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

Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 161 ]
discourse of technowar, an "organized scientific discourse" in Foucault's
sense, and that it is sharply regulated:
Technowar thus monopolized "organized scientific discourse'' through
multiple, but centralizing relationships among high-bureaucratic position,
technobureaucratic or production logic in the structure of its propositions,
and the conventional educated prose style. The debate on Vietnam occurs
within this unity. (1986, p. 467)
He contrasts the official "unpoetic poetic" of the "technobureaucratic or
production logic" (obvious by its propositions and style) with what he
calls the "warrior's knowledge," which has many different viewpoints and
insights and lacks a formal structure or concepts or any data in a regular
sequence.
This warrior's knowledge often comes in the form of stories. The official
discourse does not consider stories, poems, memoirs, interviews, and music
as valid forms of knowledge. They are disqualified because of their genre and
their speaker. Nonfiction is valued over fiction and the high-ranking officer's
memoirs are more important than any grunt's:
The warrior's knowledge is not homogeneous; its insights and concepts
and "supporting data" are not laid out in readily understood sequence, but
are instead embedded in thousands of stories. ... Regardless of propositional
content, the story form marks the warrior's knowledge as marginal
within the terrain of serious discourse. . . . Prose style in the top-level,
generalized works of Technowar follows the normal academic practice as
well. It is a prose style with a very unpoetic poetic, (p. 468)
Gibson's analysis is that the Vietnam War was lost because it was
prosecuted as a rationally managed production system more interested in the
appearance of scientificity (body counts, systems analysis) than real effectiveness.
He also points out that
By adopting microeconomics, game theory, systems analysis, and other
managerial techniques, the Kennedy administration advanced "limited"
war to greater specificity, making it seem much more controllable, manageable,
and therefore desirable as foreign policy, (p. 80; emphasis added)
McNamara insisted on numbers to explain the war. Many of the
numbers were lies. Gibson analyzes a series of reports and other documents,
such as the "point system" combat units used to judge their effectiveness, and
concludes, after a close reading of Gen. William C. Westmoreland's April
1967 report to President Lyndon B. Johnson, that it