The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Military History Series) [Paperback]

James William Gibson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 2000 | Series: Military History Series

In this groundbreaking book, James William Gibson shatters the misled assumptions behind both liberal and conservative explanations for America's failure in Vietnam. Gibson shows how American government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war -- what he calls "technowar" -- in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy's body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction, American leaders failed to take into account their enemy's highly effective guerrilla tactics. Indeed, technowar proved woefully inapplicable to the actual political and military strategies used by the Vietnamese, and Gibson reveals how U.S. officials consistently falsified military records to preserve the illusion that their approach would prevail. Gibson was one of the first historians to question the fundamental assumptions behind American policy, and The Perfect War is a brilliant reassessment of the war -- now republished with a new introduction by the author.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gibson, Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., believes that much of the blame for the debacle in Vietnam is attributable to the introduction of "managerial science" into the war effort. He attempts to show that by the fall of 1967, the war managers had constructed an Orwellian double-think of "multiple systematic falsifications" in which credit, debit and progress were gauged by a body-count index. (The author's personal outrage occasionally spills over into questionable generalizations: "Management did not care whether labor lived or died, only about producing a high body-count.") The study includes quotes from participants and close observers of the war, illustrating in a shockingly concentrated manner how demoralizing to the troops were the ruthless and impersonal management techniques of business accounting imposed on them. Gibson warns that this managerial mind-set is still very much in evidence at the Pentagon and that "the redeployment of Technowar can only result in another massive defeat."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

According to Gibson, Vietnam was a "technowar," conceived and waged by U.S. war managers as "a high technology, capital-intensive production process." It was neither a mistake nor a problem of ailing national will. It was rather the perfect expression of the American logic of making war on invented enemies through highly rationalized industrial management. Gibson's argument is not altogether new; and he introduces no new evidence in support of his position. He does, however, argue his case with great energy and inventiveness, exploring the dimensions of this "technowar" from Vietnamese cities and countryside to the U.S. air war over Indochina. His analysis should be of interest to anyone seriously interested in the social and intellectual sources of Washington's war effort. Charles DeBenedetti, History Dept., Univ. of Toledo, Ohio
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (February 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871137992
• ISBN-13: 978-0871137999
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #960,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Flawed Concepts for a "Perfect War", June 18, 2000

By 

Steven S. Berizzi - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Military History Series) (Paperback)

In preparation for and during the era of the Vietnam War, according to sociologist James William Gibson, the United States developed what he calls "Technowar," a series of concepts in which war was waged "as a kind of high-technology, capital-intensive production process." But Gibson argues that even overwhelming military force could not produce solutions to political problems. Summaring the experience of Vietnam, Gibson writes: "It should be amply clear that Technowar has the capacity to destroy, but it cannot persuade political leaders and entire societies to simply give up and submit to American will." This was a disastrous, perhaps fatal, flaw in the United States' approach to this conflict and largely explains why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War without being beaten on the battlefield.

Gibson writes that the United States should have learned from France's defeat in its Indochina War in the early 1950s, in spite of massive infusions of American aid, that "[w]hat the Vietminh had lacked in techno-capital they made up for by mobilizing people." However, Gibson quotes Henry Kissinger that,"since 1945, American foreign policy has been based `on the assumption that technology plus managerial skill gave us the ability to reshape the international system." According to Gibson, Kissinger devised a strategic doctrine in which, "[b]y virtue of its technological production system, the United States [could] achieve its foreign-policy objectives by limited wars fought as wars of attrition."

John Kennedy, the first president born in the 20th-century, and his advisors naturally embraced the ideas that became Technowar: "With the appointment of Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense in 1961, the `managerial' approach to warfare soon permeated the entire military apparatus." Vietnam served, Gibson writes, as "the laboratory for weapons development and military science." According to Gibson, a "deep belief in technology [characterized] the war-managers' approaches to virtually all questions," and "United States military officers conceived of themselves as business managers rather than combat leaders." Gibson quotes one of Gen. William Westmoreland's principal subordinates that the Vietnam War "was comparable to an assembly line." Gibson asserts that "[a] great many soldiers...saw war-managers as directly responsible for their deaths. Management did not care whether labor lived or died, only about producing a high enemy body count." Gibson explains that "middle-management officers used their troops as the human `bait' called for in Technowar strategy." According to Gibson: "Enlisted men were seen as a kind of migrant labor force of only marginal importance. They were marginal in that artillery, jet fighter-bombers, and helicopters were official responsible for producing enemy deaths, while infantry and armored cavalry became the `fixing force.'" According to Gibson: "War-manager pressures for high body counts led to both systematic falsification of battle reports, routine violation of the rules of engagement and regulations covering treatment of prisoners, and systematic slaughter of Vietnamese noncombatants." According to Gibson, the "massive killing of civilians drove Vietnamese toward the Vietcong." Nevertheless, according to Gibson, American leaders believed they were invincible: "Technowar must produce victory." In August 1966, a report prepared by an American civilian official in Vietnam stated: "Wastefully, expensively, but nonetheless indisputably, we are winning the war in the South....[O]ur side now has in presently programmed levels all the men, money and other resources needed to achieve success." According to Gibson, American leaders "believed they had beaten the Vietcong by the autumn of 1967, " so the Tet offensive, which began on January 31, 1968, "came as a surprise." In early 1969, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger asked the Rand Corporation to prepare a list of policy options for Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, then a Rand employee, prepared the list, which did not include any U.S. action leading to victory. When Kissinger asked why, Ellsberg responded: "I don't believe there is a win option in Vietnam." According to Gibson: "Many crucial studies demonstrating Technowar failure...came to the attention of leading war-managers" in 1968 and 1969. Gibson asserts that, by this time, the war-managers had created "a double-reality: a war at ground level and a much different paper edifice for Saigon and Washington headquarters." Gibson explains: "The idea of low-tech peasants either defeating or offering major support to the most advanced technological power on earth was unthinkable to Americans." In his chapter on the Tet offensive, Gibson goes into what appeared to be a long digression concerning racial and class conflict in the U.S. military in Vietnam. At first, I failed to see how it was relevant to Gibson's main premise, Technowar. But Gibson then made the point that, during the Vietnam War, "class conflict between `working-class' grunts and war-managers centered on the soldiers' unwillingness to die for the war-managers. For some soldiers, Vietnam duty became a deeply radicalizing experience. Such men later founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Vietnam."

