Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...

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Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 159 ] described his policy of strategic hamlets that removed tens of thousands of peasants from ancestral homes as "forced-draft urbanization and modernization" (quoted in Sheehan, 1988, p. 712). McNamara, the number cruncher from World War II, become President John F. Kennedy's secretary of defense. He hired Charles Hitch, the analyst of firebombing, and latter economics division director at RAND and president of the Operations Research Society of America, to be the Pentagon comptroller. Hitch, in turn, hired Alain Enthoven, another former RAND analyst, to be the deputy assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis, a new position. Other RAND analysts hired by the Pentagon included Harry Rowen as deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs; Frank Trikl, to work for Enthoven on strategic offensive forces (replaced by Fred Hoffman in 1964); and Bill Kaufman and Daniel Ellsberg (a Harvard bargaining theorist like McNamara before him and Kissinger) as consultants (Kaplan, 1983, pp. 252-254). Fred Kaplan says of Enthoven, "He . . . had the systems analysts obsessive love for numbers, equations, calculations, along with a certain arrogance that his calculations could reveal truth" (p. 254). Kaplan concludes that these "whiz kids" transformed not only the vocabulary and procedural practices of the Pentagon, but also the prevailing philosophy of force and strategy—not only the way that weapons are chosen, but also the way that war should be fought, (p. 256) One young whiz kid, Barry Bruce-Briggs, enthused: Most real military innovation is made over the feelings of the uniformed officers by the so-called whiz kids and defense intellectuals. We've performed this role and for that reason our senior staff people are received at the highest level in the Pentagon like the Jesuit advisers who walked the courts of the Hapsburgs. (quoted in P. Dickson, 1971, p. 93) This comment reveals a number of things about the whiz kids, including their hubris and affinity for priestly status. There is also something childlike about the assurance of such experts, especially in the light of their paucity of experience and their ignorance of the real cost of war, and considering their dismal successes. Also, such a claim underestimates the commitment many uniformed officers have made to innovation, whether for its utility in war, help in career advancement, or both. Vietnam was supposed to be fought as a political war, "for the hearts and minds of the people." Instead it became the war of the electronic battlefield,
[ 160 ] The Past and the United States not only lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese but the struggle for the hearts and minds of many Americans as well. In retrospect, it is clear that the Army's conversion to counterinsurgency doctrine was only superficial (Krepinevich, 1986). The Vietnam War was fought and lost as a conventional high-tech war. Vietnam was run along the assumptions of what has been called crisis management, which is systems analysis (SA) applied to a crisis. Somebody thinks through various possibilities, including the effects of effects (feedback); someone gives key factors certain numerical weights; someone assigns mathematical values (plus, minus, multiply, divide, or something more complex) to the relations between various factors; someone makes assumptions about the value of possible outcomes, and then a machine calculates the costs and benefits of different approaches. Vietnam was the SA war, the electronic war, the computer war, the technological war. From the point of view of the technophile analysts there was no reason they could have lost—unless it was because the peace movement stabbed the military in the back. Others, including many who were there, saw it differently. The Vietnam War is a particularly good case of how subjugated knowledges can be used to reveal, even change, a society's conception of a complicated issue. Appeals to the wisdom of the grunts (foot soldiers) are made by many writers with quite different explanations as to why the war was lost, but the majority see it as a war that could not have been won. Obviously, considering their victory, the North Vietnamese knew what the U.S. strategy was. Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, their commander in chief, described it thus: The United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn't work here. If it did, they'd already have exterminated us with their planes. (1970, p. 329) That even the Vietnamese military leadership could get its views published in New York in 1970 at the height of the war shows how normally discredited views can come out. One book that has applied many of these marginalized views is James Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986). It is a detailed examination of the Vietnam War as seen by the subjugated knowledges of combat soldiers from the lower ranks, protesters to the war, dissident officials within government, and journalists. It details how official power, patriotic ideology, flashy-destructive technology, and scientific rules of discourse were used to formulate and perpetuate U.S. policy. Gibson's conclusion is that the system of discourse for Vietnam is the
Page 1 and 2: Chapter Eight Postmodern Wars Imagi
Page 3 and 4: [ 152 ] The Past Detailed histories
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Page 7 and 8: [ 156 ] The Past when the cost seem
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Page 15 and 16: [ 164 ] The Past the role of human
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