The 33 Strategies of War (32 page)

What I particularly admire in Alexander is, not so much his campaigns...but his political sense. He possessed the art of winning the affection of the people.

--Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

TOTAL WARFARE

In 1967 the leaders of the American war effort in Vietnam thought they were finally making progress. They had launched a series of operations to search out and destroy the Vietcong--North Vietnamese soldiers who had infiltrated South Vietnam and had come to control much of its countryside. These guerrilla fighters were elusive, but the Americans had inflicted heavy losses on them in the few battles they had managed to force on them that year. The new South Vietnamese government, supported by the Americans, seemed relatively stable, which could help to win it approval among the Vietnamese people. To the north, bombing raids had knocked out many of North Vietnam's airfields and heavily damaged its air force. Although massive antiwar demonstrations had broken out in the United States, polls showed that most Americans supported the war and believed that the end was in sight.

Since the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army had proved rather ineffective in head-to-head battle against the might of American firepower and technology, the strategy was to somehow lure them into a major engagement. That would be the turning point of the war. And by the end of 1967, intelligence indicated that the North Vietnamese were about to fall into just such a trap: their commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, was planning a major offensive against the U.S. marine outpost at Khe Sanh. Apparently he wanted to repeat his greatest success, the battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in which he had defeated the French army, driving the French out of Vietnam for good.

Khe Sanh was a key strategic outpost. It was located a mere fourteen miles from the demilitarized zone that separated North from South Vietnam. It was also six miles from the border of Laos, site of a stretch of the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese supply route to the Vietcong in the South. General William C. Westmoreland, the overall U.S. commander, was using Khe Sanh to monitor enemy activity to the north and west. Dien Bien Phu had served a similar role for the French, and Giap had been able to isolate and destroy it. Westmoreland would not allow Giap to repeat that feat. He built well-protected airstrips around Khe Sanh, ensuring full use of his helicopters and control of the air. He called up substantial numbers of troops from the south to the Khe Sanh area, just in case he needed them. He also ordered 6,000 additional marines to reinforce the outpost. But a major attack on Khe Sanh was nothing he wanted to discourage: in frontal battle the enemy would finally expose itself to severe defeat.

In the first few weeks of 1968, all eyes were on Khe Sanh. The White House and the U.S. media were certain that the decisive battle of the war was about to begin. Finally, at dawn on January 21, 1968, the North Vietnamese army launched a vicious assault. As both sides dug in, the battle turned into a siege.

Soon after the engagement began, the Vietnamese were to celebrate their lunar New Year, the holiday called Tet. It was a period of revelry, and in time of war it was also a traditional moment to declare a truce. This year was no different; both sides agreed to halt the fighting during Tet. Early on the morning of January 31, however, the first day of the New Year, reports began to trickle in from all over South Vietnam: virtually every major town and city, as well as the most important American bases, had come under Vietcong attack. An army general, tracking the assault pattern on a map, said it "resembled a pinball machine, lighting up with each raid."

Parts of Saigon itself had been overrun by enemy soldiers, some of whom had managed to blow their way through the wall of the U.S. embassy, the very symbol of the American presence in Vietnam. Marines regained control of the embassy in a bloody fight, which was widely seen on American television. The Vietcong also attacked the city's radio station, the presidential palace, and Westmoreland's own compound at the Tan Son Nhut air base. The city quickly descended into street fighting and chaos.

Outside Saigon, provincial cities, too, came under siege. Most prominent was the North Vietnamese capture of Hue, the ancient Vietnamese capital and a city revered by Buddhists. Insurgents managed to take control of virtually the whole city.

Meanwhile the attacks on Khe Sanh continued in waves. It was hard for Westmoreland to tell what the main target was: were the battles to the south merely a means of drawing forces away from Khe Sanh, or was it the other way around? Within a few weeks, in all parts of South Vietnam, the Americans regained the upper hand, retaking control of Saigon and securing their air bases. The sieges at Hue and Khe Sanh took longer, but massive artillery and air bombardments eventually doomed the insurgents, as well as leveling entire sections of Hue.

When dark inertia increases, obscurity and inactivity, negligence and delusion, arise. When lucidity prevails, the self whose body dies enters the untainted worlds of those who know reality. When he dies in passion, he is born among lovers of action; so when he dies in dark inertia, he is born into wombs of folly. The fruit of good conduct is pure and untainted, they say, but suffering is the fruit of passion, ignorance the fruit of dark inertia. From lucidity knowledge is born; from passion comes greed; from dark inertia come negligence, delusion, and ignorance. Men who are lucid go upward; men of passion stay in between; men of dark inertia, caught in vile ways, sink low.

T
HE
B
HAGAVAD
G
ITA
: K
RISHNA'S
C
OUNSEL IN
T
IME OF
W
AR
,
CIRCA
F
IRST
C
ENTURY A.D.

After what later became known as the Tet Offensive was over, Westmoreland likened it to the Battle of the Bulge, near the end of World War II. There the Germans had managed to surprise the Allies by staging a bold incursion into eastern France. In the first few days, they had advanced rapidly, creating panic, but once the Allies recovered, they had managed to push the Germans back--and eventually it became apparent that the battle was the German military's death knell, their last shot. So it was, Westmoreland argued, with the North Vietnamese army at Khe Sanh and the Vietcong throughout the South: they had suffered terrible casualties, far more than the Americans had--in fact, the entire Vietcong infrastructure had been wiped out. They would never recover; at long last the enemy had revealed itself and had been badly mauled.

