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The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam

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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.

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.

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.

Instead of offering new perspectives, or at least some original research, THE PERFECT WAR fires a barrage of cliches, buzzwords, and catchphrases, usually conveyed in a condescending manner. Thanks to the editor, James William Gibson repeats himself like a copy machine after a lightning strike. Beginning with the title, readers can look forward to monomaniacal sarcasm, from cover-to-cover.

Some of the source material was selected with the care of a student radical, and includes quotes from many anonymous individuals. The Appendix is a rambling manifesto, where Gibson actually starts mining Vietnam-themed novels in attempt to feed red herrings. The author does not hide his contempt for American military and government agencies; that is the focal point (and pretty much the only point) of his diatribes. This is underscored when Gibson describes the veracity of Communists, their cause, and their policies, where his analysis is more simplistic, idealistic and less critical.

Gibson's overriding notion is that Technowar (Vietnam war policies) was a natural progression of capitalism and American business accounting models. This may be correct to some degree, but he tends to ignore other influences on strategy that casts doubt on his conclusion. Gibson billed it as a popular insurgency, but in fact the main Communist bases were outside South Vietnam, and as time passed (especially after the 1968 Tet Offensive) the Communist effort looked less like an insurgency and more like a foreign intervention by China, Russia, and North Vietnam. South Vietnam's western border was landlocked with two officially neutral countries which were also in a state of Communist revolt. Laos and Cambodia were illegally used as supply areas and staging areas for North Vietnamese troops. These factors made the Vietnam situation very different than communist uprisings elsewhere, such as South Korea, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines.

There is a plus side to this credit/debit themed book. For a single-volume history, the author makes many legitimate points about bad government policies, though they have been covered before. If you are new to Vietnam war history and don't mind Gibson's cherry picking, you might find that THE PERFECT WAR is very informative. If you are well-read on this subject and looking for fresh air, then you might be disappointed with another academic who wants to grind his ideological axes on your time.

Gibson does a great job of providing a framework to understand Us policy during the Vietnam War. Many other reviewers have focused on how Gibson discussed the "incomptence" of the military, but they missed the point completely. Gibson's main concern was to show how policy was, and is, guided by an imperial ideology which can be stated as: "The United States has the most desirable social system in the world and it is our right, in fact our duty, to 'encourage' others to adopt it." In Vietnam, as in various other countries, encouragement came at the other end of a bomb.

US policies weren't "incompetent" as much as they were the logical outcome of the imperial premise. From here, you can see how the corporate managerial perspective viewed the war as an assembly line geared towards producing a commodity: body counts.

It would be wrong to view this as an overview of the war however as he spends less time discussing the NLF side of things than the US side. For something more general, I would recommend Marilyn Young's "The Vietnam Wars."

As for those who criticize Gibson for bias, these accusations stem from a pro-US viewpoint, so how are you not biased? In fact by implying that supporting the United States is "normal" and that any other opinion is biased [and wrong], you only prove Gibson's point about the ideological blinkers that help produce horrific wars, like the most recent ones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the enduring themes in the literature about the Vietnam war has been "why did the us do X?" In books, novels and movies you get there is a sense that the US simply failed about in Vietnam trying one thing and then another with no real plan, no ideas, just trying anything that came to mind or in the end simply indulging in mindless destruction out of sheer spite with a bit of maddness tossed in "we destroyed the village in order to save it."

What this book does - and I think does well, postulates a shared mind set among the policy makers of the country be they democrat or republican and when viewed through the prism of that mind set: everything the United States did in Viet Nam makes complete and perfect sense at least viewed within the context of that Mind set. No other book I have ever read about Viet Nam has done that for me. All them at some point in time have just tossed up their hands and surrender to the mystery.

It's a depressing read in many ways - and far too relevent today as we struggle to extracate ourselves from Iraq and Afganistain with many of the same arguments being heard again and everybody feeling they have no real choice since the midset is so narrow.

