No Sure Victory : Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War

Filled with incisive analysis and rich historical detail, No Sure Victory will be a valuable resource for Vietnam War historians and current military professionals alike. For students of military history, American history, and 20th-century political history, this book will provide a new take on the well-worn issue of determining the root cause of U.S. military failure in Vietnam. For the contemporary military or political official, No Sure Victory is a case study in unconventional warfare, a cautionary tale that will be an important guide to measuring performance in current and future armed conflict.

It is commonly thought that the U.S. Army in Vietnam, thrust into a war in which territory occupied was meaningless, depended on body counts as its sole measure of military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian Gregory A. Daddis uncovers the truth behind this gross simplification of the historical record. Daddis shows that, confronted by an unfamiliar enemy and an even more unfamiliar form of warfare, the U.S. Army adopted a massive, and eventually unmanageable, system of measurements and formulas to track the progress of military operations that ranged from pacification efforts to search-and-destroy missions. Concentrating more on data collection and less on data analysis, these indiscriminate attempts to gauge success may actually have hindered the army''s ability to evaluate the true outcome of the fight at hand--a roadblock that Daddis believes significantly contributed to the multitude of failures that American forces in Vietnam faced. Filled with incisive analysis and rich historical detail, No Sure Victory is a valuable case study in unconventional warfare, a cautionary tale that offers important perspectives on how to measure performance in current and future armed conflict.