Vietnam Postmortem: A Senseless Strategy

Abstract

American strategists struck out in Vietnam. Our forces won every battle, but this country lost the war. That scandal, contrary to conventional wisdom, had little to do with our ally's lack of spirit or President Thieu's poor leadership. It had little to do with disciplinary problems that deviled American troops during the later stages. It had little to do with constraints on US air power or privileged sanctuaries. It had little to do with outside logistic support for our opposition until the fracas was almost finished. The cause was a senseless strategy that foiled us for 14 straight years. It turned this so-called superpower into a sorry giant like George Foreman, who lost his heavyweight championship in Zaire because he couldn't cope with Ali's strange style. The pity of it that, unlike Foreman, we fashioned winning concepts in the final stages of that fiasco, but failed to stay the course. That subject has been summarily dismissed in US decision-making circles, where conventional concepts still hold sway. Military men especially are convinced that unfettered firepower could cure an established insurgency. This critique says it can't. The Legacy of Earlier Wars Top-level US leadership has never been very subtle when it comes to war. Strategy takes a back seat to physical strength and tactics in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. When the chips are down, we've always poured on the power until opponents were crushed. Our ruling councils, whose members were schooled in conventional combat before the showdown in Vietnam, subscribed to that approach. Threats in earlier US wars were classically military. Direct strategies on both sides featured force, not fraud or finesse. Political, economic, social, and psychological pressures were strictly secondary once the shooting started. US force predominated. We were prime movers in World War II, and although UN units fought in Korea, ours was the prime contingent, and we were in command. Technology, not strategic theory, was this country's trump card. Masses of materiel from the military-industrial complex turned most every trick. Atom bombs stopped the Japanese during World War II, and they restarted stalled talks in Korea. Our whole approach to conflict coupled the theories of Clausewitz with the bombing concepts of Douhet. One stressed killing combatants, the other blasting civilians. Military victory was our major conscious aim. We achieved it in World War II (at the cost of later agony), but inconclusive Korea left a sour taste, convincing men like MacArthur that there no suitable substitute. He featured that theme--There no substitute for victory--in a fervid farewell address to Congress in 1951, and he echoed it at West Point 12 years later. Your mission, he told the cadets, is to win in armed combat. Revolutionary Challenges US leaders learned those lessons too well. They forgot that winning combinations cannot be switched from one time period to another without very precise appreciation for changes that transpire in the interim. Concepts are just as tough to transplant from place to place, unless the problems peculiar to one locale are pertinent in the others. Certainly, there was clear evidence as early as Eisenhower's era that insurgency of the sort in southeast Asia bore little resemblance to conflicts this country experienced in Korea or Europe. The threat faced was ambiguous, as opposed to the clear-cut threat of a conventional conflict. Further, the decisive strategy was indirect rather than direct; the decisive force was political rather than military; the decisive participant was not an outside force, but the local people; the impact of technological advantage was trivial rather than telling; and, the desired culmination was political, rather than military, victory. There was no overt military threat at the onset. Frontal assaults were out. …