Why Strategy Matters in the War on Terror
Abstract
The two statements above, separated by twenty-eight years of history, reflect the views of enemies who, unable to defeat the United States militarily, adopted similar long-term strategies of attrition to defeat instead the American national will. One had just defeated the United States, and the other has declared itself at war with the United States. In 1973, after more than ten years of conflict in Vietnam and Southeast Asia (at an average annual cost of sixty-one billion dollars a year in FY2006 dollars and more than 211,000 American casualties, including more than 58,000 American dead) the Vietnam War ended in the United States suffering the first defeat in its history. It is difficult to grasp how a Western industrialized superpower could be defeated by an underdeveloped agrarian nation - with a fraction of its population and no gross national product to speak of - without accepting that the larger nation's overall objectives and strategy in that war were flawed. The lesson of Vietnam, a war of policy and limited political objectives, is that while the United States military accomplished every tactical objective it set on the battlefield, in the end North Vietnam emerged strategically victorious.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA484986
Entities
People
- Donald J. Reed
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School