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

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.

Readership: General readers, students, and scholars interested in American politics, Vietnam War, military history, and security studies.

Gregory A. Daddis, Academy Professor of History, US Military Academy, West Point

Gregory A. Daddis is Academy Professor of History at the United States Military Academy, West Point, and a Colonel in the U.S. Army.

Maps of Vietnam and Major Breakout Zones
Lists of Abbreviations
Introduction
1: Of Questions Not Asked
2: Measurements Without Objectives
3: An "Unprecedented Victory"
4: Metrics in the Year of American Firepower
5: "We are winning slowly but steadily"
6: The Year of Tet
7: "A Time for Testing"
8: Soldiers' Interlude
9: Staggering to the Finish
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index