Book review: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam

 So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to  overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, materiel, and firepower, politics could  be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. The book’s cardinal flaw (or saving grace, depending on your point of view) is that this core  and the halo of mostly confused nonsense around it never link together; the methods of one have nothing to do with the other. If the postmodern jank took over it’d be just another gibberish academic  book to be filed and forgotten; had an editor managed to cut out the extraneous bits, Technowar might  have been a classic.  

So...when the book is good, it is very very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid? 

To back up a bit: Technowar was written in the early/mid 1980s by Gibson, adapted from his Phd dissertation. Reading through the intro Gibson wrote for the second edition in 2000, you find that the author has pretty much scored bingo on his American social science academic card: he is a Marxist, could be described as a postmodern, and is not above quoting contemporary French philosophers or doing asides in later-discredited postmodern linguistic theories. So the book is going to have a few stylistic onions tied to its belt, as was the style at the time. Having read a few papers from similar people, I can also tell you to expect the occasional lunar theory: a comment that is ludicrous but just  sort of dropped in as a fully authoritative statement, like the author’s contention that only the United  States won World War 2, an idea Gibson definitely didn’t get from the USSR. The PRC similarly would have reason to criticize Gibson’s assertion that the decline of China was purely from western  imperialism (oddly complementary to the Manchus) or that China's war with Japan started in 1939.  

But before the cat is out of the bag, let me say that in the good parts of the book, Gibson’s  Marxism is, if anything, a strength. The wheelhouse of a Marxist is the critical analysis of material  circumstances leading to social or political outcomes, and this approach lends itself very well to  criticizing the “rational war” of Secretary of Defense Robert S. MacNamera. This is where the book  shines, the core of which is showing how dumb idiocy at the top of the American command structure  crafted policies that in Vietnam were not only doomed to failure, but disaster. MacNamera’s war was  designed to be quantifiable; where objective data was produced by all military activities. This data was  then an objective measure as to how close or how far victory was, an obscure point defined by  American postwar thinking we’ll get into in a moment. The flaws of this approach are obvious: it  ignored both the political and to a great extent the military situation in Vietnam, and created endless incentives for waste and pointless death.  

When in this mode, Gibson is admirably hard nosed, working through the vast library of public  documents on Vietnam, up to classified CIA analysis released with the Pentagon Papers. These are the parts of the book that will make you angry. The "production of death" aspects in the ground forces chapters in particular made me miss having to roll my eyes at the occasional pompous Marxist flourish, as the policies were so awful and horrific in effect I’d take anything as a distraction. Wide-scale murder was in effect incentivized, while at the same time the fiction that the opposite was true was cultivated,  giving the leadership a veneer of plausible deniability. This reaches a nadir with the US Marines publishing a pamphlet for the Vietnamese peasants saying, and I'm paraphrasing but only a bit, “We’re  a bunch of cool guys who are here to help and protect you. So, never run from us, because we assume  you are the enemy when you do that, so we have to shoot you.” Again and again, attempts to  ‘rationalize’ ‘combat production’ end with destruction and slaughter that has nothing to do with winning a war. The waste is not just in lives; shell production was such that artillery units found  themselves shelling empty jungle just because they couldn’t get people to stop delivering the damn shells - and dud shells became an important source of explosives for the Viet Cong. The US Air Force, meanwhile, found itself mostly unnecessary in a low-tech ground war they’d done little to prepare for, and for MacNamera’s team found itself trying to meet production goals that constituted air forces expensively doing nothing, or worse, squinting at the Vietnamese countryside and defining worthwhile targets as “brick buildings'' (usually foreign built schools and hospitals, naturally.) The Air Forces involved decided that maybe a campaign against North Vietnamese petroleum fuels was worthwhile - it worked very well in World War 2 - but CIA analysis estimated daily North Vietnamese energy needs were met by a single tractor trailer tanker, five heavy trucks or 15 pickups. This doesn’t stop a  campaign aimed at trying to bomb fuel depots of oil drums, which the North Vietnamese intelligently  hid underground, leading to quite a few direct hits on empty fields.  

These chapters are also valuable as they serve as refutation to then-contemporary arguments as  to how the Vietnam War might’ve been won. Gibson makes clear victory was impossible, for two reasons. 

