Gregory A. Daddis

The Problem of Metrics: Assessing Progress and Effectiveness in the Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War the complex nature of fighting an insurgency posed significant problems for US Army officers attempting to measure progress and military effectiveness. While much of the Vietnam historiography maintains that ‘body counts’ served as the primary, if not only, indicator of wartime success, such arguments overlook the vast numbers of reports attempting to measure progress and performance. Problems in evaluating progress stemmed not from a lack of effort on the part of army officers or from a single-minded commitment to counting bodies. Rather, complications arose from attempting to collect too many facts, figures, and statistics without evaluating how accurately such data reflected progress in a complex political-military environment.

Out of Balance: Evaluating American Strategy in Vietnam, 1968-72

Abstract This paper examines the ineffective implementation of American military strategy in the Vietnam War’s final years. While the Nixon administration conceived a comprehensive strategic concept aimed at winding down the war in South Vietnam, civilian and military leaders struggled to realize, in an effectual manner, Nixon’s wide-ranging political objectives. American officials in Saigon and Washington found it near impossible to balance the competing strategic imperatives of combat operations, diplomatic negotiations, Vietnamization, and the withdrawal of US forces from South-east Asia. This inability to reconcile imbalances within the American strategic framework helps explain more fully the outcome of US political and military efforts in South Vietnam.

Mired in a Quagmire: Popular Interpretations of the Vietnam War

Abstract For the war in Vietnam, real perspective can only come when we extricate ourselves from the historical quagmire and start evaluating the conflict as more than just a mistake that deserves our condemnation.

Strategy in the American War of Independence: A Global Approach edited by Donald Stoker, Kenneth J. Hagan, and Michael T. McMaster

Levels of complexity make the American War of Independence a difficult conflict to understand. An insurrection in Britain’s thirteen American colonies became a regional war fought by conventional forces. At the same time, irregular warfare did not cease but instead fanned the flames of conflict across the colonies. The instability resulting from Britain’s attempt to reestablish control over its thirteen colonies caused hostilities to expand beyond North America, leading to a global maritime struggle. Strategy in the American War of Independence approaches the war’s multilayered nature through a series of chapters highlighting the strategic imperatives faced by the principal combatants as well as certain tangential players. With each chapter written by a different area specialist, the book’s editors overcome language constraints that would make a single author book on the subject nearly impossible. Several chapters are particularly valuable, especially the ones on the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish. The Dutch are frankly forgotten in most studies of the conflict, yet Victor Enthoven’s chapter demonstrates that the war was a catastrophe for the Dutch state, damaging its maritime trade to such an extent that it never recovered. Enthoven also persuasively argues that the Dutch tried to maintain neutrality but other imperatives prevented this course of action. Though the role of the French is generally better known than that of the Dutch, most studies do not analyze French involvement from their perspective. James Pritchard’s chapter does a real service in this respect. Pritchard focuses on the French navy and how French leadership attempted to use it to obtain the state’s objectives. He clearly demonstrates the difficulty of balancing naval power in European waters with naval power in the peripheral colonies while trying to satisfy the requirements of several allies. In addition to assessing operational alternatives, Enthoven and Pritchard also succeed in tying broader diplomatic and economic considerations to issues of military strategy. Thomas E. Chavez provides a sympathetic description of Spain’s role in the FrancoThe Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 34, No. 2, 281–293, April 2011