The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1375: The Significance of Khe Sanh - Part 2 - The Finale - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

46 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas concludes a series on the significance of the 1968 Battle of Khe Sanh.Radio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas' WebsiteThomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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the audio files that you can download and listen to or you can stream in most cases through those locations as well. So if you want to avoid the ads, consider supporting the show if not, just know none of these ads get any endorsement from me, skip by them, do what you need to do. I appreciate all of you. Head on over to the Picanionos Show.com. You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back and we're going to pick up where we left off on Kaysan. Hey, Thomas. How are you doing? I don't very well. Thanks. I want to talk, General. I think at least if memory serves, and I was going over my outline from the last episode,

I think it would be redundant to get into the discrete order of battle, the battle of QaSan. And anyway, that was fluid in terms of overall deployment on the communist side. And on the American side, obviously the ground element was static. It was because, I mean, it was a siege. You know, what carried the day was just taking. nothing away from the fortitude of the the the Marines who were trapped there but um what what carried the day was you know combined arms and very very heavy bombardment from the air and what was significant was most significant as i said ironically i believe westmoreland discerned that that there was a

critical significance to case san accepted as calculus as why that was was wrong and i i don't think the the Vietnamese were being particularly coy about it, particularly Jop, in after action accounts, and some of which were relayed almost 20 years later. I think some of this was literally lost in translation. And I think they looked at the effort, they looked at the Tet offensive, and they looked at the Kaysan siege as part of a common nexus of operational doctrine and effort. What's significant to people really misunderstand the Vietnam War, and I mean, in all kinds of ways, some of which owe to a misguided and facile ethical narrative, whereby Vietnam was a bad war, and the war against Europe and the Empire of Japan was a good war. But in doctrinal terms, they don't really understand what happened. I raised the issue in the last episode.

I take strong exception because it's ridiculous, but it's also demonstrative what I'm talking about. about this narrative of we won all the battles but lost the war. I mean, on his face, that's somebody logical. I don't, people may not know this, but other than Gettysburg obviously and, and Vicksburg and some other critical engagements, you know, the union lost as many engagements as they won. Does that mean the South actually fought to withdraw? You know, and the Confederates out killed the Union substantially.

But, I mean, that's moneyball logic. So did the South, did the Confederacy actually win? just we don't realize that. You know, warfare is not a football game. And the metric of what constituted victory conditions, on the one hand, people emphasize sort of on the, on the factorial side, that the body count was over-emphasized as a primary metric. That's absolutely true. And people try and hang that exclusively on McNamara, which is misguided.

McNamara didn't create the conditions that were extant in fear. You know, he was charged with devising an operational paradigm that could realize the conditions as president was ordering him to facilitate. Okay. But on the Army side, in terms of the military command structure, they'd been taken in by this ideological narrative that was devised and implemented by the new dealers. So they weren't thinking in military logic, really. and they'd internalize this idea that warfare is always an ideological enterprise. There is no victory, but total victory over the enemy whereby you force is unconditional surrender. And the purpose of waging war is to facilitate some kind of betterment of mankind by social engineering by violence.

And there's all kinds of things wrong with that. But that's also not a military evaluation. You don't go to war to change people's values. That values exist in a metaphysical domain. You know, the military affairs are very concrete, number one. And military quagmires or exigencies constitute very discrete problems that often converge with political problems, but they're not synonymous. You know, that's why, for example, and I realize I come back to Operation Banner a lot, But the British Army during the Cold War actually exhibited a lot of really like a real adeptness

and operational flexibility suited to the sorts of challenges that they were charged with meeting. Frank Kitson, for example, didn't deploy to Belfast and say, we're going to kill as many Catholic people who we have reasons of suspect they're sympathetic to the Fenians. They're going to total up the number. And when it reaches a tipping point, we win. in order to say that we're going to alter people's living patterns and corral the Catholic population into what we consider to be manageable, defensible areas, and then we're going to try and re-educate them as to why they should like the British Empire. You know, and it sounds like I'm being silly, but that's pretty much exactly what was in the mind of army war planners. And if it seems like I'm singling out the army, it's because I suppose I am, because an institutional culture developed there born of this sort of perverse ideological culture of New Deal or America and World War II, but also the strategic landscape under Eisenhower.

