He hoped that these limited actions would not only lead North Vietnam to seek peace but also increase the combat effectiveness of South Vietnam’s army by bolstering its morale. His hopes were disappointed. With South Vietnam tottering on the edge of defeat, morale alone could not turn the tide, and Ho Chi Minh’s mind was set on military conquest, not compromise.
In the summer of 1965, North Vietnam began a concerted drive for total victory. Now, to fulfill his pledge to keep South Vietnam free, Johnson decided he had to undertake a huge military buildup in Vietnam and order our troops to take over the war against the guerrillas. This decision made it America’s war rather than South Vietnam’s.
The most critical week of the Johnson presidency began on July 21, 1965. The President had long been torn between the conflicting demands of the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty. Now he had to assign priorities.
On July 21, Secretary of Defense McNamara reported to the National Security Council that the military picture was rapidly deteriorating. He recommended that the President send another 100,000 men to Vietnam by October and said that an additional 100,000 might be needed in early 1966. McNamara also suggested that the administration ask Congress for authority to call up 235,000 troops from the reserves.
The cost for these steps would add up to $8 billion. The President could get the money either by seeking a supplemental appropriation from Congress or by juggling the accounts in the Pentagon budget. As Johnson contemplated such a major escalation of our role in Vietnam, he also had to decide whether to mobilize the country behind the war. Meanwhile, the Great Society hung in the balance in Congress. During the week of July 21, two centerpieces of Johnson’s domestic program—the civil rights bill and Medicare—had reached crucial stages in Conference Committee. Another twenty-six major bills were moving through the House and Senate, while eleven more awaited scheduling.
Johnson knew that the Great Society and the Vietnam War were on a collision course. He was convinced that any action which focused attention on the war undermined the prospects for his domestic program. He later exploded in exasperation, “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.” On the one hand, if he let North Vietnam win the war, the acrimonious debate about who lost South Vietnam would wreck his plans for the Great Society. On the other hand, if he went all out to win the war, conservatives would use it as an excuse to gut his domestic programs. “History provided too many cases where the sound of a bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers,” Johnson later told a biographer. He added that once the Vietnam War had begun, “all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society.”
It was a terrible dilemma for Johnson. He could not afford to lose the war, and he could not afford to do what was necessary to win it. Either way he would lose the Great Society. He made the worst possible choice: He would fight—not to win, but only not to lose.
Johnson decided to pursue a policy of guns and butter. He gave his Great Society programs priority over Vietnam and tried to prosecute the war out of the public spotlight. As he approved additional military actions in Vietnam, he told his National Security Council that he did not want to be “overly dramatic and cause tensions.” His fear was not that bellicose rhetoric would lead to a superpower confrontation but that a public debate on the war would kill his domestic plans.
He deliberately downplayed the importance of the actions he was taking in Vietnam. He announced that he was sending our armed forces into war in a short opening statement during an afternoon press conference. He did not seek authority from Congress to call up the reserves. He did not ask for a resolution of national emergency or even a supplemental appropriations bill. He did not present his plan for the war in a prime-time address to the nation. He did not publicly disclose the size of the anticipated call-up through the draft or explain that our troops would now engage in direct combat. He did not cut back social programs or increase taxes to put the economy on a wartime footing.
Making the point that Vietnam was a just war would have been easy, but Johnson deliberately chose to avoid the question. While he sporadically made strong statements on the war, he never marshaled a concerted public campaign to explain why we were in Vieinam. It was the greatest political error this master politician ever made. American leaders cannot wage war without the solid support of public opinion, and the American people will go to war only if they are convinced that it is in a just cause. An American President therefore must never commit his troops to battle without getting the people to commit themselves to the war.
• • •
When Johnson intervened in Vietnam, he had to deal with the war as he found it. It was being fought in South Vietnam with guerrilla tactics, and the government in Saigon was near collapse. Our first priority was to stop our ally’s slide toward defeat at the hands of Communist guerrillas. But that alone could not ensure South Vietnam’s survival. Our second priority should have been to blunt North Vietnam’s invasion through Laos and Cambodia. And because our forces eventually would be withdrawn, our third priority should have been to prepare South Vietnam to defend itself against both the internal and external threats it faced.
From 1964 through 1968, our strategy primarily addressed our first priority—and by virtually ignoring the other two, guaranteed its own failure. Had we addressed all three problems from the outset of our involvement, President Johnson could have ended the Vietnam War before he left office. Instead, it became our longest war.
Democracies are not well equipped to fight prolonged or limited wars. A totalitarian power can coerce its population into fighting indefinitely, but a democracy fights well only as long as its public opinion supports the war, and public opinion will not continue to support a war that is fought indecisively or that drags on without tangible signs of progress. This is doubly true when the war is being fought half a world away.
Some say that our mistake was in failing to follow Douglas MacArthur’s dictum that in war there is no substitute for victory. According to them, we should have either stayed out of the war entirely or sought unconditional victory over the enemy as we had in World War II. But few wars have been all-or-nothing propositions. Unlimited or total wars have been a rarity. Except for World War II, none of our foreign conflicts has been a total war. We did not demand the surrender of Madrid in the Spanish-American War or march on Berlin in the First World War, and we accepted an armistice to end the Korean War.
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.
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