The fog of war, a long 2003 interview of Robert S McNamara, shows that how one frames an issue has an influence on how a question can be solved. As soon as they got engaged in Vietnam, the US presented the conflict as a fight between freedom and communism. This happened in the late fifties, after China had become communist and right after the Korean war, in a context in which the communist world seemed to progress inexorably. The domino theory, introduced by the Republican US president Eisenhower in 1954, stated that once a country fell and became communist, neighboring countries also would. Hence it became crucial to defend any country facing a communist insurgency. As David Halberstam mentions in his book “The best and the brightest”, the US national context also played a role later in the Vietnam process: Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s Democratic predecessor, was accused during the cold war to have “lost” China in 1949 and to have been weak against the communists, particularly during the Mccarthyst period. A longstanding reputation of “Democratic weakness” persists to this day as a result. In the early 60s, the democrats were still traumatized by these accusations that were systematically used by their Republican adversaries. This is the initial cognitive frame with which the Vietnam question was analyzed by President Kennedy’s administration. Right from the beginning then, the administration was prisoner, without being aware of it, from a frame that was in effect imposed by their adversaries. Despite their doubts and mounting skepticism, they would remain unable, right until the very end, to get rid of it.
Our book:
-
-
Join 705 other subscribers
Keywords
23andMe analysis of competing hypotheses artificial intelligence BCG Matrix Betts Big data black swan Cassandras China CIA clayton christensen competitive intelligence Constructing cassandra crafting strategy Cuban Missile Crisis culture decision making demography disruption diversity economics energy entrepreneurship Ernest R May Forbes Forecast forecasting geopolitical alpha Geopolitics Geostrategy Global Trends 2030 Graham T. Allison grand strategy Hedge funds identity Integrated Strategy intelligence Intelligence Analysis Intelligence failure investing Kodak leadership Nassim taleb National Intelligence Council non-linearity non-market strategy non-predictive strategy nonlinear systems non market forces organizational decline Osama bin Laden Peter F. Drucker Porter's Five Forces prediction Richard E Neustadt Richard Neustadt Risk Sam Walton scenario planning Sherman Kent Social construction strategic autism strategic surprise strategy strategy making surprise Tactics technology Tetlock uncertainty Use of analogs Use of history USSR Value Chain Analysis videoFollow us on Twitter
Tweets by silberzahnjonesArchives
Silberzahn Jones
Silberzahn & Jones 