You know, Eisenhower's doctrine was massive retaliation, 110%. You know, Eisenhower famously said if NATO was still deployed. to, or if America still deployed to Europe, you know, subsequently of NATO still deployed to Europe, you know, 20 years on, we failed in what the post-war mission is. You know, and the idea was to essentially draw down forces the point that there was only a token ground element, some sort of constabulary element almost, that constituted the U.S. Army's combat capability, if we could even call it that. You know, the spherpunkth of U.S. military power was the Air Force, Strategic Air Command was the crown jewel of American military power and nuclear weapons were the means by which America could enforce its will and the communists and anybody else.

And obviously, this was decades. The strategic parity with the Soviet Union was decades away at this point. Okay. So the U.S. Army and these officers who were, you know, thirsty for promotions and career accolades, they recognized that. that essentially their assigned role post-Korean war was to potentially occupy the smoldering ruin of Eastern Europe or China after it had been devastated by, you know, strategic nuclear forces. And this left a bad taste in their mouth to say the least. You know, this changed really when Kennedy took office. You know, Kennedy may counterinsurgency, you know, which the RV substance only developed their own acronym for, which was.

coin because they love their acronyms. The JFK Special War of her center is so named, not just because he was a murdered president and, you know, the military wanted to honor a fallen commander in chief. It's because pretty much upon taking the oath of office, and especially after the disaster, the big of pigs, you know, Kennedy declared look, you know, not just flexible response, but, you know, a counterinsurgency doctrine. That's become the order of the day. and Maxwell Taylor, General Maxwell Taylor,

he could kind of be viewed as Kennedy's military mentor in a sense. You know, he, and he was sort of the father of flexible response, but Taylor had minted the term. But the big emphasis was a strategic concept of limited war. And Kennedy became very much sold on this. And in no small measure because Khrushchev, This has been, Crucisset's legacy as

as military commander and potential warlord, it's been really besmirched and not unjustifiably by the Cuba deployment of theater-based nuclear forces. You know, Cruces' whole notion was that it's a tangential bit's important.

Crucif's whole notion was that the way America could be ejected from Berlin was the deployment to Cuba of intermediate range ballistic missiles, nuclear capable platforms, would remain a secret until they were fully operational. And then Cruciff would unveil the reality of this capability before the UN General Assembly. This would throw, you know, the American National Security apparatus into chaos. And then Cruikov had offered to remove the missiles and guarantee, see further deployments to Cuba, you know, if America and NATO would abandon West Berlin.

There's an internal logic to that, but anybody who understood the strategic culture of the United States and, you know, Kennedy's vulnerability in terms of his domestic support base, which really hinged upon how he proceeded contra the Warsaw Pact and adjacent elements, he would never have undertaking that gamble. But in other ways, Khrushchev was pretty progressive in his military ideas. You know, and he said, look, obviously we've got to try and meet the strategic challenge posed by American nuclear capabilities, but that's going to take decades. And beyond that, you know, there's a situation, a stasis of not parity, is set in

on the inter-German border. So we need to emphasize people's war. in the third world, which is the real battle space of, you know, the superpowers. And when you do everything we can to facilitate victory therein, you know, and of course at this time, even though there was fractures emerging between Beijing and Moscow, really, since the death of Stalin, the military establishment, as well as a substantial majority of the political establishment, viewed the second world as monolithic, okay? and, you know, which is, again, when Nixon and Kissinger deserve a lot of credit. The problem was, as the military enthusiastically internalized, this counterinsurgency idea,

their frame of reference was faulty because it was still entirely colored by this messianic view of victory conditions. You know, so the friction came from, okay, we're going to take on a counterinsurgency doctrine, but instead of that doctrine in applied operational capacities reflecting something like Frank Kitsenade devise, you know, the idea was we're going to target insurgents inside of South Vietnam. And upon movement to contact, either by our own forces or proxies, and upon establishing conduct, we're going to bring mass of firepower to bear to annihilate them. And simultaneously, we're going to win the hearts and minds of the power. population by social engineering and re-education and altering their patterns of life, you know,

to the betterment of them as we did do the Germans and the Japanese who were living incorrectly and who had, owing to their latent cultural pathologies, developed a fascist personality, an authoritarian personality that had to be annihilated, you know, for our world society to be realized. So that's the problem here. Now, to be clear, There were guys like David Hackworth, who I've got, I mean, he's dead now, but I had a lot of respect for him. His ego was monstrous, but he was a real heroic guy. And, you know, he was very much an opponent of Westmoreland, to say the least. But he commanded what came to be known as Tiger Force, which was an element of 101st Airborne Division, which was a lot more flexible than elements like the air cab.

