On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context

Washington, DC: GPO, 1981. Wraps. fair to good. 137 pages. Wraps, footnotes, bibliography, index, some pencil underlining & marginal checkmarks, sm stains fore-edge, some soiling covers. Presentation copy inscribed and signed by the author. Author's business card (with his handwritten notes) taped to p. 122; pencil and ink notes on that page as well. An important study of the war by a career officer, applying Clausewitz's principles to the actual conduct of the war. A controversial study even before publication, this has since come to be recognized as one of the pieces of writing to formally articulate the "lessons of Vietnam" in a way that attempts to understand the mistakes and build for the future from the basis of that understanding. Summers focusedon the questions at the intersection of military strategy and national policy, and the effect of his (and later, others') analyses of such questions has been amply demonstrated in the U.S. conduct of the Gulf War, for example. There are references to the Spanish-American War on pp. 7, 8, and 40.