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The "other War"

其他書名	An Intellectual History of American Nationbuilding in South Vietnam, 1954-1975
出版	Ohio State University, 1997
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=1CxFnQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Abstract: This study contributes to a post-revisionist synthesis of the Vietnam War by making two basic points about Americans involved in the multifarious US and South Vietnamese government activities that fell outside the realm of large-scale combat operations (the so-called "Other War) from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s. Like some revisionist scholars, the author concludes that US "Other Warriors" provided their superiors with generally balanced accounts of the current activities and standings of the various contending parties in South Vietnam. He finds, however, that this group exuded an unjustified optimism regarding the prospect of constructing a strong, prosperous, independent, and democratic Government of Vietnam. The author also agrees with revisionists that, to a certain extent, "Other War" experts understood the nationalist and revolutionary character of the Vietnam War. Still, they never developed a coherent alternative to the dominant US-South Vietnamese model of attrition warfare. Thus, in the author's view, the root problem with counterinsurgency and nationbuilding in Vietnam was with the concepts themselves. American proponents of the "Other War" largely failed to confront the heterogeneous assumptions that underlay their ad hoc attempt to build a nation in the midst of war. The evidentiary basis for this dual thesis is the Vietnam-era writings of the "Other Warriors" themselves. This includes the published memoirs, interviews, journal articles, congressional testimony, and research reports as well as the unpublished bureaucratic analyses, end-of-tour reports, letters, memoranda, speeches, and essays of important "Other War" figures. The inspiration for the author's decision to treat this group of middle-level military officers and civilian bureaucrats and government-sponsored social scientists as a loosely-knit nationbuilding/counterinsurgency coalition derives from two sources: the corporatist model of US foreign relations, championed by historians such as Michael Hogan and Ellis Hawley, and the "revisionist" model of US civil-military relations introduced by political scientist Richard Betts. In order to capture the complexity of American thinking regarding Vietnam's "Other War," this study also draws upon a number of intellectual historical, military historical, and sociological accounts of America's interventionist ethos, US political development theory and doctrine, and the American or Western "Way of War."