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Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did

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The subtitle of "Backfire" - "A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We did" - sums up the contents well. But it fails to suggest the great evil and ignorance which Baritz's scholarly analysis reveals. Example: G.I.s spent a full year in Vietnam; officers were rotated in and out every six months. Reason: Officers needed to "punch their tickets" (i.e. serve in Vietnam) if they wanted to rise up the ladder of promotion. So military policy was formulated based on that priority, not on the obvious fact that just as officers were becoming really experienced combat leaders, they were sent home and replaced by inexperienced officers. The resulting cost of American lives amounts to a war crime on the part of senior military leaders who put the policy into effect, a war crime against their own men! Another example: U.S. soldiers derided Vietnamese men as "fags" because they saw them holding hands. They were ignorant of Vietnamese culture in which such conduct has nothing to do with sexual preference. Thus, "why fight for a bunch of fags" became a prevalent attitude. Baritz's book is different than almost any other on Vietnam - and more thoughtful and thought-provoking.

This is a remarkable book that I found very hard to put down. If you are interested in discovering why we went to war, and how we lost it, Backfire if for you. The author avoids the usual mantra of both the left and the right and gives us what may be the most comprehensive analysis of this war written to date. Although I will take issue with some of the authors assumptions, this book should be must reading for the politicians and military who wage war, and for parents who send their children to fight wars.

It is difficult to find fault with the author's contentions that we fought the wrong war. Our enemy fought a political and psychological war, a war against American culture; whereas we fought a conventional war and were trapped by our own cultural assumptions of American invincibility. It is the author premise that American foreign policy was, and is, driven by our cultural myth of America as the City on a Hill. Baritz observes that as Americans we see ourselves as the new Israel, God's chosen people. The author contends that because of this myth the American people see themselves as a moral example to the world, Baritz wrote: It means that we are a Chosen People, each of whom, because of Gods favor and presence, can smite one hundred of our heathen enemies hip and thigh. . . . We believe that the people of the world really want to be like us, regardless of what they or their political leaders say. So Baritz takes the Ugly American approach to our foreign policy.

In a sense, he is right. Our belief in our own invincibility, and that the Vietnamese people wanted to be like us and welcome us drove the war. It was inconceivable to us that they would not share our values, applaud our intentions or embrace our presence. It led us to trust in our guns and to our failure to state our national objectives for this war.

Here are a few of the remarkable insights the author gives us:
There was a tendency for American war planners and policy makers to think the job was done when their plans and policies were approved, leaving no one to monitor whether or not what they decided was effective. He points out that we supported a regime that had little popular support and our conventional military tactics made the problem worse because bombing, artillery, napalm and Agent Orange would wound and kill the very people whose support we needed. After Tet, the Viet Cong insurgency was defeated and the Phoenix program of the assassination of Viet Cong leaders had decimated the leadership of the Viet Cong. By 1970 General Giap had concluded the only way the North could win the war was through regular war, the very kind of big-unit engagement American Generals had hoped for. But by this time, the political war at home was lost. Yes, the press was partially to blame for our defeat. The constant stream of defeatism by the Press, especially during and after the Tet offensive cannot be underestimated in turning American opinion against the war.

Baritz takes issue with the claim that the war could have been won if the military had been allowed to fight it differently. Not because we could not win, but because the American culture at the time precluded such a victory. Vietnam was not perceived as a  threat to American, there was no anger in the American public to support such a war.  In the end, the North Vietnamese understood American culture, they believed they could win if they did not lose. All they had to do was to outlast American patience. The Americans war leaders believed that they would lose if they did not win. The failure to achieve quick and decisive victory doomed the American war effort.

Has the America changed? Are we now willing to do what we were incapable of doing in the 1960's? that is to wage an effective war? Or has the American public, like that of ancient Rome as the barbarians gathered on their frontiers, grown tired of defending its freedom? Only time will tell.  

