Certainly, some of our members must have seen the film version of Robert McNamara's book -- "The Fog of War". He was bending one way and then the other between JFK and Johnson. Johnson had come under the influence of hawks on the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarding Vietnam -- for instance, Curtis LeMay.
There is no longer any doubt what Kennedy's plan would be, despite his little speech on the White House lawn to satisfy the bellicose part of the electorate. There was not only the [Senator] Gravel edition of the October 1963 McNamara-Taylor Vietnam Trip Report, but there were some 15 different drafts generated in the White House -- much of it already written before General Taylor and Secretary McNamara actually went to Vietnam.
Around that time, with McNamara as Defense Secretary, CIA's Ted Shackley was Station Chief in Saigon (check the precise assignment, but he was there, and read David Corn's book "Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades" ~1995.) In regards to operations in Laos and Vietnam, Shackley was fabricating body-count data in reports back to Langley and the Pentagon.
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And Americans seem to have forgotten, or simply missed, the lessons of the Vietnam War, partly because people believed a lot of stuff that was reported as news at the time, they believed US Strategic Doctrine, they didn't bother to read Elsberg's revelations in the Pentagon Papers, and they didn't follow the declassifications over time through the 1990s which generally expose what really happened and why it happened.
Today, you find a lot of folks with this puerile view of the Vietnam War. Even Senator McCain, who noted that it was a "noble cause", both believed too much of that myth, and helped to perpetuate it. The men who served, many who were drafted, were noble men. But the signs were already there when the SEATO allies bailed out, the corrupt Diem regime was elected because of the way the ballots were designed to appeal to Vietnamese superstition -- the work of Maj. Gen. Edward Geary Lansdale, who had set up the Saigon Military Mission before the Diem election. In fact, the voters who elected Diem were mostly the 1.7 million Vietnamese Catholics who were relocated from the North to the South.
So it wouldn't surprise me to see this story about the war in Afghanistan. Again, you could look at it as the Trap of Sunk Cost -- a business concept. Once you invest money and lives in a war, you will ignore the signs that getting out of it is the wiser proposition. There is the political dimension, in which grieving parents will ask why their kids died, when you pulled out of a bad war. You then keep throwing money and lives at the enterprise because you are trying to salvage what has already been lost. In business, to do this with a consistently failing enterprise or operation just leads to bankruptcy. That's why they call it "sunk cost". You really can't retrieve all that has been expended, and the trap is to keep spending more and more to prop up the value of the accumulated loss.
How do you think Trump will manage this? Posit that the man is totally clueless of just about everything -- the war that he avoided for "bone spurs", the 56,000 dead Americans and many more that number maimed or wounded, and what is really hilarious -- he probably doesn't even understand these matters of sunk cost, or the "Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age" -- (see Charles Hitch).
Abba-dabba- doo! He ith thuch a bidniss-man! He hath good jeans! He knoweth how the kumquat cometh -- ever on an abba-dabba, ancient and honorable Sire!
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