McNamara's Legacies and Lessons: Beyond Simple Answers
Robert McNamara died at home in his sleep this last week, prompting widespread commentary and reflections. Perhaps the most thoughtful was on PBS's Newshour, at least IOHO. After the break you'll find some reflections and ruminations from a wide spectrum of observers, commentators and participants. Reading them and reflecting on the lessons ourselves we were, and are, struck by several things. First everyone sees things thru their own prism, naturally, but fails to some extent to broaden that prism to include the entire context. Second, McNamara's Legacy is widely held to be a failed strategy that led to a failed war; and beyond that, a legacy of distrust with government and divisions in society that persisted for years. It can be argued that in fact they persist until recently and we are only now beginning to move beyond them. Of course Mr. McNamara wasn't alone in making the decisions that so shaped and warped our public discourse, attitudes and culture for the last 30+ years but he was and is a bit of a lightening rod. History will reach its own conclusions in the fullness of time but the damage created and the difficulties in re-bounding seem to be clear. Nor is Vietnam the sole legacy of the '60s from legislation to civil changes, many of which suffered similar fates for similar reasons; and for which we are only now beginning to come to terms with and respond adequately to !
So what are those legacies ? We'll work thru that but we'll suggest (assert) three major ones for you to think about. 1) It is fundamentally necessary to understand how things work in context and not impose simple models on a complex universe. 2) It is equally necessary to adapt your understanding to new learnings and change your strategies and actions accordingly. 3) The core requirement of a public servant is to have the moral courage to admit when things aren't working and take responsibility for finding alternatives. In other words see the world as it is, not as you fantasy it and then adapt yourself to reality to achieve your goals. And have the courage, discipline, persistence and old fashioned gumption to stick with it long enough to reach a conclusion.
Ugly Americans, Real Lessons of 'Nam and Responses
The majority of the commentators (though not the PBS guests who were biographers) failed to assess McNamara and American policy in the context of the times. Retrospective criticisms are all well and good as well as fun and entertaining but they can't be taken seriously. Decision-makers have to act with situations as they are, with the tools they have and the information available, not operate in some ideal and theoretical world where infinite time and resources are available. So before we judge Caesar let us properly bury him by making the real record clearer. In the readings we've collected a reading list on Vietnam per se and on the history and context, e.g. John Lewis Gaddis' short history of the Cold, which underpins this section. We've also collected a set of Rose interviews on 'Nam, Somalia/Balkans and Iraq that trace the arc of American institutional response to these sorts of crisis and challenges.
Continued...
1. Cold War - we went into Vietnam at the height of the Cold War which, despite revisionist popular history was both a real war and not something we were guaranteed to win. Remember that not only were the leaders veterans of WW2 but had watched the Soviet Union almost take over Western Europe after conquering Eastern Europe, the success of the Communists in China, the attack on Greece, support for civil wars and rebellions in Latin America and Africa and massive worldwide efforts to undermine the West. Bottomline: this was the real deal and a real concern. It's not at all clear that the Domino Theory would not, in fact, have worked out as Eisenhower envisioned it without our intervention.
2. Nuclear War - this was a real, continuing threat that was as serious as it's possible to get. The #1 foreign policy objective of the US was to prevent an local conflict from escalating into total war. A risk that didn't move on to a move tractable path until Kissinger and Nixon's Detente.
3. Civil/Military Relations - the movie Thirteen Days gets it exactly right. The Chiefs of Staff were all WW2 combat veterans. In fact at this time they included, or had recently, Gen. Curtis "Bomber" Lemay and Adm. Arleigh "31-kt" Burke. During the Cuban Crisis these guys wanted to go full bore (cf. #1) and were intransigent in their advocacies. On top of which the DoD was a collection of feudal fiefdoms, large, cumbersome and inefficient. Both of which problems McNamara was brought in to fix but the attack on which led to the unwillingness of inability of the Military to "speak truth to power". Which was perhaps the single greatest failing institutionally after the original policy and strategic failures.
