Norton Glover reviewed The Perfect War by James William Gibson
Solid takedown of the Vietnam-era military
4 stars
A critical look at the U.S. military's failure during the Vietnam War.
According to Gibson, the military and civilian authorities ignored political and cultural realities, in favor of a data-driven "Technowar".
The stories of corruption, fragging, incompetence, poor morale, and war crimes isn't particularly new if you're familiar with the period, but it's bracing to have it all spelled out.
Gibson also criticizes a lot of the other then-current analyses of the failure in Vietnam; those that blamed excessive civilian restraint or anti-war protestors.
It's a book from the 80s, so it ends with concerns that the US was making the same mistakes in Central America. Due to the end of the Cold War, it didn't exactly happen, but there were a lot of parallels.
Gibson's criticisms don't map on to the Afghanistan/Iraq wars directly, but they're not completely unrelated.