by Lewis Sorley
18 November 1966: JCS informed CINCPAC that "conditions require that the allocation of XM16E1 rifles be revised on the basis of giving priority to first equipping US Forces, followed by non-US Forces engaged in combat in Vietnam."
Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a memorandum for the Service Chiefs, recognized a need for a re-evaluation of the allocation plans for M-16 rifles. This was based upon a significant change which occurred in the fall of 1966 that planned greater use of ARVN Forces in a pacification role while continuing the use of US Forces and some elements of non-US Forces in an almost exclusive combat role.
***
WHILE HE WAS Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland responded in writing to certain questions posed by Townsend Hoopes, a former civilian defense official who was writing a book. Westmoreland told him that his strategy had had two parts, to put maximum pressure on the enemy and "to build up the Vietnamese forces both quantitatively and qualitatively, to include the provision of modern equipment to the point where they could assume progressively more of the battlefield burden."27
If that latter task was indeed a part of his strategy, Westmoreland totally failed to achieve it, or even in any real sense attempt it, during his long years in Vietnam. In 1965, noted Herbert Schandler, when Westmoreland asked for more U.S. troops he was "recommending a virtual American takeover of the war. There was little or no mention in General Westmoreland's request of South Vietnamese forces, or any program to utilize those forces, or to make them more effective."28
So relentless was Westmoreland in giving first consideration to American forces and last to the South Vietnamese that those priorities even extended to munitions. "For a while during 1966 ammunition stocks were low, forcing me to limit ARVN artillery to two rounds per day per gun," said Westmoreland in his memoirs, "but no American unit ever wanted for necessary ammunition."29
Meanwhile the enemy was energetically and effectively improving virtually the entire arsenal of his forces. "During 1966," stated a communist history of the war, "many new types of weapons and implements of war were sent to the battlefield, increasing the equipment of main force and local force units." The upgrades included both more weapons and improved ones, to include B-40 and B-41 rocket launchers. "AK assault rifles were issued to units down to the local force level." And new and better models of recoilless rifles, mortars, and anti-aircraft machine guns were issued down through provincial local force battalions.30
General John Galvin expressed a strong opinion on the matter: "Westmoreland firmly believed that any help to the ARVN would be a disadvantage to U.S. forces. He thought the money all came from the same pot, and he was damned if he wasn't going to get it all."31
South Vietnam's armed forces were criticized by many during these years, including some Americans who served in Vietnam. But General Fred Weyand tied the admitted deficiencies of those forces to the paltry support Westmoreland was giving them. "The reason why some ARVN battalions, as well as RF and PF units, never operated at any distance from their fortified bases in 1965 and 1966," he said, "was that they were quite literally surrounded by a strong, but well-hidden enemy and these lightly armed, under-strength units simply did not have the capability to deal with them."32
General Norman Schwarzkopf, later prominent in the first Gulf War, was an Army major advising South Vietnamese airborne troops at the time American ground forces were committed. He welcomed the added firepower, wrote Schwarzkopf, but "the Americanization of the war disturbed me. We were suddenly going in the wrong direction with the South Vietnamese. It was their country, their battle: eventually they would have to sustain it. I thought we should give them the skills, the confidence, and the equipment they needed, and encourage them to fight. Yet while our official position was that we were sending forces to help South Vietnam fight, the truth was that more and more battles were being fought exclusively by Americans." And, he added, for the South Vietnamese "supplies and equipment were harder to come by because American units had priority."33
This disparity in resources, especially weapons, persisted throughout Westmoreland's tenure in Vietnam. Ambassador Bunker noted it in a reporting cable to the President only weeks before Westmoreland's departure. "The enemy has also been able to equip his troops with increasingly sophisticated weapons; they are in general better equipped than the ARVN forces, a fact which has an adverse bearing on ARVN morale," said Bunker in a 29 February 1968 message.
