Mapping Copyright Exceptions And Limitations In Europe: Fill & Download for Free

There’s lots of short answers that I neither agree nor disagree with.So, first, here’s the correct answer. Yes, there was a specific reason, strategic, not tactical. Air offensives work better if they’re around the clock.This would be obvious, except that the American case tends to get obfuscated. In the rest of the world (that is, America excepted), strategic thinking on airpower emphasised an around-the-clock offensive, in which day and night bombers alternated relentless attacks on enemy “targets.”American thinking de-emphasised the night bomber role, but it is not clear that it did so because it had genuine doubts about around-the-clock bombing, or simply lacked the funding to develop a follow-on night bomber to the Keystone B-6 of during the Depression. Which is to say, I think it is damn well obvious that America gave up on the night bomber because it couldn’t afford night bombers. But to get to that argument, we’ll have to take a few twists and turns.*Above all, the question deserves some nuance that it doesn’t get in contemporary treatments. Interwar airpower historians tend to come out of the war college milieu, where people read Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and ponder profound questions about strategy and grand strategy and super-grand strategy. There is, however, something to be said for writing about airpower from the point of view of the engineer (which I am not), and, more specifically, the old-time engineer, the kind who crawled around in lofts and did maths with a slide rule and an HB pencil. Those guys, I can, perhaps, channel.(It seemed like a good idea at the time.)(They made someone take off in this before they’d accept that it couldn’t achieve fighter level performance.)These bizarre aircraft are not intended to convince you that “sliderule and an HB pencil”is code for “huge hit of LSD.” They’re to show that interwar engineers didn’t know what they were doing. That’s not meant to be a criticism. They lacked the tools (and indestructible test pilots) needed to do their jobs properly.Perhaps more importantly, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. As a result, the interwar era is a miasma of claims of performance and technological innovations that were impossible in the first case, and didn’t exist, in spite of being invented again and again, in the second case, something that is most painfully true of the tortuous history of radio aids to navigation. Progress in aviation was made, not from one milestone to another, but from one mistake —one failure— to the next. Every aircraft built before, I want to say, the 1970s, (1960s? Not an expert on more recent times) was a failure, when you compare actual performance to the original specification. It was not until well into the computer age, and sometimes not even then, that an Air Staff could tell the designers what they wanted, and get it. The world war in the air was fought by second-bests and remainders. And that’s just the brilliant successes.So let’s look at the Royal Air Force’s Air Staff specifications for bombers. I’ve taken a driveby at Americaphile airpower historians in the footnote, so let me make this point clear and in the main text. For all the limits of interwar force structures and spending, the RAF was the best-funded, best supported, air force in the world. While it made mistake after mistake, we need to look at it as the clearest-thinking and best equipped of strategic air forces, with the forgotten French coming in a close second.The Air Staff thought that there would be three kinds of bombers in the future:i) A really fast bomber that eluded fighter interception.ii) A “self-defending” bomber that would intrude into enemy airspace in daytime, when flying and aiming was easy.iii) And a night bomber that would fly and aim when flying and aiming were hard.The three aircraft that I’ve chosen to illustrate these specifications, of the many that I could have chosen, are each illuminating in their own way. The Blenheim was the service light/fast bomber/reconnaissance bomber/long range fighter at the beginning of WWII. This specification is seen as ludicrously overwrought in connection with the Blenheim —and then we proceed to celebrate the supergenius of the de Havilland Mosquito, which actually did fill this role for much of WWII. The difference is that aerodynamics imposes hard limits on the maximum speed of aircraft. The Mosquito belonged to the first generation of aircraft to bump against those limits, and, as a result, was never decisively overtaken by contemporary fighters.Before that, the recurrent problem for fast bombers is that, when they were introduced, they were as fast, or faster than contemporary fighters, triggering much navel gazing about how the interceptor was obsolete. This tended to head off the development of Type II bombers, which were much more expensive, until suddenly a new generation of interceptors appeared that so dominated the previous generation of “fast” bombers