Backfire, by Loren Baritz

This book is not balanced or unbiased, and is full of the author's opinions, often unsupported, but it does contain some useful information. Readers who reject the notion of American exceptionalism or who strongly opposed America's involvement in Vietnam will like this book a lot. Younger people who did not live through the Vietnam War era and who have not read extensively about it should read this book with a very large grain of salt, not always trusting the opinions and constantly questioning the facts presented. In the preface, Baritz says "The time may come when enough scar tissue will have formed to permit a cooler detachment, but not yet, not for me. I also believe that passion is an appropriate response to war... The emotional involvement of the author may enlighten as well as distort." (page 15) The first 53 pages and the last 30 pages contain a lot of emotion and bias. The first chapter includes two atrocities committed by Americans, which illustrate the attitudes that Baritz believed to be common among American soldiers. It argues that all Americans were ignorant of Vietnam, that they did not feel the need to learn about Vietnam because they assumed that Vietnamese had about the same values and desires as Americans, that Americans wrongly see themselves as moral leaders of the world, Americans were over-confident in their technology and sophisticated weapons, and bureaucratic behaviors shaped events. The last chapter is cynical, pessimistic, and depressing. Baritz repeats the ideas about myths, technology, and bureaucracy, and discusses how they impact government, business and academia and how they related to the cold war conflict between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in 1985. In between, there is a lower level of emotion and bias, and more factual narrative of events.

You first sense the bias on the back cover of the paperback version. "'The first full-length and scholarly account of why we got into Vietnam in the first place, why we fought as barbarously as the Japanese in Manchuria or the Germans in Poland, and why we deserved to lose it - indeed why we did have to lose it if we were to find any kind of ultimate peace.' - Henry Steele Commager, Amherst College." I am trying to think what justifies this statement - Baritz does not say things like that in the book.

In the first paragraph of Preface, 1998, Baritz says that Colin Powell "served two tours in Vietnam, first as a major in the Americal division and, long after Vietnam, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Bush administration." It is staggering, how wrong this statement is. On page 80 of My American Journey, Colin Powell writes that in 1963, on his first Vietnam tour "I was to serve as advisor to the four-hundred-man 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry Regiment, of the 1st Division." This was an Army of the Republic of Vietnam unit. The next 24 pages describe his experiences with the ARVN. On page 85 he says he was a captain on this first Vietnam tour, not a major. On pages 130-150, he describes his second tour of duty in Vietnam, which was with the 23d Infantry Division, known as the Americal. Baritz gives quotes from My American Journey, so there is the impression that he read it, but it is not possible to read this book and think that the Powell's first Vietnam tour was with the Americal division. It's hard to tell whether Baritz really meant to say what he said, or if he was just being sloppy.

In the second paragraph of Preface, 1998, Baritz says "These [McNamara and Powell] and other memoirs center on our monumental ignorance of the enemy." I have not read McNamara's memoirs, but Powell's book does not center on this ignorance of the enemy. It has 22 chapters, and two of them are about Powell's time in Vietnam. These chapters mainly are a narrative of his experiences. At times, he is a bit cynical or critical of the tactics and strategy used to fight the war, but does not mention our knowledge or ignorance of the enemy. In the concluding pages of his chapter about his second Vietnam tour, he is philosophical in assessing the war. On page 147 he says "Given the terrain, the kind of war the NVA and VC were fighting, and the casualties they were willing to take, no defensible level of U.S. involvement would have been enough." "I recently reread Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy. Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into." This is the closest Powell comes to saying that we had a monumental ignorance of the enemy. Powell is describing many factors affecting our ability to win the war, and knowledge of the enemy is only one of them, and he does not center on it at all.

