Scan barcode
A review by mburnamfink
The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam by James William Gibson
5.0
Most of my Vietnam War book reviews include the phrase "Vietnam was fractally fucked up". In The Perfect War, Gibson identifies the mathematical seed of that fractal; an ideology that he deems Technowar, and traces its ramifications across Indochina in one of the best general histories of the war, which covers the choice to enter Vietnam, the ground war, the air war, and development and corruption.
Any honest accounting of the Vietnam War has to engage with the fact that Vietnam was a defeat, despite the overwhelming superiority of the American military on paper. Theories on this defeat fit into two major paradigms. Quagmire theory, as exemplified by The Best and the Brightest, argues that a series of decisions which individually seemed like the best alternative at the time, added up to an strategic error. Revisionist theories, as in Summer's On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argue that the full weight of American power was never applied due to perfidy in the Johnson administration and a stab-in-the-back from the anti-war movement. Gibson takes a third path. The military and strategic apparatus of the United States did exactly what it was supposed to, destroying Vietnam with a level of brutality that stopped short only of nuclear weapons. But despite this violence it could never win because of fundamental intellectual flaws.
Technowar, as described by Gibson, is a war of technologically sophisticated industrial systems directed by officer-managers. Victory is achieved through qualitative and quantitative margins of superiority in armament. Cost efficient application of key military inputs (tanks, bombs, ships, soldiers) would modulate strategic outputs (victories), and the United States, by virtue of have the best military inputs, would always achieve the best outputs. The logic of technowar, adapted from operations research and industrial management, is evident in strategic statements from military planners across the political spectrum, including Robert McNamara (the arch-technowarrior), Henry Kissinger, Maxwell Taylor, and General William Westmoreland.
More than a strategy, technowar was also a closed intellectual system. American capitalism and democracy is 'natural', so Communism is an 'unnatural Other' that infiltrates society. The enemy can only be conceived of as a flawed and inferior mirror image of the American military. The Maoist People's War strategy and tactics used by the Vietcong and NVA could not be contained within the system. Further, the closed intellectual system of technowar contained it's own justification. Unable to locate victories on the ground, technowar took to measuring it's own inputs: sortie rates, hamlets fortified, and above all the body count. The need to produce statistics falsified the war at all level, the lies "legitimated" in a process of institutional doublethink through medals and promotions for the most productive officers, and new names and propaganda for civilian programs.
This closed intellectual system made victory impossible, since strategy was generated in a kind of fantasy world. On the ground, with the soldiers and pilots who were the labor force of technowar, this fantasy generated demoralization, fragging, and atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. The Perfect War cites Lt. Calley of My Lai heavily, not as an exemption, but as an example typical of how the war was fought that happened to rise to public awareness. The My Lai massacre was a natural outgrowth of a strategy that could only measure success through bodycounts, and demanded quotas of the dead from officers.
The basic issues of the average Vietnamese civilian; land reform, honest government, an end to the violence, could not be addressed because they did not exist within the 'target space' defined by technowar. If anything, the chapters on corruption in rural development are some of the best writing I’ve seen on the war. Victory, if it were possible at all, could only mean a stable South Vietnam, in the model of South Korea or Taiwan. Due to the unique political and geographic circumstances that created South Vietnam, its government was defined by corrupt cliques of minor warlords, with nominal Vietnamese sovereignty requiring US officials to look away from the diversion of nearly all aid into private accounts of senior officials. The situation with the Piaster, and the 5x figure between official and black market exchange rates is fascinating. Somebody in the United States must have been getting immensely wealthy with the ongoing currency spread, and given that the official numbers were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, it was directly at taxpayer expense.
This is not quite the perfect book. It’s long and somewhat difficult reading for someone less interested in the topic and the theory. There are some rough edges where the Foucauldian and Marxist theory components meet technowar, which itself could use a little more historical development. The sources lean heavily on The Pentagon Papers and Lt. Calley’s testimony, although I agree that these are sufficiently representative of official and on-the-ground thinking in the war; and other sources back up these primary accounts. On the whole, however, Gibson ably covers as much of a very complex war as I’ve seen in a single volume, and does so with a theory that continues to have explanatory power, in this age of drone strikes and international terrorism.
