The Calley case has laid bare a neglected fact: Of all the major nations and their armies, the United States and its army have been, in moral terms, the least able to deal with the type of situation Vietnam has presented.

The American style of war has always been the engineer's style—for West Point is, traditionally, a school for engineers. We apply technology to grossly defined problems. We seek our military solutions in logistics, sheer manpower and firepower, thus over- powering all discrimination and subtlety. We have no military caste; since the permanent expansion of our standing army in the 1940's, the influence of the old American military families and schools has been submerged, and with it the last vestige of the aristocratic military ethos.