Lessons from Vietnam

The Pentagon Book Club

Nick Turse

"In the spring of 1984, a young Army officer wrote a seminar paper about the use of force in the post-Vietnam era. Three years later he returned to the subject in a Princeton University doctoral dissertation titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam." What "today's junior officers think about Vietnam—which is fast becoming ancient history—is likely to undergo significant change before they assume positions of power and influence," he claimed. In his dissertation, he sought to investigate the legacy of the war and its "chastening effect on military thinking about the use of force," which made military leaders, he contended, "more cautious than before." "Caution has its virtues, of course," he wrote. However, "the lessons from which that caution springs are not without flaws." Among the flawed lessons he identified were a professional aversion to counterinsurgency operations, "a new skepticism about the efficacy of American forces in the Third World countries where social, political, and economic factors are the causes of unrest" and "a widespread fear among officers that assignment to counterinsurgency, special forces type missions will be the end of their career."

The author of those words is David Petraeus, now a four-star general and commander of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, one year before the fall of Saigon, and he has lately consolidated his military career around trying to reverse the lessons of Vietnam. "