4. Operational Execution - there were three, perhaps four, prongs (or as the military now calls them) operational dimensions, to the Vietnam effort. Conventional military operations, unconventional operations, nation-building and civil affairs and socio-political development. Other than the first the other three, which were arguably both essential and more important, were under-emphasized and resourced. Despite participants and commentators at the time knowing better. Even on the great strength of US forces, conventional operations, we pursued a "heavy" approach instead of a more infantry and light, agile approach (cf. David Hackworth's books especially). Yet when more agile infantry tactics were put in place by skilled leaders with the right skills and experienced they worked and worked well. These problems were made worse by several orders of magnitude by careerism on the part of the command hierarchy, officer rotation policies (ticket-punching) and limited tours, which ensured that unit cohesion was poor, the troops ill-trained and ill-led and morale damaged and almost destroyed (cf. fragging; as an NJROTIC student and CO my unit visited a naval base in the mid-'70s and had beer bottles thrown at us on the public streets. We almost had a riot between the sailors and the unit).
5. Forlorn Hope - the conventional wisdom now is that not only was Vietnam unwinnable but it was never feasible or workable nor worth the effort required to fail. In addition to all the other failures of leadership, moral courage and political will the final straw was when, in a fit of political correctness and moral picque, the US Congress cut off all funding to South Vietnam. Up until that point Vietnamization was working, the South Vietnamese were holding their own and there was a clear but difficult chance to make things work. But when you design an armed force that requires fuel, ammo, intelligence and air support and completely cut it off it should come as no surprise that it fails. In other words we completely abandoned our allies and failed to honor our commitments (cf. Czech Uprising:1956, Prague Spring:1968, Somalia:1993, and Shia Uprising: Iraq 1991).
6. Reverberations (?): After all that it's not clear that it in fact didn't work. By essentially fighting a holding action while regimes changed in Russia and China, monolithic relationships broke up and the workability of the Communist system in the long-term was tested the sacrifices made by our forces on the ground - despite all we did to screw it up - probably bought us enough time to win the Cold War. Though certainly not the only or even prime cause Vietnam was a major component.
Lessons Learned: a Long Time Coming
If you look a the arc of US foreign and national security policy from Vietnam thru the '80s and '90s adaptaion and response was a very long, hard time coming. If you look at US society the same can be said. In fact we never came to term with the legacies of Vietnam and how to learn from them and adapt ourselves in a mature and responsible way. Instead in places like Somalia and upto and including the current Iraq War from 2004-2006 we basically repeated them. It was at the end of 2006 if you'll recall that a blue ribbon panel put together a series of recommendations essentially calling for us to cut and run again, though they sugar coated it. Yet somehow or another the military, who had gone into the fight with the wrong capabilities, managed to re-invent all the discarded lessons of counter-insurgency and nation-building while adapting it's conventional forces, tactics and strategies into a cohesive framework that reversed that trend. And did so with little or no support form Washington and the country with the single and exemplary exception of the President. Yet, as the graphic shows, a complex, difficult and highly skilled strategy was developed, put in place and effectively executed. And it has been effective and successful to date.
Yet the military is not the only institution that failed to learn the lessons of hubris and mal-adaptation that should have been taken from the '60s and '70s. Without going into great detail the last few weeks have seen the bankruptcy filings of both Crysler and GM for example (Detroitosaurus: Iconic Death vs. World Industry Futures ). Resilience and adapation will be the sine qua non of the next decades in all spheres, whether it's business, the civil or public policy. Right now we're in the midst of an economic crisis yet at the same time the administration is tackling the issues of Healthcare, Energy and Education that have been known, neglected and ignored for three decades. Our poor ability to respond under adaptive pressures in Vietnam is just one of many major examples of inabilities and unwillingness to change. But we've come to the point where the alternatives are stark and the consequences much clearer. We may not exactly know how to fix these things perfectly but we are moving forcefully with the best we know how to do to deal with issues too long neglect.
Principles for the Future
Like we said there are not simple answers to complex questions and you need to make courageous strategic decisions but also balance that with learning and change as you go.
And if there's one fundamental lesson to be learned from McNamara it's this: you have to have the moral courage not just to admit you're wrong. You've got to do better than that and figure out how to stay in the game and get it right. Mea culpa's don't count. Performance does.
