1. My dad expressed frustration over the conduct of the Vietnam war because of its focus on body counts. Do you see this as part and parcel with strategies like “shock and awe” that don’t emphasize the taking and holding of land?
I would make a correction to part of your question before answering it. “Shock and Awe” does emphasize the taking and holding of land, it just strategizes that you can take land by heavily pounding the enemy into submission with air bombardment and long range missiles to eliminate their will to resist. Small, light, highly mobile land forces then move in to exploit that success and seize the area of operations. To answer the other part of your question, the media’s morbid obsession with body counts during the Vietnam War, and the resultant mindset of Americans that they will quickly stop supporting military operations that produce large numbers of US casualties, was a major factor in the development of the “Rapid Dominance” strategy.
2. That it one of the reasons we failed in Vietnam?
No. Vietnam was a political failure not a military failure. Military strategy at that time was to seize and control militarily objectives (land). The US military never lost anything to North Vietnam or the Viet Cong, and the combination of bombing in North Vietnam and military operations in South Vietnam brought the north to agree to ceasing hostilities. The US would not invade, and easily defeat, North Vietnam for fear the Soviets and or Chinese would become involved. The seizing and then leaving of captured areas was more a frustration to the troops than a significant tactical error since the North Vietnamese never could defeat US troops in battle. The ultimate victory by the North Vietnamese occurred because of the weakened US presidency that occurred when Richard Nixon resigned. The communists correctly believed that there was no way President Gerald Ford had the political capital to recommit US forces in South Vietnam to drive the communists back. So in many ways you can blame the communist conquest of South Vietnam on ...ta da... liberals in Congress.
3. I seem to recall reading that aerial bombardment during WW2 was seen as a failure in its goal of breaking German wartime production(didn’t the Brit that headed that up from the UK end lose his job), my sources are lost to me or I have them wrong. Do you agree it was a failure?
One of the problems with aerial bombardment is that, without troops on the ground in that area, they enemy can just re-build. An example would be airport runways. If you capture it with ground forces it can no longer be used by the enemy, but if you just put holes in it they can fix it. The same goes with destroying production facilities. They can rebuild or shift to other facilities. But I would disagree as to the failure of the WWII air strategy. It did what they wanted it to do. It was a war of attrition, and over time the Allies were able to wear the Germans down and deplete their capability to wage war in both materiel and troops.
By the way, another interesting note: The U.S. Air Force was a vocal and determined proponent of “Rapid Dominance” as one might expect. The intellectual battles over this strategy (vice “overwhelming and decisive force) were fought during the Clinton years. Gen. Merrill McPeak was the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force at that time and led the charge in support of “Rapid Dominance”, successfully causing re-allocation of defense budget dollars from the land forces to air and naval forces.
By the time Dubya became president the strategy was all but doctrine.
Now retired, Gen. Merrill McPeak has endorsed B. Hussein Obama for president.