After Vietnam: What the Pentagon Has Learned
Rosen, Stephen
Stephen Rosen AFTER VIETNAM: WHAT THE PENTAGON HAS LEARNED A can-do approach to war. It is now four years after the fall of Saigon, and historians have begun to draw some tentative conclusions...
...The only way to overcome VC control is by brute force applied against the VC...
...in Vietnam, with the exception of 1971...
...At least that is a problem that people have to think of if any such thing, God forbid, should come up again...
...Whatever else it was, Vietnam was the first war lost by the United .States Army: When it was all over, the enemy was in control of the battlefield...
...This is not much...
...I'll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war...
...When Westmoreland was replaced by his deputy, General Creighton Abrams, who had had responsibility for improving the quality of the ARVN forces, and who had been associated with an early report critical of the army's conventional tactics, it was hoped that things would change for the better...
...We were aware of what we were getting into, and aware that the military measures that we were willing to use were enough to avoid defeat but altogether unlikely to bring victory...
...Opposition dominated college-educated voters by March 1968...
...Five percent said it was most important to prepare for subconventional wars involving American combat forces...
...The American military historian S.L.A...
...Howard's conclusions improve even more when they are compared with the "lesson" implied in the latest edition of Henry Kissinger's American Foreign Policy, published in the spring of 1978...
...This is probably true, but it is probably true of most armies in peacetime, and of the American army at all times...
...It seems, however, that the army's preferred style of combat is that with which the American political system is most compatible...
...Earlier editions of this book had contained an essay on the Vietnam negotiations written just before Kissinger took office in 1969...
...We tend to forget how quickly opposition to the war developed oiice we started to take serious casualties...
...On the other hand, when the 101st Airborne Division temporarily applied "clear-and-hold" tactics in contested areas in the Mekong Delta, it gained the active support of the local population in uncovering the VC network...
...But we will not fight in any serious way to maintain the internal security of a weak government...
...Maybe...
...None of S.L.A...
...The same thing was noted of American operations...
...and get killed...
...If the attempt to do more than we, practically, were able to do in Vietnam had not shattered our nerve, it would have been enough to beat back the 1975 offensive and any subsequent conventional attacks...
...This was victory for the United States and doomsday for North Vietnam, and we knew it, and they knew it...
...Few people outside the American army . would argue that the search-and-destroy tactics employed by General Westmoreland were the best means to fight an antiguerrilla war...
...South Vietnam might well have fallen to internal, or quasi-internal, attack...
...What is not so well recognized is the fact that the people who were in the best position to know better also believed in our defeat...
...We felt that in a nuclear world it is just too dangerous for an entire people to get too angry, and we deliberately played this down...
...Army could supply but that ARVN could not...
...The United States is well equipped, morally and militarily, to protect independent, sovereign nations, and poorly equipped to win hearts and minds...
...I suppose that from a social-scientist point of view it is particularly interesting that people like me-people who had some responsibility for expressing the Presidential point of view-could be so affected by the media, as everyone else was, while downstairs was that enormous panoply of intelligence gathering devices...
...The 1973 peace agreement actually negotiated by Kissinger resulted in a ceasefire in place...
...The only article written by a military man that attempts seriously to deal with the lessons of Vietnam points out a problem...
...fight the war...
...As a foreign ally of South Vietnam, we should aid the Saigon government and leave to it any negotiations it might wish to have with the NLF...
...This does not seem likely, but a military defeat does not automatically prove that the methods employed were the wrong ones...
...The 1968 offensive was a massive military defeat for the VC, but was perceived as a massive American defeat by newspapers and television...
...Two others were less incredibly obtuse...
...The oral memoirs** of some of the American officials who participated in the decision to go to war is littered with references to academic theories that seemed to show how limited wars were going to deter Communist expansion by demonstrating our commitment...
...Army officers are trained to do: bring the war to the enemy and destroy his main forces...
...More important, they could usually choose when to engage and disengage from American combat patrols, and so regulate their logistical demands...
...Ambush, Battles in the Monsoon, Fields of Bamboo, and West to Cambodia...
...Howard can be forgiven the conventionality of his remarks...
...A professional army can be deployed to the Third World and can fight without creating a domestic uproar...
...majority was increasing after Tet while approval of Johnson's policies was decreasing...
...The contradiction between Kissinger's positions in and out of office was a little too painful, and the offending essay was dropped from his book...
