The Americans were influenced by the successful British experience in Malaya as described by Robert Thompson.24 Under the leadership of Sir Gerald Templer, a communist insurgency had been contained. “The shooting side of the business is only 25 percent of the trouble,” observed Templer, “and the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of this country behind us.” The answer was not “pouring more troops into the jungle.” It was instead, in a phrase Templer made famous, “in the hearts and minds of the people.” He understood the importance of civic action but also the need to show a determination to win. This required a readiness to be ruthless.25 Templer was successful, but he enjoyed favorable conditions. In Malaya, the communists were largely associated with the minority Chinese population, their resupply routes were poor, and economic conditions were reasonable.
The unsuccessful French experiences in Vietnam and Algeria were reflected in the writings of David Galula who provided one of the more lucid texts on how to counter communist tactics, and who popularized the concept of “insurgency.” He also stressed the importance of the loyalty of the population. A successful counterinsurgency must ensure the people felt protected so they could cooperate without fear of retribution. Victory would require pacifying one area after another, each serving as a secure base from which to move to the next.26 Galula’s actual experience in Algeria was mixed. His efforts to treat local people positively were not matched by many of his fellow officers. When it came to propaganda, he judged the French “definitely and infinitely more stupid than our opponents.” Like other counterinsurgent specialists, Galula found that his theory fitted neither the local political structures nor army culture.27 The main effect of the attempt by the French officer class to develop a counterinsurgency doctrine that matched the communists in its political intensity and ruthlessness was that they began to turn their ire on Paris for not supporting their efforts with sufficient vigor—even attempting a coup.28
An awareness of the need to give the anti-communist South Vietnamese government more legitimacy and turn its forces into agents of democracy and development reflected a theoretical objective that was far removed from the realities on the ground. It was understood that any fighting should be done by indigenous forces, but that left open the question of what should be done when these forces could no longer cope. It was one thing if the insurgency was a response to local conditions cloaked in the rhetoric of international communism; if it truly was being pushed from outside by communists, that was another. The U.S. military was doubtful that this was really a new type of insurgency and preferred to treat it as old-fashioned aggression. Counterinsurgency theory suggested that the role of military action was to create sufficient security to introduce programs to improve the social conditions of the people, thereby winning over their “hearts and minds” and denying the insurgents bases, recruits, and support. Against this the military argued that wars were won by eliminating enemy armed forces and frustrating their operations. This supported a policy of “search and destroy” through shelling and bombing areas where the enemy was believed to be hiding, though the enemy had often moved on and the attacks led to civilian deaths and popular resentment.
One of those involved in the internal discussions later commented ruefully on the “somewhat simplistic” assumptions about a monolithic form of threat, following the script of a “war of national liberation.” Under this mindset, sight of the “domestic origins and root causes of internal turmoil” was lost, which meant that the insurgency was treated as if it was “a clearly articulated military force instead of the apex of a pyramid deeply embedded in society.”29 Another official questioned the very description of opponents as “insurgents” instead of revolutionaries or rebels because this denied the possibility that they might be champions of a popular movement. It was hard to accept that the opponents were often local and popular and that their victims were associated with repression.30 The basic problem was that ameliorating the “worst causes of discontent” and redressing “the most flagrant inequities” would require positive action—and in some cases, radical reform—by the local government, yet the measures being proposed threatened to undermine the government’s position because they would involve altering the country’s social structure and domestic economy.31 It is also important to note that the original formulations of counterinsurgency doctrine assumed that the main work would be undertaken by local forces, assisted by American resources and advisors. The use of American forces on a large scale was to be avoided.32 There were many examples of this during the 1960s. In this respect, South Vietnam was the exception, but it was an exception that clouded all later thoughts on counterinsurgency theory and practice.
