The Wise Man
cation is not to dole out force in small doses; rather, it is to employ the traditional American way of war, sudden, unrestrained violence in pursuit of total victory. Where Americans have fought wars that way, we have won. Where we have not, we have lost. The accepted wisdom in the Vietnam period was that had the U.S. extended the ground war to the North (as many military leaders wanted), China would have intervened, leading to a second Korean War. Moyar notes that newly obtained Chinese sources fail to support this notion. One might add that the “Second Korean War” scenario looks pretty good compared with what actually happened, since in Korea we suffered two-thirds the casualties of Vietnam (killed and wounded), and we maintained the South’s freedom.
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