No More Vietnams (12 page)

The goal of victory is essential for a democracy at war. But seeking victory does not just mean waging an unlimited war with the sole goal being the total defeat and surrender of the enemy. There can be victory in a limited war like the one in Vietnam. Victory must be defined in terms of concrete political goals that are to be reached using military means. In Vietnam, victory meant preventing the imposition of a Communist government on South Vietnam. But when we intervened in the war, we failed to tailor our means to this end.

A sound strategy in Vietnam would have begun with the recognition of five facts.

First, the theater of conflict included all of Indochina. Cambodia and Laos were involved in the war just as much as South Vietnam was. This was true not only because Ho Chi Minh's ultimate goal was to rule all of what once was French Indochina, but also because the North Vietnamese Army occupied and operated from territory in all of these countries.

Second, North Vietnam's external aggression was the
central
cause of the war. Forming our strategy required us to determine the origin of the war. Could the enemy have waged the war without major support from North Vietnam? Or was North Vietnam's participation indispensable to the enemy's conduct of the war? In the first case, it would have been in essence a civil war. In the second, it would have to have been classified as foreign aggression. If it had been a civil war, we probably should not have intervened in the first place. But all the evidence pointed to North Vietnamese aggression. The Johnson administration was well aware of the facts and even released documentary evidence to prove them in its “White Papers.” Our problem was not a failure to realize the facts but an unwillingness to
act
on them. Had we acted on the facts, we would have taken whatever steps were necessary to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Third, while we dealt with North Vietnam's invasion
through Laos and Cambodia, South Vietnam ideally should have taken responsibility for defeating the guerrillas within its borders. But circumstances in Vietnam were not ideal. Guerrilla warfare was North Vietnam's principal tactic at the time of our intervention. There was no way that we could have avoided a direct role in fighting the guerrillas, especially with South Vietnam as enfeebled as it was. But had we kept the proper division of labor in mind, our priorities would have been different. Even as we battled the guerrillas in South Vietnam, we would have focused our attention on cutting North Vietnam's invasion routes and on training our ally to take over the fight against the insurgents.

Fourth, the war against the Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam could not be won with conventional military tactics. Traditionally, the military object in war is to destroy the armed forces of the enemy. But the war in South Vietnam was as much a political struggle as a military one. The political battle was not over votes or popularity but over whose government would control the countryside. We did not have to convince the South Vietnamese that communism was bad. Apart from the members of the National Liberation Front, the great majority of the people were against Hanoi. But they could not oppose the guerrillas unless we could offer protection from Communist reprisals. For this, we did not need a strategy designed to wear down the enemy with search-and-destroy missions that won only temporary control of an area. We needed one aimed at permanently extending the reach of South Vietnam's government and securing it through local defenses.

Fifth, as Eisenhower had emphasized to Kennedy in 1961, Laos was the key to a winning strategy. North Vietnam's invasion passed through it, and the insurgents in South Vietnam depended on their sanctuaries in both Laos and Cambodia. We should have landed a large contingent of troops just below or above the demilitarized zone with orders to push its way across Laos to the Mekong River and take up positions along this route that would have quarantined North Vietnam. This maneuver would have extended the demilitarized zone 100 miles
to the west. More important, it would have created a defensible border and cut off North Vietnam's routes for sending men and matériel to its guerrillas in the South. Without this barrier, North Vietnam would endlessly replace its casualties and resupply its fighters. With it, South Vietnam's forces could mop up the indigenous insurgents once and for all.

But that is not the way we fought the war. A blind belief in esoteric counterinsurgency doctrine, an unwarranted faith in the Geneva agreement on Laos, an unjustified fear of Communist Chinese intervention, and an unwillingness to mobilize the American people to win the war led the Johnson administration to adopt a strategy of gradual escalation and to limit the ground war to South Vietnamese territory. Johnson said that “we seek no wider war” and pledged not to invade North Vietnam or to overthrow Ho Chi Minh. But by dispelling North Vietnam's fears that we might make use of our enormous military superiority, he eliminated any incentive for its leaders to cease their war against South Vietnam.

From 1964 through 1968, we became caught between our desire to limit the war and our talent for waging unlimited war. As a result our armed forces ended up fighting a war for which we were not suited, with tactics that were not suited to it.

• • •

During the first years of our intervention, we pursued two totally inadequate strategies. In South Vietnam, we tried to fight a war of attrition with American forces. But we failed to see that we could never succeed as long as we did not seal off the infiltration routes through Laos and Cambodia and provide the rural population with protection from guerrilla attacks. In North Vietnam, we kept our military pressure sharply limited and increased it only in gradual increments in the hope of inducing North Vietnam to seek a negotiated peace. We should have known that we never could coax Ho Chi Minh into abandoning a war he had chosen to start. We should have
forced
him to abandon it.

Defeating a well-organized guerrilla insurgency is a difficult
task. There were those who said it was impossible. But revolutionaries using guerrilla tactics have failed far more often than they have succeeded. Greece defeated Communist guerrillas immediately after World War II. So did Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Guerrilla warfare is a tactic of the weak. Its chances for success are therefore rarely strong.

One expert on guerrilla war observed that the success of an insurgency depends on whether the revolutionaries have a popular cause and an effective organization. If they have both, the insurgents will almost certainly win. If they have neither, even an ineffective government will prevail. If their cause is popular but their organization is weak, an effective government will snuff out the insurgency. But if their cause is not popular while their organization is strong and effective, the war will become a long-drawn-out battle. That is what happened in Vietnam.