...It is now four years after the fall of Saigon, and historians have begun to draw some tentative conclusions about the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam war...
...The war on the ground is another story...
...Another concluded that the United States Army might have done a better job in Vietnam if it had tried harder to protect the civilian population against the Viet Cong...
...But Abrams met with resistance from the officer corps above and below him...
...The Linebacker campaigns were victories of a sort for American air power...
...There are several journals published by each of the armed services containing articles written by professional military men for each other...
...More important, by conducting these sweeps Westmoreland was doing, or trying to do, what U.S...
...In a poll after the February 1968 Tet offensive, self-described "hawks" outnumbered "doves" 61 percent to 23 percent, as opposed to 56 percent to 28 percent in January...
...But an attempt to do what we cannot bring ourselves sincerely to do will prevent us from doing what we are able to do, which is to protect countries against external aggression...
...But as a military policy this is successful only in the sense that the welfare program is successful: Leaders are aware of its faults, but the costs of changing it, as evaluated by the people who are currently presiding over it, are so high as to make more of the same the rational choice...
...Nixon may have succeeded in proving that he was as unreasonable as the North Vietnamese...
...The essay was straightforward...
...Search and destroy" in practice meant wandering around in the jungle or the central highlands until you walked into an ambush, at which time you tried to fight your way out...
...There were more desertions, per thousand men, in 1944 than in each of the years that the army was...
...It is reported that he had just about decided to hit the North again in March of 1973 in response to their violations of the peace agreement...
...By keeping his troops in the bush, Westmoreland was able to use the massive firepower at his disposal without routinely destroying population centers, although the VC would often launch ambushes from villages precisely in order to provoke the army into using its heavy weapons against civilians...
...They have not lost a foreign war since they lost their French possessions in the sixteenth century...
...Their own figures demonstrate that, compared to the army's performance in recent wars, the Vietnam war did not witness the dissolution of our troops...
...President Kennedy's first Chairman of the JCS, Lyman Lemnitzer, was aware of Kennedy's attachment to counterinsur-gency and the Green Berets...
...By day interrogators and guards would inquire solicitously about our needs...
...What is clear is how uncomfortable both the American people and the American military and political leadership were with the fact of limited war...
...No doubt it costs more to fight a convenThe Irony of Vietnam, Brookings Institution, $4.95...
...South Vietnam was conquered by a modern army, not the Viet Cong...
...What, then, can we conclude...
...Army has spent so little effort assessing its performance in Vietnam...
...Two retired army officers, Richard Gabriel and Paul Savage, have documented the problems suffered by the army in Vietnam...
...Villagers familiar with the terrain were willing to guide the Americans in long-range patrols when they were assured of some protection against reprisals...
...Another commented on what we had learned about how to supply armored columns in the field by helicopter...
...But it is something...
...this manual is designed mainly to deal with the realities of such operations...
...Among those who said yes, three wanted sharply increased military action to win the war for every one who wanted to withdraw American troops...
...His willingness to ignore the American and Soviet outcry seemed to prove that, on this subject, he was not entirely rational...
...A little-publicized poll was taken among New Hampshire voters as they left the booths where they had just given Eugene McCarthy 42 percent of their votes...
...Morale would be sustained not by a sense of righteousness, but by a cool and detached dedication to the national interest...
...I think it can fairly be said that the 1972 campaign reinforced the impression drawn from earlier wars: that air power can usefully restrict the supply of materiel going to an enemy engaged in a major conventional ground battle with your own army...
...One author asserts that our combat intelligence had been particularly good in the Vietnam war...
...Michael Howard, the British military historian, has written that the "real lesson of Vietnam" is that the peoples of the Third World "must be treated as peoples, not as objects and instruments...
...I would talk to Walt Rostow and ask him what had happened...
...This turns out to be the case, as is demonstrated by the latest edition of the basic doctrinal work of the army, the Operations Field Manual: "Battle in Central Europe against forces of the Warsaw Pact is the most demanding mission that the U.S...
...The American army enjoyed its only real big victory in Vietnam when, in 1972, its firepower and logistics helped the South Vietnamese maul the NVA good and proper...
...This supposedly represented realistic military advice...
...We left, and 170,000 North Vietnamese troops stayed...
...The previous air campaigns had been carefully limited-calculated to raise the cost of the war to the North Vietnamese high enough to make it worth their while to stop, but not high enough to make them call for Soviet or Chinese ground troops...
