by Lewis Sorley
Meanwhile, also in August 1967, Ambassador Bunker submitted a paper entitled "Blueprint for Viet-Nam" which included this assessment: "We still have a long way to go. Much of the country is still in VC hands, the enemy can still shell our bases and commit acts of terrorism in the securest areas, VC units still mount large scale attacks, most of the populace has still not actively committed itself to the Government, and a VC infrastructure still exists throughout the country."40 That was what Westmoreland had to show for his more than three years in command, and that was the reality as opposed to the version being retailed to the public.
WESTMORELAND MADE YET another trip to the United States, his third of the year, in November 1967. He got off to an optimistic start at a press conference on his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, where he was asked how he saw the situation in South Vietnam. "Very, very encouraged," he responded. "I've never been more encouraged during my entire almost four years in country. I think we are making real progress."
He appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, where he claimed that "we are winning a war of attrition now," adding that the enemy was having "very serious" manpower problems in South Vietnam and that "this manpower cannot be replaced." That last was a particularly unfortunate attempt to claim the crossover point, but in no way accurate. During this broadcast Westmoreland also held out the hope of diminished American involvement in the war, saying, "I believe it is quite conceivable that within two years or less we can progressively phase-down the level of our commitment."41
Another crucially important appearance that November was a widely reported speech at the National Press Club in Washington. "In that address," said Westmoreland, "I permitted myself the most optimistic appraisal of the way the war was going that I had yet made."42 The Press Club talk contained a number of dramatic assertions, including this: "I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. There are indications that the Vietcong and even Hanoi may know this." And: "The enemy's hopes are bankrupt." And: "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."43
In response to a question, Westmoreland made his most extreme claim yet, arguing that "this body count figure which we've reported is, in my opinion, very, very conservative. Probably represents, I would say, 50% or even less, of the enemy that has been killed."44
PETER BRAESTRUP NOTED not only how Westmoreland had been co-opted, but how historically unique that was. "For the first time in American history," he wrote, "a field commander, Westmoreland, had allowed himself to be snookered into becoming a political spokesman. It was his vanity. He loved being on TV and he came home twice at Johnson's behest to speak, and it tainted him not only in the eyes of the press but in the eyes of a lot of military men. Westmoreland had in effect taken the king's shilling and become a propagandist—a soldier for the administration."45
Braestrup was right about the reaction of other military men. Some of Westmoreland's senior colleagues were quite uneasy about his being used in this way. General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, cabled General Abrams in Vietnam. "Westy's trip has gone extremely well," he reported, "and I only hope that he has not dug a hole for himself with regard to his prognostications. The platform of false prophets is crowded!"46 General Bruce Palmer was equally concerned. "Since it was obvious that Westmoreland was being used for political purposes," he wrote, "many of us in Vietnam at the time resented having our field commander put on the spot in this manner. Westmoreland enjoyed these occasions, however, and would return to Saigon still 'up on cloud nine.'"47 General "Dutch" Kerwin saw it the same way. "I think he enjoyed it," he said of Westmoreland's trips and talks. "He liked to be a part of things at the higher level. He was in the spotlight. He seemed to be rejuvenated each time he came back."48
Westmoreland's participation in the Progress Offensive was costly to him, both personally and professionally. "By playing a prominent role in [the optimism campaign], General Westmoreland, who previously had enjoyed much respect as a nonpolitical, professional military leader, became in the eyes of the press simply another pitchman for the administration line," wrote Army historian Graham Cosmas. "From then on, his command's assessments, no matter how valid they might be, would be received at best with skepticism."49
COLONEL (LATER GENERAL) Donn Starry served in Vietnam in several posts, first in the headquarters known as U.S. Army, Vietnam. There he had some fascinating experiences, including being part of a study group charged in 1966 to calculate what it would take to win in Vietnam. Westmoreland had asked for this following McNamara's visit in July of that year. They concluded it would take a million and a half men—500,000 U.S. and 1,000,000 South Vietnamese—and ten years. That infuriated Westmoreland, who refused to send in the estimate. "He said it was politically unacceptable," recalled Starry. "But the Secretary of Defense's staff kept urging MACV to respond to the Secretary's question, so finally Westmoreland sent it, but with a disclaimer. He said the war was going to be over in the summer of 1967."50
Later Westmoreland challenged Starry's assertion that he had said he could end the war by 1967. "I'm sorry, General," Starry replied, "I was there and heard you say it several times."51
That prediction turned out to be another of the positions Westmoreland worked hard to distance himself from in later years. In his memoirs he cites numerous documents and conversations in which he predicted a long war. Be that as it may, in 1965 he had promised otherwise. "At this writing," indicated one of the Pentagon Papers authors, referring to 1967, "the U.S. has reached the end of the time frame estimated by General Westmoreland in 1965 to be required to defeat the enemy." Thus "the strategy remains search and destroy, but victory is not yet in sight." Fox Butterfield commented, in the New York Times compilation of the Pentagon Papers, that "according to the Pentagon study, General Westmoreland's plan shows that 'with enough force to seize the initiative from the VC' sometime in 1966, General Westmoreland expected to take the offensive and, with appropriate additional reinforcements, to have defeated the enemy by the end of 1967."52