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Legacies and Reflections
Robert McNamara Dies: No Escape from Vietnam At the beginning of his professional career, he made a name for himself as the wunderkind who reformed the ailing Ford Motor Co. At the end, he tried to rehabilitate his reputation, as a do-gooder striving to save the globe's poorer nations as head of the World Bank. But Robert McNamara, who died early Monday morning in his sleep at home at the age of 93 (his wife Diana told the Associated Press he had been in failing health for some time), will always be best known for his role as the architect of Washington's failed Vietnam policy in the 1960s. McNamara waited 30 years before conceding in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, that he had waged the war in error. "My voice would have had no impact at all at that point," he told TIME when the book came out, explaining why he hadn't revealed his doubts when he stepped down as Secretary of Defense in early 1968. "My voice would have had no impact whatsoever." But to the baby boomers who came of age during the Vietnam War, McNamara's actions at the time spoke louder than the words of contrition he would utter three decades after 58,000 Americans had lost their lives in Vietnam. In their youth, they referred to the Vietnam conflict as "McNamara's war." But the publication of the 1995 memoir revived the debate over his role in the war. McNamara admitted in his book that the U.S. government had never answered key questions that drove its war policy, such as whether the fall of Vietnam would lead to a communist Southeast Asia and if such an occurrence would really have posed a grave threat to the West. "It seems beyond understanding, incredible, that we did not force ourselves to confront such issues head-on," he wrote. He said he wanted to help prevent the country from making similar mistakes in the future and that he fretted that just as Washington misperceived Vietnam a generation ago, it remained in danger of making a similar mistake. "We ought to learn the history of the Muslim religion," he told TIME in 1995. "Most Americans don't know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, but we need to know that because that's going to be a major issue in the world of the future."
A Complicated Legacy What a sense of possibility McNamara conveyed in those first years -- the audacity, not of hope but of reason. He came to Washington as the ultimate rationalist, believing that he could transform the bureaucratic morass of the Defense Department into something modern and efficient. He gathered his "whiz kids," bright young aides like my father, and encouraged them to challenge outmoded practices, politics be damned. And he backed them all the way. The military never really forgave McNamara for that determination to apply modern management techniques to the nation's defense. The generals and admirals didn't want to be rationalized; they had built a mighty machine to battle the Soviet Union, and they resented McNamara's attempt to impose change. Then came Vietnam, the war that will forever be attached to McNamara's name. Vietnam shattered the rationalist's faith: During the Vietnam years, the fathers in McNamara's Pentagon would come home at night as if dragging an immense weight. These were men who had never known failure, yet somehow, they were stumped by this war. Watching these charmed and brilliant people struggling with Vietnam was haunting. It was as if a magnificent sports car had hit a wall at high speed. You couldn't tell, at first, how severe the damage was. McNamara's legacy is complicated for me. In my adolescent years, I thought the question was simple -- the Vietnam War had been wrong, and I joined the protest marches demanding an end to it. But over time, and seeing my own errors of judgment, I have found another lesson: Be careful of the certainties that McNamara conveyed; be wary of the notion that smart people can solve any problem if they just try hard enough. Nobody gets to do over his mistakes, least of all Robert McNamara. But perhaps the memory of this brilliant and tragic man will keep us from being too certain of our own judgment -- and encourage us to consider, even when we feel most confident, the possibility that we could be wrong.