By the start of 1965, it was apparent that it was going to be very difficult to deal with the domestic sources of insurgency. Instead, American attention switched to dealing with the supply lines coming from the north. The conflict was firmly framed in terms of a fight with the communist leadership in North Vietnam and beyond rather than as a power struggle within South Vietnam. At this time, Tom Schelling’s concepts of bargaining and coercive diplomacy were particularly influential. This can be seen even in discussions of Vietnam, a situation far removed from the one to which Schelling had most applied himself—a superpower confrontation over a prized piece of real estate in the center of Europe and directly linked to a possible nuclear war.33 The figure in the U.S. Government most influenced by Schelling during the 1960s was John McNaughton, an academic lawyer from Harvard who died in an air crash in July 1967. He had worked with Schelling on the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, and the two remained good friends. When McNaughton spoke of arms control, for example, he showed interest in the notion of the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” and “non-zero-sum games.”34 He is said to have remarked that the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the realism of Schelling’s games.35 McNaughton was a key figure in the development of the U.S. policy on Vietnam, working closely with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. One of his memos was famously described by a colleague as the reductio ad absurdum of the planner’s art, combining realpolitik with the hyper-rationalist belief in control of the most refined American think tank.36 In a report of a working group McNaughton chaired in February 1964,37 one suggestion was pure Schelling: it would be possible to influence Hanoi’s decisions by action designed “to hurt but not to destroy.”38 Also drawn from Schelling was the proposition that “a decision to use force if necessary, backed by resolute and extensive deployment, and conveyed by every possible means to our adversaries, gives the best present chance of avoiding the actual use of such force.” The basic principle was that “a pound of threat is worth an ounce of action—as long as we are not bluffing.”39
The main threat his group had in mind was the use of American air power. At the time, the government was still trying to avoid using ground forces. But that could not achieve much of direct military value, as the supply lines were hard to disrupt and mass air attacks on civilian populations were considered unacceptable. McNaughton came up with the idea of coercive air strikes with a political purpose, which he described as “progressive squeeze-and-talk,” orchestrating diplomatic communications with graduated military pressure. Even if the United States eventually gave up, it was important to show that it had been “willing to keep promises, be tough, take risks, get bloodied, and hurt the enemy badly.”40 McNaughton was thus trying to find ways of giving the impression of commitment without being truly resolute, of following one course while not closing off others.
At the start of 1965, McNaughton consulted Schelling on exactly how the North could be coerced in these unpromising circumstances. According to one account, the two men wrestled unsatisfactorily with the question of “what could the United States ask the North to stop doing that they would obey, that we would soon know they obeyed, and that they could not simply resume doing after the bombing had ceased.” Kaplan comments, with some satisfaction: “So assured, at times glibly so, when w
riting about sending signals with force, inflicting pain to make an opponent behave and weaving patterns of communication through tactics of coercive warfare in theory, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life ‘limited war,’ was stumped, had no idea where to begin.”41 In fact, Schelling was highly skeptical about the likely value of a bombing campaign against the North. He noted the weak diplomacy accompanying the bombing and hoped that there had been private communications to Hanoi of a less ambiguous nature.42 Schelling’s reasoning, while suggestive and provocative, could not by itself generate strategies because that required the introduction of levels of complexity that his theoretical structure could not handle.
The new civilian strategists had some influence on the early stages of the U.S. policy regarding Vietnam, but the overriding influence was American military preferences. In some respects, the two came from the same starting point: a focus on techniques and tactics separate from political context. Counterinsurgency theory, like nuclear strategy, developed as a special body of expertise geared to discussing special sorts of military relationships as if they were special types of war. As discussed, Mao and Giap never saw guerrilla tactics as more than expedients for when they were weak. They did not think they could win a “guerrilla war”—success at this level would allow them to move on to the next stage defined by the familiar clash of regular armies. What they thought was truly distinctive to their type of warfare was the attention paid to political education and propaganda.
Vietnam, a war for which the civilian strategists had not prepared and on which they had relatively little of value to say, marked the end of the “golden age” of strategic studies. Just as the arrival of mutual assured destruction and a period of relative calm took the urgency out of the Cold War, Vietnam “poisoned the academic well.”43 Colin Gray charged the civilian “men of ideas” with being overconfident about the ease with which theory might be transferred to the “world of action.” The prophets had become courtiers, living off their intellectual capital. Their “dual-loyalty” to the needs of problem-oriented officials on the one hand and the disinterested “policy-neutral” standards of scholarship on the other “had tended to produce both irrelevant policy advice and poor scholarship.”44 In response to this criticism, Brodie praised policy engagement and defended the small group of civilian strategists who had accepted the burden of making sense of the new nuclear world, because the military were incapable of doing so. Yet having left RAND in 1966 bemoaning the “astonishing lack of political sense” and ignorance of diplomatic and military history among the engineers and economists, he readily accepted Vietnam as a consequence of these tendencies.45
CHAPTER 15 Observation and Orientation
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
—Sun Tzu
WITH THERE APPARENTLY being little more to say on nuclear strategy and Vietnam having turned into such a bruising experience, the civilian strategists in the United States withdrew from the field. The think tanks began to dwell more on immediate issues of policy and more technical matters. The civilians had never had much to say about the classic questions of regular warfare, though this was a natural focus for the professional military. It was the one area that had been left relatively untouched by the literature of the 1950s and 1960s due to the preoccupation with the unconventional areas of nuclear and guerrilla warfare.