...The fact that search-and-destroy tactics were relatively inefficient ways of destroying the VC infrastructure was well known to the American Military Assistance Command Vietnam back in 1964...
...Marshall's four books are now assigned at the War College...
...Instead of commitment, we communicated an unwillingness to raise the stakes of the contest past a certain point, while the North Vietnamese demonstrated their absolute determination to persevere...
...Nobody ever won a battle sitting on his ass...
...VC units of company and even battalion size remain in operation...
...Briefly stated, his argument is that the Vietnam war was the result of the successful operation of the American system...
...As an example of the successful operation of the system, Gelb quotes a 1965 estimate made by General Earl Wheeler that the complete pacification of South Vietnam would occur after 700,000 to 1,000,000 American soldiers had operated in Vietnam for about seven years...
...This last observation is not as much of a commonplace as it might seem...
...Democratic support held out for six more months...
...Because of the heavy artillery and air support available to the Americans they seldom suffered any large-scale disasters...
...It is not likely that we will never again see hostile activity in the Third World...
...Limited wars to protect nations from external threats appeal to our moralistic, as well as our moral, nature, as Kristol would put it...
...The hawkish ** Many Reasons Why, Michael Carlton, McGraw-Hill, $10.00...
...It is unrivalled in its ability quickly to create a logistics network that can move huge amounts of supplies 10,000 miles from the source of supply...
...This, perhaps, is the epitaph for the university-born idea of limited imperial wars...
...But March 1973 was also the time that John Dean chose to go over to the other side...
...Sharp, insists in his book that there was nothing wrong with the way the military wanted to Strategy for Defeat, Presidio Press, $12.95...
...But if we cannot do everything that would be useful, we can do some things...
...Four books resulted...
...Harry McPherson, the President's counsel and one of his speechwriters, gave his reaction to the offensive: I felt that we were being put to it as hard as we ever had...
...What is remarkable is how well the American soldiers performed under such unfavorable circumstances...
...It seemed to be a good idea, therefore, to study the problem of "people's wars...
...Yet when the same officers were asked on what the existing military budget should be spent, 79 percent said it was most imponant to prepare for a nuclear or conventional war with the Soviet Union or China...
...Still, he insisted that it was right to train the South Vietnamese Army in conventional Amerir can-style infantry and mechanized-warfare tactics...
...They claim that American officers are now better trained to manage a large corporation than to lead men under fire...
...In the event, this kind of professionalism was enough to sustain the officers and soldiers of the United States, but not the men who had to order them to go out and die...
...The United States Army was and is governed by the idea that the way to win any war is to go out and destroy the opposing army...
...Sharp reprints the report of a returned American POW who was in Hanoi during the initial bombings of 1966 and 1967 and during the Linebacker II strikes of 1972-1973 to support his claim...
...As the Soviet Union gains the power to project its forces or those of its proxies around the world, this may turn out to be a useful capability...
...Much more important, the political leadership of the country had lost faith in the war effort as a result of the Tet offensive...
...The problem is that the defeat of the army in Vietnam has not provoked it into an examination of the tactics and strategy best suited for fighting an anti-guerrilla war...
...The first lesson, obviously, is that despite the existence of a large body of theory and practice that indicates that wars of counterinsur-gency can be won, we would do well not to expect the American army to win them...
...In 1966, Robert McNamara wrote that "in almost no contested area designated for pacification in recent years have ARVN forces actually 'cleared and stayed' to a point where cadre teams could have stayed overnight and survived...
...There are various explanations for this attitude...
...Because the U.S...
...The United States Army did not disintegrate in Vietnam...
...What can the United States reasonably expect to be able to do...
...The picture conveyed by this sympathetic retired Brigadier General is terrifying...
...They also might have made possible the defeat of the 1975 offensive...
...Certainly, there are Persian Gulf states that would be grateful for some protection against Iraqi or Soviet attack, even if we could not protect them from internal subversion...
...The army, the American people, and the American political leadership are comfortable with the idea of combatting clear cases of international aggression...
...Earlier, American Marines had employed similar tactics with equal success in the northernmost tactical military zone, but like the 101st, they were pulled out and assigned to less "static" missions...
...Army comes off a poor second, we may wonder whether that is the relevant comparison to make...
...A 1975 poll of Army, Air Force, and Navy officers revealed that just about none of them thought that the kind of conflict most likely to involve the United States during the next decade would be a nuclear war...
