Yes, but I do not recall that military leaders offered an alternative strategic vision. Westmoreland doesn’t seem to have much of one at all. On the other hand, no telling what he would have done if he had had as much authority as Eisenhower did.
"In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! During the Kennedy Administration, they designed a one-hundred Megaton bomb! It was tested in the atmosphere; I remember this."
The 60s were a very complex political environment.
McNamara:
"I was on the island of Guam in General Curtis LeMays' command in March 1945. In a single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children."
McNamara was frozen decisively by the Russians and ignored the obvious: mine Haiphong, declare Laos and Cambodia an open theater and invade, make peace with Red China, Viet Nam's greatest enemy. None of these moves would have started war with Russia but would have created an end game for the Viet Nam war. LBJ was grossly and IMO criminally negligent as a war commander, his incompetence and failure to lead, that caused our will power to decline. Then appeasement by Nixon and Kissinger wasted more time and lives until the war was finally fought and lost in the halls of Congress.....