No Exit From Vietnam

New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1969. First American Edition [stated], Presumed first printing. Hardcover. 208 pages. Small tear on rear dust jacket. Name in ink inside the front cover. Crease in fep. Includes Preface, as well as three black and white maps of South-East Asia; South Vietnam; and Population Map of South Vietnam. Includes Chapter on Changing the Rules, as well as Part I: People's Revolutionary War; and Part II: Squaring the Error. Index. Includes red underlining on several text pages. The world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency warfare analyzes the errors of American policy and strategy in Vietnam. Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson (1916–1992) was a British military officer and counter-insurgency expert who "was widely regarded as the world's leading expert on countering the Mao Tse-tung technique of rural guerrilla insurgency". He was a liaison officer with the Chindits in the Burma Campaign, being awarded the DSO and the MC. In 1959, Thompson became permanent secretary for defence for Tun Abdul Razak. In response to a request from President Diem of South Vietnam, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Malayan prime minister sent a team to South Vietnam to advise on how to counter the insurgency problems. That team which so impressed Diem that he asked the British to second Thompson to the government South Vietnam as an advisor. In 1961, the Prime Minister Macmillan appointed Thompson head of the newly established British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam and Washington. When Thompson saw the effects of the strategic hamlets initiative, begun in February 1962, he became an enthusiastic backer, telling President Kennedy in 1963 that the war could be won. Based on his expertise in a little-known and much-misunderstood field, Sir Robert argues that in Vietnam, American strategy was misconceived and American power was misapplied. The American effort--with whose objectives the author has no quarrel--failed because the U.S. understood the nature of revolutionary warfare, demanded results faster than they could be obtained, relied on conventional military force in the field rather than on attacking the political substructure of the insurgents, and finally elected to halt the bombing and seek negotiations at the wrong time, in the wrong manner, and for the wrong reasons. The Vietnam war is likely to prove one of decisive wars of this century. It has certainly created' the greatest controversy. If it was the right war in the right place at the right time, it has been fought by the Americans, Sir Robert maintains, in entirely the wrong way. Their failure to understand the nature of the war, and the techniques of People's Revolutionary War, has brought them to the brink of defeat. The author, who is one of the world's leading experts on counter-insurgency describes these techniques, and Hanoi's strategy both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, and attributes the American discomfiture to an obscurity of aim, a failure of strategy and a lack of control. Only two options now face the new President defeat or a continuation of the war (requiring the adoption of a new long-haul low-cost strategy). Negotiations at this stage are part of the war and are not an option, because they will lead only to one or other of these two outcomes. In this wholly original and unorthodox book Sir Robert gives a lucid explanation of the course of the war over the last four years, in terms that anybody can understand, and of the point now reached. Condition: Good / Good.

Keywords: Vietnam War, Counterinsurgency, Guerrilla War, Military Strategy, Indochina, Infiltration, Pacification, People's Revolutionary War, Tet Offensive, Vietcong, Viet Cong, Vo Nguyen Giap

[Book #81413]

Price: $50.00

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