Colonel Harry G. Summerss Analysis

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Influenced by his military background, Colonel Harry G. Summers' argument’s validity resides in the congruity to the Clausewitzian perspective of “activities characteristic of war may be split into two main categories: those that are merely preparation for war, and war proper” expressed in his seminal work "On War"; Summers appropriately applies classical strategic thought to explicate America's military failings. Summers' divides his interpretation into two sections entailing an analysis of the Vietnam conflict characterised by the principles of war - the objective, the offensive, mass, economy of force, manoeuvre, unity of command, surprise, security, and simplicity. Part 1 examines the implementation of inept policies that perpetuated the …show more content…

Post World War II, the dawn of the nuclear era and the onset of Cold War, the emphasis of bureaucracy (headed by McNamara’s Planning, Programming and Budgeting system) replaced traditional military strategy in pursuit of maintaining an economically viable defense establishment and prevent conflicts culminating to a nuclear exchange with either China or the Soviet Union. War became a diplomatic signalling exercise as “neophyte political scientists and systems analysts” and the sole preserve of the president akin to an European “18th century-type army answerable only to the Executive”. The military embraced such ideas as means of bureaucratic survival. Conversely, the application of such conditions was incompatible with the nature of unorthodox warfare (unamenable to quantitative analysis) and the “constitutional requirement for congressional declaration of war”, a political structure that created “impediments to public dissent” . Thus, it may be assumed that the American public will become hostile to a war waged on their behalf (hence the anti-war movement) without permission (congressional authorisation); president Johnson did not pursue an official declaration of war as he approached the problems of Vietnam through the prism of domestic politics and the determination to sustain the …show more content…

Krepinevich. The U.S assumed it could transplant the operational methods that had proved successful in the previous European battle theatres of World War II, an approach seemingly vulnerable to the guerrilla warfare of Vietnamese communist forces. Convoluted policy inhibited the U.S from adopting complementary military tactics, rather continuing offensives against Southern Vietnamese guerrillas served to adjunct a North Vietnamese conventional invasion; it proved to be a “kind of economy of force operation the part of North Vietnam to buy time and wear down superior U.S military forces” . Krepinevich contends that the Vietnam-era American army wrongly adhered the classical army concept - military strategy concentrating on conventional warfare characterised by high volumes of firepower - and thus was unprepared for the insurgency warfare of Indochina as the U.S focused on North Vietnam’s conventional capabilities rather than the principal opponent, the Viet Cong. Krepinevich observes the “United States Army was neither trained nor organised to fight effectively in an insurgency conflict environment” and thus unintentionally attributed to the effectiveness of the “Communist strategy of protracted warfare” . Hence,

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