I'm not taking anything away from the bravery of those guys or anything. But, you know, you think of the 100-first Arab War, you think of air assault, which they are. I mean, that's their designation. But they had a lot more of a fluid tactical orientation, at least certain elements did, you know, like that under Hackworth, you know, his Tiger Force. You know, and Hackworth made the point that what the Army had decided counter-surgency was, really had nothing to do with the way anybody who had a meaningful understanding of, those kinds of doctrines would think of it. And Hackworth invoked in vote Klausowitz a lot, but he did so in an intelligent way. And some people misunderstand me because when I criticize Klausowitz, which I have pretty vociferously,

it's for ontological reasons, okay? It's not because he's always wrong or he didn't have highly developed ideas on war fighting and things. And Hapel made the point that the U.S. Army operations manual, the field service regulations, Until World War II, they reflected at Klausowitzian understanding that the conduct of war, you know, it's constrained by economic and political factors for the purpose of, as Klausowitz phrased it, affecting a satisfactory peace. You know, the objective isn't the destruction of enemy armed forces for its own sake. The objective isn't to force absolute unconditional surrender. You know, the victory metric is contingent upon the military exigency that gave rise to hostilities in the first place. You know, and Hacker's whole point was that take a situation like Korea, well, it wasn't feasible to wage a general war against the communist because after the Chinese intervention, when American forces crossed the Yellow River, and probably we're on Chinese territory, I know that's disputed, but I don't find it hard to believe.

There's a little conspiracy there. Even today with GPS and things like, you know, command and control geolocation that's accurate, you know, to a few kilometers. It's always disputed where one border starts and one ends. You know, I mean, how the hell would some company commander or even a, or even a light colonel, you know, commanding a few battalions? I mean, how would you even know if he was on what the Chikovs considered to be

sovereign Chinese territory? Point being, because it wasn't feasible to assault China with nuclear forces, wipe them out, then take on the Soviet army and adjacent elements, and force them to terms. The objective in Korea should have been, well, we've got to prevent communist forces from capturing the peninsula, whereby they can then threaten Japan more than they already do. and, you know, project power into the Pacific in a way that, particularly in the littoral capacity, that, you know, they weren't able to before. So by reestablishing the status quo, that's not a defeat because North Korea wasn't annihilated and then reeducated. And, you know, China didn't become a smoldering, irradiated moonscape where, you know, there was 200 million dead Chinese, you know. that's what should underlie military doctrine always, that understanding of contingent victory metrics, but especially under conditions where the exigency emerge and is particularly

delicate owing to a sublimited battlefield, battle space rather, where escalation is not just a puric endeavor potentially, but would be catastrophic to pursue. So this all became very, very cloudy. And the problem was to, like we talked about before, Westmoreland was trying to do, you're trying to take on basically half a dozen different mission orientation. The reason why the Marines of ICOR were responsible for KSON in the first place is because they were deployed on this east-to-west perimeter

within operational proximity to the demilitarized zone in the 70th parallel, because the understanding was that the only way South-Fee's, Vietnam is going to be conquered in military terms is by a conventional assault across the 17th parallel and probably from Cambodia, you know, through that tactical corridor. But on the other hand, the Strategic Hamlet program and all of these counterinsurgency doctrines misguided doctrinally as they were were also being pursued. and conventionally, the U.S. Army, unless we were talking about the Indian Wars, the U.S. Army didn't view the internal security of the battle space, unless we're talking about the United States. They didn't view the internal security of a foreign deployment to be within their mission orientation. Their mission orientation was to defend the territory they were deployed due from external assault. You know, and to the credit of the early Special Army Special Forces elements, that was their perspective. And they got a lot of pushback from the regular Army in all kinds of ways. You know, it's fascinating because traditionally, if you were in the Army of Special Forces,

you'd never rise above colonel. And people looked at you as a weirdo and a deviant. This idea that Special Forces is the real army, and these like sleeve tat guys who were basically a SWAT team that has shoot kill clearance. That's totally at odds with what the mission of special forces was supposed to be. And I say was because after the Cold War, it doesn't make any sense. But Army Special