McNamara, In Retrospect In 1961 at the start of the Kennedy administration, I went to work for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Just as FDR attracted a small army of bright young lawyers and domestic policymakers to his New Deal in 1932, McNamara (who had insisted as a condition of taking the Pentagon job that President Kennedy give him authority to make all appointments in the department) recruited an energetic young team to wrestle with the Pentagon behemoth. The press quickly dubbed the group McNamara's "whiz kids." I was proud to be among them, but to the top military brass, "whiz kids" was a term of disdain. McNamara was determined to control a fractious department that no secretary had yet mastered. When I arrived as a young lawyer, Cy Vance told me, "Bob intends to reorganize the Pentagon from top to bottom. Your job is to find legal authority for whatever he wants to do." Known for his extraordinary intelligence, McNamara was also a shrewd political manager. From day one, all White House requests had to go through his office. When he set deadlines for comments on his reorganization proposals, he never extended them. To set the stage for consolidating procurement of common items in a Defense Supply Agency, in order to strengthen the department's bargaining power, he had me hang on peg boards in his conference room all the hats, belts, shirts, ties, underwear and even toilet seats of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps as a backdrop for his meeting with the service chiefs. After a few seconds of embarrassment, everyone knew that the Defense Supply Agency would be established. I watched the war consume Bob McNamara. From being the most hawkish adviser, McNamara gradually changed; in the fall of 1967 he went public with his doubts about the effectiveness of bombing in Southeast Asia. By that time I was working in the White House, and President Lyndon Johnson told me, "That man can't take this pressure of the war. I've got to make Vietnam my war, not McNamara's. I need him functioning." In late 1967, after a Cabinet meeting, Bob stopped by my office and said, "I may be recommended to head the World Bank. If so, don't tell the president I'm indispensable." In early 1968, I got a call from journalist Robert Novak. "The Financial Times says McNamara is being considered for the World Bank. Anything to it?" I fudged an answer and called Bob. "Tell the president I'm on the way over to see him," he said. That day McNamara and the president holed up in the Oval Office until late afternoon, when they issued an exchange of resignation letters. "To this day," Bob told me a few months ago, over the last dinner I had with him and his wife, Diana Masieri, "I don't know whether I quit or was fired."
Lessons and History
Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam The Vietnam War that I saw, first from my seat in Congress and then as secretary of defense, cannot be wrapped in a tidy package and tagged "bad idea." It was far more complex than that: a mixture of good and evil from which there are many valuable lessons to be learned. Yet the only lesson that seems to have endured is the one that begins and ends with "Don't go there." The war in Iraq is not "another Vietnam." But it could become one if we continue to use Vietnam as a sound bite while ignoring its true lessons. Today, we deserve a view of history that is based on facts rather than emotional distortions and the party line of tired politicians who play on emotions. Mine is not a rosy view of the Vietnam War. I didn't miss the fact that it was an ugly, mismanaged, tragic episode in U.S. history, with devastating loss of life for all sides. But there are those in our nation who would prefer to pick at that scab rather than let it heal. They wait for opportunities to trot out the Vietnam demons whenever another armed intervention is threatened. For them, Vietnam is an insurance policy that pretends to guarantee peace at home as long as we never again venture abroad. Certain misconceptions about that conflict, therefore, need to be exposed and abandoned in order to restore confidence in the United States' nation-building ability. The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own. Over the four years of Nixon's first term, I had cautiously engineered the withdrawal of the majority of our forces while building up South Vietnam's ability to defend itself. My colleague and friend Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, had negotiated a viable agreement between North and South Vietnam, which was signed in January 1973. It allowed for the United States to withdraw completely its few remaining troops and for the United States and the Soviet Union to continue funding their respective allies in the war at a specified level. Each superpower was permitted to pay for replacement arms and equipment. Documents released from North Vietnamese historical files in recent years have proved that the Soviets violated the treaty from the moment the ink was dry, continuing to send more than $1 billion a year to Hanoi. The United States barely stuck to the allowed amount of military aid for two years, and that was a mere fraction of the Soviet contribution. Yet during those two years, South Vietnam held its own courageously and respectably against a better-bankrolled enemy. Peace talks continued between the North and the South until the day in 1975 when Congress cut off U.S. funding. The Communists walked out of the talks and never returned. Without U.S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973. I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now. From the Tet offensive in 1968 up to the fall of Saigon in 1975, South Vietnam never lost a major battle. The Tet offensive itself was a victory for South Vietnam and devastated the North Vietnamese army, which lost 289,000 men in 1968 alone. Yet the overriding media portrayal of the Tet offensive and the war thereafter was that of defeat for the United States and the Saigon government. Just so, the overriding media portrayal of the Iraq war is one of failure and futility.
