s taying the c ourse 221confl ict was another matter. Military leadership would vex Johnson
throughout the war. Problems started at the top, where the president
inherited a climate of mutual mistrust between his senior civilian
advisors and his military chiefs. He believed he had found an eff ective,
aggressive fi eld commander in General Westmoreland. But where West-
moreland stood out as a fi ne conventional offi cer, he was asked to take
charge of a war that was anything but conventional.
After the Second World War, with the burden of frontline defense of
anticommunist interests around the world thrust on the United States,
peacetime disarmament was no longer possible. Th e U.S. military again
had lapsed into a low state of readiness by the start of the Korean War, but
major reinforcements were available to MacArthur within a couple of
months to permit him to undertake his bold amphibious riposte at
Inchon. At the end of the confl ict, the United States had retained a vast
military establishment, sustained by peacetime conscription and a robust
defense sector that churned out the most advanced weaponry in the
world. As the United States entered the Vietnam confl ict, the American
military establishment claimed more than 2 million active-duty per-
sonnel. A rapid military buildup in Southeast Asia was possible even
without mobilization of reserve forces; political calculations and logistics
would determine the pace of deployment, not troop availability.
On the other hand, neither advanced equipment nor large troop
numbers guaranteed that American soldiers were prepared for the kind
of combat they would meet. The United States military had been
confi gured fi rst and foremost to deter a massive Soviet attack in Europe
and a Soviet nuclear strike. However, as the Kennedy administration
recognized, many weapons intended for possible use in such a potential
war—ranging from tanks to interceptors designed to shoot down
approaching Soviet bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles—
would be of little or no use in the brushfi re wars ignited by national
liberation struggles. To deal with the mismatch between a military
establishment designed for one kind of war but facing another, Kennedy
and a number of his key aides had to step on toes at the Pentagon.
Counterinsurgency advocates pushed creation of the Green Berets, an
elite unit that would train and advise the armed forces of threatened
friendly governments. But the Special Forces could not cope with the
expansion of the Vietnamese communist war effort in 1964–1965