Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 82
LETTERS
The Braestrup anecdote is not the only factually
questionable item in Stearman’s commentary. His
account of the 1972-73 peace negotiations is inaccurate in almost every detail. So is his assertion that
American journalists eagerly searched for stories
on war crimes by U.S. troops. The My Lai incident,
for instance, was reported in considerable detail by
communist news media not long after it happened,
but American reporters in Vietnam quickly accepted
the U.S. command’s denials and made no effort to
investigate the communist report. When Seymour
Hersh broke the My Lai story for American readers many months later, his report was turned down
by a long list of major media organizations before
it was finally published by a little-known antiwar
news service. Only then did the event get extensive
attention. On other atrocity reports and on the issue
of civilian casualties in general, the record is clear
that American news media were reluctant rather
than eager to pursue such stories, and those subjects were, if anything, under-reported rather than
overemphasized in U.S. media coverage of the war.
Whether Stearman’s misrepresentations of my
essay were deliberate or just inexplicably careless,
I have no way to know. In either case, they do not
advance his argument but discredit it. I am reminded
of a quotation from John Adams, who wrote in
1770, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may
be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of
our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and
evidence.”3 Whether expressing his views on Vietnam or his disagreements with my essay, Stearman
would have been more convincing if he had heeded
Adams’s advice.
1. Douglas Pike, The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror. Saigon: U.S. Mission (Cambridge,
MA: M.I.T. Press, 1970).
2. Peter Braestrup, The Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported
and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1977), 1: 279-86; 2: 241-44.
3. John Adams, “Argument in Defense of the British Soldiers in the Boston Massacre
Trials” (4 December 1770).
Ph.D. Completion Timeline
Lt. Col. Shon McCormick, Ph.D., U.S. Army,
Army Strategist (FA 59)—I am writing to voice my
concerns with the Ph.D. completion timeline Maj.
Gen. Gordon Davis, Brig. Gen. Thomas Graves, and
Col. Christopher Prigge portray in their article “The
Strategic Planning ‘Problem’” (Military Review,
November-December 2013). My own recent experience in completing a Ph.D. program encouraged me
to write and ensure prospective Advanced Strategic
Planning and Policy Program (ASP3) candidates are
fully aware of the cost in time and energy associated
with completing the program under the conditions
the authors describe.
Based on my experience, I do not think most officers can complete their dissertation according to the
ASP3 model. According to the article, officers in the
ASP3 program need to complete a substantial portion of their dissertation work while simultaneously
performing a developmental tour at a “combatant
command or other strategic headquarters.” Even
though I had the luxury of conducting the majority
of my dissertation work as a full-time student, it still
took me 18 months of eight- to ten-hour workdays.
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Moreover, the only way I was able to meet this
timeline was to choose a social science approach
because it was more amenable to rapid completion.
Those choosing a historical approach requiring
significant primary research require much more
time—time that I do not see provided in the ASP3
model. While the final year focused on completion is beneficial, the student’s research—the most
time-consuming portion of the dissertation—has
to occur during the developmental tour because
research is th