Vietnam's Legacy: Air Power Alone Cannot Win War

The Vietnam War evolved—or, rather, muddled along—over a long time, at least from 1954 to 1975, and to a great degree American strategy in Vietnam was always reactive, ad hoc, and confused. But at the core of the strategy there was a theory, and this theory was a revival and a refinement of the World War II dream of victory through bombing. The theory was called by various names, "graduated response" and "phased escalation" among them, and it held that a calibrated and predictably increasing use of bombing against North Vietnam would eventually force the Communists to abandon their efforts to take over South Vietnam and to accept a negotiated peace that would leave Vietnam partitioned between the North and the South, as it had been since the close of the first Indochina war, in 1954.