Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine

Nixon said he didn't want to be remembered as the first president to lose a war but, judging from the number of recent books moaning over the current plight of the military (see, for instance, George Walton's The Tarnished Shield and William Hauser's America's Army in Crisis), the Americans were indeed, as Loory baldly puts it, “defeated” in Vietnam. Defeated not so much by the enemy as by the military establishment's inability to solve its internal problems: the sheer vastness of the machine, the growth of a “yes-man syndrome” within the officer corps (which eroded and corrupted professional judgment), the demoralization of enlisted men, and many more factors.