On page 21, Chapter One, God's Country and American Know-How, Baritz gives two quotes of Gen Taylor and Gen Westmoreland, both stating that Americans valued human life more than the Vietnamese Communists did. Baritz calls this bigotry. This is a very subjective and disputable judgment. The North Vietnam Army had a popular and well-known slogan, "born in the North to die in the South." (The Battle of An Loc by James H. Willbanks, p 84.) That slogan, together with the willingness to both kill civilians and to accept their own casualties, indicate a low value of human life, without any need to attribute it to bigotry. Besides the name-calling, I seriously dispute his analysis: "This bigotry was a result of the Americans' ability to use technology to protect our own troops while the North Vietnamese, too poor to match our equipment, were forced to rely on people, their only resource. ... Nations fight with whatever they have; and, what we had was not enough to compensate for our cultural ignorance." This was not a war of necessity for North Vietnam. They could have accepted peace. They chose to kill civilians in South Vietnam and accepted the huge numbers deaths of their own troops in their effort to conquer South Vietnam. On page 248, Baritz returns to this theme: "But, being a poor country, not because they valued life less than the rest of the world, North Vietnam was forced to rely on manpower, not on technology which they did not have." Why "forced"? Could they not have chosen to stop sending their troops to the South?

On page 26, Chapter One, Baritz quotes Herman Melville and John Winthrop (leader on the Mayflower). Winthrop said, as they were crossing the Atlantic, "We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations [settlements], the Lord make it like that of New England: for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." Then Baritz says "The myth of America as a city on a hill implies that America is a moral example to the rest of the world that will presumably keep its attention riveted on us. It means that we are a Chosen People, each of whom, because of God's favor and presence, can smite one hundred of our heathen enemies hip and thigh." Much of chapter one is an argument that Americans view America as the city on a hill, that it is a myth, and that it prevented American leaders from understanding Vietnam and kept them from making good decisions. Throughout the book, Baritz mentions the "city on a hill" phrase at least a dozen times, but never gives any indication that he has any idea of where the phrase comes from or what it was originally meant. It comes from the Bible, Matthew 5:14-16, "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven." Baritz thought he was an expert on American myths, but he missed a lot on "city on a hill." The Christian church is a city on a hill. Winthrop was addressing the Christians on the Mayflower. Most Christians today would not embrace the idea that "ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies" because that part of the Winthrop quote is not Biblical. The real "city on a hill" problem is that sometimes American Christians do not properly distinguish between the church and the American nation. Baritz has a lot of confidence in his reader. He never disproves the idea of "city on a hill", he just describes it and assumes that his reader will agree that it is wrong.

Baritz is totally opposed to the idea that America can give moral leadership to the world, that America is more moral than any other country. On page 30, he quotes Robert Kennedy, in 1968, "At stake is not simply the leadership of our party, and even our own country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet." Baritz says that Kennedy's staff was horrified by this language, and he says that it proved that the "city myth" was still alive and well.

Baritz has an odd obsession for the religion of the politicians, if they are Protestant, and especially if they are Puritan or Presbyterian. On page 34, Woodrow Wilson is identified as the son of a Presbyterian minister. On page 37, he mentions "the peculiarities of American Protestant nationalism." On page 38 "This is the Protestant face of diplomacy and war." On page 75, "When he [John Foster Dulles] was in doubt he could always retreat for guidance to his Presbyterian pantry of moral sustenance." On page 78 we learn that Dulles' father was a Presbyterian minister. On page 132, quoting President Johnson, "'We should seek to turn the tide not only of battle but of belief,' a typically Protestant goal of American imperialism." On page 142 we learn that Dean Rusk's father was a Presbyterian minister. On page 291, regarding the rules of engagement, "The line beyond which an action would become a transgression was a matter of individual conscience, a Protestant formula." Baritz never quite says it, but the weight of the evidence seems to be that if it were not for the Puritans, Presbyterians, and Protestants, the United States would never have become involved in the Vietnam War.

