Masters of war : military dissent and politics in the Vietnam era /

Harry Summers's (On Strategy, CH, Jan'83) and Robert McNamara's (In Retrospect, CH, Sep'95) high-profile books have been at the center of the heated and ongoing controversy over the relative degrees of responsibility for our failure in Vietnam--civilian or military leadership. Beyond the number of memoirs, personal accounts, and polemics of military and civilian decision makers, Larry Cable, Andrew Krepinevich, George Herring, Mark Clodfelter, Earl Tilford, Richard Hunt and others have addressed these questions directly. Although Buzzanco adds little new, he provides a chronological overview of the internal debate and politics within and among the military services in the context of civil-military relations from the 1950s onward. His theme, that military and political leaders were consumed by parochial interests and continually fought an internal political civil war over who ultimately would bear responsibility for the failure, is hardly novel. The author's narrative is better than his analysis. Although not a monumental contribution, this is a useful addition to the literature on decision making and civil-military conflict during the war. Its broad chronological scope is one of its best features. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. P. Dunn Converse College

This comprehensively researched monograph, based on the author's Ph.D. dissertation, depicts U.S. political leaders as the consistent driving force behind America's Vietnam commitment. Military leaders were wary of intervention from 1945 onward and deeply divided over U.S. prospects to the point that they frequently offered bleak evaluations of the situation. Dissenters in the armed forces, however, were stifled by a command structure that shifted the burden of decision-making onto political authority by demanding levels of escalation that were politically impossible to implement. The military thus dodged its share of responsibility for ``losing'' an unwinnable war. Buzzanco exaggerates the armed forces' appropriate role in policy-making; at times he virtually implies that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should have said ``Enough'' on their own authority, defying the political leadership if necessary. That overstated argument makes this a book to be used with caution, despite its valuable analysis of the military's negative perspective on the Vietnam War. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An extensive and unsparingly critical reappraisal of America's prolonged presence in Vietnam, which places virtually all responsibility for the war's loss on the US military. Historian Buzzanco (Univ. of Houston), who takes a middle-of- the-road stance on America's involvement in Vietnam, comes down hard on Pentagon brass at almost every turn. In a chronological format that commences with an evaluation of Indochina's perceived importance to Washington's strategic objectives after WW II and effectively ends with the Tet offensive early in 1968, the author documents the consistent wariness with which armed-forces chieftains viewed intervention from 1945 on and the divisiveness that convulsed their ranks once troops had been committed en masse. Buzzanco also addresses the arguable containment policies embraced by the military's civilian masters during the early stages of the Cold War, noting that they pinned their hopes for a quick return to the domestic agenda on battlefield attrition and overkill. Concerned they could be held accountable for failure, he observes, uniformed leaders began maneuvering the White House into untenable positions, e.g., with requests to mobilize reserves and permit unhindered escalation. In the meantime, upper-echelon commanders fought among themselves not only about whether massive firepower offered the best chance of winning an increasingly unpopular war but also over individual branches' share of the budgetary and mission action. Buzzanco asserts that by the time it became clear that military victory in Vietnam was an impossible dream, positions had hardened on the civilian as well as military sides of the debate. Although US forces soldiered on (at no small cost) for nearly five years after Tet, Buzzanco concludes that it was communist troops (not Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, or Richard Nixon) who defeated them. A diligently researched and thought-provoking contribution to the literature of Vietnam, a conflict that may never be resolved to the complete satisfaction of either the left or right.