written a sweeping history of Vietnam that painstakingly catalogued the mistakes of the war and punctured the Army’s conventional wisdom on why it had lost. Writing during his three years at Sosh, Krepinevich was able to feed off the frustration that had taken root in the department. His work came to be passed around like a seditious tract, the sort of unauthorized thinking that resonated with some and exasperated others, not least because of his Harvard pedigree and lack of Vietnam service.
After the war, the Army had blamed its defeat on a fickle American public and meddling political leaders who prohibited the military from launching a conventional assault on North Vietnam and its military. Attacksin the north had largely been confined to bombing, and even those had been continually modulated in hopes of drawing the Communist leaders into a negotiated settlement. In the South the Army chased after Viet Cong guerrillas who senior officers later insisted were merely a distraction. This argument, advanced by Army War College professor Harry Summers and others, appealed to a demoralized force that was looking for an excuse to forget Vietnam, abandon guerrilla warfare, and focus on fighting familiar types of wars. Krepinevich, by contrast, insisted that the Army had lost in Vietnam not because of meddling civilians but because of its own incompetence. Its search-and-destroy tactics had alienated the very people it was supposed to be protecting. “The Army ended up trying to fight the kind of conventional war that it was trained, organized and prepared (and that it
wanted
) to fight instead of the counterinsurgency war that it was sent to fight,” he argued. To make matters worse, the 1980s Army was compounding its error by focusing almost exclusively on conventional combat, giving little thought to how it might fight future guerrilla wars, which seemed “the most likely area of future conflict for the Army,” he concluded.
Other officers with less fortitude than Krepinevich might have toned down their dissertation or quietly let it slip into academic obscurity, but he had ambitions to hold a mirror up to the Army’s flaws. Petraeus, listening in the audience as he outlined his arguments, was impressed. After Krepinevich finished his remarks, he introduced himself and asked if he could get a copy of the dissertation.
The two officers long had been on parallel intellectual paths. Krepinevich graduated three years before Petraeus at West Point and had gone into the artillery branch, where he was plucked from the regular Army by Olvey and sent to Harvard. There he decided on an impulse to conduct his doctoral research on Vietnam. “I always wondered, how in the hell did we lose that war?” recalled Krepinevich. He turned his dissertation into a book,
The Army and Vietnam
, that was published in 1986 to widespread praise in the
New York Times
and other mainstream publications. “From the Army perspective, the account is certainly accurate, and devastating,” wrote William Colby, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (though he chided Krepinevich for giving short shrift to the CIA’scounterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, which he had directed). It also drew praise from Sosh’s longtime Asia expert, George Osborn, who wrote in the book’s foreword that Krepinevich’s dogged work had revealed the “doctrinal rigidity at all levels of the U.S. Army.”
The acclaim from outsiders made the Army even more defensive. In what amounted to the official response, retired General Bruce Palmer, a commander in Vietnam who had penned his own lengthy history of the conflict, wrote a review for the Army War College’s journal blasting the book for its “crippling naiveté” and an overall “lack of historical breadth and objectivity.” Taking a job at the Pentagon after leaving Sosh, Krepinevich received a call one day from the West Point superintendent’s office asking if he was the officer who wrote “that
After the war, the Army had blamed its defeat on a fickle American public and meddling political leaders who prohibited the military from launching a conventional assault on North Vietnam and its military. Attacksin the north had largely been confined to bombing, and even those had been continually modulated in hopes of drawing the Communist leaders into a negotiated settlement. In the South the Army chased after Viet Cong guerrillas who senior officers later insisted were merely a distraction. This argument, advanced by Army War College professor Harry Summers and others, appealed to a demoralized force that was looking for an excuse to forget Vietnam, abandon guerrilla warfare, and focus on fighting familiar types of wars. Krepinevich, by contrast, insisted that the Army had lost in Vietnam not because of meddling civilians but because of its own incompetence. Its search-and-destroy tactics had alienated the very people it was supposed to be protecting. “The Army ended up trying to fight the kind of conventional war that it was trained, organized and prepared (and that it
wanted
) to fight instead of the counterinsurgency war that it was sent to fight,” he argued. To make matters worse, the 1980s Army was compounding its error by focusing almost exclusively on conventional combat, giving little thought to how it might fight future guerrilla wars, which seemed “the most likely area of future conflict for the Army,” he concluded.
Other officers with less fortitude than Krepinevich might have toned down their dissertation or quietly let it slip into academic obscurity, but he had ambitions to hold a mirror up to the Army’s flaws. Petraeus, listening in the audience as he outlined his arguments, was impressed. After Krepinevich finished his remarks, he introduced himself and asked if he could get a copy of the dissertation.
The two officers long had been on parallel intellectual paths. Krepinevich graduated three years before Petraeus at West Point and had gone into the artillery branch, where he was plucked from the regular Army by Olvey and sent to Harvard. There he decided on an impulse to conduct his doctoral research on Vietnam. “I always wondered, how in the hell did we lose that war?” recalled Krepinevich. He turned his dissertation into a book,
The Army and Vietnam
, that was published in 1986 to widespread praise in the
New York Times
and other mainstream publications. “From the Army perspective, the account is certainly accurate, and devastating,” wrote William Colby, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (though he chided Krepinevich for giving short shrift to the CIA’scounterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, which he had directed). It also drew praise from Sosh’s longtime Asia expert, George Osborn, who wrote in the book’s foreword that Krepinevich’s dogged work had revealed the “doctrinal rigidity at all levels of the U.S. Army.”
The acclaim from outsiders made the Army even more defensive. In what amounted to the official response, retired General Bruce Palmer, a commander in Vietnam who had penned his own lengthy history of the conflict, wrote a review for the Army War College’s journal blasting the book for its “crippling naiveté” and an overall “lack of historical breadth and objectivity.” Taking a job at the Pentagon after leaving Sosh, Krepinevich received a call one day from the West Point superintendent’s office asking if he was the officer who wrote “that
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