Lieutenant General Goodpaster protested to Secretary McNamara in the fall of 1964 about Vietnam, “Sir, you are trying to program the enemy and that is one thing we must never try to do. We can’t do his thinking for him.” He was not listened to as the US believed that increasing military pressure on North Vietnam would lead it to fold. Exactly the opposite happened.
It is one important aspect of any conflict or any relationship, and a key driver of complexity, that it is always contemptuous to think that one can anticipate the other’s reactions. Still, this mistake is done too often in when developing strategies in all ranges of life. It is also why developing strategies too far into the future can’t work.
The right approach is to experiment and see what is the reaction of the other so as to be able to determine roughly what will be its reaction to certain stimuli. And people are notoriously tough to predict as to their reaction, which often seem deeply irrational to our own rationality.
Quote from H. R. McMaster’s book ‘Dereliction of Duty‘ about how the US were progressively brought in the Vietnam war.
