"We were succeeding. When you looked at specifics, this became a war of attrition. We were winning"
About this Quote
Victory becomes a spreadsheet when the battlefield refuses to behave like one. Westmoreland’s line is doing two jobs at once: defending a strategy and laundering a moral and political catastrophe into managerial language. “We were succeeding” is a claim aimed less at history than at accountability, the kind you offer when the nightly news is showing body bags and burning villages. It’s not triumphal; it’s bureaucratic. The repetition - “succeeding,” “winning” - sounds like a briefing slide reinforced into a mantra.
The pivot phrase, “When you looked at specifics,” is the tell. It invites you to stop looking at the whole war - legitimacy, popular support, endurance, geopolitical optics - and focus on countable units. Attrition is the most quantifiable form of warfare: enemy killed, sorties flown, hamlets “secured.” It’s also the easiest to misread in Vietnam, where the opponent’s capacity to replenish, blend into civilian life, and outlast American domestic patience turned raw numbers into a kind of mirage.
In context, this is a rebuttal to the central indictment of U.S. leadership in Vietnam: that military metrics were substituted for political reality. Westmoreland isn’t just claiming progress; he’s asserting that the only lens that matters is the one that flatters his command assumptions. The subtext is a wager that “winning” can be defined narrowly enough to be true, even as the war is being lost where it actually counts: public consent, South Vietnamese legitimacy, and time.
The pivot phrase, “When you looked at specifics,” is the tell. It invites you to stop looking at the whole war - legitimacy, popular support, endurance, geopolitical optics - and focus on countable units. Attrition is the most quantifiable form of warfare: enemy killed, sorties flown, hamlets “secured.” It’s also the easiest to misread in Vietnam, where the opponent’s capacity to replenish, blend into civilian life, and outlast American domestic patience turned raw numbers into a kind of mirage.
In context, this is a rebuttal to the central indictment of U.S. leadership in Vietnam: that military metrics were substituted for political reality. Westmoreland isn’t just claiming progress; he’s asserting that the only lens that matters is the one that flatters his command assumptions. The subtext is a wager that “winning” can be defined narrowly enough to be true, even as the war is being lost where it actually counts: public consent, South Vietnamese legitimacy, and time.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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