsar," when there were four Caesars.
Soon, I'm going to publish something. It will not be a book. I don't want to contribute to the industry that covers 360-degrees of different explanations. Instead, it will be a long magazine article, not to be published in any particular magazine. I will make it available to maybe four or more forum and news websites, offering them the opportunity to link it in their pages as a sort of "research paper."
From some of those sites, I'll solicit editorial comments; there will be revisions. But none that I don't approve.
What is your article about?
The 201 file was not released by CIA to the archives until at least 1995 under the Records Act. In 1994, under the requirement that various people be held harmless from non-disclosure agreements of previous investigations or CIA, an investigator with the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) wrote and published an account of his role with the HSCA and his various discoveries.
He went to ten publishers in the US. He was only able to use an Australian company to publish the book.
Although the August 4 attack was almost certainly firing at radar ghosts, the August 2 attack was certainly by real North Vietnamese attack boats.He knew justification (Gulf of Tonkin incident) for escalating things in Vietnam were sketchy at best... But he succumbed to the pressure.
Can you tell me who this guy is and what book it is?
Although the August 4 attack was almost certainly firing at radar ghosts, the August 2 attack was certainly by real North Vietnamese attack boats.