" Fall’s message was that nations lose wars because of incomplete ground-level intelligence of the most profound cultural variety, making them unable to grasp the mentality of the people they are trying to help or change or conquer, a mentality accumulated from thousands of years of history in a specific landscape. The Americans would lose in Vietnam just as the French had lost, Fall predicted, because the Americans were given to abstractions that obscured the cultural reality on the ground in Vietnam. "

― Robert D. Kaplan , The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian