Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...neither the military nor the civilian leaders were willing to admit that a military victory in the classic World War II sense was impossible under the conditions imposed by the Red Chinese and the Soviets and the nature of the war. The Pentagon should have tried harder to persuade its civilian commanders that both ought to narrow their goals. They could hope to prevent a conquest of South Viet Nam and bolster the South Vietnamese forces for a limited time-and that, perhaps, is all that the President and the nation should have expected to accomplish in Viet Nam. Military...
...freedom to clean the Viet Cong out of populated villages without having to obtain cooperation from province and district chiefs -although the massacre at My Lai raises questions about whether the restrictions are, in fact, tight enough. Officers contend that too many of the most prominent critics of the war simply do not understand Viet Nam or the nature of the fighting there. If the military gets around to publicly pinpointing scapegoats, it will undoubtedly cite the U.S. press. There is a widespread conviction in the armed forces that reporters have fed antiwar sentiment at home by sensationalizing the war...
Perhaps no other war in history has imposed similar restraints and frustrations on an armed force, making the bitterness of the military men understandable. Still, most of their assertions about missed chances of victory are highly questionable. The notion that a quick strike by an unfettered U.S. military force would have promptly subdued the enemy ignores the whole history of the incredible tenacity, patience and xenophobic passion of Vietnamese nationalists. It also underrates their guerrilla fighting skills. A U.S. invasion of North Viet Nam to topple the Hanoi government must at times have had an obvious appeal to the military...
...concept that bombing the North could end the war has been effectively questioned by Townsend Hoopes, Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1967 until last February. In his book The Limits of Intervention, he contends that U.S. bombing, which is geared to nuclear war, is surprisingly inadequate for interdiction strikes, "a fact shrouded in professional embarrassment." He claims that the Communist war effort in the South requires a volume of supplies so small compared with the North's capacity to deliver that it cannot be effectively shut off. Sealing off Haiphong, he also contends, would not have been...
...even more basic argument against any stab-in-the-back theory is that the military only belatedly made the case for an all-out effort. Especially in the conflict's early years, the professionals of war were thinking in the old way of victory on the battlefield, and troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet...