Melvin Laird and the Foundation of the Post-Vietnam Military, 1969-1973 PDF Download

Author: Richard A. Hunt
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN: 9780160927577
Category : Cabinet officers
Languages : en
Pages : 734

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Book Description
This biography examines the former Congressman Melvin Laird's efforts to reconstitute the Department of Defense during the last years of the Vietnam war.

Author: Office of the Secretary of Defense
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
Volume VII of the Secretaries of Defense Historical Series covers President Richard Nixon's first term, January 1969-January 1973, when Melvin Laird served as secretary of defense. The Vietnam War was the dominant issue during his tenure, affecting every aspect of Defense Department operations, planning, programming, and budgeting. Secretary Laird entered office intent upon disengaging from the conflict and helping Nixon reach the peace settlement that had eluded President Lyndon Johnson's administration. Laird implicitly recognized that U.S. involvement in the war had to end because it diverted resources and attention from matters vital to U.S. national interests, such as the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. Despite the conflict's burden on Laird and the Pentagon, the secretary and his immediate staff began shaping the department for the postwar era. They sought to rebuild traditional alliances, replenish weapons and ammunition inventories, develop and procure advanced weapon systems, and adequately fund research and development projects. The success of these initiatives required stable spending in the years to come, but during Laird's tenure the defense program came under sharp attack from Congress and domestic critics. They pressed the administration to spend a greater share of the federal budget on housing, education, the environment, and Medicare. With the end of conscription and the adoption of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the department also faced rising personnel costs to attract future recruits. The military services and the secretary of defense confronted serious threats to the morale and cohesion of the armed forces. Racial tensions, inequality, and the use of illegal drugs among service members, in particular, required innovative approaches. The effort to launch the AVF likewise demanded basic changes to the way the military traditionally handled personnel issues.Laird's tenure as secretary coincided with significant changes in national security policy. The Nixon Doctrine, which encouraged U.S. allies to contribute more in terms of funding and troop levels in defense of their own nations, was part of the framework of Laird's efforts. Nixon also scaled back the national security strategy to an affordable level that could be realistically implemented.

Author: Richard A. Hunt
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN: 9780160927577
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 740

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Book Description
"[E]xamines the former Congressman Melvin Laird's efforts to reconstitute the Department of Defense during the last years of the Vietnam war... Laird acted to mitigate the adverse effects of the Vietnam War on the department and to prepare the nation's armed forces for the future. Foremost was the transition from a conscripted military to an all-volunteer force, a fundamental policy shift that ended an unpopular and inequitable draft system."--from jacket.

Author: Dale Van Atta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cabinet officers
Languages : en
Pages : 900

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Book Description
Focuses on Laird's legacy, revealing his central and often unrecognized role in managing the crisis of national identity sparked by the Vietnam War.

Author: Gregory A. Daddis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190691085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A better war. Over the last two decades, this term has become synonymous with US strategy during the Vietnam War's final years. The narrative is enticingly simple, appealing to many audiences. After the disastrous results of the 1968 Tet offensive, in which Hanoi's forces demonstrated the failures of American strategy, popular history tells of a new American military commander who emerged in South Vietnam and with inspired leadership and a new approach turned around a long stalemated conflict. In fact, so successful was General Creighton Abrams in commanding US forces that, according to the better war myth, the United States had actually achieved victory by mid-1970. A new general with a new strategy had delivered, only to see his victory abandoned by weak-kneed politicians in Washington, DC who turned their backs on the US armed forces and their South Vietnamese allies. In a bold new interpretation of America's final years in Vietnam, acclaimed historian Gregory A. Daddis disproves these longstanding myths. Withdrawal is a groundbreaking reassessment that tells a far different story of the Vietnam War. Daddis convincingly argues that the entire US effort in South Vietnam was incapable of reversing the downward trends of a complicated Vietnamese conflict that by 1968 had turned into a political-military stalemate. Despite a new articulation of strategy, Abrams's approach could not materially alter a war no longer vital to US national security or global dominance. Once the Nixon White House made the political decision to withdraw from Southeast Asia, Abrams's military strategy was unable to change either the course or outcome of a decades' long Vietnamese civil war. In a riveting sequel to his celebrated Westmoreland's War, Daddis demonstrates he is one of the nation's leading scholars on the Vietnam War. Withdrawal will be a standard work for years to come.

