McMaster. This really is interesting. One of the military thinkers, Col. H.R. McMaster, tasked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to, as part of a group of a dozen colleagues, crash-rethink military Iraq strategy, wrote Dereliction of Duty about the Vietnam war. From the Amazon review:

For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country's conduct in the war.

McMaster stresses two elements in his discussion of America's failure in Vietnam: the hubris of Johnson and his advisors and the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dereliction of Duty provides both a thorough exploration of the military's role in determining Vietnam policy and a telling portrait of the men most responsible.

Via Spencer Ackerman.

Update: Comment from a reader, a former Pentagon civilian staffer: "I'm very glad to see your mention of Col McMaster. His book was very much on my mind as we entered this war, given the controversial justification for the war. I wondered back then how history would judge the current JCS performance against McNamara's. I recall a few years ago, before the war, the Army chief of staff put Dereliction of Duty on his reading list for officers. I wondered for years when someone would bring up McMaster's thesis and compare the current state of affairs with the past. Certainly what we're dealing with is not something new and could have been avoided. IMHO the current JCS, and also Gen Myers, totally failed in the performance of their duties to provide sound military advise to the SECDEF. I think Col McMaster has a very bright future ahead of him, as he just completed a tour as the commander of the 3rd ACR in Iraq. I think he'll be Chief of Staff someday, or get command of a major combatant command."

Update II: From another reader, who has contributed research to McMaster. "McMaster's book on Vietnam is very important and thoughtful, but it's important to put it in perspective. Professor Ronald Spector (Geo. Washington University), in a very positive review of Dereliction of Duty (The New York Times, 7/20/1997) identified a significant weakness in the analysis:

Having drawn up a devastating indictment of Johnson and his principal civilian and military advisers, McMaster apparently believes he has explained the outcome of the Vietnam conflict. It was a war, he says, that was "lost in Washington . . . even before the first American units were deployed." The notion that a war like that in Vietnam, which began 14 years before the election of Kennedy and continued for six years after the end of the Johnson Administration, can be satisfactorily explained by reference to decisions made in Washington during late 1964 and early 1965 would seem at best questionable. Yet it is a view held not only by McMaster but by many of the authors who have preceded him. This preoccupation with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and their decisions displays some of the same ethnocentrism, the same assumption of American omnipotence, for which McMaster pillories the leaders of that era. It largely leaves out of account the ideas, plans and actions of the Vietnamese.

"If McMaster, or at least his book, overlooked such important lessons of Vietnam, can we be sure that his his evaluation of U.S. strategy in Iraq will not have significant analytical flaws?"

Posted by Laura at November 20, 2006 11:47 AM