Soon, military aircraft were dropping strings of sensors across the jungles, which sent information to a computer command center located in Nakhon Phanom in Thailand. The sensors, a combination of sound and seismic detectors, were designed to pick up Vietcong supply trucks, while the computers would calculate the position of the target, which would be relayed to the aircraft, allowing them to strike within minutes. Computers were still in their infancy, and computer-automated killing entirely new, so the system was, at least for the time, like something from science fiction. By linking sensors and aircraft to computers in real time, the JASON proposal transformed Godel’s idea of a barrier into something far more technologically advanced: the world’s first electronic battlefield. What the barrier failed to do, by all accounts, was to have any appreciable effect on the course of the war. In his memoir, Godel wrote that the ARPA barrier idea was resurrected “in the desperation of a failed Secretary of Defense” when it was already too late to do any good. “It was,” he wrote, “a good idea gone sour, and it never worked despite all manner of high tech communications gear, patrolling, and elaborate airborne surveillance techniques.”
The barrier was technically brilliant, but its implementation was flawed: the air force saw it as an extension of its strategic air campaign to destroy the Vietcong, rather than as a tool for stopping infiltration. Soldiers and press alike mocked it, calling it the “McNamara Line,” after the French Maginot Line, and the name stuck. “The barrier proved to be worthless,” The New York Times reported in McNamara’s obituary.
Deitchman, who had revived Godel’s border-sealing project and transformed it into an electronic fence, took a different view of ARPA’s efforts. He later acknowledged the barrier was a strategic failure but argued it was a technological success. It failed to slow the Vietcong’s progress, but it demonstrated for the first time a way to automate the “sensor-to-shooter process.” In other words, it sped up the process of killing. The failed barrier became, as Deitchman wrote many years later, the first articulation of “network centric warfare,” a term that would gain currency in the Pentagon in the early years of the twenty-first century. Deitchman, at least back in 1966, believed that science could alter the course of the war in Vietnam, and he was about to take Godel’s place as the head of AGILE.
CHAPTER 10
Blame It on the Sorcerers
“Do you see anything on this card that reminds you of a penis?”
Walter Slote, a New York psychotherapist, handed the ink-blot-stained piece of paper to the Vietcong fighter.
“No, sir,” the fighter replied curtly.
“How about this top part?” Slote asked.
“No.”
Slote persevered: “Do you see anything here on this card that reminds you of a woman’s vagina?”
“No,” he replied.
Neither man was in a particularly good mood. Slote was frustrated because he had been fruitlessly going through these cards, part of the classic Rorschach test, and the Vietcong fighter was unhappy because he was sitting in a Saigon prison staring at ink blots, rather than planting bombs and killing Americans.
An American firm, called Simulmatics Corporation, had sent Slote to Vietnam in 1966 to help the Pentagon understand the growing insurgency. Slote believed the Rorschach test, popular at the time among psychotherapists to diagnose personality traits, could be used to understand the reasons behind growing resentment of the United States and the South Vietnamese government. But so far, the Rorschach ink blotches had failed to yield great insights into the psyche of the Vietcong fighter.
Slote asked the Vietcong fighter to go through all the cards and find anything that reminded him of a person. Nothing. What about anything sexual? Nothing, again. Slote seemed puzzled that an imprisoned Vietcong fighter being interviewed by a man hired by the Defense Department to quiz him about penises and vaginas would be so reticent. Slote finally asked the fighter to find a picture that he liked or disliked, but the imprisoned man, who had once led a sabotage squad, was reluctant to even touch the cards. “I do not understand these pictures, so I do not know which one I like, which one I dislike,” the sullen fighter replied.
Slote ended up spending seven weeks in Vietnam, during which time he collected data on exactly four Vietnamese: a prominent French-educated writer, a student activist in hiding, a senior Buddhist monk, and the Vietcong insurgent. All four harbored anti-American feelings and were critical of the government of South Vietnam, but Slote found the Vietcong fighter particularly frustrating. Even the antigovernment Buddhist monk Slote interviewed was more cooperative. “You know, I’ve never seen one, except on a child,” the monk replied in astonishment, when Slote asked him if a particular ink blot resembled a vagina.
“The Viet Cong member was a thoroughly deadened man. Unless directly addressed, he stared into space, his expression was stony and flattened, he never reached out nor truly responded,” Slote later wrote in his report. “The only time he came alive was when he was telling of his exploits. His eyes would brighten and he held himself with greater dignity, but as soon as this passed, he would lapse back into a lethargic dulled apathy—a pattern that I am convinced was lifelong and not precipitated by imprisonment.”
The New York psychotherapist was not interested in the nuances of Vietnamese politics; he quizzed the men about their parents, their dreams, and their sex lives, or lack thereof. Slote decided, after interviews with his four informants, that the problem with the Vietnamese people was not a thousand years of foreign domination, including French colonialism, Chinese imperialism, and now finally American intervention. Instead, the root of the problem, he believed, was their troubled family structure. “It is my strong impression that the triad of sibling rivalry, deflected parental hostility and unresolved dependency needs constitutes the central psychological core of anti-Americanism in Vietnam,” he concluded.
