Perfect War

by James William Gibson

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394757041
• ISBN13: 9780394757049
• Release Date: May 1988
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 523 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Why War? Read this Book

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.

Excellent but not a complete overview

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.

Flawed Concepts for a "Perfect War"

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

The First Honest Autopsy of America's Failure in Vietnam

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.

Very informative, thought provoking

Gibson's thesis is that we could never have won the war because we tried to see the Vietnamese on our terms instead of theirs. The Vietnam War was what he refers to as a "Technowar" -- since strength in the Western world has its basis in technology, we often have a tendancy to assume that is the same everywhere. This is what we did with our enemies in Vietnam -- we could not recognize their strengths because they were not like us. Because we had a stronger technological base, we thought there was no way we could lose the war, and ironically this way of thinking was a great contributer to our failures in Vietnam.