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The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam
by James William Gibson
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr (1986-10)
ISBN: 0871130637
EAN: 9780871130631
Dewey Decimal #: 959.7043
Hardcover: 523 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: 20003
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Dust Jacket: Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
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 government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war-what he calls "technowar"-in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy's body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction, American leaders failed to take into account their enemy's highly effective guerrilla tactics. Indeed, technowar proved woefully inapplicable to the actual political and military strategies used by the Vietnamese, and Gibson reveals how U.S. officials consistently falsified military records to preserve the illusion that their approach would prevail. Gibson was one of the first historians to question the fundamental assumptions behind American policy, and The Perfect War is a brilliant reassessment of the war-now republished with a new introduction by the author.
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Customer Reviews
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Why War? Read this Book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-09-15
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Excellent but not a complete overview
Rating (5)
Date: 2003-07-15
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Writing History With a Bias
Rating  (1)
Date: 2003-03-10
5 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
J.W. Gibson's book has a misleading title; I sought it as a source of the technical aspects of the war in Vietnam, and instead found a polemic. His adulation for Ho Chi Minh and even faint praise for Joseph Stalin give away his bias--the book is clearly an anti-capitalist diatribe, although I certainly recognize the validity of some of his criticism. Having been an Army officer in the conflict (199th Infantry Brigade) I experienced first-hand the problems with morale and a frustrating conflict in which we consistently ceded the offensive to the enemy. But I must take exception to his perpetuation of the myth that we used our soldiers as "bait". He and Stanley Karnow, neither of whom fought in the war, agree that the typical American tactic was to blunder through the jungle until we found the enemy the hard way--by being ambushed. The fact is, rougly 90% of all ambushes (the most common type of combat in an unconventional war) in Vietnam were initiated by American or allied forces. The concept of limited war is one that the author never seems to grasp. He even manages to write an entire book on it without mentioning George F. Kennan, the architect of this war-without-victory concept. The publishing date of 1986 is telling, as the author's pronouncement that the U.S. military has not learned from its past mistakes in Vietnam would shortly be proved wrong in Kuwait. In his subsequent update, he cites Saddam Hussein's continued tyranny after 1991 as proof of failure, as though this was a military blunder rather than a political decision. Gibson's obvious affection for "wars of national liberation" carry over to his conclusion in which he seems to employ a fairness doctrine to war. If the other side is not our technological equal, we should not use our superiority to reduce our casualties and shorten the conflict. War is always a catalyst for invention and innovation, and the side that does a better job typically prevails. This did not happen in Vietnam because our electorate grew disillusioned after 14 years of war, and because we have elections every two years that resulted in a government that eventually cut the funding--and it is not possible to wage war without money. The other side did not have elections, but they did have tyrants in charge who were quite willing to expend ten or twenty of their young men for every American KIA. In the end, the war of containment became a war of attrition. This is another concept that seems not to have occurred to Mr. Gibson.
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"The Blatent Under Currents"
Rating (5)
Date: 2002-09-22
5 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book looks at the Vietnam War in a perspective that can be deeply appreciated by someone who had a four year involvement in it. I couldn't put the book down. Having spent two tours
in-country, being non-military, but supporting the US Army, in both combat and non-combat situations, this book cleared up a lot of "why in the world is this or that happening"? Also, there were several situations that Gibson mentioned that I was a participant in and his writing gives me the notion that he does have some idea of what he speaks.I do not believe he was leaning to the communist efforts, this writing was about our side. I also know that everyone there was not a dope smoking idiot, but the way MANAGEMENT handled most situations, made a sane person wonder what in the heck were THEY thinking and whos side were THEY on? I have never seen such waste of assets and personnel! I believe everyone who was there would have a better understanding of all of the goofyness that went on, and there was plenty of it, if they would read this book.
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Hysterical in its Biases
Rating (1)
Date: 2000-08-21
14 out of 17 customers found this reveiw helpful
It requires little imagination to describe U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as both misguided and mismanaged. As the politicians who got America bogged down in someone else's civil war have much to answer for, so too do those senior military officers who ran the war; the scorched-earth, search-and-destroy strategy that MACV opted for was not only wrongheaded, unworkable, and doomed to fail, it was also immoral.All this James Gibson tells us in THE PERFECT WAR. The problem is that he adds more heat than light to the discussion so overt are his biases against the U.S. military and in favor of the National Liberation Front. The same ground is covered much more intelligently in Neil Sheehan's A BRIGHT SHINING LIE. Gibson takes the officer corps to task for the poor quality of leadership displayed during the war by the many field-grade and general officers who "led" their units from a helicopter seat and who displayed more concern over their efficiency reports than their troops. Fair enough. It is true that there was not an overabundance of heroic leadership at the battalion, brigade, and division level in Vietnam. It is also true, as Gibson argues, that the war produced a lot of senior officers who should be embarrassed to wear the Silver Stars and Distinguished Flying Crosses they were awarded.Still, for all the helicopter-seat heroes in the war, there were still plenty of field-grade officers who led on the ground, with their troops, in the style of the battalion and regimental commanders of WWII. Gibson should have given these men their due. He does not. A much more incisive, well-rounded discussion of the quality of combat leadership in Vietnam is to be found in ABOUT FACE by David Hackworth.Gibson's sources are a major problem. He does not appear to have done a lot of original research, but rather quotes from previously-published books and magazine articles. Worse, he relies heavily on three books (NAM by Mark Baker, CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS by Mark Lane, and SPOILS OF WAR by Charles Levy) which, once published, were thoroughly discredited by journalists, historians, and veterans who pointed out the fabrications, distortions, and exaggerated accounts contained in them. It is distressing to see the bogus accounts from these three books repeatedly popping up in THE PERFECT WAR. Gibson seemed prepared to believe the worst about everyone who served in Vietnam, from private to general. The US Army, as described in THE PERFECT WAR, seemed to do nothing but smoke dope, kill civilians, frag its officers, and lose battles.The communists, on the other hand, are idealized in THE PERFECT WAR for their patriotism, determination, and bravery. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army had an abundance of all three virtures. It was, in fact, their patriotism, determination, and bravery which won the war, not (as the right-wing in this country would have it) the machinations of a treasonous press, a cowardly congress, and anti-war protesters. For all that, though, the communists were capable of great cruelty in fighting their war, from the murder of government officials and their families, the massacre in Hue (which Gibson downplays), to the systematic abuse and torture of American POWs in places like the Hanoi Hilton. Gibson seems unable to come to terms with the dark side of the communist war effort.
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