![]() The fascinating biography of a man driven to make the US military the superior of any in the world. Here are a some of my favorite books related to war and military thought and the applicable lessons for startups I’ve learned from them. ![]() More recently I have become interested in the lessons for entrepreneurs that can be learned from military history and the strategies of military thinkers. While in high school my classmates and I would constantly badger a certain history teacher to ignore the curriculum and instead tell us stories about his time in the jungles of Vietnam. ![]() They left the tent, doing no harm to anyone, and returned later with medical supplies which they gave to the American doctors. They saw that the American doctors were treating wounded Germans alongside American and British troops. Once, when the Nazis overran the American lines they entered his tent. A friend of my parents served as a doctor in the US Army during the desert battle in Africa against the famous Nazi tank commander Erwin Rommel, aka “The Desert Fox.” This friend spoke about how the battle line would move forward and backward faster than he and his associates could move the medical tents. At the same time I have always been and continue to be fascinated by real-life stories of armed conflict.Īs a child I listened to older generations tell stories about WWII and Vietnam. Not that I fail to recognize the necessity for defense when one is attacked, but because throughout history corrupt governments have promoted admiration of war and the military as a means to their own ends. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era.As a libertarian-leaning, anti-war (not the crazy kind of "anti-war", but anti-war in the sense most of us are) Christian I am hesitant to praise anything related to war. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied-some argued misapplied-military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia.
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