"Dereliction of Duty: Lydon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam", by H.R. McMaster. Copyright 1997.
Brief Review: President plays politics with foreign wars in order to further domestic agenda. Joint Chiefs fail to demand policy debate (public or private) on goals of war. Are forced to fight to achieve contradictory goals with inadequate resources. America loses.
(Oh, yeah, this happened in 1965, not 2003.)
No, this isn't the "Dereliction of Duty" (by Patterson) that came out recently that raked Bill Clinton over the coals (yet again) for various national security failures during his administration (different author entirely - this one's not a right-wing nut job). This one is a doctoral dissertation turned into a decent work of regular non-fiction (the huge volume of footnotes gives it away). This book examines the political, bureaucratic and personal relationship between Johnson, McNamara and all the Joint Chiefs of Staff with respect to the decision to escalate American involvement in Vietnam, specifically looking at the period between November 1963 (when Kennedy was assasinated and Johnson became president) and July 1965 (when the US escalated troop strength in Vietnam above 100,000).
The thesis of the book is that Johnson deliberately played politics with the war, being vague about goals or outcomes in order to avoid antagonizing the left or the right (and retain more domestic political power in order to further the "Great Society" programs), resulting in a war that was not planned or executed in any fashion that allowed a success (which, as noted, was undefined). In other words, domestic political considerations had a higher priority than foreign ones, which encouraged the President to avoid making hard decisions (i.e., unpopular with one side or the other) on Vietnam.
But the book is not an indictment of Johnson, or Congress (who should be the constitutional check or balance to the President, but failed to act in this case); the book is an indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They collectively failed to provide the President with military advice about the successful prosecution of the war, choosing instead to use their positions to advocate for their own services and for their own personal solutions to the Vietnam problem. Lemay (Air Force Chief of Staff) believed that we had to fight and use any means necessary to defeat the Communists and North Vietnamese, and that the Air Force is the best (most effective) way to remove them, without the need for all those green uniforms (the Army). The Army representative to the JCS (another, unrelated, Johnson) privately believed that the number of troops necessary to defeat the insurgency was somewhere north of 500,000 (remember, at this time the US had about 50,000 in Vietnam, and this was in 1965), but failed to articulate this pessimistic view to anyone outside the JCS, including President Johnson himself.
Clearly, many things went wrong in order to get the US into the quagmire that would become our war there, but I had not run across the argument that the JCS system (put in place in order to keep politics out of the military) itself failed. No one is so naive to believe that political considerations are left out of military policy, but the degree to which the professional military failed to articulate the clearly seen and easiliy demonstrated problems with the political (Johnson) direction of the war are breathtaking. And the degree to which the policy process is subverted to political goals (factfinding missions where the results are known before anyone leaves, Congressional committee hearings where it is agreed ahead of time what will be released/discussed, etc.) leaves no doubt as to why the policies all failed, at a cost of 50,000 American lives (and many times over Vietnamese lives).
All in all, an interesting book. It is a bit cumbersome and unwieldly, but that is to be expected from a dissertation. It's an interesting take on a subject not heavily studied - the military's failure to advocate for sensible policy planning in order to recieve political direction that allows them to win a war.
We can have no idea whether the events discussed, and lessons drawn, have parallels to the present events in Iraq. Certianly, from today's vantage point, it looks like military leaders are being forced to toe party lines (Rumsfeld playing McNamara), to the detriment of good planning and effective military operations (both pre-, during and post-conflict). But we won't know how disfunctional the Joint Chiefs system performed in this war until years later, when all the relevant individuals (political and military) get to speak their minds through memoirs and biographies. As of now this book allows for interesting historical evidence of past policy failures, and perhaps reveals to us one particlar path where present events might have gone wrong. Recommended for people who have an interest in these subjects.
Posted by baltar at August 12, 2004 03:55 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Books