Relegated to the backseat: Farm Gate and the failure of the US air advisory effort in South Vietnam, 1961–1963

In describing the problems that he faced in conducting revolutionary war in China, Mao Tse-tung remarked:

The only way to study the laws governing a war situation as a whole is to do some hard thinking. For what pertains to the situation as a whole is not visible to the eye, and we can understand it only by hard thinking; there is no other way.2