Special Correspondence/Conservatives, Containment, and Vietnam
Summers, Col. Harry G. Jr.
• ................................................................................................................. SPECIAL...
...And from a moral standpoint, aren't those whose tax monies pay for the war and whose sons and daughters put their lives on the line entitled (as the Constitution sought to guarantee) to a voice in the matter...
...Kennan was right...
...And if pressed, Mark Falcoff, and all the other critics of the Weinberger Doctrine, would no doubt give the same answer...
...policy for waging war was rollback and liberation which translates into the military strategic and operational offensive where (as in World War II) the war is carried to the enemy, his forces are defeated on the battlefield, his capital seized, and his territory occupied...
...The American people sensed as much by the fall of 1967, when for the first time a majority turned against the war...
...I understand I can obtain a full refund on unmailed copies at any time...
...When he said during the Westmoreland trial that as early as 1965 he thought the war was militarily unwinnable, it was obvious his will had been broken before the massive American troop involvement in Vietnam even began...
...Not only did he deliberately not mobilize the will of the American people, he demonstrated the paucity of his own will in his Johns Hopkins University speech on April 7, 1965 (the day after he ordered American ground combat troops into action in Vietnam) when he offered a payoff to Ho Chi Minh if he would stop his aggression...
...South Vietnam coalition was fatally weakened after the Paris Accords, South Vietnam by itself was no match for the twentytwo Soviet equipped divisions of North Vietnam's regular army...
...Again in Vietnam the battlefield was stalemated in 1968 and five years of negotiations led to the Paris "Peace" Accords...
...This happened in both Korea and Vietnam...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 29 those who supported and those who opposed the Vietnam war...
...As military theory has warned for centuries, that is as good as it gets...
...Both in Korea after the Chinese intervention and for most of the Vietnam war the military was specifically forbidden from launching ground offensive operations designed to destroy the enemy's army and break his will to persist in his aggression...
...In the end, the fall of Saigon-over whelmed by a 22-division North Vietnamese cross-border blitzkrieg supported by tanks, missiles, and heavy artillery-had more relationship to the fall of France in 1940 than it did to any of the critics' academic notions of counterinsurgency...
...A handy reference...
...To vilify their "grunts," as Muller has done, 220,357 of whom were killed and 570,000 wounded in defense of their country, is quite another...
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...Policy in Korea was to prevent South Korea from being overrun and eventually to expel the North Korean invaders and restore the status quo antebellum...
...Thus the options open to President Nixon, who ironically had the will required of a war President, were extremely limited...
...But a military strategist he is not...
...Further, and Falcoff s article is a case in point, they obscure the larger strategic lessons that have enormous significance for future military operations...
...To his credit, however, Falcoff was willing to listen...
...America's Military Role in Vietnam, University of Kentucky Press), General Bruce Palmer, himself a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, describes how this defeatism at the top permeated our strategic decision-making process...
...The pri mary argument today is not between Norman Podhoretz Gen...
...But, as discussed above, beginning with the Korean War and continuing through the Vietnam war until the present day, the U.S...
...The American people are finally beginning to see through the posturing, pretensions, and fallacious arguments of those who opposed America's involvement in Vietnam...
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...Not only did the United States adopt a strategic defensive strategy, we forced it on our allies as well...
...President Johnson never understood that...
...A distinguished infantry combat veteran, LeGro was a key staff officer in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations and Plans in the Pentagon in the early days of the war and the G-2 (intelligence chief) of the 1st Infantry Division in 1966-1967 and of the Defense Attache Office in Saigon (the successor to MACV after the 1973 Paris Accords) until the very end...
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...This reality has profoundly changed the way in which the United States wages war...
...The operative word is will...
...Dooley once said, it's like getting mad at a tornado and going out and kicking the wind...
...In one of the most important books on the war (The 25 Year War...
...At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for example, a former activist was trying to convince the audience that his antiwar activities were really designed to help our "boys" in Vietnam by ending the war and bringing them back alive...