...But if the army budget is spent on conventional high-performance equipment, there is a very large rhance that the army will train and prepare to fight with that equipment only...
...In truth, the Linebacker campaigns did not break the enemy's will...
...Irving Kristol, in an essay contained in The Vietnam Legacy, argues that the advent of an all-volunteer American army means that we now have the military tool with which to perform the duties of an imperial republic...
...It is not clear whether these theories, adequately put into practice, would have worked...
...The final lesson of Vietnam, paradoxically, is that we should treat the peoples of the Third World as objects, as states, that can be protected, and not as people, who must be saved...
...Leslie Gelb quotes* at secondhand a remark made by Earl Wheeler while he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Nobody ever won a battle sitting on his ass...
...He claimed to have killed 11,000 men, but somehow managed to capture only 750 weapons: "I guess I basically feel that the 'hearts and minds' approach can be overdone...
...Search-and-destroy tactics were not even a very good way simply to kill enemy soldiers...
...The situation and the effect of the bombing in 1972 were completely different, when the raids didn't last ten minutes, but went on and on-when the B-52 columns rolled in, and the big bombs impacted and kept on impacting in the distance-when the ground shook, and the plaster fell from the ceiling and the prisoners cheered wildly and the guards cowered in the lee of the walls...
...Perhaps political decisions were responsible for the outcome of that war...
...Fighting guerrillas was fine, but what would you do with an anti-guerrilla army when the North Vietnamese regular divisions rolled south...
...Americans must become more sensitive to local conditions...
...The South Vietnamese lost in 1975 to a similar attack partly because they had come to depend on the high-quality support that the U.S...
...While the U.S...
...What conclusions did these ankles draw...
...Hard drug use there was high, but it was high within the army worldwide...
...Gabriel and Savage constantly compare the performance of the American army to that of the Wehrmacht in World War II...
...Unlimited war would make everybody happy, but is totally undesirable, for obvious reasons...
...At the same time, the VC/ NVA forces could pick when to fight, and when they had had enough, they could break off contact...
...Given the history of the 1972 and 1975 North Vietnamese offensives, we must admit that Lemnitzer had a point...
...Academics had argued that we could fight fine-tuned wars to communicate our commitment to containment...
...As Dean Rusk put it, the American government deliberately waged war without the emotional fervor that makes war endurable for those who stay at home: We didn't have military parades...
...If the army declines to draw the appropriate lessons from the Vietnam war, we are forced to do so in its stead...
...Our diplomacy should be confined to getting the other foreign military power out of South Vietnam...
...Military Review is put out by the Army Staff College, Parameters by the War College...
...Moreover, Howard's "lesson" reflects an appreciation of the limited ability of the West to direct the political development of other countries...
...It may not be enough...
...McPherson's despair does not indicate how powerful television was, but rather how difficult American officials were finding it at that point to sustain their commitment to the kind of limited war we were fighting...
...tional war with the Soviet Union than to fight a guerrilla army...
...They did force him to sign a peace agreement, but it was an agreement that would have been unacceptable to everyone in the United States government, including Kissinger, in 1969...
...Those who voted for McCarthy were asked if they opposed the war...
...The army may have been doing the wrong job, but it was not doing it badly...
...The last book, despite its title, is not about the 1970 incursion...
...The army is good at destroying conventional armies on the move, and the idea that we must keep fighting until invaders are pushed back across an international frontier is natural to us...
...Well, I must say I mistrusted what he said because like millions of other people who had been looking at television, I had the feeling that the country had just about had it...
...The President then rationally weighed the costs of victory, and chose the more modest goal of avoiding defeat...
...The second lesson is that the American army is rather good at what it does, which is fighting conventional armies in straight-ahead mechanized battles...
...Since 1974, perhaps five articles have been devoted to an examination of the experiences of the war...
...The theoreticians of limited war argued that this would simultaneously communicate our commitment to the South and our willingness to accept a moderate peace treaty...
...These facts make it hard to agree with the thesis of the Gelb book...
...The reaction of an anonymous army officer to the attempt to change the army's methods to suit Vietnamese conditions is recorded in Brian Jenkins' book, The Unchangeable War...
...Stephen Rosen is a research associate at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard...
...As for the American conduct of the air war, the retired Commander-in-Chief of the American military in the Pacific from 1964 until 1968, Admiral U.S.G...
