s taying the c ourse 223hinted that future promotions would be based on experience in coun-
terinsurgency operations.) None of this boded well for mutual under-
standing when the United States found itself engaged in a major war
quite unlike recent confl icts and posing daunting, interwoven political
and military problems.
At the most fundamental level, McNamara and other civilian
advisors had a different conception of the nature of war, especially
limited confl icts such as the one in Vietnam, from that of the military
leadership. To the civilians, war represented an extension of politics as
a rational form of human activity. An adversary could be deterred or
discouraged if the price imposed on him outweighed the potential gain
from fi ghting. Actual war required infl icting suffi cient pain to make the
enemy accept a political settlement—in this instance, compelling
Hanoi to respect the independence of South Vietnam. Th e point at
which the other side would be prepared to accept terms might not be
known in advance, but it could be identifi ed through a gradual increase
in violence, each additional increment of which would also commu-
nicate American seriousness of purpose and the intention to continue
raising the level of destruction.
For the military, by contrast, war was a messy, imprecise business
that unleashed powerful emotions, undermining any eff ort to calibrate
the level of violence or connect it to a predictable political response.
Military commanders, such as General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, JCS
chairman during the escalation phase of the Vietnam War, believed that
past confl icts, especially the Second World War, demonstrated the need
to cripple completely an enemy’s capacity to continue to fi ght. Victory,
however defined, required inflicting maximum punishment on the
enemy, and doing so as quickly as possible to break his will and min-
imize losses on both sides—what a later generation would refer to as
“shock and awe.” Th e JCS pressed the president to fully exploit Amer-
ican military assets and complained about civilian Pentagon leaders
who refused to do so.
Johnson found himself caught between these incompatible views of
warfare. He sympathized with the uniformed commanders’ view that
military resources should be used to overwhelm an adversary. Still, he
subscribed to the belief that the war must be contained and all measures
that might widen it avoided. Th e military conception of how to fi ght