One exception was a retired French general André Beaufre. Whereas the tendency in the United States was to turn strategy into a series of technical and practical issues, Beaufre’s approach was broader and more philosophical. This was reflected in his definition of strategy as “the art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute.”1 This put strategy at the highest level of policy, taking in not just a clash of arms but all possible elements of power. Strategy appeared as the supreme function of the state, requiring choices between different forms of power and their coordinated employment to ensure that their effects were maximized. Success could be achieved by means other than physical force. The target was the enemy’s will to start or continue a fight. Psychological effects were therefore critical.
The dialectic was composed of three interconnecting parts—nuclear, conventional, and cold-war. As a friend of Liddell Hart, Beaufre picked up on the possibilities of an indirect approach but gave it a broader frame, looking to actions in fields other than the military to make an impact. He therefore had a traditional view of conventional warfare as being about a victory but also assumed that in an age of nuclear deterrence this had become less interesting. By contrast, the cold war intrigued him, because it was a new but apparently permanent phenomenon. It was pushing the conflict out into all areas, including the economic and cultural, where the two sides might encounter each other. In this respect, stirring up discontent in colonies or making humanitarian appeals could be part of the same strategy. The risk in this formulation was that events that had quite other causes were explained by this particular “dialectic of opposing wills.”
American readers found Beaufre’s philosophical approach, with its Cartesian and Hegelian influences, hard to follow. Bernard Brodie, with his pragmatism and view of strategy as “the pursuit of success in certain types of competitive endeavor,” described himself as uncertain of Beaufre’s meaning. Brodie also found it hard to take Beaufre’s dismissal of military history and his disinterest in the collection of technical data as a distraction. This went against the “general consensus that awareness of technological and other types of change is a top-level requirement among strategists.”2
Brodie’s reaction to Beaufre may help explain the limited attention paid to a contribution by James Wylie. Wylie was an American admiral who wrote a short but lucid guide to contemporary strategy in the 1960s. His approach was compared at the time to Beaufre’s.3 James Wylie’s Military Strategy retains a following, but its impact has been marginal.4 Wylie first began to set down his ideas in the early 1950s, partly as reflections on his Second World War experience. He worked in concert with another admiral, Henry Eccles, whose thoughts followed a similar path. Both of them put questions of power at the heart of their analyses. Both wondered what that meant in terms of an ability to assert “control.” As naval officers in the Mahan tradition, they believed that control was the objective of strategy.
Eccles recognized that the issue of control went beyond the purely military sphere and was both inward and outward. The distinctive sources of power that had to be addressed internally included not only politicians and the public but also logistics and the industrial bases. The external sources, not only adversaries but also allies and neutrals, were even harder to control.5 In these circumstances, control could clearly not be absolute and had to be considered as a matter of degree. Wylie understood strategy as being about ends and means; it was “a purpose together with a some measures for its accomplishment,” and war in terms of competing patterns of activity, in which one side would gain advantage by imposing a pattern on the enemy. This did not require actual battle. It could work through shows of coercive force, which could progressively constrain the enemy.
Wylie’s main claim to originality lay in a distinction between two types of strategy. The idea was prompted by a comment from the German-American historian Herbert Rosinski in 1951 distinguishing between “directive” and “cumulative” strategies. Rosinski was certainly aware of Delbrück, and he may well have been thinking about updating the distinction between wars of annihilation and exhaustion. Wylie developed his ideas first in a 1952 article. “It landed with no splash at the time,” he lamented, “and has lain on the deck ever since.”6 He tried again in his book. The distinction he drew was between a linear sequential strategy, tending to the offensive, and a cumulative strategy. A sequential strategy would involve discrete steps, each dependent upon the one before, which together would shape the outcome of the war. This offered the possibility of forcing the enemy to a satisfactory conclusion, but it als
o required an ability to plan ahead and anticipate the course of a conflict. The risk, of which Wylie was well aware, was that once one step turned out differently, the remainder of the sequence must follow a different pattern likely to lead to less satisfactory outcomes than the one originally sought. By contrast, a cumulative strategy was more defensive. It involved “the less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other until at some unknown point the mess of accumulated actions may be large enough to be critical.” These items would not be interdependent, so a negative result in one area need not put the whole effort into reverse. This strategy could counter a sequential strategy, denying an enemy control, but it could not offer a quick, decisive result. In practice, Wylie did not consider the two to be exclusive. He did see a cumulative strategy as providing a useful hedge against a bold plan going wrong.7
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