Robert S. McNamara (1916–2009)

This wasn't really a "tell all" about McNamara's role in Vietnam, but more an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation. It addressed some of the biggest problems with the war (the unexamined belief in the domino theory, the lack of understanding of nationalism as a key motivation of the Vietnamese, that the South Vietnamese forces were essentially unwilling or incapable to win, and that the escalations we chose, especially the air war, were insufficient to win, but merely a way of "doing something"), but his own role was limited to wishing he had challenged more assumptions by other people.

It's good that there has been some reflection on the causes of the war, but the real problem was something deeper. When a large and powerful country can choose to enter a war by choice and doesn't really have much stake in the outcome, it can prosecute that war in a completely ineffectual way. The country should be able to defend itself robustly, and maintain an absolute deterrent force, but wars of choice should not be the role of the military. We would be better off if such non-existential conflicts were waged entirely by private organizations, through something like a letter of marque or corporate security forces, and they would be far more efficient in their use of force -- in the case of the Vietnamese conflict, the reasonable policy would have been working with the nationalist/pro-independence movement and establishing a truly independent state, potentially neutral or even allied with the US, rather than continuing a colonial war and turning it into an anti-Communist crusade when it didn't need to be.… (més)