In Chapter Four, War By the Numbers, Baritz gives an increasing amount of opinion, all negative, about the American military and civilian leaders. He quotes Dave Palmer's West Point text book, "attrition is not a strategy," (page 67), but says nothing about Dave Palmer's fine book, Summons of the Trumpet, which explains that while attrition is not a strategy, President Johnson denied the use of any other strategy.

General Westmoreland said that B-52 bombers only hit populated areas (civilians) two times. Baritz says that a B-52 miss of one thousand feet was usual (I agree), so they caused random civilian deaths. (page 165) You would think that Baritz would have evidence of this, but he does not. He simply asserts it. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. He seems to have not idea of how B-52s were used in Vietnam. The B-52 planners knew how accurate they were, and accounted for it. Sometimes B-52s were used to support troops in contact with the enemy, and it was necessary to know where the friendly troops were, and how accurate the B-52s could be expected to be. Dale Andrade's fine book, America's Last Vietnam Battle, shows how B-52 strikes were essential to the defense of An Loc and Kontum in 1972.

The account of why the peace talks failed in October through December, 1972, is muddled. He suggests that Nixon did not want a peace agreement before the November election, "But then his popularity was rising in the opinion polls, and he began to wonder whether peace might not hurt him, whether the risk of peace was worth it." (page 219) "Mr. Nixon lied to the North Vietnamese to delay signing the peace treaty until after the election, and until the airlift of supplies to the South could complete the resupply." (page 219) This is not credible, not that much supplies can be airlifted in a month or two. Other accounts I have read, of the failure of the peace talks, have said that President Thieu rejected the agreement, or that the North Vietnamese inserted additional provisions into the Vietnamese language document. He quotes Porter, A Peace Denied, "Kissinger did not bother to cite Saigon's objections as the reason for requiring further negotiations," apparently referring to a televised speech Kissinger gave.

I agree with what Baritz says on page 256 - the Air Force could have been more effective in South Vietnam, in the close air support role, with a fleet of propeller-driven fighters, rather than the F-4, F-100, and F-105 jet fighters. A propeller-driven fighter has more loiter time, and is generally more accurate. The Air Force actually could see this and chose the propeller-driven A-1E for the rescue mission. When a pilot or crewmember was on the ground in hostile territory, they wanted the most effective aircraft to provide support to the rescue helicopters. For the interdiction role in North Vietnam, jets were needed. After the war, the Air Force developed the A-10 for close air support. It is a jet, but it has the performance characteristics of a propeller-driven fighter - slower airspeeds, greater loiter time, and rugged armor.

From page 259-271, it describes how the CIA lied about how many Viet Cong there were, always on the low side. It draws on several sources and seems to be reliable. In Chapter 7, The Warriors, it says that of the 2,700,000 men who served in Vietnam, more than 500,000 received less than honorable discharges. There is no footnote - we don't know where that number comes from. (page 287)

For a more dispassionate, thorough, and balanced account of the Vietnam War, I recommend The Summons of the Trumpet by Dave Palmer.

A great book for an in-depth look at what went on in Washington and the influence of American culture in how we fought in Vietnam. Baritz thoroughly describes the state of mind America was in at the time of the war and the greedy beauracrats in Washington. Baritz also focuses on the myths of American culture that led us into the war and the myths that made us think that winning was possible and inevitable. A false sense of hope about the war and cover-ups were planted in the American public. Overall, this book has changed my view on American culture and politics and the corruption that is never addressed to the public.