that they were dead meat.So the Air Staff, in developing Type IIs, had to have a certain stubbornness of will, ignoring the people telling them that the latest wonder plane had rendered interception obsolete, and therefore why waste all that money on an aircraft that could go fast enough to give enemy fighters a decent run, while still carrying enough firepower to deter them?One way of dong that was to wave at the great propagandist of the “flying fortress,” or “aerial battlecruiser,” the Italian “airpower theorist,” Giuilio Douhet. Whatever else you can say about Douhet, he discovered one great truth about airpower. That, while it is impossible to get the public to pay for a strategic bomber, it is easy to get them to buy magazine stories about the strategic bombers of the future. The Douhetian paradox is that, when it comes to strategic bombers, the public won’t stop demanding the planes that the public won’t pay for.(“This picture doesn’t make me look Italian enough! Increase the ‘Italian’ setting to 11!”)The Bristol Overstrand was a classic example of “out of the box” thinking, intended to get around the Douhetian paradox —a cheap, expensive plane. The secret lay in that front turret. Compared with the turrets on the Whitley, they’re barely that, but by solving various problems that aircraft designers were having with “independent” weapons, the Overstrand’s turrets allowed the Air Staff to fantasise that it could deliver a day bomber that wasn’t some kind of oversized monster, festooned with fighting positions and machine guns pointing in all directions.In reality, however, the Air Staff was committed to the day bomber, but not convinced of it, as Colin Sinnott has pointed out, a day bomber could always evolve into a night bomber, and that was the path of least resistance that the Air Staff settled into. The Whitley, the night bomber that I chose to illustrate that concept, was both faster than the Overstrand and, by an order of magnitude, better armed. While it wasn’t as fast as the aircraft that the RAF did briefly try to operate as a day bomber over Germany in 1939 —the Vickers Wellington— it wasn’t that much slower, either.On 18 December, 1939, the RAF finally screwed up its courage and launched a full-on daylight raid against a target that allowed the Germans some time to marshal their defences, a naval base that had to be approached across the Helgoland Bight. As it happens, the Germans had considerably more time than planners expected, as they had early detection radar in place. Six squadrons of Wellingtons were assembled for the raid, at least some of which had the full set of four turrets. That is, they had the incredibly ugly “waistbin” belly turret that was generally loathed by aircrew for understandable reasons, even before taking into account the imposed drag.The upshot is that the Germans thought that they had shot down 38 bombers for a loss of 12 fighters shot down or written off due to damage, while the RAF thought that it had fought off between 60 and 80 fighters with the loss of “only” twelve bombers, although it accepted that the bombing had not been effective. After chewing the results over for a few weeks, the Air Staff drew the obvious conclusion. The loss rate simply didn’t justify the use of the Wellington in this role.Now, let’s step back for a moment. One of the reasons that it took so long for the Air Staff to accept the lesson of the Helgoland fight is that the crews f the Wellingtons that were sent in, were not trained for daylight formation flying. Even before the battle, the crews had been trained for night bombing? Why?In a word, weather. Airpower historians (yes, I’m being a critical asshole again), tend to circle around this subject and come in on the tail with the Butt Report. This was a 1941 study that showed that Bomber Command’s night bombing campaign was about as accurate as drunks playing darts in pitch darkness, and less dangerous. Usually, at this point, your strategy-drunk historian will announce that the RAF had “neglected” navigation before the war.This is, to be generous, nonsense. You only need to look at Coastal Command’s ability to get its aircraft out and home again to realise that RAF pilots with a Navigation certificate were very, very good at their job. Mass-produced bomber navigators of 1942 were not as good at blind navigation, but the real problem was that practically anyone will lose the plot when the other guy starts shooting at you. That’s cheating, that is!It is true that the Air Ministry had specifically not purchased a “blind landing” aid called the Lorenz system that the Germans deployed in support of night bombing in 1940, but there were reasons for this that go beyond a certain amount of disgraceful “not invented here” lobbying from the Royal Air Establishment, Farnborough. We could go off on a long, long tangent in discussing what radio and radar navigation could deliver in practice from case to case in 1939–45, but the overarching reality is that blind navigation was a huge problem even in daylight flying