Dr. Marc,

The devil, however, is in the details and, let's face it, the details in both Iraq and Afghanistan morphed into the construction of "democracies" which was not part of the original, political calculus of cost; neither were the "insurgencies" .
Very true. Iraq was a stretch and Afghanistan morphing in under a half-century is an impossibility.

That being said, then why has the response to the economic "warfare" of various and sundry financial institutions not been dealt with in a similar manner? Why is he not advocating swarming by accountants which, IMHO, would have far more effect
Amen. For an anthropologist, you are a fine economist.

Ken,

Impressive response. You wrote:

That's merely one small point, a far larger issue is what capability those dollars bought and what combat effectiveness was or is produced. Cost effectiveness is too easily skewed to prove that money is being 'wasted.' What should be purchased for the spending is combat effectiveness. I have no doubt what so ever that the average Infantryman in Viet Nam was more capable than his WW II counterpart probably by a factor of two-- and I have no doubt that my serving Son and his contemporaries are miles ahead of us old guys, probably by another factor of at least two and quite possibly up to four. So yes, we're spending more but we're buying far more capability with fewer but considerably more expensive people.
Fuchs already carried on the discussion with you on effectiveness/efficiency, so I won't beat a dead horse.

Agree with you that combat-effectiveness per soldier has been greatly multiplied (very Cebrowskian ), and expensive technology is part of that. That's a good thing. I'm not looking for cost savings by going "cheap" on what individuals or small units use. Given pie-in-the-sky objectives by politicians, the military naturally tries to secure maximum deployment of personnel and resources when most of the realistic military objectives (as opposed to political/diplomatic/economic objectives) that can be acheived in any given situation short of a great power war require less. Sometimes much less because the military is often used as a blunt instrument for inherently political and murkily complex problems ( ex. Lebanon 1980's, Somalia and Haiti 1990's) to which they are ill-suited as the primary instrument of national policy.

I fully understand the perspective of military specialists needing to plan a campaign or a mission from the point of effectiveness over cost. They should. However, the purpose of civilian leadership in is to ensure that the war effort is sustainable over time until victory is acheived, which means setting parameters and priorities whether it is "Germany, First", "Don't go north of the Yalu" or "we're building carriers not battleships". Our national political leadership have pursued the war on terror generally in a way that maximizes expenditure without maximizing effect. As we are waging war on borrowed money, we ought to, at least, bring our strategic goals into alignment with what the military is most likely to be able to accomplish and put more heft into the activities of HUMINT operators, diplomats and economic development rather than chase diminishing returns with marginal dollars.

Wilf,

Tet was significant. It did not loose the war, or even represent a turning point. It wasn't Kursk or Stalingrad. - and was the North better of with Nixon than LBJ?
LBJ was inept in foreign affairs and Nixon was adept. After Tet both sought a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam, but the difference is LBJ had no idea even how to begin such a process and Nixon did; moreover, he intended to try and drive a hard bargain with Hanoi. Nixon's foremost worry in the summer of 1968 was that LBJ would give away the store to the Communists in order to get Humphrey elected.

Nixon had a strategy, unlike LBJ. He was no less determined to "win."
We agree that Richard Nixon had a strategy. Unfortunately, winning in Vietnam was not part of it and never was ( to use one of your phrases, such a position is "evidence-free"). In Nixon's own words he was looking for "unexplored avenues to probe" in "finding a way to end the war".

Nixon began moving beyond Vietnam as a national priority in 1967 when he penned "Asia After Vietnam" for Foreign Affairs. This position hardened after his pre-presidential campaign world tour. The idea that Nixon intended to "win" is belied by the record of Kissinger's Paris talks and numerous other documents.

Sorry but it was. It was instrumental in the coup in Cambodia and it knocked out all the major NVA base areas for two years. No single action did more military damage to the NVA than the Cambodian invasion. It was military action focussed on military forces, and yes it had strategic effect.
Sorry, it was not. With Cambodia, Nixon gave his military leaders - whom he did not trust, nor who trusted him - far more of what they had been asking to do for years but this was in part because of the demands he was imposing on them with the pace of troop withdrawals. Arguably, Cambodia bought GVN a breathing space and was the right thing to do but it was not (and did not) going to compel Hanoi to come to terms. It was on Saigon, not Hanoi that the USG ultimately imposed peace terms.

Watergate and the 73 Oil crisis doomed SVN greatly more than the very minor reversals of Tet five years before
Watergate certainly rendered Nixon and later Ford of extending air power and military assistance to GVN as the USG had promised Saigon. Tet however did not doom GVN, it changed American perceptions of the war and political support for it here at home.