...In contrast, the 1972 bombings seemed to show the North Vietnamese that Richard Nixon was unconditionally committed to the defense of South Vietnam, and would stop at nothing to deny the North its victory...
...This may or may not be so...
...The existence of geographic sanctuaries, the on-and-off nature of the 1967 bombing, "provided a training ground for their political cadres to learn the rudiments of maintaining morale and production under intermittent fire Several of our interrogators bragged about their 'instruction tours' on the hard stands" in the areas where American bombers were operating...
...Perhaps there was nothing wrong with the way the American military performed in Vietnam...
...An all-out air war directed at the morale and economic assets of the North Vietnamese, and not at the flow of supplies to the South, would have broken the will of the North and ended the war...
...But the Linebacker campaigns did represent a significant change in our strategy...
...The British, after all, have not often had to learn from military defeat...
...Morale was always high because the bombing never lasted long, and you could always come back to Hanoi where you knew you were safe...
...The shock was there, the commitment was there, and the enemy 's will was broken...
...We can begin to understand why the U.S...
...A disturbingly large part of the writing about the Vietnam war since 1974 has shared the tendency, so brazenly exhibited by Kissinger, to forget one's mistakes, when possible, and to explain away the rest...
...Peter Braestrup's Big Story is the best account of a media phenomenon now widely recognized...
...One noted that the American army had spent more years fighting in revolutionary and civil wars than in more conventional conflicts...
...Keeping his troops in the bush also meant keeping them away from cities where they had access to narcotics...
...By October 1967 opponents of the war among Republicans and independents outnumbered supporters...
...The problem with this, as the outgoing Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Paul Warnke, put it, was that "we guessed wrong with respect to what the North Vietnamese reaction would be...
...Before that time, the army had to build and protect base areas so that supplies could be brought over to sustain combat operations...
...This may or may not be so, but if past experience is any guide, the American army is more likely to lose guerrilla wars the more professional it becomes...
...We tried to do in cold blood what can only be done in hot blood, when sacrifices of this order are involved...
...Marshall spent several months in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, each time spending a month with one division in the field in order thoroughly to research combat operations...
...At the most basic level, one can approach the question of the lessons of Vietnam from the standpoint of military history...
...Army could be assigned...
...In low morale armies, the officers stay in safe base areas while the enlisted men go out % Crisis in Command, Hill and Wang, $4.95...
...Sixty-four percent said that the United States was most likely to become involved in a war of counterinsur-gency...
...While in 1972 many North Vietnamese tanks were abandoned or destroyed, literally when out of fuel, this does not show that a similar campaign in 1967 could have starved out the VC and North Vietnamese Army forces in the South...
...There was some logic behind the use of this tactic...
...After South Vietnam had fallen, Henry Kissinger told reporters informally that if he had had his way, the skies over Hanoi would have been black with B-52s...
...If economic and military aid to South Vietnam was not enough to prevent a Communist victory, Vietnam would still be as badly off as it is now...
...Public support for the war ended after one year of serious fighting in which casualties were taken as rapidly as during the Korean war, Popular, as opposed to intellectual, opposition to the war was not particularly in favor of "peace...
...Major General Julian Ewell conducted a year-long search-and-destroy campaign well into 1969, despite Abrams' directives...
...The use of heavy weapons and the destruction of civilian property were minimized...
...Can we draw any general conclusions from them...
...We must, as it were, win the hearts and minds of the people...
...Army is structured primarily for that contingency...
...It is likely that if we had left the 70,000 troops in Vietnam who manned the logistics base we had created, they would have been the constant object of terror attacks...
...Easily twice as many articles were written during the same time period about the Revolutionary and Indian wars fought by the American army...
...There are always reasons to explain why the system operates the way it does, but they do not prove that the system is a success...
...Lewy's evaluation of the army's after-action reports shows that Communist forces had the initiative in over 90 percent of all fire fights involving company-sized units or larger...
...We anticipated that they would behave like reasonable people...
...But this is not true when the enemy is a guerrilla who fights at his convenience...
...They relied on local sources for much of their food, and, if the reports in Guenter Lewy's book (American in Vietnam) are accurate, they could often buy arms and ammunition from South Vietnamese officials...
...American combat activity did not begin in earnest until early in 1967...
...The American army seems determined to learn nothing from Vietnam...
...More officers died in combat, in comparison with the number of deaths suffered by enlisted men, in Vietnam than in World War II or Korea...
...The third lesson of Vietnam is not so clear-cut...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
