Mark Moyar

Mark Moyar (born 1971) joined Orbis Operations as Director of Research in July 2010 after serving as a professor at the Marine Corps University where he held the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism. Moyar is known for his writing on the Vietnam War.

Moyar holds a B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. His articles on historical and current events have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Moyar is the author of the 2006 book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, a history that is considered revisionist by many American historians. In it he argues that Ngo Dinh Diem was an effective leader. Moyar states that supporting the November 1963 coup was one of the worst American mistakes of the war. The other biggest mistakes according to Moyar were: the failure to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, and the United States Congress' refusal to support the South Vietnamese government after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were violated, and the refusal of emergency aid to South Vietnam near the end of the war.

Triumph Forsaken caused a great stir and many opinionative reviews, some negative, as well as some positive. In response to the reactions it created, Triumph revisited : historians battle for the Vietnam War, a collection of detailed reviews of the book by 15 different academic historians, edited by Andrew Wiest and Michael J. Doidge, was released in 2010. The reviews are attached to responses by Moyar, mostly robust rebuttal of the criticism of his work.

Books

 * Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (1997) ISBN 1-55750-593-4
 * Republished in 2007 as Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam with a foreword by Harry Summers and a new preface and chapter; ISBN 0-8032-1602-5
 * Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (2006) ISBN 0-521-86911-0
 * A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (2009) ISBN 0-300-15276-0