Herbert's "Soldier"

[ymarkov]

Just finished reading Anthony Herbert's "Soldier". The main thesis of the book can be expressed as "had there been more commanders like me in Vietnam, we wouldn't have lost the damn war." He's probably right. The pro and con comments on Amazon are also enlightening.

An opinion popular on the right, with which I mostly agree, is that the war was lost in the media, rather than on the battlefield. Nevertheless, had the US Army operated the way Lt. Col. Herbert wanted it to, it would have been much harder to lose it in the media.

(The appropriate Russian expression is "просрали войну.")

Comments

[aphar.livejournal.com]

"Роковые решения" читал? all soldiers who lost a war manage to explain that away somehow.

the war was lost not because some commanders were not good enough (why were they good during two world wars?)
it was lost not because the journalists smeared it (why didn't they during the two world wars?)
it was lost due to the inexorable demographic changes.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114159651882789812.html
"After 1945 Europe lost every war it fought, from Indochina, to Algeria to Timor."

[ymarkov.livejournal.com]

I can agree with this thesis, provided that it is interpreted as follows: reduced population pressure has greatly reduced the will to hold on to remote territories and commit significant resources to same.

"The generals always fight the last war," or at least they do at first, cf. Iraq that took several years to figure out. Herbert insists that the generals who ran that war were WWII also-runs, with little to no combat experience.

Towards the end of the Vietnam war, operations were finally getting much better. The Tet offensive failed as an operation. But it was never a question of resources in Vietnam. Gen. Westmoreland kept saying that it took 15 American soldiers to defeat one Viet Cong guerrilla, and he had about that many soldiers and loads more of superior equipment. But as Herbert writes, there was no sense of mission.

not because some commanders were not good enough (why were they good during two world wars?)
Wrong assumption, there were plenty of blunders during the World Wars. But those were much bigger wars and the determination to win was much greater, so the generals - and the public! - shrugged off the cost of mistakes, both in blood and treasure, and pushed on.

not because the journalists smeared it (why didn't they during the two world wars?)
They just didn't. Control of the media was much tighter, its willingness to misreport was nil (that greater purpose, again), those were not guerrilla wars so most armed contact was between uniformed soldiers (conversely, what coverage did post-1945 clean-up of Germany get?).

Compare the journalistic coverage of JFK to that of Clinton. A couple of months worth of JFK's sexual escapades eclipsed everything Clinton ever did (except maybe the alleged rape of Juanita Broderick), and most members of the White House press corps knew about them, but kept mum.