“War in Peacetime”

In his book “War in Peacetime,” published in 1969, General J. Lawton (Lightning Joe) Collins, the celebrated Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War, discussed Korea, and its lessons, writing, “We rushed into Korea with no advance planning, and we stumbled into the ground war in Vietnam with uncertain footing. In neither case did we have any fully thought-out ideas concerning our objectives or the means we would be willing to expend to attain them. As each situation arose we extemporized, unsure what the next step would be, until we were far more committed than we had expected to be.”