The war in Vietnam was multilayered, like a Russian babushka doll. It was a civil war within South Vietnam between the communists and other parties. It was a civil war between North and South Vietnam – the artificially divided parts of a single nation. It was an Asian regional war in which North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, China, and the Republic of Korea all played military roles. It nested in the context of a broader East–West war of ideas, in which the United States and the Soviet Union were the chief protagonists. With that layering, the war in Vietnam was inherently a hybrid conflict in which state-of-the-art conventional arms and tactics commingled with the tools and techniques of guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare.

The term “hybrid warfare” has little meaning to a soldier, airman, marine, or sailor in the thick of a fight. Troops on both sides simply did what they had to do to accomplish their assigned missions and in the hope of emerging from the war alive. The demands of hybrid warfare, however, had clear relevance at higher echelons of authority. In fact, those demands forced political and military leaders to make choices among competing conceptions of what the war was all about, and thereby to determine how best to prosecute it.