The Americans thought Tet had been a tactical disaster for the North. But another viewpoint began to trickle in from home: the drama at the U.S. embassy, the siege of Hue, and the attacks on air bases had kept millions of Americans glued to their television sets. Until then the Vietcong had operated mostly in the countryside, barely visible to the American public. Now, for the first time, they were apparent in major cities, wreaking havoc and destruction. Americans had been told the war was winding down and winnable; these images said otherwise. Suddenly the war's purpose seemed less clear. How could South Vietnam remain stable in the face of this ubiquitous enemy? How could the Americans ever claim a clear victory? There was really no end in sight.

American opinion polls tracked a sharp turn against the war. Antiwar demonstrations broke out all over the country. President Lyndon Johnson's military advisers, who had been telling him that South Vietnam was coming under control, now confessed that they were no longer so optimistic. In the New Hampshire Democratic primary that March, Johnson was stunned by his defeat by Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had galvanized the growing antiwar sentiment. Shortly thereafter Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection in the upcoming presidential race and that he would slowly disengage American forces from Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive was indeed the turning point in the Vietnam War, but not in the direction that Westmoreland and his staff had foreseen.

At this the grey-eyed goddess Athena smiled, and gave him a caress, her looks being changed now, so she seemed a woman, tall and beautiful and no doubt skilled at weaving splendid things. She answered briskly: "Whoever gets around you
[
Odysseus
]
must be sharp and guileful as a snake; even a god might bow to you in ways of dissimulation. You! You chameleon! Bottomless bag of tricks! Here in your own country would you not give your stratagems a rest or stop spellbinding for an instant?...Two of a kind, we are, contrivers, both. Of all men now alive you are the best in plots and story telling. My own fame is for wisdom among the gods--deceptions, too.

T
HE
O
DYSSEY
, H
OMER, CIRCA
N
INTH
C
ENTURY B.C.

Interpretation

For the American strategists, the success of the war depended mostly on the military. By using their army and superior weaponry to kill as many Vietcong as possible and gain control of the countryside, they would ensure the stability of the South Vietnamese government. Once the South was strong enough, North Vietnam would give up the fight.

The North Vietnamese saw the war very differently. By nature and practice, they viewed conflict in much broader terms. They looked at the political situation in the South, where American search-and-destroy missions were alienating South Vietnamese peasants. The North Vietnamese, meanwhile, did everything they could to win the peasants over and earned for themselves an army of millions of silent sympathizers. How could the South be secure when the Americans had failed to capture the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese farmers? The North Vietnamese also looked to the American political scene, where, in 1968, there was to be a presidential election. And they looked at American culture, where support for the war was wide but not deep. The Vietnam War was the first televised war in history; the military was trying to control information about the war, but the images on television spoke for themselves.

On and on the North Vietnamese went, continually broadening their outlook and analyzing the war's global context. And out of this study they crafted their most brilliant strategy: the Tet Offensive. Using their army of peasant sympathizers in the South, they were able to infiltrate every part of the country, smuggling in arms and supplies under the cover of the Tet holiday. The targets they hit were not only military but televisual: their attacks in Saigon, base of most of the American media (including the CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, visiting at the time) were spectacular; Hue and Khe Sanh were also places heavily covered by American reporters. They also struck symbolic locations--embassies, palaces, air bases--that would suck in media attention. On television all this would create the dramatic (and deceptive) impression that the Vietcong were everywhere while American bombing raids and pacification programs had gotten nowhere. In effect, the goal of the Tet Offensive was not a military target but the American public in front of its televisions. Once Americans lost faith--and in an election year--the war was doomed. The North Vietnamese did not have to win a single pitched battle on the field, and in fact they never did. But by extending their vision beyond the battlefield to politics and culture, they won the war.

We always tend to look at what is most immediate to us, taking the most direct route toward our goals and trying to win the war by winning as many battles as we can. We think in small, microlevel terms and react to present events--but this is petty strategy. Nothing in life happens in isolation; everything is related to everything else and has a broader context. That context includes people outside your immediate circle whom your actions affect, the public at large, the whole world; it includes politics, for every choice in modern life has political ramifications; it includes culture, the media, the way the public sees you. Your task as a grand strategist is to extend your vision in all directions--not only looking further into the future but also seeing more of the world around you, more than your enemy does. Your strategies will become insidious and impossible to thwart. You will be able to harness the relationships between events, one battle setting up the next, a cultural coup setting up a political coup. You will bring the war to arenas your enemies have ignored, catching them by surprise. Only grand strategy can yield grand results.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

--Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

KEYS TO WARFARE

Thousands of years ago, we humans elevated ourselves above the animal world and never looked back. Figuratively speaking, the key to this evolutionary advance was our powers of vision: language, and the ability to reason that it gave us, let us see more of the world around us. To protect itself from a predator, an animal depended on its senses and instincts; it could not see around the corner or to the other end of the forest. We humans, on the other hand, could map the entire forest, study the habits of dangerous animals and even nature itself, gaining deeper, wider knowledge of our environment. We could see dangers coming before they were here. This expanded vision was abstract: where an animal is locked in the present, we could see into the past and glimpse as far as our reason would take us into the future. Our sight expanded further and further into time and space, and we came to dominate the world.