NATO's assault on Yugoslavia is remarkably similar to the USA's war of aggression against Vietnam. Loren Baritz's excellent book Backfire: a history of how American culture led us into Vietnam and made us fight the way we did, (Morrow, 1985) presents the US Government's pattern of thought, in some detail. The McGeorge Bundy report of February 1965 "concluded by informing the president that if he kept his focus on what the NLF was doing in the South as the cause of our bombing in the north, the world's criticism of the bombing could be dealt with. If the American players would continually emphasize the atrocities of the guerrillas, `the international pressures for negotiation should be quite manageable.' America must not get sucked into negotiations for peace except for what amounted to an unconditional surrender of the guerrillas." "While he (President Johnson) was destroying the country with bombing, defoliation and napalm, he could without cynicism speak of peace and progress. He believed that the destruction was unfortunately necessary before the construction could occur. That was Ho Chi Minh's fault." "During the debate about whether the United States should send its bombers to help the French at Dien Bien Phu, the Chief of Staff of the army, General Matthew B. Ridgway, recalled that in Korea, where he had been in command, `We had learned that air and naval power alone cannot win a war ... It was incredible to me that we had forgotten that bitter lesson so soon - that we were on the verge of making that same tragic error.' The lesson we had learned in World War II was forgotten before it was relearned in Korea, and was forgotten again in Vietnam. Old myths apparently neither die nor fade away. Before America withdrew from Vietnam, we dropped four times more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs we dropped all over the world during World War II. It did not work, as the CIA regularly said it would not." "LBJ had received the advice to start the air war to prevent the ground war." But a failed air war provoked pressure for a ground war. "The decision to send in the marines was based on the assumption that they would serve only `security', not combat, objectives. The war planners did not have to admit to themselves that they were in an Asian ground war. The President did not inform the American public about the decision to send the marines when he had the opportunity to do so. America soon learned what was happening, and Secretary Rusk explained, if that is the right word, that the marines were ordered to avoid combat, only to return enemy fire." Paul Warnke, the appropriately-named Pentagon hack, said, "There is no question of the fact that we can keep on winning the war forever. We always win and we always will, and it won't ever make any difference. Our wins won't make a clear dent because there is no way in which we can bring about political progress in South Vietnam. ... The more of an American occupation you engage in the longer you're going to stay." "Guerrillas do not need to win; they simply must avoid losing. Conventional forces must win. Guerrillas can wait for the expense of foreign expeditionary forces to wear down the enemy's economy, and for the accumulating casualties to enrage the home front. Guerrillas are at home to start with. They never need to fight set battles unless they choose to. Because they can wait, time is on their side and is therefore a test of the enemy's patience and will in a distant land." "General Westmoreland's `strategy' was to fight a `war of attrition', to kill as many guerrillas and North Vietnamese troops as possible. Then they would quit. Then we would win. The killing became the objective. General Westmoreland did not know what else to do: `What alternative was there to a war of attrition?'" But, as a standard military textbook said, "Attrition is not a strategy."

Every politician should read Loren Baritz's analysis of the delusional thinking that got us into the Vietnam quaqmire. It bears directly on how we got ourselves into the Iraq War.

Loren Baritz describes the complete ignorance of foreign cultures, the complete inability to predict consequences, of the presidents, politicians, and military commanders who dragged us into a no-win war with "north" Vietnam. In his preface Baritz says:

"The war presidents beieved in what they were doing. I have no doubt they were sincere. Victims of Cold War jitters, they meant to curtail the spread of communism. With deep-seated American idealism, they intended to engineer a more sanitary and more democratic Vietnam. LBJ desperately wanted to "win their hearts and minds," and Nixon described the war as a "noble cause." They wanted to save the Vietnamese, sometimes from themselves, always from their ideologically crazed brothers. Our sense of moral superiority to the rest of the world, our missionary compulsion, is a story as old as the settlement of America. . . Our commanders lusted for a massive conventional battle . . . [but] There was never a front line -- never any line at all -- and no territory to be won and held. The Vietcong looked exactly like our allies in South Vietnam, never appearing in uniform and easily blending into the village life of the countryside. . . . For the GI grunts in the field, it was a grisly nightmare. Think of the soldier "lucky" enough to have his laundry done by a sweet old woman who, after dark, changed into a Vietcong guerrilla, laying mines on the path to the mess hall."

Nothing has changed. We are still putting our GI's at unnecessary risk due to presidential delusions. We are still labeling our real enemies (Iraqi's, Saudi's, Pakistani's) as friends -- just to keep that oil flowing. And soon we will be importing thousands of so-called Green Zone Iraqi "friends" into the US when we cut and run.

It's fifty years after the Vietnam debacle, and Repubs and Dems are just as clueless as they ever were about the dangers implicit in anti-Western, anti-rule-of-law, cultures and value systems. Now our democracy-sloganeering president has put our soldiers into Iraq, as Nixon said about Vietnam, to "win their hearts and minds." But for the GI grunts, it's a nightmare even more surreal than Vietnam was: This time our clueless military commanders are not only inviting the enemy Shia into the Green Zone to do the GI's laundry and translation, this time they are forcing the naive, young GI's go on patrol with Shia gunmen, who could easily shoot them -- the infidels -- in the back at any moment and in good Islamic conscience. This time the oil-blinded leadership is TRAINING the enemy.

I read this book before the US invasion of Iraq after reading an article in 2002 by Philip Gold, a Seattle-area conservative, who spoke highly of it. He believed the US was going to end up repeating its mistakes in Vietnam, for similar reasons. He was right.

I'll list just one example: the myth that technology is a panacea, and a substitute for troops on the ground. Donald Rumsfeld appeared to believe that he had discovered a revolutionary breakthrough that would allow for an easy victory in Iraq, one no one had ever thought of before. In fact, he'd just fallen for the same exact myth as the planners of the Vietnam War, for the same reasons.

Numerous other comparisons can be made reading this book. It's not a moral critique of the war, but rather a chronicle of bureaucratic disaster, and a blueprint for what was to come.