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...Although his message was flawed, Falcoff was on target: "Let's Be Honest About Vietnam...
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...The Korean War was proof that we can obtain our national objectives with a national policy of containment and with a military strategy of the strategic defensive...
...It was this change in strategy that brought the disagreements between President Truman and his field commander, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, to a head and led to MacArthur's relief from command...
...In Hanoi on a negotiating mission five days before the fall of Saigon, I told my North Vietnamese counterpart, "You never beat us on the battlefield...
...He is also the author of the definitive history of the fall of Saigon, Vietnam from Cease-Fire to Capitula tion (U.S...
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...As a respected Latin America expert, Falcoff undoubtedly can see through and demolish the distortions and exaggerations of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador and their ilk in a heartbeat, but he doesn't have the same keen eye when it comes to Vietnam...
...For the first time in its history the U.S...
...But on Vietnam he accepts political scientist Guenter Lewy's academic thesis on how American strategy was "fundamentally flawed" by General Westmoreland's "attrition" strategy...
...The last American ground combat troops, the 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry, left Vietnam on August 23, 1972, two and one half years before Saigon fell...
...From a practical standpoint, if we don't have public and congressional support, who then will pay for the war...
...At each of these levels, war is fought in two ways: offensively, where the battle is carried to the enemy, and defensively, where one repels the enemy attack...
...Harry G. Summers, Jr...
...As Syracuse University Professor John Mueller has pointed out ("Reflections on the Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the Curious Calm at the War's End," in Vietnam as History, University Press of America), they did not turn against the war on idealistic grounds, as the antiwar movement claims...
...Robert McNamara, who as Secretary of Defense was the equivalent of the General-in-Chief and Admiral-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in earlier conflicts, never understood the critical importance of will either, perhaps because it could not be programmed into a computer...
...The purpose of the armed forces is only secondarily the destruction of the enemy's military forces...
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...It is between those who understand the fundamental nature of war and those who do not...
...It had damn well better be worth it and we'd better have a plan to win...
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...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988...
...By giving Congress-the representatives of the people, periodically elected-the authority to declare war, the framers of the Constitution, themselves veterans of a long and divisive war, sought to ensure that American troops would not be committed to sustained combat without the backing of the American public...
...We'd better be, for the future security of the United States may well depend upon it...
...The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians (Dutton...
...national policy changed to the liberation of the entire Korean peninsula...
...In both wars public support went down the tube during the negotiating process (see John Mueller's War, Presidents and Public Opinion, Wiley...
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...national policy has been containment, and containment translates into the military strategic and operational defensive...
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...As long as we maintain our nuclear deterrent, they are not liable to march on Washington either...
...Falcoff compounds the error when he questions the credentials of a genuine military strategist, Colonel William LeGro (Correspondence, TAS, March 1988...
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...If there is a paradigm of war today it is Korea, with its battlefield stalemate leading to a prolonged negotiated settlement...
...That phrase came to mind when I read Mark Falcoff's "Let's Be Honest About Vietnam" (TAS, December 1987...
...The war was lost by the strategic failure of senior political and military leaders to formulate clear political and military objectives and communicate them both to the American people and to military leaders on the battlefield...
...Instead, Eisenhower reaffirmed it during the Hungarian uprising in 1956 when he specifically ruled out "rollback" and "liberation" in favor of "containment...
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...The enemy, among other things, used our POWs for negotiating leverage, and played on the fact that the American people have no stomach for prolonged and drawn out wartime negotiations during which American soldiers continue to be killed for no apparent reason...
...Even Procrustes himself would have been hard put to fit it into the frame provided by guerrilla war theory...
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...Fearful of becoming involved in a land war with mainland China and fearful of directly confronting the Soviet Union, which the year before had become a nuclear power, Truman abandoned the national policy of rollback and liberation and adopted the national policy of containment...
...Not at all...
...And the enemy had another advantage as well...
...That reality has to be explained to the American people...
