DR CHRIS TRIPODI Oddly, and in contrast to my colleagues, there’ll be relatively little reading happening for me this summer. Largely because the summer recess that I do get (i.e. August) will be spent writing. Consequently, most of my summer reading has already been done. And very illuminating it has been, I must say. Research… Read More DSD Summer Reading #6
DR JEFFREY MICHAELS In the anti-war film Go Tell the Spartans, set in Vietnam in 1964, the conflict is described as ‘going nowhere, just around and around in circles’. Perhaps a slightly more accurate representation can be found in the work of Franz Kafka, such as Der Prozeß, in which his protagonist seems to make… Read More Stuck in Endless Preliminaries: Vietnam and the Battle of the Paris Peace Table, November 1968-January 1969
by Lt Col EDWARD T. NEVGLOSKI, USMC In the 50 years since US Marines first landed at Da Nang on the morning of 8 March 1965, the history of their involvement in the Vietnam War has been one of the most misunderstood and sometimes contentious topics in modern military history. In most cases historians assert… Read More Reconsidering US Marine Corps Involvement in the Vietnam War
by DR KEN PAYNE The Vietnam war is quite a story. And it’s a story rich with irony: the dramatic irony of unintended consequences and flawed heroes. That makes it hard, perhaps impossible, for modern artists to say much new about conflict, and explains why that war continues to resonate a half century after the… Read More War Stories
DR ANDREW GAWTHORPE A new book from Evan Thomas reminds us – as if we needed it – of the peculiarities of President Richard Nixon. Brilliant, reclusive, and disturbed, Nixon ought to defy caricature even though he has often been the subject of it. His foreign policy partnership with Henry Kissinger reflected this. By marginalizing… Read More Nixon the Nation-Builder? Strategic Understanding in the Vietnam War
by DR KENNETH PAYNE Behavioural economics is all the rage these days. Thanks in large part to the Nobel prize winning research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, economics has discovered some powerful insights about how humans really behave when it comes to making life choices. That is really behave, as opposed to the dominant approach hitherto, which was to assume… Read More Behavioural Strategy: Exploring the Psychology of Strategy
by MR ANDREW GAWTHORPE While the debate over American strategy in the Vietnam War has been long and bitter, it has also been strangely constricted. This stems in part from the fact it has largely been an anguished dialogue among Americans searching for the reasons which underlay their nation’s defeat. This means that a lot… Read More Nation-Building: A Forgotten Aspect of the Vietnam War
Defence-In-Depth 