Andrew Krepinevich

An important but flawed book that should be read by anyone serious about understanding the Vietnam war. The author is primarily concerned with what is called the "Army concept" which is the US Armies idea of why it exists and what future wars it existed to fight in the 1960's. That war was a conventional war against the Soviet Union in central Europe. Instead the war it fought was a counterinsurgency war in Vietnam. The author's case is that the US Army took it's conventional mindset and show more fought the Vietnam War using that instead of counterinsurgency methods. That a policy of attrition was used which left the population to be dominated by the Viet Cong. I think that case is mostly proven.

My criticism is three fold.

Firstly it doesn't cover the policy of Containment, the grand strategy of the US during the Cold War. Without discussing this policy it makes decisions made regarding Vietnam seem without context and irrational.

Secondly the book finishes in 1968, it is a common thing in books on the war but wrong. There is still 7 years of war to be fought and nothing within that time is important or can change anything?

Thirdly why are the Communists invisible? Nothing that America does has any effect on the Communist war effort. That is simply not true, the Communists were forced to change constantly because of the American forces and that includes at a strategic level.

I think the book is an important critic of the US Army and government in Vietnam, it is important to question assumptions, but it is far from the final answer on the war. Finally the story is that this book destroyed the authors career in the US Army, it's rare to read the sentence that destroyed a career but here it is on page 262:

"That this strategic war of annihilation against North Vietnam still evokes support in some Army quarters reinforces the notion that for some the learning process proceeds at a glacial pace, if at all."

No employer is going to be happy with that sentence! show less

The Last Warrior may suffer from overly high expectations for those who’ve heard of the enigmatic Andrew Marshall. For one, it’s constrained by the plain fact that much of Marshall’s work product remains classified. Krepinevich and Watts are both Marshall proteges, so as one would expect, they treat their subject with a gentle touch. If they level any criticism, it’s that Marshall could have been more assertive at times, but it’s quickly excused as professional detachment. Another show more limitation of the book -- and the authors are upfront about it -- is that it was not intended to be a biography, but rather an intellectual history of the man. A book with a man’s name in the title that reveals only the highlights of his life and little of his personality leaves one a bit thirsty. The book is, rather, a post WWII history of net assessment in the United States presented through the lens of Andrew Marshall’s experience. As far as Marshall’s contributions to the national security discussion go, they are according to the authors (1) his insistence that the CIAs estimate of how much GNP was being consumed by military production in the USSR, (2) recognizing that the U.S. was in the midst of a revolution in military affairs, and (3) anticipating China’s rise. It seems, however, that Marshall’s greater contribution to national security is the analytical rigor he brought to the generation of forecasts, while trying to temper them with the realities of a non-linear environment inhabited by (at times) non-rational actors. He was a leader and a role model in that he always sought to ask a better question; no use in rushing for answers if you haven’t framed and formulated the right question. In sum, the book doesn’t offer a great deal of insight into either ONA or its father. In the end, we’re still left to assume that Marshall did great service to the nation, based mostly on his longevity in the inauspicious A-ring office he inhabited. show less

Looking at the changing face of war in the 21st Century, this book looks at several deadly scenarios that will threaten America's, and the world's, security in the near future.

A large part of the world's oil tankers have to travel through two geographic choke points: the Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia, and the Persian Gulf. What would happen to the price of oil, and the world economy, if one was closed because a supertanker was sunk in the most inconvenient spot, and the show more other was closed because Iran decided to flex its political muscle?

Muslim terrorists set off several black-market nuclear weapons in US cities. Beset with internal strife, China decides to take back Taiwan, once and for all. They also send diesel submarines all over the world, to cause lots of economic trouble for any country who considers doing something about it. The Pakistani government collapses, and some of its nuclear weapons find their way into the hands of the more fundamentalist members of the military. There's one about America dealing with a major cyberattack, and one about what will happen after America withdraws from Iraq (faster than it intended). Remember bird flu, from a couple of years ago? Well, it's back, mutated into a form that can be easily transmitted from person to person. Shopping malls and other public places are deserted, hospitals are flooded with the sick and dying, America doesn't have nearly enough retroviral drugs even for emergency personnel, and it takes time to make more. To make things worse, the White House has just gotten word of a human flood of 8 million sick Latin Americans, desperate to reach America. They are scheduled to reach the US-Mexican border in a couple of days.

This is avery sobering, and utterly fascinating, look at what the future may hold. It's not an attempt to predict the future, but to show the sort of things that senior planners at the Pentagon are, or had better be, thinking about. Highly recommended. show less

Andrew Krepinevich, among other critics of the so-called “Army Concept,” has refuted Harry Summers’ plan (see Summers' On Strategy) for isolating South Vietnam from the North. Krepinevich asserts the following about Summers’ plan. Summers’ idea had already been proposed (as the EL PASO Plan) by the military, and discarded, because of the enormous support and logistical requirements. This barrier force, like that along the DMZ, would have been subjected to an enormous amount of show more harassing fire, requiring a great deal of support to maintain its position. Also, the North Vietnamese could have gone around this barrier by entering Thailand. This would have lengthened the North Vietnamese supply lines into the South, but South Vietnam would not have been completely isolated from the North. And, until the Tet Offensive in 1968, the primary opponents were the Viet Cong already operating in South Vietnam, who relied mainly on supplies and support provided from within South Vietnam, rather than relying primarily on external aid.

Krepinevich also argues that instead of focusing too much on the counterinsurgency component of the war effort, the U.S. military failed to concentrate on it enough. He contends that mere lip service was given to the civilian leadership’s demands for greater counterinsurgency effort, and that the early efforts (like the CAP – Combined Action Platoons program, for example) were highly successful, but were discarded shortly after implementation because they were a longer-term solution requiring more time and patience than the military establishment was willing to invest in this type of program. Rather than adapting its doctrine and operations to meet the changing threat of the insurgency, the U.S. military, Krepinevich says, was too inflexible, and wanted to use its conventional approaches and doctrine. Using the same military doctrine that had prevailed in Korea and World War Two, and was designed to match the Soviet conventional threat in Europe, instead of adopting a new low-intensity conflict doctrine is what caused the military failure in Vietnam. Failing to commit enough of our effort on counterinsurgency, rather than too much on it, as Summers asserts, was one of the major causes of U.S. failure in Vietnam, according to Krepinevich.

Review copyright 2009 J. Andrew Byers show less