In, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War, written in 2011, David Anderson states that the Tet Offensive can be seen both as an action of survival to initiate a general offensive before U.S. arms further weakened the People’s Liberation Armed Forces and People’s Army of Vietnam (North) and as an act of political belief that the people of the South would turn on the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and the United States. The general offensive did not lead to a popular uprising and instead exposed the Communist forces to enormous losses that they could not afford. Robert J. McMahon, states that the weeks preceding and the months following the initial Tet fighting constituted the pivotal period when the escalation of the American ground
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In terms of both conventional and revolutionary warfare, the Tet Offensive was a tactical failure. In an intelligence memorandum circulated on January 31, the CIA soberly described the Tet Offensive as designed to demonstrate North Vietnamese and Vietcong strength and resiliency and at the same time deal a psychological blow to the United States and South Vietnamese partners. As McNamara, Carver, and others had forecast, the Tet Offensive did have influential psychological and political impacts that went well beyond its rather limited military accomplishments and dealt a body blow to the Johnson administration’s believability, making a mockery of the wildly optimistic statements that Westmoreland, Bunker, and Johnson himself had delivered so recently. Johnson and his chief aides publicly claimed that the attacks were not unexpected and that the U.S. and South Vietnamese defenders had inflicted a devastating defeat on the insurgents. The year 1968 certainly deserves the distinction as the conflict’s pivotal year as decision makers hesitantly accepted the fact that the war simply could not be won-at least not at an acceptable cost and exposing the fundamental contradictions of the Johnson-Westmoreland …show more content…
intelligence reports as they tended to produce intelligence that confirmed beliefs about the decline of the communist military, thereby pleasing everybody except a few pessimists at the CIA. However, the U.S analysts did fall victim to the “ultra” syndrome, the tendency to rely on sources of information that have a reputation for providing accurate and timely information. Analysts and those responsible for responding to warning solved the dilemma posed by the “cry-wolf” syndrome in an extremely unproductive fashion as they shifted the responsibility for discriminating warnings to field commanders as they were forced to rely on their own devices and those who collected and analyzed information that indicated a threat against their units responded to the Tet alert and those in an apparently quiet sector dismissed warnings issued by Military Assistance Command Vietnam as just another false alarm. Intelligence failure also highlights the herculean task faced by officers, analysts, and policy makers as they attempted to complete the intelligence cycle. The failure to anticipate an attack in wartime, when Americans could have assumed that their opponents would do everything in their power to hurt the allied war
In terms of both conventional and revolutionary warfare, the Tet Offensive was a tactical failure. In an intelligence memorandum circulated on January 31, the CIA soberly described the Tet Offensive as designed to demonstrate North Vietnamese and Vietcong strength and resiliency and at the same time deal a psychological blow to the United States and South Vietnamese partners. As McNamara, Carver, and others had forecast, the Tet Offensive did have influential psychological and political impacts that went well beyond its rather limited military accomplishments and dealt a body blow to the Johnson administration’s believability, making a mockery of the wildly optimistic statements that Westmoreland, Bunker, and Johnson himself had delivered so recently. Johnson and his chief aides publicly claimed that the attacks were not unexpected and that the U.S. and South Vietnamese defenders had inflicted a devastating defeat on the insurgents. The year 1968 certainly deserves the distinction as the conflict’s pivotal year as decision makers hesitantly accepted the fact that the war simply could not be won-at least not at an acceptable cost and exposing the fundamental contradictions of the Johnson-Westmoreland …show more content…
intelligence reports as they tended to produce intelligence that confirmed beliefs about the decline of the communist military, thereby pleasing everybody except a few pessimists at the CIA. However, the U.S analysts did fall victim to the “ultra” syndrome, the tendency to rely on sources of information that have a reputation for providing accurate and timely information. Analysts and those responsible for responding to warning solved the dilemma posed by the “cry-wolf” syndrome in an extremely unproductive fashion as they shifted the responsibility for discriminating warnings to field commanders as they were forced to rely on their own devices and those who collected and analyzed information that indicated a threat against their units responded to the Tet alert and those in an apparently quiet sector dismissed warnings issued by Military Assistance Command Vietnam as just another false alarm. Intelligence failure also highlights the herculean task faced by officers, analysts, and policy makers as they attempted to complete the intelligence cycle. The failure to anticipate an attack in wartime, when Americans could have assumed that their opponents would do everything in their power to hurt the allied war