The Perfect War; Technowar in Vietnam

Boston, MA: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. First Edition. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 25 cm. x,[2], 523, [9] pages. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Index. James William Gibson is the author of Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America and The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and winner of multiple awards, including a Guggenheim. He attended graduate school at Yale University, and wrote his thesis on how the U.S. military conceptualized and fought the Vietnam War, and why, despite overwhelming technological superiority, it was defeated by the Vietnamese. The Atlantic Monthly Press subsequently published a revised version of the thesis in 1986 as The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. In February 2000, Grove/Atlantic re-issued The Perfect War with a new introduction. While writing The Perfect War in the early and mid-1980s Gibson began to study the cultural and political traumas caused by America's defeat in Vietnam. He began to research the emerging paramilitary culture. Derived from a Kirkus review: In Gibson's concept, the war is seen as a corporate-style production system in which the managers were the officer corps, the workers were the enlisted men, and the product was the infamous body count. Gibson condemns the US organization of the war in strong terms: "The production model of war has no concept of legitimacy, of loyalty, of allegiance...; instead it attempted to produce control by force, distribution of commodities, and public relations slogans." He coins the term "mechanistic anticommunism" to describe the basic US motive. The massive firepower and high technology caused the war managers to feel invincible: defeat was impossible. Though American technology killed massive numbers of the enemy, the production warfare system could not counter the political and military strategies of the other side. A perceptive, cogent, significant--and so far the best--analysis of the meaning of America's only military defeat. Gibson includes massive documentation.