A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  The Secretary described America’s military constraints as hinging on the asymmetric nature of the conflict, noting that this required the Americans to disperse their forces. He devoted roughly equal attention to America’s political weaknesses, as it faced growing internal and global opposition. He also added mention of American economic decline. So was this all pure propaganda aimed at rallying the Party to the cause? Not quite. Though his speeches and directives certainly contained heavy doses of propaganda, his assessments reflect some sober analysis of America’s strategic situation. That knowledge no doubt contributed to Hanoi’s willingness to prosecute its protracted war strategy despite the enormous toll it was taking on the Vietnamese people.

  It was then time for the Party’s First Secretary to speak about predictions. The underlying aim of developing strategic empathy, of knowing one’s enemy, is of course to anticipate an opponent’s actions. Le Duan proclaimed that the war would intensify, becoming more vicious in both the North and South. The scale of fighting would increase as the Americans stepped up their artillery and air strikes. The Americans would use chemical warfare and poison gas on liberated zones, even those adjacent to urban centers. The enemy would increase its bombing of North Vietnam, but it would focus on disrupting the transportation and supply lines from north to south. The Americans would attack key economic zones, the dike system, and residential areas. Finally, they would use psychological warfare and espionage to shake the will of the Vietnamese people.36 Though none of this may have been difficult to predict (especially as much of it was already occurring), it was at least essentially accurate.

  In order to counter the anticipated American intensification of the war, Le Duan spelled out the nature of Hanoi’s protracted war strategy while also seeking a quick victory: two ostensibly contradictory positions. This policy, as suggested above, may have emerged as a compromise between divergent Party factions. Le Duan tried to square the circle this way:

  We have also clearly explained that these two things are not in contradiction to one another, because the basic condition for fighting a protracted war as well as for seeking victory within a relatively short period of time is to quickly develop our power and forces in all areas, and especially military forces, in order to change the balance of forces in our favor.37

  The protracted war strategy was not, he explained, a policy of annihilating all American forces down to the last man. Instead, as is well known, it was a plan to sap the enemy’s will to fight. It was also, he added, to force the enemy to accept defeat with certain conditions. This caveat indicates that Hanoi’s “talking while fighting” tactic allowed for the possibility that at least a faction within Hanoi’s leadership was willing to make certain concessions. Such a statement suggests that the more compromising members of the Politburo who were open to negotiation with the Americans still held some sway over Party pronouncements. Le Duan would later silence this faction through intimidation and arrest.

  The tension between waging a protracted struggle and seeking a rapid victory is perhaps best played out in this section of the speech. Le Duan explained that Party leaders had a responsibility to understand the psychological state of Southern Vietnamese. Although they had been fighting the Americans officially since 1960, the revolution had actually been fought for the past twenty years under savage conditions. The Party leaders therefore had to make the greatest effort to shorten the fighting as much as possible. And then he struck this compromising note: “Naturally, our goal must be to win total, 100 percent victory, but if in a certain situation we are able to achieve a 90 percent victory, we can then bring the war to an end under conditions that are favorable to us.”38

  Le Duan distinguished Vietnam’s past struggles against the French from the current war with the Americans. Though he had frequently drawn comparisons between the two conflicts, he now identified the significant differences. First, the strength of communist forces in both the North and the South was far greater in 1965 than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, the communists in the North now possessed a solid rear area backed by the socialist bloc. Third, the war against the Americans and puppet government began with offensive, rather than defensive, operations. He asserted that this time the Party held the offensive initiative in its hands. Through the use of protracted war, Le Duan believed that Hanoi would eventually win. The Party leader’s ability to recognize what was new in the current conflict enabled him to adjust Hanoi’s strategy to the enemy at hand, rather than applying a one-sized approach to waging war. He was not fighting the last war with yesterday’s methods. Instead, he had the mental agility to see what was unique about his enemy and adapt accordingly.

  Shortly after Le Duan’s address, the Party convened a meeting of high-level cadres on January 16, 1966, for the purpose of studying the Twelfth Plenum’s resolution. Although his folksy style stood in sharp contrast to Le Duan’s more formal speeches, Ho Chi Minh showed himself in agreement with Le Duan’s assessment of America. Addressing the assembled cadres, Ho confronted the challenges of fighting American soldiers. He observed that the Americans were well-fed and well-financed, receiving meat, cake, cigarettes, and chewing gum as typical rations. He claimed that supporting an American soldier cost fifteen times that of a South Vietnamese soldier. In addition, the Americans had just introduced a mobile division transported by helicopter. But then Ho outlined the enemy’s weak points. First among these was their lack of mobility on the ground. Calling the Americans “big, heavy-set people,” weighted down with all imaginable equipment, he observed that once they were on the ground, they could not move as quickly as the Vietnamese. Ho argued that although Vietnamese soldiers were smaller, they were faster, more agile, and therefore not at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat. Beyond these tactical appraisals, Ho underscored the view that body counts mattered for political reasons.