First, the political battle for Vietnam had been decided before America became significantly involved. Gibson argues that the Vietnamese, being colonized first by China and then by the French, had all their political activity driven underground. This unified Vietnamese politics in a way that likely  wouldn’t have been possible otherwise: political movements that might have seen others as rivals and enemies found themselves allied by being illegitimate. Critically, Ho Minh Chin and the Vietnamese communists wisely embraced a big tent approach to resistance, emphasizing nationalism over ideology, allowing this cohesion to happen. So when the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, this was a victory for all Vietnamese nationalist political movements. Meanwhile, whatever pro imperialist Vietnamese there were constituted just hangers-on and rich landowners, despised by the  nation at large and only maintaining their privileges thanks to being pro Imperialist. Thus, the imperial side found itself completely defeated politically. 

What's more, the united politics of the Vietnam nationalists gave some consensus of basic goals of Vietnam independence: sovereignty, with free and open political processes that didn't discriminate.  This meant that socialist and communist parties were allowed just like any other. It was this last point  that would get America involved, and even at this first point, there's a fatal contradiction. America  claimed to want what the Vietnamese wanted: a sovereign nation with a healthy political culture. But  because this culture if left to the Vietnamese would be socialist of some description, America's reflexive anti-communism rejected this, and in doing so, rejected the entire legitimate spectrum of Vietnamese nationalism, and sided instead with the losers of the previous war (IE the small group of  Vietnamese who stood to lose if the nationalists got their way.) Reflexive anti-communism lead to being opposed to legitimate Vietnamese politics while claiming to be fighting for legitimate Vietnamese politics. In another lamp black irony on Gibson’s account, had the US problems with the new nation of Vietnam (like a guarantee of religious rights for Vietnam’s Catholic minority,) these were easily achievable had diplomacy been tried instead of force. 

The second reason Vietnam was unwinnable was that the entire notion of victory American forces were counting towards was esoteric in the extreme. Gibson gets into the miasma of bad thinking that hung over the swamp of US Victory in Vietnam. Re-reading this section I don’t trust all of Gibson’s conclusions, but it is at least an interesting discussion. Certainly you need to wear your high falutin’ big thinking hat to see the flaws in American thinking.

One: anti-communism. In the manichean conception of the post war world, there was FREEDOM and there was COMMUNISM. In the late 1940s thanks to internal memos like NSC-68  and the Greek intervention, America’s position on communism was monolithic: it was all the same thing, and had to be opposed everywhere. As Gibson points out, this had the effect of reducing things like history and politics, two things that I think we can all agree can be complex, into black and while pieces on a game board, which Gibson quite rightly derides as a gross simplification. This simplification meant that anything deemed ‘communist’ had to be opposed regardless of context. There was also an ever-present fear that small gains for the bad side in the near term would lead to enormous gains in the long term, IE the very dubious domino theory.  

Second: economic determinism, a view where those who are the richest or have the most resources win wars, asterisk, as long as nuclear weapons are not involved. With direct conflict with the USSR carrying a promise of total annihilation, policy wonks like Dr. Henry Kissinger started to see secondary conflicts (IE proxy wars in the Third World) as desirable. In addition to avoiding the whole “everybody dies” issue, proxy wars were to the United States' advantage, especially proxy wars of attrition, the logic being economic determinism meant the USSR backed faction would always lose. Let me restate the problem so its flaws are a bit more pronounced: the Soviets couldn’t win a war of attrition. 

I feel it necessary to start a new paragraph. Things just get weirder from there. Third, Game Theory, or at least some cousin of it, was assumed to not only be universal, but universally understood. I say cousin because the language Gibson quotes certainly sounds like the rational calculation of game theory, and it assumes results that sound like the result of it: namely that in a war where the enemy has overwhelming superiority in force and firepower, the other side will naturally just give up without much of a fight. Gibson himself uses the term but seems to confuse it with profit maximization. Still, the diseased weasel under the stairs Uncle Sam had for MAD days escaping does sound plausible. In the Vietnam War, it was predicted that the Vietnamese after a certain point would rationally just give up after “material superiority was demonstrated”, because that's just game theory and you can't argue with that.  Gibson gets some very good, entirely justified digs in here, including how it was really a shame Vietnamese nationalists had not been trained in the elite schools of the American war leaders.

Fourth, victory as the constrained variable. In MacNamera’s view, victory was completely assured, and the real question was not one of material limits, IE "what's the best way for me to produce lots of tanks for victory", but rather "how little do I need in order to produce the inevitable outcome?" This is very different from how most wars fight - the question in the USSR in World War 2 was "what was the best way to produce T-34s for victory", not "what's the cheapest total victory over Nazism can we get?" One major theme was victory would be accomplished with the “right” amount of force; equating victory with maximum efficiency. The miasma of numbers drifting  off swamp Vietnam was partially to adjust the use of force in the conflict with the scheme of  “messaging” just discussed. It wasn’t long until stranger [ed: heh] things  started to happen, with  “sorties not flown” becoming a part of the calculation. Now Gibson dismisses the whole thing out of hand as “fetishistic thinking”, which as we will see, Gibson means "the thinking of the bad ones." In what will become a pattern, Gibson himself will go on to make mistakes identical to MacNamera. 

