Ten Lessons the West Forgot. Vietnam, the Ruins of Technocratic War, and a Warning to Washington’s New Crusaders

“We were wrong, terribly wrong.” — Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect, 1995

Half a century after the last American helicopter clawed its way off the roof of the Saigon embassy, the Vietnam War remains the skeleton key to understanding how great powers lose wars they need not have fought. Not because the facts are obscure — the Pentagon Papers, McNamara’s own confession, and four decades of multilingual scholarship have laid the record bare — but because every generation of Washington policymakers contrives to forget what the record teaches.