KREPINEVICH : The Army and Vietnam (fülszöveg)
Many senior army officials still claim that if they had been given enough men and hardware, the United States could have won the war in Vietnam. In this probing analysis of the development and failure of U.S. military policy in Vietnam from 1954 to 1973, career army officer and strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., argues that precisely because of this mindset – that more bombs, guns, and troops could lead to victory – the war was lost before the army had a chance to fight it.
The army's failure lay in the assumption that it could transplant to Indochina the operational methods that had been successful in the European battle theaters of World War II. The army's orientation toward mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties proved ill-suited to the war the Vietnamese Communist forces chose to fight. Theirs was a war of insurgency, of small attacks and skirmishes, of jungles and mountains. Counterinsurgency requires light infantry formations, firepower restraint, and the resolution of political and social problems within the nation targeted by the insurgents, Krepinevich contends. To the very end, top American military commanders refused to place emphasis on this.
Krepinevich documents the deep and growing division between the American military and civilian leaders over the very nature of the war being fought. More troubling is the division within the U.S. Army itself. Through extensive research in recently declassified material and interviews with officers and men with battlefield experience, he shows that those engaged in the actual combat understood early on that they were involved in a different kind of conflict. Their reports and urgings were discounted by the generals, who pressed on with a mid-intensity war that brought devastation but little success.
The Army and Vietnam provides the most thorough analysis of the U.S. Army's role in the Vietnam War yet to appear. Krepinevich demonstrates with drilling persuasiveness the multitude of ways in which the army was unprepared to fight its most recept war – and why it remains unprepared to fight a similar one any time in the near future.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
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