War of Numbers : An Intelligence Memoir

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Summary: Intelligence with integrity!
Review: Adams' book is not so much a book about Vietnam as a chronical of what happens when intelligence units and agencies report what the commanders WANT to hear. The CIA and J2 of MACV in Adams' book become pawns in the politics of Vietnam. They ignored facts and basic tenents of intelligence reporting. The agencies feared reaction to the facts and its possible effect on public sentiment to US involvement. Because of that they purposely, according to Adams, reported and knowingly maintained false information.

Even more disturbing are Adams' insights into the CIA of the middle and late Sixties. Though deeply entrenched in war in Vietnam, they seemed to take an overall cavalier approach to the mission. Adams notes after Tet-1968 there were "considerably less than 6" CIA agent handlers in Vietnam who spoke vietnamese. These same case officers received a grand total of 2 hours orientation on Vietnam and their enemy prior to assignment.

This book is a MUST read for intelligence personnel, policy makers and anyone who wants to learn how, the hard way, not to run an intelligence organization.

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Summary: Interesting look at one man's struggle for integrity
Review: I expected not to finish this book, given my previous lack of interest in Vietnam-War history, but I found that the story transcended its milieu and beyond that drew my interest to a key period of recent American history. I imagine that fans will counsel students of history and political science to read it, and they probably should as an interesting nuance from more high-level views provided by more famous luminaries like Westmoreland, McNamara, et al, but I found this fascinating from a different standpoint: how one individual struggled to keep his intellectual integrity in the face of massive institutional pressure not to. There are lots of melodramatic movies that seek to capture the situation more cleanly, but this book, in chronicling one man's true-life experience, did it better and with more resonance than any film I've seen. As a young person who works with "numbers" myself, I understand how frequently people try to manipulate them and use them as persuasive devices for major decisions.

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Summary: One For Intelligence Analysts
Review: War of Numbers is an essential book for intelligence analysts as well as students of the Vietnam War. Adams provides key insight to strategic policy failure. In order to fully appreciate Adam's contribution to the intelligence history of Vietnam, it is important to understand that wars are fought by nations in the pursuit of interests and that for Americans, the decision to go to war should address seven considerations: Problem Identification, Interests Assessment, Objective Identification (including End State Assessment), Strategic Self Appraisal, National Power Assessments of The Enemy, Strategy Development, and the Identification of Gaps between Policy and Means.
Adam's book addresses errors in the National Power Assessment phase which had a negative cascading effect in subsequent decision making. Flawed enemy strength calculations contributed to flawed strategy development which contributed to a gap between policy and means. When Adams identified the flaw, the Johnson Administration was too heavily committed to a war of attrition to tolerate public exposure of the gaps between policy and means. Strategically, telling the truth about the numbers of enemy forces would have required larger commitments of U.S. forces increasing the strain on public support for the war. The strength of Johnson's political will and McNamara's quantitative analysis approach to war deeply affected the way the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, counted the enemy (called, Order of Battle).
MACV kept three sets of books; The first set of OB was the official version sent to Washington. The second set belonged to the OB Analysts themselves, and the third set was a blend of the first two. The first set was an undercount to keep official Washington placated; the second set was the honest count but did not go anywhere, and the third set went to Westmoreland who kept it close hold.
Adams contribution to the intelligence discipline is his description of how he found the flaw in OB accounting and the political correctness that resisted him within the intelligence community. The key to his breakthrough was to have actually gone to Vietnam, worked the Order of Battle issues on the ground, understand the enemy from "the enemy's" perspective and then double check how U.S. reporting of enemy strength matched that of how the enemy was reporting his own strength. This is when Adams discovered that MACV was undercounting troop strength. He performed a validity and reliability check on MACV and found their procedures and results wanting. The technique he used is described in detail and serves as a lesson learned for today's OB analysts.
The second lesson is how Adams' persistence caused a rift between the CIA and MACV over the integrity of the OB counting. The CIA is evenhandedly portrayed in the book. Individual analysts who looked at the numbers invariably sided with Adams; those in responsive political positions and vulnerable to the political influence of the Johnson-McNamara Administration behave in the subtle manner normally associated with behind the scene politics. Adams illustrates how assessments were watered down, reports delayed, egos clashed in the briefing rooms, and all of the suppressive efforts were brought to bear to keep him muffled and how he countered them. Basically, his operating principle was that the truth should be allowed to surface and he describes how he created those opportunities; back channel copies of reports; boot leg copies of reports, analyst to analyst contacts (CIA to DIA, for example), as well as maintaining contact with the honest brokers at MACV.
This is an important book for students of Intelligence Analysis. It serves as a guide on how to double check the validity and reliability of Order of Battle data; it gives insight to how politics heavily filtered ground truth under the Johnson Administration, and it lets the world see that the CIA wasn't evil incarnate. Like every other agency in Washington, it simply surrendered to political pressure from the White House.