  America’s fundamental weaknesses, Ho asserted, centered on the growing domestic and global opposition to its intervention. He cited American youths setting themselves on fire in protest. He pointed to the violent uprisings by black Americans. Underscoring the same theme that Le Duan had stressed many times before, Ho assured the cadres that increased American casualties would only augment domestic opposition. He even cited U.S. Senator Morse as saying: “The more American troops we sent to South Vietnam, the more caskets that will be sent back home to the United States.” Because victory hinged on what happened in South Vietnam, Ho concluded that “we must do whatever it takes in South Vietnam to destroy and shatter the puppet army and to kill large numbers of American troops. . . .”39

  These same notions of America’s vulnerability continued for years, even after the general offensive. Following the multiple attacks that together comprised the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Party’s resolution of August revisited the current strategic balance, paying closest attention to the contradictions inherent in America’s position. First, the resolution asserted that America’s greatest contradiction was that it needed to confront the enemy directly, yet its current posture was defensive. It could not win without substantially increasing its troop strength, but deploying more troops would guarantee an even greater defeat. The next contradiction, as Hanoi saw it, involved de-Americanization, or what the Nixon administration would later dub “Vietnamization” of the war: transferring primary fighting responsibility to the ARVN. Hanoi maintained that ARVN’s forces were becoming less effective as their morale deteriorated, but the Americans needed to place them in the principal fighting role. In addition, the Americans needed to mass their forces, though they were compelled to disperse them because they needed to defend the cities while simultaneously controlling the countryside.40 In short, all of the weaknesses Hanoi had recognized years before were now exacerbated.

  The same was true for the way Hanoi assessed America’s international position. On August 29, 1968, a report to the Central Committee observed that Vietnam had hamstrung U.S. actions in other hot spots. Referring to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, th
e report argued that America could not mount a serious response because it was tied down in Vietnam. It could not go deeper into the Middle East despite the recent Arab-Israeli War. It could not go deeper into Laos following its defeat at Nam Bak.41 Despite Hanoi’s military losses from the Tet Offensive, Party leaders still maintained that America’s underlying constraints left its future prospects grim.

  By the start of 1969, Le Duan recognized that American support for the war had reached a turning point after Tet. On January 1, the Politburo cabled Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy (two of the leading delegates to the Paris peace talks) to report on its discussions of American intentions. Party leaders believed that the key American policymakers wanted to end the war by withdrawing troops but maintaining a strong regime in the South. President Nixon, they presumed, was also compelled to follow this course, though he sought an honorable end to the war. In subsequent Politburo cables throughout January and February, Hanoi reiterated its belief that U.S. politicians wanted to deescalate and de-Americanize the war, though Nixon hoped to negotiate from a position of strength. Consequently, the Politburo concluded that the struggle must continue on all three fronts—military, political, and diplomatic. In order to maintain the protracted war strategy, the cable instructed that diplomacy must not give the impression that Hanoi desired a quick conclusion to the conflict.42 On each of these three fronts, Le Duan continued to pursue an effective grand strategy of wearing the Americans down.

  Conclusion

  Le Duan’s strategic empathy for America—his ability to identify America’s underlying constraints—proved strong on the most crucial dimension. He grasped the enemy’s sensitivity to casualties. He understood America’s vulnerability to being bogged down, fighting for years without demonstrable progress. He comprehended that America’s global commitments could be hamstrung if overextended in Vietnam. Ultimately, this was the most important assessment to get right, and on this point he succeeded in knowing his enemy well.

  Le Duan also saw the shelling of North Vietnamese islands and the Tonkin Gulf episode as both a provocative act by America and a distinct break in the pattern of U.S. behavior. According to the Politburo directive of August 7, 1964, he expected America to intensify the war in the South and step up its measures against the North. Here, too, he correctly estimated his enemy’s intentions.

  Le Duan likely understood that President Johnson would retaliate against the post-Tonkin attacks culminating at Pleiku. Rather than halting COSVN assaults in order to avoid provoking an American escalation, Le Duan seems to have reasoned that since escalation at that point was both likely and imminent, attacking the Americans would boost morale, giving southern communists a resource that would be greatly in need throughout the protracted war to come. The fact that Le Duan permitted those attacks to continue after Tonkin strongly suggests that he recognized Tonkin as signaling an inevitable escalation. It is not clear that Le Duan ever comprehended why President Johnson and his advisors decided to expand the war, but his uncertainty is understandable, especially since even historians are divided on the matter. They have been debating the Johnson administration’s motivations for decades and will no doubt continue to do so. Given Le Duan’s in-depth, reasoned efforts to understand his American foes, we cannot attribute his predictions of American actions to his Marxist-Leninist convictions alone. The often conflicted nature of Hanoi’s assessments of America show that ideology influenced, but did not determine, Hanoi’s thinking. Instead, Le Duan’s and Hanoi’s strategic empathy derived from a complex interplay of pattern recognition, attention to pattern breaks, and an overlay of Marxist dogma.