in Europe. European flying weather is much worse than American, mainly due to poor low level visibility. To be an effective bomber in European conditions, both day and night bombers, and, for that matter, interceptors, had to have “all weather capability.”Now, one aspect of my introductory claim that all combat aircraft before the 1970s were “failures,” is that just because aircraft had to have “all weather capability,” doesn’t mean that they actually had it. There is a colourful story from prewar commercial navigation, of an airliner(!) coming into Croydon or Heston, or one of those old London airports, and flying over the field at fifty feet in the blind fog, while the radio operator in the tower broadcast up to it, “left,” “right,” “left again. . . “ Until the pilot was oriented enough to cut the engine and settle in to what he hoped was the ground. This is, by the way, a much tougher trick when you have retractile undercarriages and runways instead of landing grounds.That said, pilots were still making “timed landings” in 1948. Which is another way of saying, “We’ve flown this far from Paris, and if we’re on the right track, Northolt is right below us, so let’s lower the undercarriage and go right in!” I’ve seen a calculation to the effect that an American commercial airline passenger of the 19302 had better than a 1% chance of getting killed per flight. The European, nationalised airlines were safer, but you could still get killed real good if a hill (or slight rise) decided to step into the Croydon flight path on a dark and foggy night. Whee!As I said, Americans tended not to get this. As cold as it gets in parts of America, the sheer persistence of low level fog and cloud that they encountered in Europe had no parallel in North America outside the Pacific Northwest,leading to somewhat fewer people being killed in the landing phase of operations, and more in the theoretically-midair phase. In any case, the USAAC tended to concentrate its planes in the parts of the country with the nicest weather, for very obvious and economical reasons that —again!— were perfectly justified in the event. Although there main research station was in Dayton, Ohio, so I shouldn’t oversell that one.(The planes last longer if they don’t get rained on.)When the United States Army Air Force arrived in Europe, it was with a “Douhetian” “flying fortress” as its main weapon —the B-17. As you know, it was called that because it was just so well arm—Er, no.This is a Boeing B-17B on its way to the Philippines, where General MacArthur took one look at it, said something to himself to the effect of, “Gee, thanks,” and stuck it out on the perimeter of Clark Field in the hope that it would attract some Japanese bombs that might otherwise hit something useful. It carries a grand total of five manually-operated machine guns in four positions, with none in the tail, and its main selling point is that it has a better performance than the bomber adaptation of the DC-2 (Spoiler: airliners converted into bombers don’t usually have good performance). Wikipedia says that it was “designed defensively,” but the only guys defending here are the Boeing lawyers who managed to sell the courts on the idea that “flying fortress” should be lifted from Thrilling Air Stories and turned into a Boeing copyright.I know I sound critical here, but, again, we have to accept reality. And the reality was that the USAAC did not have the money to develop a strategic day bomber any more than the British did. The kind of research money that would have been required was beyond anyone’s dream of what a “military industrial complex” might look like. It took WWII to transform our expectations and, even then, we’ve got the story of the B-2 as a cautionary. It turns out that America —America!— is better able to afford Moon landings than a competitive strategic bomber.What the B-17 was supposed to accomplish is hidden in the nature of the competition it entered. Douglas, as I said, fielded a conversion of the DC-2, because there was money to develop airliners. Airliners made money, sold for money, and had a reliable stream of subsidy from the airmail scheme.What America did not have in the early 1930s was the money to build a four-engine airliner, which the British were all-in on as a publicly subsidised way of providing “Empire air mail.”