THESE WASTED YEARS—when the South Vietnamese could have been developing in terms of leadership, combat operations experience, and skill in the use of more modern weaponry—had cascading effects in the years of American withdrawal. Many of Westmoreland's senior associates understood, at least in retrospect, the negative consequences of ignoring the South Vietnamese armed forces during these years, and they said so. In his survey of Army general officers who commanded in Vietnam Douglas Kinnard included a list of actions that, given another chance, they would most like to see given more emphasis. Ninety-one percent of the respondents (the highest percentage opting for any of the eight items on Kinnard's list) selected "improving the ARVN."34
Ambassador Maxwell Taylor put it succinctly: "We never really paid attention to the ARVN army," he said. "We didn't give a damn about them."35
LATER, WHEN THE Nixon administration took office in January 1969, the White House settled on a policy of "Vietnamization" for ending the war. That entailed, among a number of other steps, upgrading the South Vietnamese military establishment, especially in terms of providing arms comparable to those the enemy had long possessed, and progressive unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from the war zone. That was a new idea.
When Creighton Abrams had been in Vietnam for only a month, in early June 1967, he sent a significant message to General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff. "It is quite clear to me," said Abrams, "that the US military here and at home have thought largely in terms of US operations and support of US forces." Thus: "ARVN and RF/PF are left to the advisors." Added Abrams, "I fully appreciate that I have been as guilty as anyone. The result has been that shortages of essential equipment or supplies in an already austere authorization has not been handled with the urgency and vigor that characterize what we do for US needs. Yet the responsibility we bear to ARVN is clear." And finally: "The ground work must begin here. I am working at it."36
Westmoreland would later claim that Vietnamization had been his idea, albeit one he had been unable to sell to Lyndon Johnson. "I tried to get the President to adopt this as policy," he told a group of Marine Corps historians, "but the Johnson administration did not do it. They did not want to pay the price of giving the South Vietnamese the equipment that they needed if they were going to take over progressively more and more of the war."37
Westmoreland complimented himself for discerning, early on, that the South Vietnamese were deficient in communications equipment, in his judgment "a major contributor to deficiencies in combat." He came up with a solution, diverting "sufficient funds to provide every squad and platoon leader with a brass whistle and every company with a bugle. That was no final answer to the communications problem," he admitted, "but it helped. Aside from practical use, the whistle became a kind of prestige symbol, and the bugle had a second use for ceremonies."38
Long after the war, Westmoreland continued to claim that Vietnamization had been his idea. "I became particularly disenchanted with the political strategy in 1967," he told interviewers. "And it was during that time frame that I came up with the strategy of withdrawing our troops and turning over to the Vietnamese."39 In an oral history for the Military History Institute Westmoreland noted that "Vietnamization was not my term," acknowledging that it was coined later by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. "But," he asserted, "I was the one that initiated the concept."
The cupboard of countervailing evidence is richly stocked. Westmoreland's late requests for large numbers of additional U.S. forces for Vietnam—200,000 in 1967 and 206,000 in 1968—head the list. All along Westmoreland had given priority to
U.S. forces for modern weapons and combat force multipliers such as close air support, B-52 missions, artillery, and helicopters. Bringing in large numbers of additional U.S. forces to compete for such assets would inevitably move the Vietnamese armed forces backward, not ahead, in their ability to take over the primary role in defending their nation against the communists.
Given Westmoreland's single-minded focus on the main force war and on his personal conduct of it using American units, it apparently never occurred to him that the wiser course of action would have been to give all the good modern gear to the South Vietnamese first, then to U.S. units if there was any left over.