John Sweet
Book review #3

Baritz, Loren. Back Fire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. Baltimore: The John's Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Loren Baritz takes a look at the Vietnam War in a way that lets us understand why we decided to fight and why we fought the way we did. Unlike most surveys of the war that focus on the logistical elements and command decisions which explain what the war was Baritz explains why it was. "To understand our present role in the world" Baritz explains, "we must understand the Vietnam debacle." (p.9) Indeed, if we are to learn anything from our mistakes, and virtually everyone now agrees that Vietnam was a mistake, it is essential to know why something happened and not just what happened. To explain why Vietnam happened the way it did Baritz proposes that there is "an inherent connection between war and culture [that is] present in all nations." In our case, Vietnam was fought the way it was because our culture left us no other way to fight it.
Baritz divides the book up into three parts. The first part, Tinder, explains why America decided to fight in Vietnam and the myths that forced us to make war half way around the globe with a people that we did not understand. The second part, Fire, explains how we fell into an ever deeper war in Vietnam and how our means of fighting determined how we fought and why we were unable to effectively combat a vastly inferior military force. The third part, Backfire, is the most telling part of the book for it presents an explanation of how our culture forced us to fight the way we did, why we ultimately lost, and why we are still making the same mistakes today.
In Tinder, Baritz convinces us that Americans firmly believe that we are the best. We are a "chosen people" inhabiting a "city on a hill" doing "Gods work" bringing a "Great Society to Asia." Such blatant solipsism is part of our entrenched American dogma. So ingrained is this self righteousness that we truly can not comprehend someone who does not wish to be like us. One GI put it simply "The Vietnamese are so stupid that they can't understand a great people were trying to help a weak people." So it was, as Baritz explains, that Gods Country went to Vietnam to save them.
Our almost total ignorance of the Vietnamese culture is now legendary but at the time it did not seem important. Our sense of righteousness and invincibility was so complete that we never even considered the possibility that we were the real enemy to the South Vietnamese. One of the greatest blunders of the Vietnam War was the refusal to see the indigenous forces of the South as the main target. Instead, we assumed that the North was behind our failures to win the hearts and minds of the "backwards" South Vietnamese. Baritz is careful to explain that all nations have myths about their own greatness, but it is when these myths of inherent superiority are combined with power that terrible things happen. As was the case for us in Vietnam. Indeed, Baritz's book is now routinely quoted to expose the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq in an attempt to put the brakes on what is turning out to be a similar debacle.
Our moral superiority has often been derived by our technical superiority according to Baritz. Our obsession with the power of technology is absolute. It has been, and is today, the firm belief of most Americans that technology is the answer for most problems. This dependency on technological solutions, according to Baritz, blinded us to the proper response in Vietnam which was counterinsurgency. To truly win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, intelligence and human interaction, practiced on a national scale might have handed the US a victory. But such a strategy offered no stage to display our superior technology. Even when our use of technology was obviously not working the Army responded in a typically American way. "When something failed to work we did more of it."(p.233) While such insanity is self-evident today, at the time it was perversely logical to the American generals who were so caught up in their own myths that to do otherwise would be tantamount to admitting the entire American way of life was wrong. After reading Backfire the belief in American military strategy as an extension of what is essential about America is not such a slippery slope. Baritz is very convincing connecting American culture to the way we fight. We are a technological nation and, more than anyone, dream of winning wars by the push of a button. "Shock and Awe," "smart bombs," and "stealth" are all extensions of our desire to separate us from harm and have the wonders of American ingenuity save the day. In Vietnam, as well as in the war on terror, where there is no front line intelligence gained from good foot soldiers and not bigger and better missiles are the deciding factors in achieving victory.
If all of this is so clear now why do we continue to make the same mistakes? In the third part, Backfire, Baritz explains that we have no choice. We fight the way we do because our culture defines who we are and how we fight. As long as our culture remains the same we will continue to be more efficient in our fighting but no more effective. This is because we are prisoners of our faith in technology. In order to maintain a high tech society the functioning of government, business, and the military must reside in a bureaucracy. As Baritz explains "when the technological mind is turned to the problem of organizing human activity, the result is bureaucracy." (p.48)
Baritz demonetization of the effects of bureaucracy on the military is total. With clarity and logic he explains how the fighting of such a technological war necessitated the bureaucisation of the military and its tragic consequences. The most damning of the outcomes is the development of careerism within the officer corps. The shift of officers from "leaders to managers" created such hazards as a drop in morale, insubordination, lack of responsibility, lack of experience, and unimaginative tactics. When officers are working to "get ahead" the job takes precedence over the mission and the mission suffers as it did in Vietnam.
The combination of bureaucracy and technology in Vietnam led to the eventual, extreme conclusion in strategy, that of having no strategy; the body count. When killing becomes and end unto itself the morality of war breaks down quickly. War becomes cold and passionless. Baritz correctly finds fault with such thinking claiming that "passion is an appropriate response to war." Without passion and debate the bureaucratic ship will be on autopilot. Incidences such as My Lai are the tragic results.
Did we learn from Vietnam? Baritz claims that "one antidote for folly is experience" and the experiences of Vietnam should have cast our invincibility myth into the ashcan as well as our reliance on technology as a panacea. Yet, it seems that the lessons of history are nothing in comparison to the American Myth that we are a city on a hill. Ronald Reagan against the Soviets, Clinton against the third world and the Bush Doctrine of preventive strikes and the forced spread of democracy all have repeated some of the mistakes that we made in Vietnam.
Baritz concludes that "our power, complacency, rigidity, and ignorance have kept us from incorporating our Vietnam experience into the way we think about ourselves and the world." (p.349) To fight a different, more humane, more effective war, will require more than a change in the military structure but a change in American cultural thinking. Looking at the current global policy of the United States, this does seem likely to happen any time soon and so we will continue to fight the way we do: with a national myth that shows us that we are good, with technology that makes us strong, and a bureaucracy that gives us standard operating procedures. Unfortunately, it has proven not to be a winning combination.

I can't add to the description of the book, except to say that it's too bad more people haven't read it. Especially our leadership. It's horrendously important to recognize the failures that we're repeating in Iraq.