Author: Spencer C. Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440860769
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 2392

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Book Description
This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War superpower face-off between the Soviet Union and the United States dominated international affairs in the second half of the 20th century and still reverberates around the world today. This comprehensive and insightful multivolume set provides authoritative entries on all aspects of this world-changing event, including wars, new military technologies, diplomatic initiatives, espionage activities, important individuals and organizations, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. This expansive coverage provides readers with the necessary context to understand the many facets of this complex conflict. The work begins with a preface and introduction and then offers illuminating introductory essays on the origins and course of the Cold War, which are followed by some 1,500 entries on key individuals, wars, battles, weapons systems, diplomacy, politics, economics, and art and culture. Each entry has cross-references and a list of books for further reading. The text includes more than 100 key primary source documents, a detailed chronology, a glossary, and a selective bibliography. Numerous illustrations and maps are inset throughout to provide additional context to the material.

Author: Beth Bailey
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469673274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
By the late 1960s, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August 1968, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured. As Black and white soldiers fought in barracks and bars, with violence spilling into surrounding towns within the US and in West Germany, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan, army leaders grew convinced that the growing racial crisis undermined the army's ability to defend the nation. Acclaimed military historian Beth Bailey shows how the US Army tried to solve that racial crisis (in army terms, "the problem of race"). Army leaders were surprisingly creative in confronting demands for racial justice, even willing to challenge fundamental army principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Bailey traces a frustrating yet fascinating story, as a massive, conservative institution came to terms with demands for change.

Author: Daniel M. G. Raff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198787766
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
"This collection of essays originated in a series of conferences held at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in November 2012 and April 2013"--Preface.

Author: Charles D. Melson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472843371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
During the Cold War, Vietnam showed the limitations of a major power in peripheral conflicts. Even so, the military forces involved (North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, American, and Allied) demonstrated battlefield consistency in conflict that gave credit to them all. By early 1972, Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization" was well underway: South Vietnamese forces had begun to assume greater military responsibility for defense against the North, and US troops were well into their drawdown, with some 25,000 personnel still present in the South. When North Vietnam launched its massive Easter Offensive against the South in late March 1972 (the first invasion effort since the Tet Offensive of 1968), its scale and ferocity caught the US high command off balance. The inexperienced South Vietnamese soldiers manning the area south of Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone in former US bases, plus the US Army and Marines Corps advisors and forces present, had to counter a massive conventional combined-arms invasion. The North's offensive took place simultaneously across three fronts: Quang Tri, Kontum, and An Loc. In I Corps Tactical Zone, the PAVN tanks and infantry quickly captured Quang Tri City and overran the entire province, as well as northern Thua Thien. However, the ARVN forces regrouped along the My Chanh River, and backed by US airpower tactical strikes and bomber raids, managed to halt the PAVN offensive, before retaking the city in a bloody counteroffensive. Based on primary sources and published accounts of those who played a direct role in the events, this book provides a highly detailed analysis of this key moment in the Vietnam conflict. Although the South's forces managed to withstand their greatest trial thus far, the North gained valuable territory within South Vietnam from which to launch future offensives and improved its bargaining position at the Paris peace negotiations.

Author: William Mannen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793607109
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In the second half of the twentieth century, strategic and economic conditions compelled the U.S. government to start running budget deficits on a permanent basis. A new role of global leadership in containing communism required a robust military establishment. The federal government overwhelmingly relied for general revenue on an income tax code that also could not impede economic growth. And general revenue increasingly funded transfer payments in an expanding entitlement state. Fiscal overstretch resulted in unending deficits that continue to this day. At first the shift to deficit normality was not obvious. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations attempted to hold the line on deficits, but this commitment gradually waned in subsequent years. Arms, Revenue, and Entitlements: U.S. Deficits in the Cold War, 1945–1991 looks at the Cold War era from a budgetary perspective and how defense spending, income tax reductions, and entitlement programs all contributed to the emergence of the deficit normative state. As national debt continues to climb in the twenty-first century, Arms, Revenue, and Entitlements shows how the U.S. reached this point and how a comprehensive policy approach might again restore fiscal stability.