Vietnam

2018 ◽  
pp. 199-212
Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Strategic Vision ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Vietnam War

This chapter chronicles Kennan’s emergence as a public critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War fifteen years after he had warned against a US military commitment in Indochina. This episode echoed both his earlier strategic vision in East Asia—which asserted the absence of vital US interests on the mainland—and the earlier dilemma he faced in reconciling that vision with his assessment of the importance of maintaining US prestige and credibility there. The chapter highlights how Kennan declared that his doctrine of containment was not applicable in Vietnam, but that he avoided advocating complete military withdrawal until US prestige was irretrievably lost there.

scholarly journals Sensing, territory, population: Computation, embodied sensors, and hamlet control in the Vietnam War

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 416-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Belcher
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Evaluation System ◽  
Military Advisors ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Military Systems ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Systems Analysts ◽  
Village Life ◽  
Machine Readable

This article analyses a mid-20th century computerized pacification reporting system, the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), used by the US military to measure hamlet-level security and development trends in the Vietnam War. The significance of the HES was its capacity to translate US Military Advisor observations of Vietnamese hamlet life into a machine-readable format used by US military systems analysts to disclose ‘patterns of life.’ I show how US Military Advisors operated as ‘embodied sensors’ within the HES, producing a distinctive location-based event ontology – a ‘view of below’ – accompanied by rudimentary digital maps in-formation from incoming hamlet-level observation streams. I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of ‘epistemic violence,’ rooted not so much in the narrative subjection of the ‘Other,’ but in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.

The Vietnam War and the ‘Miracle of East Asia’

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-398
Author(s):  
Keunho Park ◽  
Hiroko Kawasakiya Clayton
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The Vietnam War

Sino-American Relations and the Vietnam War, 1964–66

1976 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 293-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank E. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
International Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Public Signals ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S

Perceptions as well as realities have always played an important role in international politics and it is frequently difficult to separate the two. By the 1960s the realities of increased American involvement in South east Asia and a more militarily and politically influential China heightened the possibility of a Sino-American confrontation. It is the thesis of this study that the United States and the People's Republic of China, both fearful of that possibility as a spill-over from the conflict in Indochina, reached a tacit understanding limiting their involvement. This understanding was transmitted through a series of subtle public signals and, quite possibly, by a number of confidential communications. The primary motive was to prevent an unwanted Sino-American con frontation which could have resulted from a misperception of intentions. As will be demonstrated in this study both Peking and Washington sought, on a number of occasions, to transmit their intentions in order to prevent misperceptions and possible over-reactions.

Targeting Without Lawyers

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-88
Author(s):  
Craig Jones
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that the US-led war in Vietnam (1955–1975) paved the way for institutional changes in the US military, including the establishment of the US Law of War Program, which later precipitated the emergence of a new doctrinal approach to the laws of war called ‘operational law’. Military lawyers emerged from the Vietnam War better equipped and with a formal mandate to advise military commanders on the legality of targeting operations. Military lawyers performed a wide range of duties in Vietnam, especially around Prisoner of War (POW) issues, and were deployed in unprecedented numbers. Military lawyers were not involved in targeting, neither during ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ nor ‘Operation Linebacker’, but the Vietnam War in general and the My Lai massacre of 1968 in particular helped to create the conditions for their involvement in subsequent wars.

The Birth of ‘Operational Law’

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-116
Author(s):  
Craig Jones
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Legal Regimes ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Military Law ◽  
Military Friendly

This chapter analyses the invention and development of ‘operational law’ by US military lawyers and commanders in the decades following the Vietnam War. Operational law is a pragmatic, practitioner-oriented, and military-friendly framework for interpreting rights and responsibilities under international, domestic and military law. This chapter shows how operational law helped the US military to put these legal regimes to work in the service of achieving military objectives, as military lawyers helped create a broadly permissive albeit bounded legal environment for military operations. The birth of operational law laid the foundations for a new symbiosis between commanders and lawyers, providing them with a common vocabulary and a shared understanding of the mission—factors which were later crucial to the integration of military lawyers into targeting operations.

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