Today, twenty-five years after Saigon fell in the spring of 1975, with the United States and Vietnam moving toward reconciliation, one might ask: What difference does it make? The answer, of course, is that Technowar did not expire when the final helicopter left Saigon. The United States has, to borrow Gibson's term "reproduced " Technowar on several occasions since then. For instance, according to Gibson: "The 1991 war against Iraq at first seemed like a complete validation of Technowar - images of advanced technological weapons in action dominated reporting." Gibson writes than Technowar killed "Iraqi troops by the thousands, and bombing destroyed the industrial infrastructure of Iraq. But the Iraqi political and military regime remained intact." More recently, NATO's air war against Serbia caused great destruction without dislodging President Slobodan Milosevic and his band of thugs. Whether one believes that the Vietnam War was a noble cause or the most tragic episode in American history since the Civil War, it never was "The Perfect War." We must learn its lessons or we will be condemned to repeat its errors. This book is not the final word on the Vietnam War, but it is a provocative interpretation.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The Blatent Under Currents", September 21, 2002

By 

John Eslinger (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Hardcover)

This book looks at the Vietnam War in a perspective that can be deeply appreciated by someone who had a four year involvement in it. I couldn't put the book down. Having spent two tours
in-country, being non-military, but supporting the US Army, in both combat and non-combat situations, this book cleared up a lot of "why in the world is this or that happening"? Also, there were several situations that Gibson mentioned that I was a participant in and his writing gives me the notion that he does have some idea of what he speaks.

I do not believe he was leaning to the communist efforts, this writing was about our side. I also know that everyone there was not a dope smoking idiot, but the way MANAGEMENT handled most situations, made a sane person wonder what in the heck were THEY thinking and whos side were THEY on? I have never seen such waste of assets and personnel!

I believe everyone who was there would have a better understanding of all of the goofyness that went on, and there was plenty of it, if they would read this book.

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hysterical in its Biases, August 21, 2000

By 

Keith W. Nolan (Blackwell, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Military History Series) (Paperback)

It requires little imagination to describe U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as both misguided and mismanaged. As the politicians who got America bogged down in someone else's civil war have much to answer for, so too do those senior military officers who ran the war; the scorched-earth, search-and-destroy strategy that MACV opted for was not only wrongheaded, unworkable, and doomed to fail, it was also immoral.All this James Gibson tells us in THE PERFECT WAR. The problem is that he adds more heat than light to the discussion so overt are his biases against the U.S. military and in favor of the National Liberation Front. The same ground is covered much more intelligently in Neil Sheehan's A BRIGHT SHINING LIE. Gibson takes the officer corps to task for the poor quality of leadership displayed during the war by the many field-grade and general officers who "led" their units from a helicopter seat and who displayed more concern over their efficiency reports than their troops. Fair enough. It is true that there was not an overabundance of heroic leadership at the battalion, brigade, and division level in Vietnam. It is also true, as Gibson argues, that the war produced a lot of senior officers who should be embarrassed to wear the Silver Stars and Distinguished Flying Crosses they were awarded.Still, for all the helicopter-seat heroes in the war, there were still plenty of field-grade officers who led on the ground, with their troops, in the style of the battalion and regimental commanders of WWII. Gibson should have given these men their due. He does not. A much more incisive, well-rounded discussion of the quality of combat leadership in Vietnam is to be found in ABOUT FACE by David Hackworth.Gibson's sources are a major problem. He does not appear to have done a lot of original research, but rather quotes from previously-published books and magazine articles. Worse, he relies heavily on three books (NAM by Mark Baker, CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS by Mark Lane, and SPOILS OF WAR by Charles Levy) which, once published, were thoroughly discredited by journalists, historians, and veterans who pointed out the fabrications, distortions, and exaggerated accounts contained in them. It is distressing to see the bogus accounts from these three books repeatedly popping up in THE PERFECT WAR. Gibson seemed prepared to believe the worst about everyone who served in Vietnam, from private to general. The US Army, as described in THE PERFECT WAR, seemed to do nothing but smoke dope, kill civilians, frag its officers, and lose battles.The communists, on the other hand, are idealized in THE PERFECT WAR for their patriotism, determination, and bravery. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army had an abundance of all three virtures. It was, in fact, their patriotism, determination, and bravery which won the war, not (as the right-wing in this country would have it) the machinations of a treasonous press, a cowardly congress, and anti-war protesters. For all that, though, the communists were capable of great cruelty in fighting their war, from the murder of government officials and their families, the massacre in Hue (which Gibson downplays), to the systematic abuse and torture of American POWs in places like the Hanoi Hilton. Gibson seems unable to come to terms with the dark side of the communist war effort.