Forces, they were supposed to go in and train indigenous elements to act as what Kitson called a counter gang to assault an insurgency incident to a foreign deployment. You know, and obviously

a truly critical mission of theirs. And I told you, my academic advisor in college with this Armenian guy who was one of the early special forces of soldiers. And they picked him because he was fully bilingual, but also he could fit in potentially behind Soviet lines. So the understanding was that, you know, when Europe gets overrun in World War III and Warsaw Pax driving for the Rhine, you know, you're going to deploy and make contact with sympathetic elements and you know you're gonna you're gonna train them as a guerrilla force against

the Soviet army behind their own lines which makes a lot of sense you know um like don't get me wrong obviously is a place for direct action commandos but i i don't understand what special forces has become a SWAT team and i don't understand why the US Navy deploys commandos to landlocked countries but what do I know but bringing it back um it was interesting thing because in what King of being known is the great debate over the Korean War you know a bunch of uh and in the lead up to the the big schism between MacArthur and a

Truman a bunch of Joint Chiefs of Staff Elements and experts and Army Brass including Omar Bradley who was in Chairman of Joint Chiefs they were cross-examined by these senators who were basically asking why of this binary and apocalyptic victory metric. And the senator from Connecticut, Brian McMahon,

he put it to Bradley, well, what kind of suits victory? He said, did we lose the war of 1812? Because upon ejecting the British, we didn't sail to London, burn it down,

kill 10 million Englishmen, and then overthrow the monarchy and socially engineer, I'm paraphrasing, you know, the United Kingdom into some American client state. And then Bradley stipulated, you know, that, well, you know, there's a place for political negotiation that it's got to be paramount, you know, and in his words, quote, I think you must, and he was varied from being willing to accept a rather small thing that you start to correct up on an objective, which we set in World War II of unconditional surrender, because there are many variations between the two. So Bradley, who I was not a big, like, dynamic guy. And logistics genius, he may have been. I'm told that's what his strong suit was.

But they said the same thing of people like Courtney Hodges, who was responsible for the disaster at Hurricane Forest, quite singularly. That's not scapegoating. But, you know, Bradley, under questioning whether he realized it or not, he acknowledged that a strategic culture has developed that's first and foremost ideological and has very little to do with operational flexibility

and operational flexibility to other do the discrete political and economic conditions on the ground, which, like I said, until World War II was standing doctrine, so much so that Klausowitz was paraphrased in the Army Field Manual. Later, after 1962, I don't know if I had the language transcribed, but I heard as it said, The 94 field service regulations.

It said that, quote, victory alone as an aim in war cannot be justified, since in itself, victory does not always assure the realization of national objectives. You know, and that's military speak for declaring that conventional victory conditions, incident to a spectrum of outcomes that are contingent upon discrete criteria, can't be justified because all wars have. to be pursued in the service of realizing an ideological imperative.

You know, victory can only be defined in terms of total victory, you know, entertainment and objectives for which the war is waged, which is always some sort of social engineering, which is always some sort of restructuring of enemy societies. Anything short of that is a defeat. And that's basically a mirror, as we talked about in the episodes on Barbarossa and icebreaker and Stalinist aggression in the lead up to September 1939. That's basically a mirror of what Red Army military doctrine was. We're an ideological army.

We go to war for purposes of liberation of the proletarian element within the battle space. We always act aggressively. We always proceed offensively. I'm not making some stupid internet argument like Americans are actually commies. What I'm saying is that it was just as ideologically coded, which should come as no surprise. I mean, if you understand what transpired during the Second World War, but this bears directly on the Vietnam conflict. The Vietnam conflict didn't become this terrible quagmire because we won all the battles and a bunch of pussy liberals wouldn't let us win. It wasn't because U.S. Army Vietnam had long been and the Joint Chiefs were worried about killing civilians.

We slaughtered those fucking people. It wasn't because there was an absence of a firepower brought to bear. I mean, it says it all that these arc light purpose B-52s, you know, they had to paint the underside of them black so that at night they wouldn't register to Iron Sight AAA because they'd been repurposed from Strategic Air Command to drop conventional payloads. I mean, massive conventional payloads on Vietnam. You know, I mean, there's something ridiculous about that, but this idea that there wasn't adequate firepower brought to bear because of some sort of liberal humanist conception of warfare, I mean, that's ridiculous.

It was literally a scalp hunt. You know, and I'm not being some moralist here. I'm saying that's the reality. You know, it, it, the victory metric in localized taggle terms was how many, how many corpses. you can stack up and count, you know. And nor was it, you know, I made the point too, and I'm not trying to be controversial for its own sake.

I can't remember, and that's not just advancing age and me being an absent-minded writer, I can't remember we covered the Phoenix program or not in a dedicated episode or episodes, but I know we've discussed it. The Phoenix program was highly effective for what it was tailored to do. And once, interestingly, at the end, end of Operation Banner, if you allow, again, the parallel analogy or comparative analysis, once the British security forces and special branch were able to develop Intel, particularly within Belfast, but also within Mid-Euster or not to the same degree, and identifying

Republican cadres, they began targeting them in a very effective capacity. That was instrumental in bringing the IRA to the table, okay? And the infrastructure, the cadre infrastructure, the National Liberation Front was being irreparably damaged by the Phoenix program. And to be clear, the Phoenix program, it wasn't born of foolishness and conceptual illiteracy of this sort that's endemic today where some random guy is branded a terrorist and then, you know, U.S. SWAT forces kicking his door and shoot him in the face or some religious leader in Iran is randomly declared to be the final boss of the Iranian

Revolutionary Guard Corps, and then some IDF drone murders him. And there's a great course of idiots who love Trump declaring that Iran's been vanquished because the final boss is dead. The Phoenix program, what it did

was it identified mid-level cadres, essentially the equivalent to NCOs. And in a guerrilla army, or in a Nazi actor, partisan force. There's not a perfect mirror of military rank elements and command elements at, you know, squad or platoon or battalion or division level or anything. But military rank structures where the rubber meets the road in, you know, an infantry platoon or in a direct action squad,

it does mirror basic sociological realities. You know, in any cell or any cadre, you're going to have a man or a couple of men who represent the seasoned leadership. element or the guys for almost a game or most sophisticated at, you know, carrying out that type of warfare at operational level. So murdering them or being able to factor them out by eliminating them, that irreparably harms the operational capability of the element in question. And particularly, if you're talking about an organization like a National Liberation Front, which was contingent upon their cadre leaders, being able to essentially bring

the rank and file into line and exhibiting a radical and utterly selfless commitment to the revolutionary cause. But, you know, that was the Phoenix program was an outlier. And of course, subsequently, this is one of the aspects of the war effort that was singled out as being this

unconscionable war crime, which was very interesting because of the getting into my manuscript. There was a, very selective outrage. It was very performative on what, you know, the institutionalized opponents of the war effort characterized as unacceptable or beyond the pale of decency at war. And it's a bit outside the scope, but again, because I raised the issue of these myths of what caused American defeat, what is true and not a myth is there was, as we've talked about, in the past, a fifth column that was working night and day to sabotage the war effort.

And that can't be overstated. You know, like I said, Cronkite going on TV and the degree to which Cronkite was the face and voice of the monolithic bully pulpit can't be overstated. People, like, people trusted him like they would their pastor or their priest. Okay. him going on TV, national television, and announcing the war is now unwinnable, you are being lied to. That would be like if Walter Winchell, after American forces cut and ran at Cassarine Pass, said, America cannot defeat the Third Reich. Roosevelt is lying to you. I mean,

that'd be unthinkable. I mean, any newsman who did that also would have been arrested. You know, I mean, this idea that you can effectively wage a bloody and highly unpleasant and already controversial war, like the Vietnam War, incident to a draft, which was grabbing up young men and, you know, some of whom were basically just boys, you know, like 18, 19 years old, throwing them into a meat grinder, owing to the fact that, you know, there was close to a million forces in being already deployed guarding interim and border. and over 100 other duty stations and deployments contra the Warsaw Pact and the CHICOMs, while also Americans were dealing with the daily terror of wondering if they were going to become countervalue attrition in World War III. I mean, the psychological environment was even more paramount

than it would be ordinarily. So this idea that, oh, we can just have an open debate over television and the radio airwaves and within university classrooms whereby people are perfectly welcome. I mean, people who have access to this positively manipulate the psychological environment, they're free to declare that this war effort is unwinnable and you should burn your draft card. That's literally insane. I'm not striking some hawkish posture here.

What I'm saying is that when about irrationality of the Cold War, as it was in 1965, 968, 1970, 973, thousands of American lives are at stake in theater, tens of millions are at stake

incident to the strategic paradigm and the balance of nuclear forces. The parity gap, which was rapidly closing by then, it is absolutely imperative

that such a war would be waged with victory in mind and to make sure that that is not subverted. You know, in history in the rearview mirror, people say,

they'll say things like, oh, the Vietnam War was pointless because now Vietnam is part of the WTO and people go on tourist vacations there. Okay, unless you were an auger or some kind of sorcerer at a crystal ball,

it wasn't clear that America was going to win the Cold War militarily. In fact, of that juncture, America was actively losing. So it's like criticizing somebody for not picking the winning lottery numbers after their broadcast. And that

that's something that people seem incapable of doing these days. And it's not just because of a partisan divide that colors people's ability to render an objective analysis. It's somehow situational awareness across temporal distance, including future outcomes and events, is just presumed. I don't understand it. But the one standout, there's actually two standout books. There's a biography of John Paul Van, who's an interesting guy. he warrants an episode and two himself. Very early in the war, he deployed with U.S. Army Vietnam, in 2020, 62, 63, somewhere about, thereabouts.

Then later he returned a civilian advisor and military journalist. He died in a in 71, I think. The aircraft he was in a helicopter that got shot down, and memory serves. And every man aboard was killed. But he became a huge critic of operational doctrine in Vietnam. And he had a notion that counterinsurgency should have been abandoned altogether. It should have been placed within the operational purview of Army, Republic, of Vietnam forces and adjacent police and paramilitary elements. And America's only role should have been to defend critical military objectives, you know, like Saigon, Hui, positions along the Cambodian front.

frontier and maintaining an ability to bring forces to bear at the 17th parallel. But otherwise, this movement to contact whereby guerrillas are drawn out. And then once identified massive firepower through combined arms and particularly air assault is brought to bear on them was assonine. I've got my own thoughts on that. I think people have gleaned in part from this discussion just now. but this Neil Sheen, who's somewhat of an interesting guy because he's basically this big liberal. I think he's dead now.

But he wrote this really interesting biography of John Paul Van, and he wrote a really fascinating book on, God, what's his? The Edwin Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. It wasn't just about Teller. It was about the entire program of the hydrogen bomb. The development of which, particularly before command and control and, targeting technology whereby circular error probable could be profoundly reduced. The hydrogen bomb was a huge force multiplier and a devastating weapon, really a terror weapon and its destructive power.

And the idea was even a handful of hydrogen bombs with massive throw weight, you know, the aircraft carrying them, even if a handful breakthrough air defense arrays and drop them on populated areas, you're talking about millions of people dead. and obviously Teller was held out as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, but the reality is always more complicated. But John Paul Van, most of his own writings were in the form of policy papers and things. A lot of which you can find on archive, which has become a great resource. I don't know if a lot of people use it or not.

I'm an old, so I've been using it for years, but people, probably younger people, who are we caught on to what we've provided. You can access a huge amount of data, some of which is long since out of print. But a bright shining lie is worthwhile. And on strategy by Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. He was an infantry colonel. And he wrote this retrospective in the early 80s, around 1982, peak revolution in military affairs era.

And he raised a lot of these points about the corrupting the Army's strategic culture and things and the poisoning of operational doctrine as well as grand strategic vision by ideological considerations. And that might not seem particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking these days, but in 1982 it was, not just because it was at best considered unseemly and at worst, grossly immoral or fascistic to impeach the legitimacy of the New Dealer ideology. But that also, that was just outside the conceptual purview of people who analyzed the war effort. It didn't even occur to them. Like I said, the litany of objections to doctrine in

Vietnam, it was either we went all the battles nonsense, or it was, oh, there was a lack of political will because of, you know, liberals in Congress or, you know, absence of firepower or, I mean, just, you know, nonsense, you know, born of, in part partisan conceits and conceptual blind spots, but also just raw ignorance. A lot of this stuff, don't get me wrong, I, I very much agree with the fellas who make much of clown world and the fact that there's something just abjectly moronic about the way power political affairs are discussed at present. That's true. It's striking.

But the rot goes really deep. And I mean, just the fact that there wasn't this sort of abjectly infantile and sort of staggeringly, monumentally stupid conceptual vocabulary back in those days, this, the epistemic prior is held by guys with real command authority, you know, not just random like war college, you know, second lieutenants or whatever. You know, it was a real thing. And like I said, I know something about political theory. I know something about game theory. And I know something about how technology indexes with war planning and strategic doctrine and how sociological and psychological factors impact that. But I'm not a remotely military person.