At the very end of his tour in Vietnam, half a year after Westmoreland insisted he had come up with the scheme to Vietnamize the war, an approved priority list for providing equipment to the South Vietnamese refuted such a claim. Priority 1 was U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. Priority 2 was U.S. forces deploying to Southeast Asia. Priority 3 was the training base in the United States. Priority 4 was U.S. forces in Korea. Priority 5 was U.S. reserve forces called to active duty. Not until Priority 6 were South Vietnamese forces so much as mentioned, and even then it was to be materiel dribbled out over time: "Equipment for time-phased modernization of the RVNAF. Equipment for the unprogrammed Civilian Irregular Defense Group improvement and modernization." There were three lower priorities on the list, and last place was also instructive. Priority 9: "Equipment for RVNAF expansion in FY 1969."40
In his memoirs, which appeared in 1976, Westmoreland maintained that "only with the advent of the Nixon administration and new officials in the Pentagon was my strategy of strengthening the ARVN to stand to the total Vietnamese Communist enemy fully implemented."41
General Richard Stilwell provided a definitive view of the actual situation: "I think one of the most significant differences between the Westmoreland tenure and that of Abrams is that, under the former, overriding priority was given to the buildup and sustainment of US forces. And the training, equipment, mothering, helping the ARVN forces took a relative back seat—until Abrams got there."42 Asked in Douglas Kinnard's survey about Vietnamization efforts "beginning in 1969," 73 percent of responding Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam said that program "should have been emphasized years before."43 Said South Vietnam's top soldier, General Cao Van Vien, after the war: "The U.S. and the RVN wasted seven valuable years since 1961 by developing the RVNAF in a half-hearted way."44
Jeffrey Clarke, later the Army's Chief of Military History, commented in an official history: "Despite all the public relations hoopla, Westmoreland had not yet planned any new role for the South Vietnamese military. The combined campaign plan prepared in late 1967 differed little from its predecessor regarding the employment of South Vietnamese troops. The division of missions between American and South Vietnamese forces remained unchanged."45
Another authoritative source, the JCS History, is confirmatory: "The United States had included the strengthening of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) among its objectives since the beginning of its involvement in South Vietnam, but in the period 1965 through early 1968, major US attention was devoted primarily to the conduct of combat operations. It was only after the 1968 Tet offensive, when President Johnson ruled out a further US troop increase in South Vietnam, that the United States undertook serious preparations for eventual South Vietnamese assumption of the combat effort."46 By that time Westmoreland was on his way home.
15. Progress Offensive
DURING MOST OF 1967 the Johnson administration orchestrated what came to be known as the "Progress Offensive," a systematic effort to convince the American people that the war in Vietnam was being won. Westmoreland became an important part of the campaign, making several trips back to the United States for speaking engagements and briefings of political leaders.
Even before those trips began, a most revealing flap on the implications and integrity of reporting came to light. Westmoreland had submitted to General Wheeler, in an early 1967 cable, statistics that showed the enemy, not allied forces, holding and indeed increasing the tactical initiative. Wheeler was distraught. "If these figures should reach the public domain," he wailed, "they would, literally, blow the lid off Washington." First, an interim solution: "Please do whatever is necessary to insure these figures are not repeat not released to news media or otherwise exposed to public knowledge."1
Two days later Wheeler followed up with a longer and even more anguished message. He had been informed that the MACV Periodic Intelligence Report for January 1967 showed that, of about 385 enemy battalions making contact with friendly forces during the period 1 February 1966 through 31 January 1967, approximately two-thirds had occurred as a result of enemy initiative. "I must say I find this difficult to believe and certainly contrary to my own impression of how the war has been going during the past six to eight months," he observed.2
"The implications are major and serious," Wheeler continued. "Large-scale enemy initiatives have been used as a major element in assessing the status of the war for the President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Congress, and, to some degree, the press here in Washington." Moreover, "these figures have been used to illustrate the success of our current strategy as well as over-all progress in Vietnam. Considerable emphasis has been placed on these particular statistics, since they provide a relatively straightforward means of measuring the tempo of organized enemy combat initiative. (In cold fact, we have no other persuasive yardstick.) Your new figures change the picture drastically." Thus: "I can only interpret the new figures to mean that, despite the force buildup, despite our many successful spoiling attacks and base area searches, and despite the heavy interdiction campaign in North Vietnam and Laos, VC/NVA combat capability and offensive activity throughout 1966 and now in 1967 has been increasing steadily, with the January level some two and one-half times above the average of the first three months in 1966."3
"I cannot go to the President," Wheeler maintained, "and tell him that, contrary to my reports and those of the other Chiefs as to the progress of the war in which we have laid great stress upon the thesis that you have seized the initiative from the enemy, the situation is such that we are not sure who has the initiative in South Vietnam."4 Of course Wheeler could have done that, could have told the President the truth, could have provided him with the information he needed to make informed decisions about the future course of the war. But he did not. Instead he sent his Special Assistant, a general officer, out to Vietnam to confer with Westmoreland about how to make the problem go away.
