0 - The Black Vault

! THE BDM CORPORATION
CHAPTER 1
OBJECTIVES AND STRATEGIES
Top-level US leadership has never been very subtle when
it comes to war. Surategy takes a back seat to physical
strength and tactics in the White House. the
Pentagon, and the State Department. When the "chips
are down," we've always poured on the power until
opponents were crushed. Our ruling councils, whose
members were schooled in convent 4 onal combat before the
showdown in Vietnam, subscribed to that approach.
Threats in earlier US wars were classically military.
Direct strategies on both sides featured force, not
fraud or finesse. Political, economic, social, and
psychological pressures were strictly secondary, once
the shooting started. l/
Colonel John M.. Collins, US Army,
Ret. Vietnam Postmortem: A Senseless
Strategy.
Our military art has successfully solved a number of
questions relating to strategy, operations, and tactics,
with a view to defeating a strong enemy; it has
correctly determined the relations between man and
weapons, politics and tech]iEue, regarding the homan
factor, as the decisive factor, while considering
weapons and technique also important. Now that the
people's armed forces have the possibility of having
better equipment, of being strengthened materially and
technically, our military art is stili firmly maintaining
the above guiding principles, combining politics
and technique on the basis that politics and fighting
spirit are the essential factor, which enhances to the
highest degree the fighting power of the armed forces.2/
J"i
General Vo Nguyen Giap,
itary Art of People's War,
The Mil-
Emphasis
in the Original.
A. INTRODUCTION
National strategies are ideally devised to provide maximum support to
the pursuit of a nation's own interests and objectives -- communist or
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