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

[ 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