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...That was obvious when he quoted professional Vietnam vet Bobby Muller-best known for his groveling to the North Vietnamese and his wreath-laying at the tomb of the mass murderer Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi-as an authority on the South Vietnamese military...
...Most of them have every column published in full...
...As long as the Soviet Union has nuclear weapons with which to defend itself, we are not liable to march on Moscow...
...foreign and military policy for almost forty years for two simple reasons: (1) it works and (2) there is no acceptable alternative...
...That may be so," he said...
...their answer took on a different tone: "Not much...
...F orewarning the American people leads into the next major strategic lesson of the Vietnam war...
...Where forty years ago "monolithic world Communism" appeared about to sweep the world, now Communism has long since fragmented into polycentric power centers...
...Where once the MarxistLeninist claims that Communism transcended nationalism were taken as gospel, now we see Communist nations waging war on each other, and nationalism touching off riots even in the Soviet Union itself...
...First articulated by Ambassador George F Kennan in 1947, "containment" essentially holds that the best way to deal with the Soviet Union and its satellites is not to attack them directly but instead to contain their expansion by diplomatic, political, economic psychological, and, as a last resort, military means and allow the internal contradictions of their own society eventually to bring them to heel...
...At the tactical level the battlefield commander determines whether to attack or defend, but at the operational and strategic level that decision is a matter of national policy...
...The greatest threat to Communism has been its own internal contradictions...
...Falcoff should have suspected that a compiler as blatantly biased as Willenson would pick and choose those stories that primarily reflected his own prejudices...
...Painful as it may be, we must do the same with those well-meaning critics who supported that involvement...
...To criticize South Vietnam's senior military leaders is one thing...
...Where once serious people talked about the death throes of capitalism and the Communist economic model was seen as the wave of the future, now it is Marxist economic policies that are bankrupt and around the world Communist nations themselves have had to adopt capitalist methods to save their economies from total collapse...
...Not only did the American people not understand the war, in itself a fatal error (it is the objective, wrote Clausewitz a century and a half ago, that determines the value of the war...
...From that point on it didn't matter what happened on the battlefield...
...CONSERVATIVES, CONTAINMENT, AND VIETNAM by Col...
...Does that mean that "containment" dooms us to defeat...
...They especially have to be dissuaded from the popular notion that World War II with its total military victory over the enemy is the true paradigm of war...
...As a result, we never had a military strategy worthy of the name...
...But while their criticisms may have merit, they miss the central point of the war...
...and it is this value that determines the sacrifices to be made in pursuit of it both in magnitude and.duration), but those who were doing the fighting didn't understand it either...
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...could not do was move beyond costly stalemate...
...If Falcoff was going to use oral histories to make his casealways a doubtful proposition-he could have at least balanced them with more objective accounts, such as those collected by Vietnam combat infantry veteran Al Santoli in his Everything We Had (Random House) and To Bear Any Burden...
...But another less well-known goal of strategic offensive operations is to break the community of interest among allies, and when the U.S...
...But if we can't change it, the least we can do is understand what it portends-as long as our national policy is containment, our military strategy against any major adversary (or the ally of a major adversary) will continue to be the strategic defensive...
...War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will...
...Some time back TAS did a 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 retrospective on the 1960s and found out that none of the psychedelic predictions of the "greening of America" had proved true...
...forced its policies and strategies on its allies, the Soviet Union encouraged its allies to take a precisely opposite tack...
...While the form of a declaration of war may be out of fashion, Vietnam was proof that while Americans will stand still for the immediate use of military force by the President to respond to short-lived crises like Grenada and Libya, when it comes to a prolonged military involvement they still have the ultimate say-so...
...Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger tried to warn against such folly in his November 1984 statement of strategic principles, but it was conservatives who led and (viz...
...There are practical and moral reasons for this...
...But it is also irrelevant...
...But when then asked, "For what would you send your son or daughter to war...
...It is not, as Falcoff argues, between liberal and conservative interpretations of that conflict...
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...And with the strategic defensive, "stalemate" will continue to be the best battlefield result obtainable...
