The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam - Hardcover

Gibson, James William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871130637 ISBN 13: 9780871130631

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr, 1986

Synopsis

Drawing upon government papers and personal accounts from soldiers, this book documents the failure of technowar in Vietnam and argues that the lessons learned have been ignored by the political and military establishments that continue to espouse it today in Central America

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Gibson, Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., believes that much of the blame for the debacle in Vietnam is attributable to the introduction of "managerial science" into the war effort. He attempts to show that by the fall of 1967, the war managers had constructed an Orwellian double-think of "multiple systematic falsifications" in which credit, debit and progress were gauged by a body-count index. (The author's personal outrage occasionally spills over into questionable generalizations: "Management did not care whether labor lived or died, only about producing a high body-count.") The study includes quotes from participants and close observers of the war, illustrating in a shockingly concentrated manner how demoralizing to the troops were the ruthless and impersonal management techniques of business accounting imposed on them. Gibson warns that this managerial mind-set is still very much in evidence at the Pentagon and that "the redeployment of Technowar can only result in another massive defeat."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

According to Gibson, Vietnam was a "technowar," conceived and waged by U.S. war managers as "a high technology, capital-intensive production process." It was neither a mistake nor a problem of ailing national will. It was rather the perfect expression of the American logic of making war on invented enemies through highly rationalized industrial management. Gibson's argument is not altogether new; and he introduces no new evidence in support of his position. He does, however, argue his case with great energy and inventiveness, exploring the dimensions of this "technowar" from Vietnamese cities and countryside to the U.S. air war over Indochina. His analysis should be of interest to anyone seriously interested in the social and intellectual sources of Washington's war effort. Charles DeBenedetti, History Dept., Univ. of Toledo, Ohio
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0871130637
• ISBN 13: 9780871130631
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 523