William Gibson's analysis of the America's failure in Vietnam is conducted with the precision of a surgeon weilding his penetratingly sharp knife. Unlike most histories of the confict, which chronical the events, Gibson is interested in finding the answer to why we failed. His answers will startle most readers, conservative or liberal. Massively documented with official reports and first hand accounts, Gibson's work points the finger at the war managers, military and political. Their easy acceptance of their own self delusions about the nature of our enemy and ally, led to policies which failed to take account of what was really happening on the battle field. When enemy activity was at an ebb, it was interpreted as evidence of the success of our strategies and tactics, even though, time after time, such periods of quiesence were followed by vigorous enemy action.

Gibson documents the knowledge that senior war planners had, that the bombing wasn't and couldn't achieve its goals; that casualty rates, American and Vietnamese, were never under the control of the American military; that the CIA refused to take part, after a period, in target selection for bombing raids because they could determine no level of bombing which would achieve our goals. Gibson explains why military estimates of the amount of forces necessary to achieve our goals were never accurate.

This book should be required reading for anyone who wants the answers to why we failed in Vietnam.

I am pleased to see it has been re-issued.

I will just say after reading several books on the subject, this one told me what I wanted to know and really what I wanted to hear. It summed it up about like I thought it is, but in a very informitive way. thanks, LLoy

Will the moron who believes there has ever been a war that wasn't started by self-serving sociopaths, please stand so we can put you somewhere in hopes of keeping you from harming others?

This author and book provides one with all the knowledge needed to understand the sole purpose of the Vietnam War, and the wars before and after it. While this book is a most interesting read, I will guarantee that if you're capable of putting your country before your political party for five seconds, the material in this book will make you want to gag. That is unless you're like me. In that case, it will make you want to kidnap as many of these corporate executives and their [...] boys in Congress as possible, and give them all a sulfuric acid enema. But that's being hypocritical. It's not the corporate executives and politicians who are the source of the problem; it's the hopelessly in debt, unread voters who would crawl through a mile of broken glass and human waste to get their picture taken with one of these sociopaths.

Politicians are a lot like the bears in Yellowstone National Park; they do okay until some idiot comes along and gives one of them a free meal. After that, all you can do is shoot the bear because it's now a danger to society. That would be a perfect solution if they shot the damn fool who caused the problem in the first place.

J.W. Gibson's book has a misleading title; I sought it as a source of the technical aspects of the war in Vietnam, and instead found a polemic. His adulation for Ho Chi Minh and even faint praise for Joseph Stalin give away his bias--the book is clearly an anti-capitalist diatribe, although I certainly recognize the validity of some of his criticism. Having been an Army officer in the conflict (199th Infantry Brigade) I experienced first-hand the problems with morale and a frustrating conflict in which we consistently ceded the offensive to the enemy. But I must take exception to his perpetuation of the myth that we used our soldiers as "bait". He and Stanley Karnow, neither of whom fought in the war, agree that the typical American tactic was to blunder through the jungle until we found the enemy the hard way--by being ambushed. The fact is, rougly 90% of all ambushes (the most common type of combat in an unconventional war) in Vietnam were initiated by American or allied forces.

The concept of limited war is one that the author never seems to grasp. He even manages to write an entire book on it without mentioning George F. Kennan, the architect of this war-without-victory concept. The publishing date of 1986 is telling, as the author's pronouncement that the U.S. military has not learned from its past mistakes in Vietnam would shortly be proved wrong in Kuwait. In his subsequent update, he cites Saddam Hussein's continued tyranny after 1991 as proof of failure, as though this was a military blunder rather than a political decision.

Gibson's obvious affection for "wars of national liberation" carry over to his conclusion in which he seems to employ a fairness doctrine to war. If the other side is not our technological equal, we should not use our superiority to reduce our casualties and shorten the conflict. War is always a catalyst for invention and innovation, and the side that does a better job typically prevails. This did not happen in Vietnam because our electorate grew disillusioned after 14 years of war, and because we have elections every two years that resulted in a government that eventually cut the funding--and it is not possible to wage war without money. The other side did not have elections, but they did have tyrants in charge who were quite willing to expend ten or twenty of their young men for every American KIA. In the end, the war of containment became a war of attrition. This is another concept that seems not to have occurred to Mr. Gibson.