ABSTRACT
The debate surrounding the Vietnam debacle has, not surprisingly, been rather intense. It is important to avoid believing that it is polarised between one side and another. Rather, differences of opinion tend to be of degree rather than substance. On the one hand, John Shy and Thomas Collier have argued that American strategic theory as applied to the war was:
[S]hallow, lacking either the fusion of mysticism and rationalism of guerre revolutionnaire, or the phlegmatic pragmatism of British civil-military coordination. It was almost a purely military approach, like the Normandy landings or the liberation of Luzon in 1944, targeted on an enemy presumed to be the mirror image of American combat units, the peasants waiting passively for the blessings attendant on American liberation.1