Slote’s presence as a Pentagon-funded researcher in Vietnam might have sounded ludicrous, but it was part of a much broader trend spearheaded by ARPA to study the roots of insurgency. Defense officials realized the growing insurgency was a phenomenon bullets and bombs alone could not stop, and increasingly they turned to researchers from the “softer” sciences, including anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, and in this case even a psychotherapist. The chief proponent of this new line of work was Seymour Deitchman, an emerging member of Secretary of Defense McNamara’s technocratic elite and a longtime nemesis of William Godel’s. Deitchman was convinced it was an engineer’s slide rule, not a soldier’s intuition, that would determine who won or lost battles. More important, he believed that people could be studied and their actions predicted the way engineers measure and track the flight of a ballistic missile. Vietnam was about to become the test bed for a new science of human behavior.
—
In 1966, on the last day of the summer meeting of the JASON advisers in California, the same meeting where the electronic barrier was born, Deitchman was asked to help fix ARPA’s troubled Vietnam program. John S. Foster Jr., who had recently taken over from Harold Brown as the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering, pulled Deitchman aside and told him that he had a new job for him. Foster, like Brown, was a physicist, and though he supported the work being done in Vietnam, he felt the ARPA program needed some technical oversight. Foster “started to twist my arm about taking over Project AGILE in ARPA,” Deitchman recalled. Foster wanted someone like Deitchman, an engineer, to bring more science into the program. Just a year and a half younger than William Godel, the diminutive, pipe-smoking Deitchman had a path that ran parallel to that of the former marine. Both Godel and Deitchman fashioned careers as counterinsurgency experts, albeit from different perspectives.
Deitchman had been applying operations research to aviation and defense issues as an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses. There, he befriended Jesse Orlansky, a psychologist who was interested in the growing insurgency in Vietnam. Intrigued by the idea of blending soci
al science with the hard sciences, Deitchman began using operations research to analyze questions of “limited warfare,” the Pentagon jargon at the time for insurgencies. In 1962, he published “A Lanchester Model of Guerrilla Warfare” in the journal Operations Research, which took mathematical formulas popular with modeling U.S.-Soviet conventional engagements and applied them to insurgent warfare.
With his growing expertise in guerrilla warfare and operations research, Deitchman was recruited to work in the Pentagon with Harold Brown, one of McNamara’s whiz kids. In 1964, Deitchman became Brown’s special assistant for counterinsurgency, a job that made him responsible for research and development programs in Southeast Asia. Much of what he did was patrol for dumb ideas being proposed in the hallways of the Pentagon. There were more than a few, he recalled, like an air force proposal to create an “artificial moon” over Vietnam—a satellite with a giant dish that would illuminate the Mekong delta region, allowing the air force to use starlight scopes at night.
The military services were grasping at technological solutions, yet Deitchman understood that the problem the military increasingly faced was one that defied modern weaponry. In the mid-1960s, an increasing number of Vietnamese were turning against both the South Vietnamese government and the American military. The Vietcong attacks in South Vietnam began to climb in number and scale, highlighted in February 1965 by a dramatic Vietcong infiltration of the Pleiku airbase—home to American military advisers. The attack resulted in the deaths of nine Americans and more than one hundred wounded. Villagers in South Vietnam were increasingly aiding and joining the Vietcong, a phenomenon that mystified officials back in Washington who believed that only coercion could account for this dramatic shift in support. The South Vietnamese military was losing ground to the Vietcong not for lack of better weapons or technology but because something was driving the peasants to support the enemy. It was a question of psychology, and psychology was not a problem that one could bomb into submission. But it could be studied.
ARPA had been moving into the social sciences since the early 1960s, first under J. C. R. Licklider, who had been brought in to start a behavioral science program. Licklider’s behavioral science program was small in scale but continued to grow after he left and eventually became part of Project AGILE. Under the direction of Lee Huff, a political scientist, ARPA expanded even more into the social sciences, contracting with think tanks like the Rand Corporation to perform fieldwork in Vietnam. A description of AGILE in 1966 summarized it as seeking to understand the “close interrelation between the technological, behavioral, and environmental factors” involved in insurgency. AGILE would no longer be a narrow technical program to help indigenous forces; it would be directed at creating the “total solution of the problem of counterinsurgent operations.”
Defense contractors also saw an opportunity to profit from this new direction. By the mid-1960s, ARPA was being flooded by proposals from companies, universities, and independent researchers, all suggesting ways to help understand why increasing numbers of Vietnamese—and which Vietnamese—were siding with the Vietcong, rather than embracing American forces. The military-industrial complex offered up its own bizarre mix of solutions to this problem, often with technologies to fix what was, essentially, a very human problem. General Electric in August 1965, for example, wrote to ARPA suggesting the company be given a “continuing open ended type contract” that would allow it to apply its technology to counterinsurgency. Its first proposal was a “mass polygraph for internal village security.” The concept was a sort of modern version of witch dunking reimagined as science fiction.
