While kind of a dry enterprise this monograph is best regarded as an effort by a writer who was a staff officer in the contemporary United States Army to comprehend the errors of his predecessors in Vietnam. The basic conclusion that Daddis comes to is that while generals such as Westmoreland and Abrams were well aware that simplistic measures of military inputs were probably not going to cut it in terms of judging progress in the war, those simplistic measures are what they tended to lean on as they went about their business for lack of anything better. Why there was nothing better would require a close examination of the U.S. Army's intellectual culture; there is the suspicion (see the works of Tom Ricks) that it did not help that many of the senior generals of the Vietnam era had missed out on going to the War College, thus lowering the professional tone of the service. Be that as it may, the overall impact is to reinforce the interpretation that United States involvement in Vietnam was probably a mistake from the start (if inevitable considering the temper of the time), and that the intervention of a large field army was definitely a mistake. ( )