There were two sides—one political and the other military—to the war in South Vietnam.

The Communists waged their political struggle in the villages and hamlets. It was not a matter of passing out leaflets to win the hearts and minds of prospective supporters but a ruthless attempt to replace the current government with one of their own. First, they sought to destroy the Saigon government's presence in the countryside by assassinating or abducting its local officials. Second, they tried to turn the South Vietnamese people against the central government. The insurgents sought either to incite the peasants to hate the government by championing and distorting popular grievances or, if that failed, to terrorize the people with violence in order to cow them into submission.

Outside the villages, the Communists waged the military struggle with the tactics of guerrilla war. Platoon-size units were dispersed in the hills. These were deployed individually for hit-and-run attacks and consolidated only for a major assault.

One side of the war was intimately intertwined with the other: The political war helped create the base for the military
war. Some South Vietnamese freely supported the Communists. But most submitted to them only because they were the ones who had the guns.

Those who voluntarily served the Communist cause were integrated into a highly organized secret network, or infrastructure, at the village level. It kept track of who was cooperating with the government. It provided the guerrillas with supplies, intelligence, and recruits. It helped them find food and shelter, conceal caches of weapons, and escape from patrolling government troops. Without an infrastructure involving perhaps 10 percent of the local population, the guerrilla war would have become unsustainable.

But Communist control of the countryside depended on the creation of an atmosphere of fear. Saigon's armed patrols could move freely through most of the countryside during the day. But after nightfall, when they withdrew to their outposts, Communists troops had free run of virtually every village. It was impossible for twenty government soldiers to protect all the peasants from an outpost at the corner of an area of twenty square miles. When Communist officers appeared at the door, no one in his right mind would have refused to comply with whatever they demanded, whether it was to hand over a tax of ten pounds of rice or hand over a son to serve with the guerrillas.

We had three possible strategies to deal with the enemy's tactics. We could try to grind down the guerrilla forces in a war of attrition. We could try to uproot their infrastructure in the villages through pacification. Or we could seek to do both.

Waging a military and a political battle simultaneously was the key to victory. There was a lot of talk about counterinsurgency doctrine in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. But neither had a strategy to defeat both sides of the insurgency as the British had done in Malaysia. Our efforts to foster democracy and economic growth neither deterred the North Vietnamese who were directing the guerrilla war nor bolstered Saigon's control at the village level.

Our counterinsurgency doctrine ended up meaning only that
we would fight the war on South Vietnamese territory. Specialized units, like the Green Berets and the Combined Action Platoons, which focused on providing security at the village level and on uprooting the Communist infrastructure, were never more than a low-priority sideshow. Our military advisers trained South Vietnam's army to wage a large-unit conventional war, and our own forces acted as if they were fighting a conventional war in Europe or Korea.

General Earle Wheeler, army chief of staff, said in 1962, “It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem is military.” The Pentagon, which had been put in charge of managing day-to-day operations in Vietnam following the Bay of Pigs disaster, proceeded to devise a purely military solution. It was the strategy of attrition. Our forces were to “seek out and destroy” major Communist military units, bases, and other facilities. This, combined with efforts to cut off the infiltration of additional men and matériel from North Vietnam, would lead to the “progressive destruction” of Communist military forces.

Search-and-destroy missions became our principal tactic. In theory, American forces would use their vastly superior firepower and mobility to liberate enemy-occupied territory and would then turn over the area to South Vietnamese forces, who were to root out the Communist infrastructure and provide permanent security. In reality, South Vietnam's army was unable to follow up our victories because it did not have enough well-trained troops. We tallied up hundreds of victories in these battles—often retaking the same hill over and over—but they did not add up to victory in the war. Many areas we liberated reverted to Communist control almost as soon as we left.

By virtually ignoring the political aspect of the war, we stepped onto a treadmill. While our troops spent their time finding, engaging, and destroying the enemy's larger units, the Communists ruled the villages. Their presence was constantly
felt. Their infrastructure remained intact. Their troops returned a few days after ours left, and their war effort resumed almost without a hitch.

When the British army advocated a purely military solution in Malaysia, Britain's counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson, disagreed, saying, “It's all very well having bombers, masses of helicopters, tremendous firepower, but none of these will eliminate a Communist cell in a high school which is producing 50 recruits a year for the insurgent movement.” In Vietnam, while we were fighting in the hills, the Communists had free run of the hamlets.

Attrition was a fatally flawed strategy. We underestimated the enemy's ability to control his losses and to bring in reinforcements from North Vietnam. No matter how hard we tried to engage him in decisive battles, he could avoid them by either evading our troops or withdrawing to sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Guerrilla units in the field received excellent intelligence about our troop movements from the Communist infrastructure in cities and villages. If the guerrillas did not want to fight, they simply let our forces pass through the areas they occupied. Because the guerrillas controlled the tempo of the fighting, the Communists were able to control their own casualty rates and thereby prevent the attrition of their ranks.

Our strategy ultimately failed because we did not stop the steady stream of reinforcements coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam. The success of a strategy of attrition depended on whether we would pass the point where enemy losses exceeded new recruits in the South and reinforcements from the North. That point was never reached. From January 1965 through December 1967, Communist losses totaled 344,000, including 179,000 troops killed in action. Despite these staggering figures, Communist forces in South Vietnam increased from 181,000 in December 1964 to 262,000 in December 1967. Over those three years, North Vietnam and recruitment in South Vietnam had supplied over 400,000 reinforcements. Population statistics indicated that this rate
could be sustained: Another 120,000 North Vietnamese boys reached military age each year.