...His apologia was interrupted by a young student who asked, "When you waved `baby killer' placards, yelled curses, and spit at the returning soldiers, was that just your way of telling them you were glad to see them...
...As Mr...
...Falcoff's article) continue to lead the attack on those principles, especially his warning that there must be some reasonable assurance of public and congressional support before American combat troops are committed to sustained combat...
...I have enormous respect for Guenter Lewy...
...Although much criticized, the truth is that "containment" has served the nation well...
...I can defend myself from my enemies...
...His 1978 work, America in Vietnam, was the first to debunk the lies and distortions about America's conduct of the Vietnam war...
...The end was merely a matter of time...
...But unfortunately his account obscured more than it illuminated, partly because of the sources he used to make his case...
...Harry G. Summery Jr is editor of Vietnam magazine and the author of On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Presidio/Dell) and Vietnam War Almanac (Facts on File...
...But because Korea was not very satisfying to the American psyche, a Korean War-type strategy of isolating the battlefield and keeping the outside aggressor at bay, although repeatedly proposed by General Westmoreland and others (see Hannah's book), was never seriously considered in Washington...
...Conservatives argue that that would make the conduct of foreign and military policy difficult...
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...Although at times on the tactical and operational defensive, from the very beginning North Korea and North Vietnam were on the strategic offensive...
...But after the successful Inchon invasion in September 1950 and the apparent collapse of the North Korean army, U.S...
...Glad we found You" MacArthur Library USSR nuclear standoff, to rail against it is futile...
...There is no question that Falcoff is a "friend" whose intentions were well meant...
...Col...
...Containment has remained the foundation of U.S...
...When the Chinese intervened in November 1950, U.S...
...instead it has to be terminated by political negotiations...
...national policy...
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...As Falcoff s article illustrates, many respected critics continue to blame the war on faulty American tactics...
...Truman not only ordered American troops into Korea, he also ordered a massive troop buildup in Western Europe, ordered the U.S...
...And I am sure, when it comes to Latin America, Falcoff knows full well that expertise is not fungible...
...While there was much hue and cry about this from Republicans, when General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower was elected to replace Truman he did not rescind that fundamental change in U.S...
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...As Falcoff says in his critique of the conduct of the Vietnam war, "What the American presence...
...That change in national policy required a similar change in its supporting military strategy, and the American military was ordered to abandon the strategic offensive and instead assume the strategic defensive...
...To understand why this is so, one must appreciate that war is waged on three interconnected levels-the tactical (the clash of small units on the battlefield), the operational (the combination of a series of battles within a theater of war), and the strategic (the use of military force to achieve political goals...
...Limited to strategic and operational defensive operations, the best result it could obtain was stalemate...
...In Korea the battlefield was stalemated in 1951, and it was only after two years of bitter negotiations that the war was ended with the armistice agreement...
...From that point on, the end of American involvement was inevitable, for the war was lost in the only place that really counted-the minds of the American people...
...Navy into the Taiwan Straits, increased aid to the Philippine government then fighting a Communist insurgency, and (in a move that would have long-term effects) sent military assistance and a U.S...
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...And one does not temporize with evil...
...They must believe, if they are to put their lives at risk, that the enemy is evil incarnate...
...The second reason that "containment" has been reaffirmed is that its alternatives, "rollback" and "liberation," appear too risky in the nuclear age...
...If that had been explained to the American people when we went into the Vietnam war, many of their subsequent frustrations may well have been avoided...
...As expected, being professional military officers, they replied that they would go to war if ordered to do so by proper authority...
...But such debates about the tactical and operational aspects of the Vietnam war are of limited value, since nothing we say now will change the outcome there...
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...In his reply to LeGro's criticisms he praises one of the most important recent books on the war, Norman Hannah's The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War (Madison Books...
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...When I was teaching at the Army War College, I used to ask my students, all Vietnam veterans, "For what will you go to war...
...What they fail to see, as The Federalist Papers make clear, is that it was meant to be difficult...
...To argue whether "containment" is right or wrong is almost beside the point...
