Gibson,J. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. 1986
Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. 523 pages.
James Gibson is a left-of-center scholar who noticed a curious lack of
interest in addressing the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam during the
years following the war. Pundits were quick to use Vietnam as a point of
departure for discussions of other topics, but they carefully avoided
discussing the war itself. Liberals felt that Vietnam was a mistake,
conservatives felt that we lost due to self-imposed restraints, and no one
examined the evidence.
Gibson's loose thesis is that the U.S. fought the war as an affair of
statistics and technology, and made the mistake of assuming that the enemy
was fighting the same war. The assumption was that the enemy would have to
acknowledge our superior firepower and our higher body counts, and then they
would surrender. For Washington, the war was a logistical exercise in
production: when certain quotas were met, then certain boundaries were
redrawn to reflect newly-secured areas on the map. But when reports from the
field were skewed to reflect these priorities, it only served to increase
our bureaucratic isolation. Ultimately the managers in Washington were far
removed from the realities in Vietnam, and had become the dupes of their
own definitions.
ISBN 0-87113-063-7
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