No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War

Abstract

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps writing team assigned the mission to develop a new counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006 found its most difficult task to be determining relevant measures of effectiveness (MOEs) and measures of progress (MOPs) for such operations. As the West Point professor Gregory A. Daddis reveals in No Sure Victory, this is not a new problem for the American military or for any nation battling an insurgency. He argues persuasively that a system of assessment that mistook effort for progress, never determined the most important threat in a mosaic war, and became more focused on collecting data than analyzing it contributed significantly to the failure of the United States to save its beleaguered South Vietnamese ally. Both organizational and individual motivations pushed the army in Vietnam to rely too heavily on easily quantifiable measures such as body counts. Gen. William Westmoreland’s attrition strategy, the lure of systems analysis in vogue within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense, and the desire of individual commanders on short tours to show significant results quickly all contributed to the emphasis on quantification. Staff officers on short assignments also had no incentive to come up with a better assessment system or reduce the 14,000 pounds of reports produced daily. Gen. Creighton Abrams may have had a broader view of what the war required than did his predecessor Westmoreland, but Abrams was also hamstrung by the same flawed assessment methods. As the United States withdrew from South Vietnam, Abrams and other U.S. military leaders fixated mainly on evaluating the preparedness of the South Vietnamese Army to deal with a still poorly defined threat. The reliability of the primary tool to measure the progress and effectiveness of pacification efforts, the Hamlet Evaluation System, depended upon the subjective judgment of more than 250 district advisers, most of whom had deficient language and cultural skills. As one frustrated U.S. officer complained, “I wish people’s ears would light up or something when we have won their heart or their mind” (p. 122). Daddis likens the U.S. Army in Vietnam to the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, so awash in a flood of statistics of their own creation that they could not stop. In the absence of a well-articulated strategy or a vision for victory linked to political goals, dominant numerical indicators of military success became a substitute for a real understanding of the war.