Newt was supposed to be a historian

Virginia Postrel thinks Newt Gingrich "thinks seriously about strategy (of all sorts)." But you couldn't tell that by the passage she quotes:

Gingrich argues that the administration has been putting far too much emphasis on a military solution and slighting the political element. “The real key here is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow,” he says. “And that is a very important metric that they just don’t get.” He contends that the civilian-run CPA is fairly isolated and powerless, hunkered down inside its bunker in Baghdad. The military has the money and the daily contact with the locals. But it’s using the same tactics in a guerrilla struggle that led to defeat in Vietnam.

Makes it sound like the Republic of South Vietnam fell to a popular insurrection and a peasant army. But that's not the way it happened. Saigon fell to a modern army that was equipped with Soviet tanks and artillery and that waged a conventional offensive. It was Poland 1939 or Norway 1940.

Outside the Beltway has the right perspective

But what Newt knows about military strategy is just what he's heard others say; he's not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.