  Contingency and chance are always at play in every conflict. Rarely are any outcomes predetermined or ineluctable. Obviously there were many causes of Hanoi’s ultimate victory, primary among them being the support it received from China and the Soviet Union, its ability to continue sending arms and materiel south via the Ho Chi Minh trail, and its willingness to allow its people to endure extraordinary suffering. We must add to that list Hanoi’s strategic empathy for America. Despite its failings, that empathy proved an equally important factor in its final triumph.

  Although Le Duan ultimately triumphed, he and other Party leaders still failed on numerous occasions to read their enemies correctly, most notably with their prediction that the South Vietnamese would rise up in revolution. Thus far we have examined cases in which the pattern-break heuristic played a helpful role (or could have, in the case of Stalin). I want now to turn to a different heuristic, one that sometimes undermines even the sharpest observers. I will call this the continuity heuristic: an assumption that the enemy’s future behavior will mirror past behavior. To illustrate this mistaken mindset, we must look back at one of its earliest recorded cases, on the battlefields of ancient China. As the Han dynasty collapsed into warring factions, three kingdoms vied for supremacy over China’s vast dominions. Amid countless generals, one strategic thinker stood apart. Though his fame was already secure, it turned legendary when he faced a massive onslaught with merely a hypnotic tune.

  8

  ______

  The Continuity Conundrum

  When the Past Misleads

  The Lute That Beat an Army

  They called him Sleeping Dragon, though his mind was wide awake. Master Cun Ming’s strategic insights were so renowned throughout China that his enemies shuddered at his name. When garbed in his white, silken Taoist robes embroidered with red cranes down the sides, it seemed hard to imagine that such a placid figure could be so dominant in battle. Yet through the careful, cautious application of superior force, Cun Ming had reached almost legendary status. But the Dragon’s string of victories was about to end when he found himself left to defend a city with just 2,500 men. In the distance, Marshall Sima Yi advanced with the full might of his Wei army, nearly 150,000 troops. This time, even Sleeping Dragon could not hope to fight and win.

  Cun Ming’s officers were terrified. They knew a bloodbath was soon to come. Their foreboding only heightened as they received the Dragon’s orders. After soberly assessing their impossible predicament, Cun Ming ordered the city gates flung open. Strangely, he did not issue the command to surrender. Instead, he instructed twenty of his soldiers to remove their uniforms and dress in the clothing of townsfolk. The disguised soldiers were to do nothing more than peacefully sweep the streets at the city gates. All other soldiers were to hide from sight. Any officer who so much as made a noise would be instantly put to death. Cun Ming then changed into his Taoist robes and ascended the roof of the highest building, armed only with his lute.

  Had he gone mad? Was the strain of endless battle at last too much to bear? Or had he simply decided to meet his fate with the serenity of a peaceful spirit? As Sleeping Dragon played a haunting tune, Marshall Sima Yi’s scouts surveyed the eerie scene. Uncertain as to its meaning, they hurried back and reported to their commander. Incredulous and slightly unnerved, Sima Yi ordered his army to halt while he advanced alone to observe the situation for himself. Sure enough, he saw precisely what his scouts had described. Townsfolk peered downward as they methodically swept the streets. Two ceremonial guards flanked Cun Ming atop the building: one bearing a sword; the other holding a yak tail, the symbol of authority. Cun Ming sat between them, absorbed in the playing of his lute, as if nothing at all were amiss.

  Now Sima Yi’s confidence was shaken. Cun Ming’s lack of preparation had to mean a trap. But what exactly did he intend? By making the city appear undefended, Cun Ming must be planning an ambush, the Marshall had to conclude. Sima Yi’s second son tried to offer counsel. “Why do you retire, father?” the boy asked. “I am certain there are no soldiers behind this foolery. Why do you halt?” But Sima Yi knew better. He had known Cun Ming for years and knew that the Master never took risks. If the city seemed defenseless, then he could be certain it was too strongly defended to attack. Sima Yi turned his entire army around at once. They headed for the hills in full retreat.

  Upon seeing the massive ranks
of soldiers fleeing from his lute, Sleeping Dragon laughed and clapped his hands with delight. “Sima Yi knows that I am a cautious man,” Cun Ming explained to those around him. “But if I had been in his place I should not have turned away.”

  Because Cun Ming knew his enemy even better than the enemy knew him, Cun Ming was able to predict how his enemy would react to surprising information. Sima Yi did not possess the wit to accurately interpret the meaning of this pattern break, and Sleeping Dragon understood this. Instead, Sima Yi fled at the sound of a lonely lute. Later, when Sima Yi learned he had been tricked, he could only sigh resignedly. “Cun Ming is a cleverer man than I.”1