(High tech!)The idea was that you really needed four engines if you were going to fly over water, because engines have boo-boos.So when Boeing slips a four-engined bomber into a competition for twins, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it is trying to dip into the Air Corps’ budget to subsidise the development of a next generation four-engine airliner. And the Air Corps is okay with that! This is good strategy! It’s the only hope America has of maintaining its lead in the airliner business and maybe, just maybe, getting a next generation strategic bomber out of it.When the first B-17s arrive in Europe, they’re basically intended to operate like American airliners. You point the “radio range” in the right direction, and they’re good for about 200 miles. The technology isn’t good enough to aim the bomb, but they’re flying by day, and so they can navigate off a map, and bomb visually. The fact that they might have to fly three times that far to bomb German factories doesn’t really register, because it’s the army’s job to get the Air Force in range, somehow, and, anyway, flying in daytime, you can probably puzzle out where you are. “Hey, that river down there is blue! It must be the Danube, which makes the town next to it, Vienna!”Okay, I’m being facetious. But the thing is, they don’t have a solution to the navigation problem. Not really! So they either have to postpone WWII until GPS is invented, or they have to march on with what they’ve got, and hope that the radio “longhairs” can come up with something, anything, that’ll solve the problem.In the event, it turns out that 8th Air Force can put on a decent show about six days a month, which leads on to the next aspect of planning, which is to make it a really big show. American planners are tasked with coming up with one target that would decide the war, and come up with ball bearings. Now, you have to bear in mind that while the Schweinfurt Raid is being planned, the British are simultaneously building high teck blockade runners to sneak into Sweden and buy up Swedish ball bearings, so limited are the supply of the really good ones, and so vital are they to making things like aeroengines, which have to generate thousands of horsepower at rotational speeds of 3000rpm.(HMS Gay Viking. And, yes, “gay” already meant “gay” in 1940, though maybe no-one told the Admiralty about the latest cool cat lingo.)The Second Schweinfurt Raid, in which 291 B-17s were escorted by relays of Spitfires of Fighter Command and P-47s of 8th Air Force, had to fight its way across European skies against virtually the whole interceptor force of the GAF. It’s usually seen as an staggering American defeat and a “failure at every level,” to quote Wikipedia. I think that is incorrect. It’s about what you’d expect of a daylight attack under this paradigm, and it really did shut down ball bearing production. The dismissive observation that it was for only six weeks masks the fairly obvious point that German industry was getting no desperately needed ball bearings for over 10% of an entire year going into D-Day. There’s a reason that the big, late war German aero engines used slide and taper bearings, in spite of this making the designs unreliable. The sacrifice of the Schweinfurt raiders was not in vain, even if the more important reason for German fighters sucking in the late war is lack of high octane fuel.It’s been pointed out that 8th Air Force was basically stuck with day bombing for lack of ability to train its crews in night flying. Well, yeah. You can have the biggest fighting air force in the world, or you can have the hypertrophied training apparatus required to turn out aircrew with an extra two hundred hours of instrument flying training. Training takes planes! And instructors! And runways! And fuel! And casualties, for that matter!(Training is fun!)You can’t have both. Successful D-Day, or more planes for the night air offensive. Which one do you choose?This conversation is never complete without an obligatory reference to the “long range fighter.” Supposedly, the dumb old Air Staff didn’t realise that it was easy to whip up a long range fighter, as the P-51 proved.To them I ask only: Give me one additional example of a long range fighter. And, once you’ve done that, describe to me all of the operations in which American bombers took off accompanied by groups of P-51s, flew to Berlin, accompanied by escorting P-51s, and returned to their bases, still escorted by P-51s. Because that is what “escorting” means.P-51s can’t do that. No fighter than can engage enemy interceptors can do that. The only way that can be done is if the escorting fighter cruises at the same speed as the bombers, and cruising speed is a fixed proportion of maximum speed.Cruising speed +a third-or-so equals maximum speed. Bombers go slower than fighters. You do the math.Cruise like a bomber, fight like a bomber. If you’re thinking that I’m making some kind of crazy, contrarian claim about air warfare in Northern Europe in 1944–45, you need to take a closer look at what actually happened, sortie by sortie. The “Big Week” raids laid in end-to-end fighter escort not with some kind of magic aeroplane, but with relays of fighters, something that was only possible because the Allied fighter forces outnumbered the Germans by such a huge margin that they could afford to put three times as many single engined aircraft in the sky. P-47s, heavily laden with drop tanks, could fly safely through air space dominated by Fighter Command Spitfires, then drop their tanks and create an additional foothold of controlled airspace through which P-51s, with their drop tanks (replacing P-38s, which really didn’t work out in the theatre), could cruise, at their most economical speed, to Berlin.