MacNamera assumed his information was perfect and via the intellectual hooks and crooks detailed above, he was in total control of the situation, as a manager would be on his own  production line. The entire war, then, was trying to reach X, where X was trying to demonstrate a  sufficient value of force to make the Vietnamese give up. This of course was completely at odds with how the Vietnamese saw the conflict, a point MacNamera himself would concede many years later.

Without a plausible view of victory and mystified by an enemy they never bothered to try and understand, even with very good information all American strategy was doomed. Then of course, politics: in another good section Gibson goes over what happened when, even by the artificial standards of MacNamera, the statistics were clearly showing defeat instead of victory by a then-classified CIA audit. Not surprisingly, the stats were then falsified to reflect the politically acceptable view.  

The final fifth brother in this grimm story of warcrime and evil ideological stepfathers is metaphysical truth, IE that the view of MacNamera and Kissinger is not better than their opponents, but perfect. Gibson is going to claim this a lot, but he at least can point to some crazy stuff Kissenger wrote to get him started. Namely: America is the greatest, richest, strongest, smartest, prettiest (etc) because it has a perfect worldview; that the Third World is not any of those things because they don’t have any of the perfect worldview; and that the  Soviets have “some, but not all” of that perfect worldview. (You may wonder why that concession needs to be made; it’s because the Soviets by virtue of their technology and position as a great rival must by definition have “some” of the right stuff.) This “perfect” worldview allowed American policy makers to assume they were literally infallible. This creates all sorts of epistemic trouble, (to say nothing of “pride goeth before...”) since having a perfect worldview without some buttressing from fictional metaphysical concepts is impossible. When even your basic concept of truth is not being parsed by the logic compiler, you have some problems right now, and also in your future. 

So while not complete, or even gone into in depth, this picture of thinking dysfunction at least fits in our understanding of the Vietnam War today and how American policymakers viewed it.  

We now come to the start of the book’s flaws, which are right there in the title, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. The Perfect War allusion you now get, but the concept of “technowar” is where  things start to go wrong. On Gibson’s account, “technowar” is war conducted by modern capitalist imperialist Americans; MacNamera's war being the logical development of a false worldview. This false worldview starts, and I'm not making this up, with the labor theory of value. (For the confused: the labor theory of value is an early economic view that the first generation of economists like Adam Smith held to, that the prices of things was a reflection of the human labor it took to generate that thing, and nothing else, While economics moved on, Marx kept the idea.) Labor theory of Value seems like an aside when Gibson details it early in the book, but it becomes central as Gibson makes the Manichean distinction between “real” things created via Marxism, and “false” things everywhere else (Capitalism/Imperialism/Literally America - shortened  to CILA hereafter.) Technowar, on Gibson’s account, then, is a war fought from a falsified perspective that actually has no connection to reality. Not a bad description of MacNamera's war, but beyond that this definition torpedoes the whole usefulness of ‘technowar’ as a concept, since it is reduced to being a partisan pejorative to wars CILA makes, but not Marxists.  

Further, Gibson mirrors the faulty metaphysical logic he effectively criticized earlier. He has a  ‘true’ world, that of ‘social relations’ - which, haha, in the Marxist view always end in Marxism - and  the “fetishistic commodification” of the evil bad world. This is definitely a case of ideas putting on a  little pompousness to hide their simplicity, since “fetishistic commodification” is “I disagree with how things are priced” in a corset and ballroom gown. Still, the dichotomy of Marx vs. 'the wrong, bad people who stink' is absolute.  

This is actually very postmodern. I’ll forgo a full discussion, but postmodernism in one sense of the term arose in the 1970s among Marxist academics. Y’see, all the Marxists of the 1960s were sure, absolutely sure, the great proletarian revolution was getting underway. But, of course, that never  happened. Your 1970s Marxist academic had several choices as to how to think about this development, but annoyingly, all save one involved some kind of mea culpa; saying “I, Marxist, got the theories wrong in this case” or “I, Marxist, have discovered some flaws in my beliefs and are going to modify them, because that’s the sort of thing that happens when you have an empirical theory.” So naturally, some of these academics picked the one that wasn’t either of those: deny reality. Qanon, eat your heart  out! Among the continental (IE Western European) Marxist academics, it suddenly became very fashionable to talk about the falsification of reality itself. All you really need to know about these  people is that they regularly said “there is no truth, and that is a truth” while never seeing the joke.  

