A wide range of authors on the subject all came to a startlingly simple conclusion: the United States didn’t know precisely what it was trying to achieve, and it was therefore impossible to have an effective strategy. A 1974 survey of Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam found that almost 70% of them were uncertain of United States objectives.

U.S. leaders failed to take the additional step of adopting the British solution of integrating people, equipment, and information: an intelligence center that tracked ships and planes, gathered photographs and prisoner interviews, and intercepted German messages.

Military Misfortunes reports, “In the eighteen months before the creation of the Tenth Fleet, the U.S. Navy sank thirty-six U-boats. In the six months after, it sank seventy-five.

In 1944 the US Office for Strategic Services (the precursor of the CIA) produced a ‘sabotage manual’ to advise people in occupied European states on how to obstruct the conduct of the war with little personal risk. Suggestions included:

• Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

• Make ‘speeches’. Talk as frequently as possible, and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

• Advocate ‘caution’. Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Many readers, especially academic ones, will be able to testify to the continuing effectiveness of these techniques even in peacetime.

I think about Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover not because they were gentle souls. Each had an unseemly lust for power. Both men were idealists with sharp elbows. Both men, as it happens, were also Jewish, experiencing prejudice in institutions meant to be genteel: Yale University for Moses and the US Navy for Rickover. Both were also devoted public servants who spent their entire lives building great works for government pay. Rickover and Moses achieved something we no longer see among public officials. They delivered projects on time and under budget, year after year, while avoiding corruption charges.