Comment on Mueller: American Misperceptions

Abstract

Professor Muellers article examines one major aspect of American strategy in the Vietnam war, by addressing what was important to our own decision-making process. I am not convinced, however, that it gets at what was fundamentally significant in the conduct of the war from our adversaries' point of view. It is most revealing that, five years after the American defeat, we are offered another example of a persistent flaw in American strategic thinking about the nature of the Vietnam war. I refer to the belief that the United States was engaged in a conflict which could be measured primarily in American dimensions and within our scientific framework when in reality the war strategy that countedpsychologically and politically-was the one designed by the Vietnamese Communists and refined continuously to meet the needs of a complex situation evolving over decades. In Professor Mueller's article we have a brilliant, well-documented analysis of an American football game set forth in terms which we find intellectually compatible. Unfortunately, the Vietnamese Communists' game was of their own choosing. While Professor Mueller's statistics are not irrelevant, the course of the war was decided on grounds closer to the Communist conception of reality and according to rules not susceptible to the precise quantification of which we Americans are so fond. Indeed, reading certain sections of Professor Mueller's analysis, I feel uneasily at home-as if I were returning to those lucid American Embassy Saigon and MACV papers of the 1960s. My basic disagreement springs from Professor Mueller's question regarding the U.S. search for a breaking point. He questions why the Vietnamese were willing to accept virtually unprecedented losses for the sake of a military goal that was far from central to their survival as a nation, (emphasis added). This major premise misses the essence of the Vietnam war. It also reflects the fundamental misperception of Ameri-