Back to Gibson, as he’s done something similar - attributing “reality” to his political views and  “unreality” to everyone else, making all of the Vietnam War a product of this “unreality” [and thus technowar.] As Gibson pointed out earlier, quite correctly, in a slightly different context, this is a view  that reduces immense complexity to black and white, but that doesn’t stop Gibson from doing it whenever he steps away from his reporting. For example, the differences between how the Johnson and Nixon administration viewed the Vietnam War is unaddressed, with Gibson just flapping a hand on how they were “exactly the same”, by which he means “part of the bad team.” Nixon, hilariously, is too complex for Gibson, as the idea of detente by itself a refutation of his simplistic worldview, as is Nixon recognizing People's Republic of China, or, Nixon and Henry Fucking Kissinger saving world communism from itself. [That last one is almost forgivable, since for a blind partisan like Gibson, the cognitive dissonance in becoming conscious of that little incident might cause his head to literally explode.] Similarly something he can’t make reference to is American domestic politics, since it too is “of the bad”, so its impact on the Vietnam War is utterly ignored. A similar myopia can be found when  Gibson discusses books on Vietnam are books written by chief policy makers in charge at the time -  and Gibson’s book, which is both a hilarious simplification and one that makes Gibson a lone crusading hero against the evil of CILA. Anything that cannot be made to fit into Gibson’s black and white  worldview is ignored. And this really shouldn’t come as a surprise; Gibson explicitly says in one of his intros that his method is the only correct method to understanding the Vietnam War.  

This blind partisanship of Gibson has a few other negative effects. First, Gibson’s value judgments on Vietnam are meaningless, since ultimately any judgment he makes against CILA and the terrible things done in Vietnam he’d reverse (or try to deny) if the sides were reversed. If we’re talking about imperial hubris and overreach leading to a ruinous war in a third world country in Asia, what about the USSR invasion of Afghanistan? Surely the ol’ technowar criteria could be used there. Well, fun fact: in Technowar, the only mention of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is Gibson gloating how some of the men who ambushed the US Rangers in Mogadishu [with their good proletarian RPGs] had been trained by good Soviet Marxists in Afghanistan. {endnote #1} I’ve no idea if this is true, but it is a good example of the sheer ugliness of the blind partisan worldview, and how the partisan excuses this ugliness in himself by projecting it onto the Other. Speaking of ugly, there’s a spit-take moment when Gibson looks down his nose at revolts by US soldiers against their own officers, noting some of them  became ‘radicalized’ (more marketing tinsel meaning Marxist) but most of them did not, so who the hell cares. Dismissing people who are fighting against the thing your book is nominally also against because they didn’t sign on to the right -ism is some first class gormlessness that you’d figure even a blind partisan would know better than to show.  

Though truth be told, there’s a lot of material in Technowar that shows Gibson operates only on the partisan ledger where the only goal is scoring more than the other side, gormlessness be damned. 

This you can see pretty much anytime history outside of Vietnam comes up, for example, FDR. Now  you’d think that a guy who teamed up with Stalin to murder fascists and used a command economy to murder fascists AND create a GDP half of the earth’s in 1945 would merit a few kind words. You’d be dead wrong, of course, since FDR is just another CILA and thus bad.  

A far uglier (and truth be told, grimly funny) example can be seen as Gibson tip-toes around the  Cambodian Genocide. Cambodia was in a civil war where the partisan ordering of things breaks down completely. The Khmer Rouge were politically useful to the PRC and America, as while they were communist revolutionaries working with the North Vietnamese, longstanding grievances between the Vietnamese and the Cambodians meant any alliances between the two were temporary. Nixon illegally expanded the war into Cambodia with the B-52 raids of Operation Menu. [Endnote #2.]

Gibson once again can't deal with that sort of ambiguity and complexity. So bad things the Americans did are discussed, but Gibson tried to cast Operation Menu as a snark hunt for a nonexistent Viet Cong jungle fortress HQ, then mentioning “oh, and the Viet Cong did have bases in Eastern Cambodia.' That these were also attacked is carefully omitted, then we skip ahead to the ground  invasion by South Vietnam, which of course fails. Once the Khemer Rouge, who Gibson does not describe as explicitly Marxist, takes the fore, the tale ends. As far as Gibson tells, Cambodia is a story of the American ogre triggering a revolt of some sort against its badness, huzzah! (The Marxist Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, French-educated communist and not mentioned in Technowar, would kill 25% of Cambodia’s population in just three years. One of Pot’s lieutenants actually possessed a Phd from the Sorbonne, and I guess if you think the kool kids are a bunch of French postmodern Marxists , you have a whole basket of reasons to not mention it.) This demonstrates the pattern throughout the book: anything not reducible to Gibson’s simplistic worldview is passed over, obfuscated, or ignored.  

