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On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War By Harry G. Summers Jr. Presidio Press, 210 pp., $12.95 Colonel of Infantry Harry G. Summers served as a squad leader in Korea and as a battalion and corps operations officer in Vietnam. He is a strategist now serving on the faculty of the Army War College. I mention these matters up front to get them out of the way: some will dismiss this book because it was written by an Army officer on taxpayer time with the cooperation of the entire military bureaucracy, from the Army Chief of Staff on down. Others more familiar with the workings of the military and the candid give-and-take that occurs within its councils will recognize this short, dense book for what it is: the definitive analysis of one of America’s greatest agonies. Take Dispatches off your coffee table. Move Crisis in Command to a distinctly subordinate spot in your library. Give Self-Destruction to the Cub Scouts’ paper drive. On Strategy will, I predict, not merely become the seminal work on Vietnam; it will make history. First privately printed by the Army War College, the book has just been reissued commercially by Presidio Press. Advance reviews have been uniformly laudatory, and with good reason. Our civilian and military leaders, and the citizens whose blood and flesh and treasure are expended in our wars, will ignore this book at their peril.

What Clausewitz did for war, Colonel Summers has done for the Vietnam War. Applying Clausewitz’s principles and his own abundant good sense, Colonel Summers has woven an intricate tapestry of the strategic, tactical, political, and social aspects of the war into a coruscating analysis of what went wrong, of how and why, and of what we could have done at each stage to keep our effort from turning into an inexcusable and costly debacle.

JA

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Joseph A. Rehyansky

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On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War By Harry G. Summers Jr. Presidio Press, 210 pp., $12.95 Colonel of Infantry Harry G. Summers served as a squad leader in Korea and as a battalion and corps operations officer in Vietnam. He is a strategist now serving on the faculty of the Army War College. I mention these matters up front to get them out of the way: some will dismiss this book because it was written by an Army officer on taxpayer time with the cooperation of the entire military bureaucracy, from the Army Chief of Staff on down. Others more familiar with the workings of the military and the candid give-and-take that occurs within its councils will recognize this short, dense book for what it is: the definitive analysis of one of America’s greatest agonies. Take Dispatches off your coffee table. Move Crisis in Command to a distinctly subordinate spot in your library. Give Self-Destruction to the Cub Scouts’ paper drive. On Strategy will, I predict, not merely become the seminal work on Vietnam; it will make history. First privately printed by the Army War College, the book has just been reissued commercially by Presidio Press. Advance reviews have been uniformly laudatory, and with good reason. Our civilian and military leaders, and the citizens whose blood and flesh and treasure are expended in our wars, will ignore this book at their peril.

What Clausewitz did for war, Colonel Summers has done for the Vietnam War. Applying Clausewitz’s principles and his own abundant good sense, Colonel Summers has woven an intricate tapestry of the strategic, tactical, political, and social aspects of the war into a coruscating analysis of what went wrong, of how and why, and of what we could have done at each stage to keep our effort from turning into an inexcusable and costly debacle.