Jeffrey Record is a prolific defense analyst who served with the State Department in Vietnam. In his new study, The Wrong War, he ascribes the defeat of the United States in the Vietnam war to arrogance, ethnocentrism, a disregard for history, and policies that were contradictory to the point of incoherence.
And yet, Record has packaged that argument in a book that is itself strident in tone, heedless of culture, derelict in its use of history, and laced with contradictions. Perhaps the most curious thing about The Wrong War is the way in which it is not just an explanation of America's defeat in Vietnam, but a compelling example of the attitudes that Record himself declares led to that defeat.
Record begins with a characteristically breezy assertion: The United States routinely investigates such disasters as plane crashes and presidential assassinations, but "there has been no such inquiry into the cause of America's failure in Vietnam." With The Wrong War, he aims to correct that ostensible deficiency.
The result -- based entirely on readily available sources published in English -- makes four main points. The United States lost the war because it misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the tenacity of its adversary, overestimated its own stamina and military prowess, and allied itself with a client that was from the outset incapable of commanding the loyalty of its people. "To be sure," the author notes, "these judgments have been made before," as indeed they have, repeatedly, beginning twenty-five years ago with The Pentagon Papers and continuing with a flood of histories, memories, conferences, and documentaries ever since.
To support his thesis, the author brings to bear an arsenal of opinion, with much the same fervor as General William Westmoreland tried to use American firepower to bludgeon his adversary into submission. As with Westmoreland, zeal isn't always sufficient. Within the space of a single paragraph, Record declares that Americans "accorded little intrinsic importance to South Vietnam" and quotes David Halberstam in 1965 describing it as "one of five or six nations that is truly vital to U.S. interests." Even among the war's sternest critics, in other words, Vietnam's strategic insignificance was not obvious in the mid-1960s.
Record's confusions are many. Lyndon Johnson's reluctance to mobilize the reserves was a huge mistake, he declares, depriving the Pentagon of "a vast reservoir of mature and well-trained manpower." Yet elsewhere the author skewers Westmoreland for misusing the forces he already had. Given the American insistence on huge base camps, creature, comforts, and a one-year tour of duty, few of those serving in the war zone, according to Record, were gainfully employed. If this is true, sending still more troops to Vietnam would have had little bearing on the actual conduct of the war, and the mobilization issue becomes a red herring.
Similarly, in describing the rationale for U.S. restraint in prosecuting the war, Record notes and immediately dismisses administration fears of possible intervention by China. Given that China in 1965 "was on the verge of starting its long march toward the disaster of the Great Cultural Revolution," it appears obvious to Record that "Beijing had every reason to avoid war with the United States."
In short, a reprise of Korea was improbable. A chapter later he returns to the topic and reaches the same conclusion, but concocts a different explanation: China was unlikely to intervene not because it was convulsed by internal turnoil but "precisely because the United States refrained from actions . . . that could have threatened the integrity of North Vietnam's territory and regime." One page later, Record backs away from the issue altogether, conceding that "it is too easy, in retrospect, to argue, as I have in these pages, that a war with China over South Vietnam's fate was never in the cards."
Record does not disguise his low regard for the U.S. forces that fought the war. Obsessed with firepower and technology, "the American armed forces were military misfits in Indochina." Blissfully ignorant of Mao's theory of revolutionary war, they assumed that they could win in Vietnam, as they had won elsewhere, by waging a "capital-intensive brand of conventional warfare that placed a premium on material and technological superiority." Pacification, in the eyes of American officers, was for sissies, not real soldiers.
Elsewhere, however, Record concedes that both the U.S. Army special forces and Marines devised innovative and effective approaches to pacification. Indeed, the shift by Westmoreland's successor Creighton Abrams away from attrition to population protection "fateally undermined the communist base in the South, propelling Hanoi toward increasing reliance on conventional military and diplomatic means to achieve reunification." In short, Record credits the misfits after 1968 with forcing the North Vietnamese to fight on American terms.
The author is adamant in his judgment of those who fought for and governed South Vietnam: They were craven, cowardly, and corrupt. Apparently considering this view to be self-evident, he offers little documentation to support his claim, none at all from Vietnamese sources. Indeed, the bibliography contains only three books by Vietnamese authors. Although Record does not hesitate to delve into the collective psyche of the North Vietnamese, to do so he relies on the testimony of American journalists like Harrison Salisbury and radicals like Gabriel Kolko.
Excluding the Vietnamese allows Record to explain the war as "the product of bad decisions by well-intentioned though arrogant -- and ignorant -- individuals," all of them Americans. He hurls charges against President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (branded by Record as the American Albert Speer). And he arrives at the most comfortable of conclusions: Defeat was an aberration, attributable to the mistakes of a handful of bumbling officials. Having purged the perpetrators, having identified the personal foibles and the specific errors of judgment that led to failure, we can rest easy. Having "explained" Vietnam, Americans need not fear its recurrence.
Yet, however inadvertently, this book serves a useful purpose. Reducing the reasons for American failure in Vietnam to a handful of familiar cliches -- all of them rendered in language suggesting that war is simple -- The Wrong War reminds us that smugness lives on, gets published, and even attracts admiring blurbs. At a time when the United States is becoming increasingly casual in employing its military might, such cautionary reminders are to be welcomed.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University.