...F alcoff fails to understand that battlefield stalemate has been (and continues to be) the most "relevant" fact of American military strategy for over a generation...
...And he acknowledges General Westmoreland's explanation that the war was "disynchronic"--i.e., that the wars against the Viet Cong irregulars and the regular military forces of North Vietnam were taking place simultaneously...
...In both cases the United States was at a disadvantage...
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...Of all people, they ought to be contemptuous of self-appointed "vanguards of the proletariat" who know best what is good for the American people and are willing and eager to send someone else's sons and daughters (but rarely their own) off to war...
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...His reply was short but to the point...
...But this change is not widely appreciated...
...Almost 70 percent of the generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives," wrote Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard in The War Managers, University of Kentucky Press...
...Any letter postmarked after 30 days will be returned...
...Three years later when the Korean War broke out, containment had its first real test...
...Both South Korea and South Vietnam were specifically barred from carrying the war to the enemy, and as a consequence it was the enemy who was given the psychological advantage of championing national "liberation...
...They never wavered from their goal of destroying their opponent's army, occupying his territory, and seizing his capital...
...And that's exactly what he did...
...But Roosevelt knew that Americans don't fight wars in cold blood...
...They turned against it on the all too correct suspicion that the bozos in Washington didn't know what the hell they were doing, a suspicion confirmed in their minds several months later by the Viet Cong's Tet offensive...
...efend me from my friends," said Marechal Villars...
...Its primary purpose is to break the enemy's will to resist (or, in defensive operations, his will to persist in his aggression...
...military advisory team to aid the French and the Associated States of Indochina then fighting the Viet Minh insurgents led by Ho Chi Minh...
...With such a strategy, war cannot be terminated by military means...
...Historically, the U.S...
...A similar forty-year retrospective on Communism would produce the same results...
...For some strange reason conservatives find the idea of public will as the very foundation of war hard to accept...
...The purpose of war is to break the opponent's will, and by 1968 American will was irretrievably broken...
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...Then there was his reliance on the "tell-me-another-verse-that's-worsethan-the-other-verse-and-waltz-mearound-again-Willie" war stories of Kim Willenson's "oral history," The Bad War...
...It is this fact that makes war a political act-an act for the entire American people-not merely a task for the armed forces...
...Given the reality of the U.S: "Wonderful Publication...
...Every subsequent administration, including the present one, has reaffirmed that policy-albeit (as will be discussed below) with a lack of understanding of the effect that policy has on American military operations and strategy...
...the war was not lost on the tactical level, and it most certainly was not lost to the irregular forces of the Viet Cong...
...If that is so, then all of the controversy over the failure of Congress to appropriate adequate resources to South Vietnam's survival in 1974-75 may be sadly irrelevant...
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...military was forbidden to carry the war to the enemy in order to break his will to resist...
...0 pponents of the war have long since been routed from the moral heights they once commanded, and in my talks around the country I have found them everywhere on the defensive...
...And he was exactly right...
...While the U.S...
...We frustrated that strategy in Korea, and, until the Paris Accords in 1973, we frustrated it in Vietnam as well...
...That is a key point, a point not understood by otherwise "friends" of America's involvement in Vietnam such as Guenter Lewy, Robert Komer, and Andrew Krepinevich, who continue to argue, against all evidence, that our defeat there was due to failure to concentrate on counterinsurgency...
...T he first strategic lesson is an appreciation of the effect of the national policy of containment on American battlefield operations...
...national policy changed once again...
...The best he could do was extricate American military forces at the lowest possible cost while providing the South Vietnamese at least a fighting chance for survival...
...As President Truman made clear in his June 27, 1950 "war message" to Congress, the North Korean invasion of South Korea was seen as evidence that monolithic world Communism, directed and controlled from Moscow, had moved from subversion to force of arms to spread its ideology...
...As even the North Vietnamese acknowledge, the Viet Cong were a spent force after Tet 1968, and for the next seven years the war was primarily with the regular forces of North Vietnam...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