“Consider the following scenario as being typical of the type of situation and method of operation,” the General Electric sales manager began. “A high security Central Government anti-terror police contingent arrived by helicopter at a village suspected of being under covert Viet Cong pressure or subject to territorial activities. The villagers are assembled by their local chief such that each villager can see every other villager. Each individual is connected to the new type of mass polygraph which measures galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart beat of all the villagers simultaneously.” From there, the scenario got still weirder. A suspected supporter of the Vietcong would be hauled up before the assembled villagers, who are all hooked up to the polygraph. The machine would record a “group” response, alleviating the fear that any single villager was the informant. “The process can be repeated to test as many members of the village as desired,” the sales manager explained.
ARPA managed to stay out of the lie detector business, but when Deitchman arrived in November 1966 to take over Project AGILE, the program he inherited was in disarray, “a collection of $25 to $30 million worth of odd projects.” He began to comb through the programs, weeding out what he deemed to be shoddy work. Godel’s former cadre viewed Deitchman with a mix of suspicion and horror. AGILE under Godel had been run like an intelligence operation, employing local contacts, like a Thai prostitute who was coordinating the river surveillance project. The prostitute spoke Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and English and knew all of the key people in the region, according to Warren Stark, the AGILE program manager.“Sy Deitchman was aghast that he would have someone like that on the payroll,” Stark said.
Deitchman, however, was resolved to clean up AGILE’s problems and bring in grounded science. One of his first decisions was to get rid of Herman Kahn, the portly nuclear war theorist. Kahn had left Rand to found the Hudson Institute, and now he was gallivanting around Vietnam with ARPA funding giving entertaining slide presentations filled with grandiose, if perhaps functionally useless, ideas. That included, in one report, a proposal to build a moat around Saigon to protect it from the Vietcong. Kahn’s anti-infiltration moat was widely derided by the press and lawmakers. The moat became so famous that when the army general Creighton Abrams complained about the “fucking geography” of Vietnam, someone jokingly suggested that they could move some hills. Abrams’s response, greeted with raucous laughter, was: “Well, you could get Herman Kahn to work on that.”
Kahn and his colorful slide presentations were starting to cause political problems for ARPA, and Deitchman was determined to cut ties with him. “What is Herman Kahn doing for you out there?” Deitchman asked one senior official at Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
“Well, he comes out here and gives us some absolutely fascinating briefings that get us thinking and we enjoy it,” the official replied.
“Is that worth a quarter of a million dollars of Uncle Sam’s money to you?” countered Deitchman.
“No, I guess I couldn’t say that,” the official said.
And with that, Deitchman got rid of Kahn, and when Kahn threatened to complain to McNamara, Deitchman called him on his bluff. “Go ahead,” Deitchman said.
Kahn’s flashy lectures underscored a larger problem facing Pentagon-funded social science work: there was a tendency to pay for studies that supported what the military wanted to hear, rather than what it needed to hear. For example, ARPA had been paying for Rand since the early 1960s to conduct social science work in Vietnam. That support included funding for Gerald Hickey, the Rand-employed anthropologist who had questioned the strategic hamlet program. Though highly regarded in the Defense Department, when Hickey’s work ran counter to Pentagon policy, as it often did, officials simply ignored him.
One of Rand’s most significant ARPA-funded projects, and the one that would become its most famous wartime social science work, was the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, which sought to understand support for the the communist insurgency. Two Rand analysts, Joe Zasloff and John Donnell, were sent over to supervise the interviews, which were conducted with captured Vietcong, as well as those who had surrendered under amnesty. The initial analysis of the interviews was rather dismal for the prospects of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The study produced insights that did not mesh with the official line, because it showed that the Vietnamese were joining the Vietcong out of genuine political
conviction, rather than being forced to join, as many government and military officials back in Washington maintained. Joining the Vietcong “had to do with anger at an exploitative government, and a sense of nationalism,” and the ability of the communists to manipulate those feelings, according to David Morell, who oversaw the study for ARPA. The response from Washington to those conclusions, however, was “not just negative; it was shock.”
In 1964, Rand embarked on a second prisoner of war study, this time sending over Leon Gouré, a noted Rand Sovietologist and political hard-liner who had been accused of hyping the Soviet Union’s civil defense programs. According to his colleagues, he went to Vietnam already sure that air strikes were the solution to counterinsurgency, and that was the answer he gave to the Pentagon. “The new theme, as expounded by Gouré in his proposal, was finding and exploiting enemy vulnerabilities to the impact of military operations,” wrote Mai Elliott in her authoritative account of Rand’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Not surprisingly, the results of the new study were quite different from the first. “When the Air Force is paying the bill, the answer is always bombing,” Gouré reportedly said. Even Gouré’s colleagues at Rand did not trust his findings; they believed he was cherry-picking information and interviews. But Gouré’s new slant on the Rand work soon got him the ear of Secretary of Defense McNamara, who upped his budget from $100,000 to $1 million. By January 1966, McNamara was briefing President Johnson about Rand’s work, which not surprisingly confirmed that strategic bombing was working.
The Imagineers of War Page 20