“Big Week,” like the Schweinfurt raid of five months before, consisted of a limited series of massive raids against “key” targets selected so that the day bomber offensive could have a decisive effect at the time of D-Day with just a few bombing opportunities. Specifically, it was intended to hit the German fighter aircraft factories. From experience during the Blitz, Allied planners knew that the Germans would have to react by dispersing production away from a small number of central factories, where it was more efficient, to many subcontractors, where it was less so. The dispersal period would cut German fighter production in the leadup to the Invasion.After that, of course, it would begin to ramp up again, and one might even expect the Germans to have solved the ball-bearing/high octane performance problem. (As, of course, they did.) But, by that time, the army would have ripped a hole in the air defence of the Reich, through which 8th Air Force could fly.So that’s the story of the Crusade in/over Europe. Accidentally, it’s also the story of the rise of regular commercial airline service, so that not only can we bomb the Nazis into the Stone Age —where it unfortunately turns out they’re happy as clams— we can also get home for Thanksgiving without worrying about becoming the crunchy, meaty filling in a serving of airliner flambee.There. Aren’t you glad you read through to the end? Bueller? Anyone?*The United States Army Air Corps could only dream of having a mighty fleet of 30 of these, because Congress wouldn’t play ball. And considering that the United States won WWII, I’m saying that Congress was right to do so. Unfortunately, air power enthusiasts tend to take a dimmer view of Congressional cheeseparing, which leads, via the usual nationalist distortions, to some strange versions of the story.

You will read they are hero’s.The best of the best.The Avengers level (note for future generations, lol: the movie Avengers vs Thanos is just released).(due to copyright thingies, this superhero picture is NOT an Avenger although it suggests a kind of Avenger, man, I hate copyright, source: pixabay)And they are right.Google, for example, isn’t where it is now because they hired the worst.Much like an R&D pipeline, the output is started way back in the past.Some boring stuff to show offGoogle was able to find exceptional people to define products that people needed. They gave them away for free (gmail, google docs, gdrive), which was unseen before (Microsoft was milking us for every penny we had). Founded in 1998, it is exceptional to now be worth as much or more than companies that exist for 60, 80 years. Nobody can deny this is EXCEPTIONAL.They found those exceptional people in tempore non suspecto, so the higher echelons have on average more capable software people than other companies. But every organization that grows attracts losers that want to associate with success. The quality is going down, it is the case for every organization.Like my answer yesterday, Bert Verrycken's answer to Why do many people who don't work for Google or Microsoft claim the companies hire large numbers of software engineers for mindless entry-level coding?, there are two important things:Entry level coding is needed and it is the majority of the work.Google people that have proven themselves do tend to do more important work.Working for Google looks good on a resume, success rubs off, which is not the same as saying every Google employee is competent.The wealth, stock, stock options, and perks attract the wrong kind of people for sure. It is unavoidable.The question: skillsWe have established that not all Google employees are the same.And, in Europe, at least based on what I have seen, it is not the same as in other parts of the world. International companies can have talent and smaller companies can have talent as well. People that stay at international companies for 5 to 10 years or more, they cope well with meaningless cosmetic management style changes, changes in the company logo, in company credo and slogans as a way of mimicking innovation. It is not real innovation, it is pretending to innovate. The kind of people that accept this in the longer term are not innovative either, they are CONFORMING. An important skill for any employee.In smaller companies, you get on average more junior people (cheap) and more senior people. The latter accepts a lower pay sometimes in exchange for the freedom and less conforming nature of small companies. Their skill is OUT-OF-THE-BOX thinking. And they appreciate a more lenient environment where they are not micro-managed and where they can decide things based on experience and reason. For junior engineers, it is an opportunity to learn from experts if they possess this quality. Some do not, they graduate with the mindset of superiority and no fact in the world can convince them they are wrong. It is always a mixed bag.Coming back to Google, they still have enough free running experts that drive their progress. But it has slowed down significantly. Over the years, they