Put this one at the top of your Vietnam War bookshelf.
Any honest accounting of the Vietnam War has to engage with the fact that Vietnam was a defeat, despite the overwhelming superiority of the American military on paper. Theories on this defeat fit into two major paradigms. Quagmire theory, as exemplified by The Best and the Brightest, argues that a series of decisions which individually seemed like the best alternative at the time, added up to an strategic error. Revisionist theories, as in Summer's On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argue that the full weight of American power was never applied due to perfidy in the Johnson administration and a stab-in-the-back from the anti-war movement. Gibson takes a third path. The military and strategic apparatus of the United States did exactly what it was supposed to, destroying Vietnam with a level of brutality that stopped short only of nuclear weapons. But despite this violence it could never win because of fundamental intellectual flaws.
Technowar, as described by Gibson, is a war of technologically sophisticated industrial systems directed by officer-managers. Victory is achieved through qualitative and quantitative margins of superiority in armament. Cost efficient application of key military inputs (tanks, bombs, ships, soldiers) would modulate strategic outputs (victories), and the United States, by virtue of have the best military inputs, would always achieve the best outputs. The logic of technowar, adapted from operations research and industrial management, is evident in strategic statements from military planners across the political spectrum, including Robert McNamara (the arch-technowarrior), Henry Kissinger, Maxwell Taylor, and General William Westmoreland.
More than a strategy, technowar was also a closed intellectual system. American capitalism and democracy is 'natural', so Communism is an 'unnatural Other' that infiltrates society. The enemy can only be conceived of as a flawed and inferior mirror image of the American military. The Maoist People's War strategy and tactics used by the Vietcong and NVA could not be contained within the system. Further, the closed intellectual system of technowar contained it's own justification. Unable to locate victories on the ground, technowar took to measuring it's own inputs: sortie rates, hamlets fortified, and above all the body count. The need to produce statistics falsified the war at all level, the lies "legitimated" in a process of institutional doublethink through medals and promotions for the most productive officers, and new names and propaganda for civilian programs.
This closed intellectual system made victory impossible, since strategy was generated in a kind of fantasy world. On the ground, with the soldiers and pilots who were the labor force of technowar, this fantasy generated demoralization, fragging, and atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. The Perfect War cites Lt. Calley of My Lai heavily, not as an exemption, but as an example typical of how the war was fought that happened to rise to public awareness. The My Lai massacre was a natural outgrowth of a strategy that could only measure success through bodycounts, and demanded quotas of the dead from officers.
The basic issues of the average Vietnamese civilian; land reform, honest government, an end to the violence, could not be addressed because they did not exist within the 'target space' defined by technowar. If anything, the chapters on corruption in rural development are some of the best writing I’ve seen on the war. Victory, if it were possible at all, could only mean a stable South Vietnam, in the model of South Korea or Taiwan. Due to the unique political and geographic circumstances that created South Vietnam, its government was defined by corrupt cliques of minor warlords, with nominal Vietnamese sovereignty requiring US officials to look away from the diversion of nearly all aid into private accounts of senior officials. The situation with the Piaster, and the 5x figure between official and black market exchange rates is fascinating. Somebody in the United States must have been getting immensely wealthy with the ongoing currency spread, and given that the official numbers were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, it was directly at taxpayer expense.
This is not quite the perfect book. It’s long and somewhat difficult reading for someone less interested in the topic and the theory. There are some rough edges where the Foucauldian and Marxist theory components meet technowar, which itself could use a little more historical development. The sources lean heavily on The Pentagon Papers and Lt. Calley’s testimony, although I agree that these are sufficiently representative of official and on-the-ground thinking in the war; and other sources back up these primary accounts. On the whole, however, Gibson ably covers as much of a very complex war as I’ve seen in a single volume, and does so with a theory that continues to have explanatory power, in this age of drone strikes and international terrorism.
Put this one at the top of your Vietnam War bookshelf.