A story made the rounds of the Army during the closing days of the Vietnam War. When the Nixon administration took over in 1969, so the story goes, Pentagon officials fed all the data on North Vietnam and the United States into a computer: popu- lation, gross national product, manufacturing capacity, size of the armed forces, and the like. The computer was then asked: "When will we win?" It took only a moment to answer: "You won in 1964!"
From the American professional soldier's...