I think we can assume that any acolyte of Robert McNamara belong on the 'can't wait till your dead' list.
Does Hallmark have a card for that?
One more idiot for the list of shitheads during the Vietnam war, General Westmoreland
Nice job you twit, they kicked our asses because of you & Kissenger.
Fact
"Westmoreland was sent to Vietnam in 1963. In January 1964, he became deputy commander of
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), eventually succeeding
Paul D. Harkins as commander, in June. Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara told President
Lyndon B. Johnson in April that Westmoreland was "the best we have, without question".
[20] As the head of the MACV, he was known for highly publicized, positive assessments of U.S. military prospects in
Vietnam. However, as time went on, the strengthening of communist combat forces in the South led to regular requests for increases in U.S. troop strength, from 16,000 when he arrived to its peak of 535,000 in 1968 when he was promoted to
Army chief of staff.
On April 28, 1967, Westmoreland addressed a joint session of Congress. "In evaluating the enemy strategy", he said, "it is evident to me that he believes our Achilles heel is our resolve. ... Your continued strong support is vital to the success of our mission. ... Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, determination, and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the communist aggressor!" Westmoreland claimed that under his leadership, United States forces "won every battle".
[21] The turning point of the war was the 1968
Tet Offensive, in which
communist forces attacked cities and towns throughout
South Vietnam. At the time, Westmoreland was focused on the
Battle of Khe Sanh and considered the Tet Offensive to be a diversionary attack. It is not clear if Khe Sanh was meant to be distraction for the Tet Offensive or vice versa;
[22] sometimes this is called the
Riddle of Khe Sanh. Regardless, U.S. and South Vietnamese troops successfully fought off the attacks during the Tet Offensive, and the communist forces took heavy losses, but the ferocity of the assault shook public confidence in Westmoreland's previous assurances about the state of the war. Political debate and public opinion led the
Johnson administration to limit further increases in U.S. troop numbers in Vietnam. Nine months afterward, when the
My Lai Massacre reports started to break, Westmoreland resisted pressure from the incoming
Nixon administration for a cover-up,[
citation needed] and pressed for a full and impartial investigation by Lieutenant General
William R. Peers. However, a few days after the tragedy, he had praised the same involved unit on the "outstanding job", for the "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists [
sic] in a bloody day-long battle". Post 1969 Westmoreland also made efforts to investigate the
Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre a year after the event occurred.
[23]
Westmoreland was convinced that the Vietnamese communists could be destroyed by fighting a war of
attrition that, theoretically, would render the
Vietnam People's Army unable to fight. His war strategy was marked by heavy use of artillery and airpower and repeated attempts to engage the communists in large-unit battles, and thereby exploit the US's vastly superior firepower and technology. Westmoreland's response, to those Americans who criticized the high casualty rate of Vietnamese civilians, was: "It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn't it?"
[24] However, the
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the
National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) were able to dictate the pace of attrition to fit their own goals: by continuing to fight a guerrilla war and avoiding large-unit battles, they denied the Americans the chance to fight the kind of war they were best at, and they ensured that attrition would wear down the American public's support for the war faster than they.
[25]
Westmoreland repeatedly rebuffed or suppressed attempts by
John Paul Vann and
Lew Walt to shift to a "pacification" strategy.
[21] Westmoreland had little appreciation of the patience of the American public for his time frame, and was struggling to persuade President Johnson to approve widening the war into
Cambodia and
Laos in order to interdict the
Ho Chi Minh trail. He was unable to use the absolutist stance that "we can't win unless we expand the war". Instead, he focused on "positive indicators", which ultimately turned worthless when the Tet Offensive occurred, since all his pronouncements of "positive indicators" did not hint at the possibility of such a last-gasp dramatic event. Tet outmaneuvered all of Westmoreland's pronouncements on "positive indicators" in the minds of the American public.
[26]
At one point in 1968, Westmoreland considered the use of
nuclear weapons in Vietnam in a contingency plan codenamed
Fracture Jaw, which was abandoned when it became known to the White House"
