War During Peace

Dr. Hamilton's personal interviews with many of the then recently retired generals and admirals who had served on Joint Chiefs of Staff during the McNamara Era reveal the angst those flag officers felt while being ordered to carry out a strategy they knew was doomed to defeat. Hamilton, a former U.S. Army infantry officer, recounts his experiences in Vietnam as an infantry company commander and as a battalion- and division-level operations officer carrying out those orders. Hamilton details the flaws in the Johnson Administration's Strategy of Attrition and the folly of thinking the gradual application of air power could "modify" the behavior of the North Vietnamese leadership. The failure to seal off the theater of operations from Chinese and Soviet resupply is detailed, as well. The folly of allowing the North Vietnamese forces to maintain sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and even North Vietnam is made manifest. War During Peace: A Strategy for Defeat exposes the thinking of those who made the Vietnam War impossible to win and how our political leadership keeps making many of the same mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. For those seeking answers as to how the United States became bogged down in Vietnam, War During Peace: A Strategy for Defeat is a must-read. As evidenced by the book's voluminous bibliography, War During Peace: A Strategy for Defeat is carefully researched and documented. The book details the strategic mistakes made in Washington, D.C. between 1965 and 1968 and how partisan politics made the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 just another meaningless piece of paper littering the dustbin of geo-politics. Dr. Hamilton's probing examination of the proper relationship between military professionals and elected officials is a major contribution to military science and to the field of military-civil relations.