Calculus and Compassion Who was the most compassionate member of the cabinet? I guessed, rather unconfidently. Wrong. I guessed again, wrongly. He laughed and said: “You’ll never get it. It’s Bob McNamara. By far.” And it was a surprise, because we all thought of Bob McNamara as the no-nonsense numbers man from corporate America. The steel-rimmed glasses and the steel-trap mind were perfectly suited to an industrial mentality. Robert McNamara went to the Pentagon to reform it, to rationalize its decision-making and systematize analysis. From the outset he was unpopular with many high-ranking officers who were more comfortable with the institutionalized cross-purposes of the defense establishment and the educated intuition of experienced military personnel. Of course, Mr. McNamara was right, and it was in part his confidence in this sensible effort at reform that blinded him to the need for a change in strategy in Southeast Asia. He was used to hearing mindless criticism and became wedded to relying on those analytic methods that were superior to the ones he found at the Pentagon, not quite appreciating their limited utility in Vietnam. Unfortunately, just as he was trying to liquidate the bureaucratic practices that governed the Army in the first half of the 20th-century, he found himself in the midst of a sudden shift away from the strategic context that had structured American warfare since the Civil War. The “total warfare” of the industrial state, at which Bob McNamara excelled, was no longer either acceptable or effective. He was not the only one to miss the need for this kind of change, a change in the war aim rather than simply its practices. Strategic planning is an extrapolation from the past and, in Southeast Asia, the United States confronted warfare for which its past provided no guidance; Mr. McNamara’s obsession with quantitative planning tended to make matters worse: though we killed more and more of the enemy, we were never able to protect civilians adequately.
The McNamara Mentality The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three members of Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors. Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything -- really everything -- under control. The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held -- holds; it is a hardy perennial -- that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever. Two of behavioralism's reinforcing assumptions were: Things that can be quantified can be controlled. And everything can be quantified. So, pick a problem, any problem. Military insurgency in Indochina? The answer is counterinsurgency. What can be, and hence must be, quantified? Body counts, surely. Bingo: a metric of success.
Modern Implications
Still ‘Ugly’ After All These Years In the annals of misunderstood titles, a special place belongs to William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s novel “The Ugly American.” Today, the phrase is shorthand for our compatriots who wear tube tops to the Vatican or shout for Big Macs in Beijing. But as summer vacation season begins (at least for those who can still afford it), it’s worth recalling that the impolitic travelers in “The Ugly American” aren’t drunken backpackers or seniors sporting black socks, but the so-called educated elite of the diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language and customs prompts observations like this: “The simple fact is, Mr. Ambassador, that average Americans, in their natural state, if you will excuse the phrase, are the best ambassadors a country can have,” a Filipino minister tells an American official. “They are not suspicious, they are eager to share their skills, they are generous. But something happens to most Americans when they go abroad. Many of them are not average . . . they are second-raters.” But the book’s most enduring legacy is its argument that “we spend billions on the wrong aid projects while overlooking the almost costless and far more helpful ones,” which could serve as an unwieldy subtitle to the books of Rory Stewart, who chronicled his solo walk across war-torn Afghanistan in “The Places in Between” and described his year as a deputy provincial governor in Iraq under the British administration in “The Prince of the Marshes.” Stewart criticizes well-meaning Western policy makers who arrive in country with notions of “capacity building” and “democratization” but little local knowledge and even less patience. “Many people don’t want to sit with a village leader in a tent and eat with their hands,” Stewart said by phone from Cambridge, Mass., where he is the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It’s much easier to announce an initiative to ‘stabilize Afghanistan.’ There’s a lack of realism.” A half century after “The Ugly American,” the United States has another young president urging us to connect with the wider world, only this time he has lived in it. “I know that the stereotypes of the United States are out there,” Barack Obama recently told university students in Istanbul. “And I know that many of them are informed not by direct exchange or dialogue, but by television shows and movies and misinformation.” Lederer and Burdick would most likely respond that no matter how cosmopolitan a superpower’s leadership, foreign opinion is also informed by its actions, or lack thereof. Obama’s 2010 budget proposes increasing the Peace Corps’s financing by 10 percent, to $373 million, though that will not come close to covering his proposal to double the number of volunteers to roughly 16,000, close to the 1965 peak. As Mark Gearan, a former Peace Corps director, lamented to The Boston Globe, “We spend more on the military marching bands.” The Peace Corps is not a panacea, but when it comes to projecting America’s values abroad, its spirit comes closest to what the fictional Homer Atkins advocated decades before that global symbol of a different kind of ugly Americanism, Homer Simpson, told his children: “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”
