Bureaucracy At War U.S. Performance In The Vietnam Conflict is an encyclopaedic analysis of many issues raised in the course of the Vietnam War. Komer questions the presence of the U.S in South-east Asia as well as tackling technical, strategic, tactical, military and non-military issues.

This volume examines Max Weber’s pre-World War I thinking about bureaucracy. It suggests that Weber’s vision shares common components with the highly efficient Prussian General Staff military bureaucracy developed by Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke. Weber did not believe that Germany’s other major institutions, the Civil Service, industry, or the army could deliver world class performances since he believed that they pursued narrow, selfish interests. However, following Weber’s death in 1920, the model published by his wife Marianne contained none of the military material about which Weber had written approvingly in the early chapters of Economy and Society. Glynn Cochrane concludes that Weber’s model was unlikely to include military material after the Versailles peace negotiations (in which Weber participated) outlawed the Prussian General Staff in 1919.

Although they appear successful, are businesses incubating seeds of disaster? In this book, Kolind helps readers uncover the earliest signs of trouble and reignite a powerful new growth cycle instead of accelerating towards failure.

A playbook for mastering the art of bureaucracy from thought-leader Mark Schwartz.

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Through a century of movies, the U.S. military held sway over war and service-oriented films. Influenced by the armed forces and their public relations units, Hollywood presented moviegoers with images of a faultless American fighting machine led by heroic commanders. This book examines this cooperation with detailed narratives of military blunders and unfit officers that were whitewashed to be presented in a more favorable light. Drawing on production files, correspondence between bureaucrats and filmmakers, and contemporary critical reviews, the author reveals the behind-the-scenes political maneuvers that led to the rewriting of history on-screen.

Focusing on the creation and misuse of government documents in Vietnam since the 1920s, The Government of Mistrust reveals how profoundly the dynamics of bureaucracy have affected Vietnamese efforts to build a socialist society. In examining the flurries of paperwork and directives that moved back and forth between high- and low-level officials, Ken MacLean underscores a paradox: in trying to gather accurate information about the realities of life in rural areas, and thus better govern from Hanoi, the Vietnamese central government employed strategies that actually made the state increasingly illegible to itself. MacLean exposes a falsified world existing largely on paper. As high-level officials attempted to execute centralized planning via decrees, procedures, questionnaires, and audits, low-level officials and peasants used their own strategies to solve local problems. To obtain hoped-for aid from the central government, locals overstated their needs and underreported the resources they actually possessed. Higher-ups attempted to re-establish centralized control and legibility by creating yet more bureaucratic procedures. Amidst the resulting mistrust and ambiguity, many low-level officials were able to engage in strategic action and tactical maneuvering that have shaped socialism in Vietnam in surprising ways.