By 22 March 1967 Westmoreland could report by cable to Admiral Sharp the fixes that had been made. Quoting a memorandum sent to General Wheeler: "Lieutenant General Brown's team and members of my staff have developed terms of reference in the form of new definitions, criteria, formats and procedures related to the reporting of enemy activity which can be used to assess effectively significant trends in the organized enemy combat initiative."5 General Wheeler could rest easy. They had redefined the problem out of existence.
MEANWHILE THE JOINT Chiefs of Staff were unhappy on other fronts as well, including the most basic of all, the way Westmoreland was fighting the war. This discontent led to establishment as early as October 1966 of a working group charged to develop an alternate course of action for Vietnam. One product, sent to McNamara by the JCS on 23 December 1966, was a draft NSAM on "Strategic Guidelines for Vietnam." The basic observation was that, "while military accomplishments of the past two years provide encouragement, we have not reached a turning point in the over-all effort where successful accomplishment of our objectives is clearly in view." Worse yet, concluded the JCS, "unless the present course is altered, either the U.S. may never attain its objectives or the effort to reach them will be excessively long and costly."6
At about this time a novel idea was floated: Westmoreland might be appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam. General Wheeler cabled the news to Westmoreland, reporting that "at luncheon today Secretary
McNamara told me that over the weekend discussions were renewed concerning the merits of your being designated as Ambassador to Vietnam." Two options had been considered. One involved Westmoreland's taking on the post as a civilian, the other as Commander, U.S. Forces, Vietnam. "I told Secretary McNamara that... you personally would be unhappy to give up your military rank," said Wheeler.
McNamara had not reacted well to the "military ambassador" proposal, arguing that because of Westmoreland's personal involvement in the war he would inevitably give too much time to that while neglecting his political and economic responsibilities. Now Wheeler told Westmoreland, "I personally consider what we need in Vietnam is an operation of the MacArthur type wherein you would plan the strategy, both on the military and non-military fronts, insure coordination between the two, and devote your principal energies to the weakest segment of your operation."
Secretary of State Dean Rusk didn't oppose the appointment in principle, but balked at what he viewed as the complete "militarization" of the senior structure in South Vietnam. McNamara, having been lobbied by Wheeler on Westmoreland's reluctance to take off his uniform, counseled against putting Westmoreland in the job as a civilian. The next morning McNamara talked with Wheeler and came away with the understanding that both Wheeler and Westmoreland would prefer to see another civilian ambassador installed, with Westmoreland retaining the military command. That stance on the part of the two officers torpedoed the scheme. A week later Wheeler again cabled Westmoreland: "I learned this morning from Secretary McNamara that the proposal to give you overall control in South Vietnam by making you ambassador as well as commander-in-chief is almost surely dead." There would be no Ambassador Westmoreland.
For a moment, it appears, there was the further prospect that there would be no more COMUSMACV Westmoreland, either. According to columnist Drew Pearson, he met with LBJ a few days after the ambassadorial issue had been resolved, at least insofar as Westmoreland's candidacy was concerned, and was told by the President that "Lodge has got to go" and also that "probably Westmoreland will go."7