Clash of Cultures

This study depicts the intense and complex relationship between the U.S. military and both its supporters and opponents in American civil society during the Vietnam War. The ability of the U.S. military to prosecute the war was complicated by its relationship to a civilian state that interpreted the strategic value, risks, morality, political costs, and military and political results according to a different set of values. The conduct of the war represented complex compromises between military and civilian leaderships that reflected an underlying clash over the whole perspective on the conflict, its nature, purpose and results. Throughout the Vietnam War era, the military faced the extraordinary political context of limited wars in the modern era, where military planning has to calculate the impact of television as an instrument used both to perceive the war and to project the actions and ideas of a large domestic antiwar movement. The author argues that divergent ideological systems determined the specific nature of U.S. intervention. The political context of U.S. intervention, namely the disastrous relationships among the military, the Nixon administration, and the hostile antiwa The civil-military divide thus defined the Vietnam War and its legacy to the post-Vietnam armed forces and to American society as a whole.