Blind Partisanship I think is understood all too well by people reading this, so let me tell one more tale of Gibson inflicting some wounds on himself. 

Most of the book’s discussion of air power in Vietnam is on point at critiquing how America fought in Vietnam. The services involved were usually a massive force in search of a mission, and Gibson documents attempts by war planners to find missions more in line with the force’s capabilities, sometimes ending in tragedy, sometimes farce. But then Gibson, having proved his point, goes on.  (God strike me dead if these are not accurate summaries.) 

American F-105 Thunderchief fighter bombers were clearly bad, because they were heavier than the aircraft the North Vietnamese used, and had more electronics.  

F-105s were also bad because flying from bases in Thailand, they had to refuel flying to AND from Vietnam! 

Speaking of, having to stage aircraft from Thailand proves the F-105’s deficiencies. (Gibson himself points out elsewhere that American forces had heavy trouble ensuring security around airbases in Sothern Vietnam regardless of location.) 

A further deficiency here is that the airbases were undefended against air attack. Had the North Vietnamese attacked, the results would have been horrendous! (This one physically hurt me it is so stupid; the reason why Thailand airbases had no air defense is that the North Vietnamese air force didn’t have the capability to attack bases in Thailand. It’s like observing that North American defense plants in World War 2 could have been bombed to cinders, had the Nazis had bombers or missiles capable of attacking them.) 

American fighter-bombers in Vietnam rarely used supersonic flight.  

In fact, they were incapable of it, because it takes too much fuel. An aircraft breaking mach 2 would instantly run out of fuel. (Endnote #3)

This is because the CILA industry loves the generation of abstract numbers instead of actually meeting a performance goal, unlike the good Marxist engineered aircraft that were slower but could achieve  their cited performance statistics. (For the curious, the North Vietnamese AF fielded MiG-17s, MiG-19s and MiG-21s, with the first two types being supplemented by Chinese copies. MiG-21s, by the way, are point defense interceptors who can achieve speeds in excess of mach 2.) 

American aircraft were also more complex than the above fighters. To keep a fighter wing of F4 Phantoms flying (which is, ahem, 70-75 aircraft), a warehouse of 70,000 different parts was needed, as well as a computer inventory system for it. F4s also need “thick concrete runways”, and the USAF  pilots and crews needed to regularly patrol the aprons and runways for foreign objects that could be ingested by the jet turbines!  

This last point is magnificently stupid, as Foreign Object Detection [FOD] walks are a bog standard part of modern aviation, and in no way a practice restricted to the USAF. This is something Gibson could have learned had he asked at the nearest airport.  

So, why do I bring all this up, aside to point and laugh? A few reasons. First, I think it demonstrates well how a blind partisan thinks. Clearly, Gibson knew nothing about the practical side of aviation. He then, I imagine, looked at what the North Vietnamese fielded in combat aircraft. Then, because they were Marxist and obviously right, any capability or aircraft deployed beyond that was a waste and/or a lie. He also uses the line of reasoning to argue that CILA is obsessed with numbers and abstractions that have nothing to do with reality, and Marxists do not, to which history replies no,  just no. 

One further point, though: Gibson’s basic criticism of the use of the American Air Force in Vietnam is unaffected by this buffoonish tangent. You don’t really need to understand what a FOD walk is to  effectively criticize the USAF in Vietnam. That’s the bottom line, really: even a man with a worldview  I’d characterize as “childishly simplistic” quite successfully critiques US policy in Vietnam, and makes  many points I agree with. If that isn’t a damning statement on the Vietnam War in itself, I’m not sure  what is.  

~ * ~

endnote #1: This almost certainly not only wrong but also the reverse of what happened, that the Somali militia were trained by people fighting the good Soviet Marxists.

 endnote #2: I'd no goddamn idea *how* secret these raids were. Nixon, Kissinger, and a bunch of officers essentially carved out an secret organization inside the USAF just to accomplish these attacks.   

Endnote #3:  This is such a bizarre comment I'm not sure if Gibson is misreading a claim he read, or the original claim was really that stupid. Some of Gibson's claims are coming out of period discussions American Marxists were having, which I'm not really familiar with, but they also prosecute the thesis that American military spending was going to not so much break  the economy as contradict it, and that the USSR was doing 'much better' by the economic metric of a retired civil engineering professor. Certainly "mach 2 literally impossible" sounds like something you'd get after a long game of telephone.