The U.S. military may have checked out of Vietnam in the 1970s, but it still had not left. Just as that war continues to shape American foreign and military policy and the nation's cultural politics, it has also conditioned the armed forces' approach to policy making and civil-military relations for the past two decades. Even before the war ended, service leaders feared that they were bearing the burden for the U.S. failure in Vietnam as the military's previously respected standing in American public life dropped markedly. Thus Harold K. Johnson complained that “the whole onus for Vietnam … has fallen upon ‘the military,’” while Matthew Ridgway lamented that “not before in my lifetime – and I was born into the Army in the nineteenth century “ has the Army's public image suffered so many grievous blows and fallen to such low esteem in such wide areas of our society.”

The decline in military prestige and influence did not last long, however. In the aftermath of Tet, American service leaders intensified their efforts to score political points and regain traditional levels of credibility and power, while civilian leaders in turn continued their own political struggles against the brass.