A Dose of Realism in Honduras Sometimes you have to give political leaders credit. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are on the verge of achieving their own coup in Honduras and advancing American interests with a deftness not seen from Washington in many years. The president's reference to Honduras during his trip to Moscow reflects how the small Central American country is but a pawn as the administration pushes the reset button globally and in the hemisphere. Justice may not be totally served in Honduras, but the country is likely to end up better off anyway. That the administration has joined with the Organization of American States in condemning the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has left Chávez puffing a lot of hot air with no one to fight against. The United States, long seen as a bully in the region, is suddenly being seen as respectful and wise. The flummoxed Chávez could only come up with a patently hilarious formula in which the "Yankee empire" was still the villain in Honduras but Obama may not be responsible because he is "more like a prisoner of the empire." More fundamentally, Obama and Clinton, perhaps because neither is particularly experienced in Latin America, have approached the region with fresh eyes and wonder what all the fuss is about. The Moscow speech and their actions in Honduras underline that the Cold War really is over. So, are we sacrificing Honduras? No. Zelaya is the main culprit in this crisis, but what counts is the rule of law. His hand has been slapped very hard. Allowing him to serve out the last six months of his term while not holding the referendum that would have opened the way to succession has a better chance of bringing peace and stability to the country than the current standoff. The bigger question will be: What have the rest of us learned? We have all been pushing Latin Americans to uphold the rule of law, but beyond simply insisting that Zelaya was elected, few in the OAS, the European Union or other critics have been willing to give much credence to Hondurans for trying to do just that. The Honduran Supreme Court, as it is empowered to do under the constitution, ordered the army to arrest Zelaya after he began to carry out a referendum for a constitutional convention that the court, Congress and his own attorney general said was illegal. Yet, many Latin American and European governments still call it a "military coup" or, as the Associated Press called it several days afterward, a "military power grab." Clinton and Obama dropped calling it a coup. There are gray areas having to do with presidential powers and the fact that the Honduran constitution prohibits extradition of citizens. The army exiled Zelaya in consultation with civilian leaders to avoid precisely the sort of violence seen when Zelaya tried to return. He forced the country and its institutions against the wall, and for that he should take his medicine.
Reading List: Vietnam
- Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow
- Street Without Joy by Bernard B. Fall
- Steel My Soldiers' Hearts : The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation of U.S. Army, 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, Vietnam by David H. Hackworth
- The Vietnam Primer - Paperback (Mar 1, 2003) by David H. Hackworth and Samuel L. Marshall
- Strange War, Strange Strategy: A General's Report on Vietnam by Walt Lewis W.
- The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
- Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald
- Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective by Dave Richard Palmer
- On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War by Harry G. Summers
- A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
- Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. Mcmaster
- Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (Reprint ed.) by Jim Stockdale
Reading List: History and Context
- Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by John A. Nagl and Peter J. Schoomaker
- The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual by Sarah Sewall, John A. Nagl, David H. Petraeus, and James F. Amos
- The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz by Martin Van Creveld
- The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis
- Expansion and coexistence; the history of Soviet foreign policy, 1917-67 [by] Adam B. Ulman by Adam Bruno Ulam
- The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and How America Helped Rebuild Europe by Greg Behrman
Watching List: Vietnam, Somalia/Balkans, Iraq
An interview with Robert McNamara
- A conversation with Robert McNamara and Errol Morris...
- Part two of a discussion of the Vietnam War
- A conversation with Pete Peterson about Vietnam
- An interview with David Hackworth
- An interview about the American military
- A discussion about the book "Black Hawk Down"
- A conversation with director Ridley Scott
- A discussion about a possible troop surge in Iraq
- A conversation with Jack Keane