Okay. And if this jumps out at me, that means it's not some sort of esoteric tenancy. hidden between the proverbial lines of drift or something or in these like interstitial spaces that can only be detected by people who's day-to-day involves contemplating complex military affairs or something that's important to give in mind and okay like why is this relevant well war in peace never occurs in a vacuum temporally okay and also there's a direct causal chain between new dealer ideology and this messanic conceit and the way the Vietnam War was waged and subsequently the way, you know, very, very false and destructive revisionist fantasies are projected onto the Vietnam War.

And most critically, there's this deliberate and sharp and absolute distinction drawn between World War II and Vietnam, when a reality should be viewed rather synonymously. Okay, like, don't get me wrong. In purely strategic terms, the Vietnam War had to be fought within the bound of rationality of the Cold War. And the war against the German Reich, in contrast, was the ultimate war of choice. However, what informed strategic doctrine they're in and the way victory metrics were conceptualized, that absolutely derived from the same epistemological bias. and prior to the New Deal Revolution, this didn't exist.

Nobody thought that way. And any man who'd proposed those things would have been viewed as some sort of crazy zealot in order of John Brown or something. You know, and I know some people are going to, I guarantee you in the comments, there's going to be people are like, well, what about Wilson? He was a crazy liberal. He really wasn't. And what did Wilson say, if you read Wilson's 14 points, basically it's the anti-Versai.

Okay, and did Wilson say we need to invade Germany, we need to execute the Kaiser, we need to declare that Hulweg and Ludendorf and everybody else are criminals who were against humanity, that's laughable. You know, he viewed himself as failing, and the entire American delegation is failing, because the British and the French would by appeal to this sort of histrionic and messianic moralism, were able to impose a periodic victory on the Hasbrook Empire and the Kaiser Reich, which shouldn't have been judged in ethical terms. You know, power political affairs aren't, don't reduce to, aren't reducible to

and don't resolve in theological judgments. Like, I'm not saying Wilson was a good president, and he wasn't. And Colonel House, I think, was probably a subset of sociopathic personality. and it's unconscionable that World War I happened. Okay, that's, I'm not saying any of those things. What I'm saying is this idea that you can extrapolate from Wilson's highfaluting rhetoric that he was some crazy proto-new dealer is nonsense. And that would not have occurred to him.

That would not have occurred to Pershing. That wouldn't occur to any man in uniform. They would have viewed that as insane. War propaganda where the Kaiser's this, like, giant, like, guerrilla, rapo, not with standing. But that's all I've got on Ksson and the

conceptual doctrines at play in the Vietnam War. I hope it was informative. All righty. Well, I guess next up for us, we got to watch a movie. Yeah, I know I'm stoked about it, man. And the substags been popping really good. And that makes me really happy. I'm very

humble and honored. You people got to get more active on the ex bullshit or I'm going to nuke it. Because I only set that up for two reasons. Like plug the book, which is going to drop very soon. It's being published now. And because you people said, you got to come back to social media. Well, I did.

And now you don't fuck with it. Okay. So if you don't fuck with it, I'm going to nuke it. I'm not being petty. I'm not being some fucking drama bag. But it's not worth it to me if you guys aren't going to engage. Okay. That's all.

But thank you so much for, like, helping the suburb. stack pop so much. That's huge. I think a lot more people are just getting off of X and deciding that they need to go talk to people in real life, at least. Which is awesome. That's great. I, X sucks. Social media sucks. But I got tired of, like, first of all, like I said, I, I think it remains useful for plugging your work product or whatever, but also there was just, like, endless chorus of people, like, begging me to come back to X. And when I do, it's like, they don't fuck with it. If people are leaving X, that could not make me happier. Man, that's like my birthday. Okay. It's a shit platform. But yeah. Well, go on over to real Thomas 777.7.7.com

and that's the best place to connect to Thomas and go support his work. I mean, he's got, I mean, season three of mind phasers, like, what are you at like 100 episodes now? Yeah, we're going to transition to season four after the OGC conclave. There's a reason why this season was longer because I'll explain like when I wrap it up. But yeah, Generally, season four only been like 30 or 40 episodes. This one went long for a reason. But yeah, we're going to get into season four around like July, August. Awesome.

Awesome. All right. Thank you, Thomas. Appreciate it. Thank you, buddy.