missed opportunities. They hopped on a trend much too late and failed with the thing they came up with much too late. Google+, various chat tries, iGoogle (which I actually liked), wave,…. On the other hand, Google Drive is integrated with email and basic spreadsheet and text editor, they first had it map as a drive (but downloading all files) and now the file streaming (which takes less local disk space). This is an example of several teams, able to WORK TOGETHER across products, something onedrive, Office and Exchange from Microsoft still struggle with. I used both extensively and Google solution is what a person need. And the competition (onedrive and iCloud) are inferior. Again, this is a unique benefit you cannot find in big companies, cross-department success. Really.Even though they are diluted with less valuable programmers, they still outclass the rest. That should not be underestimated because it is impossible to establish in other big companies.Sidestep: hardwareGoogle is a software company and thus susceptible to Hubris. Project Tango and their TPU chips touched with the Movidius Myriad chip a few years ago. Movidius was built on hardware and had a core ASIC team. Google was a frontrunner to start making chips (ASIC’s) because they saw what was coming. It is important that a software company looks into hardware. That means it is potentially crucial for the future. Today, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (!), Amazon and others joined them and have their AI and hardware acceleration teams in-house. They develop silicon that hurts the CPU and GPU vendors (Intel, AMD, NVidia) but also FPGA vendors (Xilinx, Actel, …). What we are seeing is revolutionary, giants making their own chips reducing the market for semiconductor companies. Not a lot of people see what the result will be. But they will, in a few years. The mistake is that software people think they can design hardware. Because an HDL (hardware description language) has a software syntax. So, it makes sense for them. Unfortunately, that is the greatest threat, I explained it a long time ago:Bert Verrycken's answer to Can you explain FPGA to a software engineer?IT IS NOT SOFTWARE, IT DESCRIBES HARDWARE.I ordered the Google coral USB Stick and it is a disaster.Review: Kyle Cooper's post in HW accelerators eating AIIt is based on Chisel, an attempt by computer and software people to write software that translates into hardware at the same time. Still, they need to go through an HDL, so in essence, they have the software part covered, like in the year 2000 (C level design launched C synthesis, which essentially just recreated a synthesizable subset in C, the same as any HDL did, they went out of business).These mistakes have been made before. As a hardware engineer, I do think there will be software in the future that is built on the next level of abstraction (now, gates, then processors). But we need thousands of processors on a chip to make this happen (and not one type of ISA, but many, much like there are several gates with different functionality).Mixed conclusionGoogle is still more innovative than the competition. In software. The signs are there that it is in decline, the gap is closing, not due to the others improving but Google suffers more and more from its size. On the other hand, they still believe they are superior even in hardware, where they have no stronghold and they are unable to see or understand how different hardware is. After so many years, you just have to look at the chips they make. Huge cooling needed. Why? Because power efficient and low power design is not something that comes with a software syntax (*). Not even in an HDL description. It is a methodology that is totally outside coding. And they didn’t get that. Hubris.Note: I spoke to the Coral USB support and I got a guy that was totally into AI on the academic and research side. Probably also proficient in software, but, boy, he didn’t understand anything about hardware. Even the USB protocol, another scam by Google, the enumeration of their USB stick is just something that is hacked towards one OS. Pretending it is USB 3.x is implying standard and certification. It is far from the truth.Thanks, Fardin Khan, for the A2A.(*) UPF files have level shifters and isolation cells but they are not present in the RTL (which is the digital circuit design in HDL). Power domain controllers are. Clock gaters are as well, but clock trees are not. And clock trees do consume a lot if the clock gate is not placed at the start of the clock tree. Essentially a clock tree is made of delay buffers that try to limit the skew of the clock reaching all flops in different physical positions on the silicon. There is a reason that there are hardware designers. There aren’t many compared to software people, and expert hardware designers are a rare find. Which makes me sad because it takes an expert to recognize an expert, and they seem to be missing a hardware expert in Google.Quora space: HW accelerators eating AI (more than 8K professionals following my space).My blog on Quora: System On Chip blog

Well, I'm 95% done on my latest book, which is about a type of top secret reconnaissance activity conducted by my Air Force unit throughout the 11 years the U.S. was actively involved in the War. Even as a Vietnam Veteran and historian, my research uncovered a lot of information I was either not aware of, or my understanding of a particular aspect of the War was skewed or incomplete.Being a 4th generation military serviceman, our family has always "run toward the sound of the guns," as they say. I can recall, however, that both my dad and paternal grandfather were not too warm & fuzzy about Vietnam by time the 1968 Presidential Elections came around. Neither my dad or grandfather had fought in, nor was the country ever involved in, a war beyond our borders lasting more than three and a half years. By the end of 1968, America had been fighting in Vietnam for four years with no end in sight.As much as my own family began to question American involvement in Southeast Asia, and it was common to hear people say we did not belong there, or we should have never entered into direct participation - much the same as you still hear today, even from my fellow Vietnam Veterans - my extensive research has shown me that these views, although passionate and heartfelt, are extremely naive. I can tell you this: arguing the merits of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War with anyone who is not well read on the War, listens to a lot of rhetoric, and is very passionate about the War - possibly due to their own participation or a loved one who was a casualty - is going to be a difficult proposition; you will likely end up in a stalemate, at best.Here are some questions about the Vietnam War that once answered, helped me understand the bigger picture, and goes beyond the three word statement, "it was wrong."1. Much like the purpose behind creating NATO in Europe after WW II, another treaty organization was also created after the war: SEATO (SouthEast Asia Treaty Organization). Ask or research what the U.S. obligations were as a signatory to that Treaty.2. Ask if the U.S. Government had any high level experts on Communism and global politics who were eminently qualified to expound on the reality of the Communist Domino Theory in Southeast Asia. Did they write anything official on this topic? What was their expert analysis on the Domino Theory? Did anyone who was either an elected member or Senate high level appointee of a presidential administration get read-in on the Domino Theory by a USG expert?3. What was the real contribution by the CIA throughout the Vietnam War?4. What involvement did Communist China and the USSR actually have during the Vietnam War?5. In order to prevent North Vietnam's ultimate takeover of South Vietnam, what actions could or should have been taken (by anyone)? Were North Vietnam's policies during the War altruistic, or did they practice the axiom of, "the ends justifies the means?"6. After WW II, why did Ho Chi Minh swing his political faction (and insurgency) toward Communism? Was Ho a Communist?7. By actively fighting the Vietnam War using all of the available U.S. military resources (except nuclear weapons), did it ultimately degrade, or help improve the military?If you seek out legitimate, factual information on these questions, you'll be better informed than the vast majority of people who have an interest in the Vietnam War. Once again, I will warn you: Be SURE you are using credible sources for information. Try to conduct as much research as you can from primary source documentation, or secondary source documentation with a documented bibliography, or a secondary source person with impeccable credentials.Let me make a research suggestion that will help you start-off in the right direction. Texas Tech University's (Lubbock, TX) Department of History maintains a program known as the "Vietnam Virtual Archive." Outside of the USG, the VVA owns the largest Vietnam War collection in the World. As the name implies, VVA's charter includes digitizing as much as possible, all of their holdings, and then post the digital file to the VVA website . VVA's collection includes primary source documents, recordings, photographs, maps, videos, books and many historical artifacts stemming from the Vietnam War. One of my favorite collections is their Vietnam Veteran's Oral History Project. Anyone who had a first-person experience related to the War can apply to become one of the contributors to the OHP. The standard format includes a series of written questions you answer ahead of time. Once you have completed the questionnaire you are added to OHP's list of waiting candidates. When it is your turn, one of VVA's staff PhD historians will schedule you for a one-on-one, recorded, phone interview. The interview does not have any minimum or maximum time limit. The oral interviews have been really interesting reading because it gives firsthand accounts by those men & women who were there.Good luck!Steve Miller, Copyright 2015, USA