According to Alain Enthoven, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis, when those months had elapsed it was clear that Westmoreland's approach had failed. "We know that despite a massive influx of 500,000 US troops, 1.2m tons of bombs a year, 400,000 attack sorties a year, 200,000 enemy killed in three years, 20,000 US killed, our control of the countryside and the defense of urban areas is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels," Enthoven wrote. "We have reached a stalemate at a high commitment."53
"THE CULT OF OPTIMISM fostered in Saigon and Washington," observed Army historian Jeffrey Clarke, "was self-defeating and, in the end, only encouraged the continuation of policies and practices that had little hope of success."54
As 1967 neared an end David Halberstam wrote a powerful essay, published in Harper's Magazine, as an antidote to the official optimism to which Westmoreland had lent himself throughout the year. Halberstam had talked with a rural pacification official, described by him as "a competent American professional" who had been working in Vietnam for four years, and quoted him: "We are losing. We are going to lose. We deserve to lose."55
As the year of the Progress Offensive drew to an end, President Johnson visited the troops at Cam Ranh Bay in the Republic of Vietnam. There he observed that "all the challenges have been met. The enemy is not beaten, but he knows that he has met his master in the field. For what you and your team have done, General Westmoreland, I award you today an oak leaf cluster."56 Back in Washington, meeting at the White House with General Wheeler and others, the President observed: "I like Westmoreland.... Westmoreland has played on the team to help me."57
16. Order of Battle
DURING MOST OF 1967, in ironic parallel with the Progress Offensive, there raged a fierce struggle within the Intelligence Community, spilling over into the decision-making apparatus on the war, a struggle over enemy order of battle. "Order of Battle" is a military term of art having to do with the enemy's estimated s
trength and organization.
The disagreement centered primarily on the number of enemy forces, an argument of great significance to Westmoreland in terms of being able to demonstrate that he was making "progress" in his prosecution of the war and that he was nearing the point of attriting enemy forces faster than they could be replaced.
MACV J-2, the intelligence staff, was responsible for estimating and reporting enemy order of battle.1 Besides the numbers themselves, the other most pertinent, and contentious, element was how the enemy was organized and how the troops were distributed in the constituent categories. Intelligence on the various categories was considered of decreasing reliability: best on main forces, then descending to least on the shadowy irregulars. In August 1966 a CIA memorandum entitled "The Vietnamese Communists' Will to Persist" stated that "recently acquired documentary evidence, now being studied in detail, suggests that our holdings on the numerical strength of these irregulars (now carried at around 110,000) may require drastic upward revision."2
In a retrospective analysis of the year 1966, Westmoreland acknowledged that "the enemy continued to build up his forces by recruiting in the South and infiltrating from the North." As a result, "his total strength exceeds 280,000." That was despite enemy losses of "at least 50,000 killed" during the year and compared with an estimated strength of approximately 240,000 at the beginning of the year. The analysis also gave estimates of monthly enemy infiltration into South Vietnam from the north. It was clear that the crossover point had not yet been reached. In fact, enemy strength was going in the other direction, increasing rather than dropping.
Shortly after the MACV analysis was forwarded to Washington, Walt Rostow wrote a note to the President: "I do not for one minute believe the infiltration rate is 8,400 per month. I believe it is a MACV balancing figure to give them what I strongly suspect is an inflated order of battle. They are being excessively conservative both as an insurance policy and to protect themselves against what they regard as excessive pressure to allocate more forces to pacification."3 Since Rostow of course had no independent knowledge of the validity of the figures he was questioning, what he was really saying was that Westmoreland's reporting could not be trusted.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1967 elements of the Intelligence Community met in Honolulu for a week-long conference on enemy order of battle methodologies and estimates. Among the very important conclusions was "acknowledgement that the irregulars—guerrilla, SD [Self-Defense], and SSD [Secret Self-Defense]—and political categories carried unchanged at, respectively, 112,000 and 39,000 since May 1966, had been too low and would have to be revised upward."4
Much else was accomplished at this important conference, including unanimous agreement that Self-Defense and Secret Self-Defense forces, along with the political order of battle, should continue to be included in the enemy order of battle. Describing these results later, Major General Joseph McChristian, at that time the MACV J-2, was asked for his professional judgment on whether the Self-Defense and Secret Self-Defense forces belonged in the order of battle. "It was my strong conviction from the beginning that they were definitely a force who could and who did adversely affect the accomplishment of the commander's mission and should be in the order of battle," he replied.5
In the spring of 1967 work began in Washington on what is called a SNIE, or Special National Intelligence Estimate, a document to be developed collegially by the various members of the Intelligence Community. MACV and CINCPAC were also participants. The topic was "Capabilities of the Vietnamese Communists for Fighting in South Vietnam," or in other words the enemy order of battle. Early in the process it became clear that unanimity was going to be hard to come by. Led by CIA, civilian agencies had begun to believe that the true enemy numbers were greater, perhaps much greater, than MACV was reporting. MACV clung tenaciously to its much lower figures, arguing that, as the people on the ground, they were entitled to specify the counting rules. CIA's George Allen later observed that "the higher numbers [in the draft SNIE] proposed for the enemy's order of battle in South Vietnam sparked one of the most heated and prolonged controversies in the history of American intelligence."6
Simultaneously MACV, in the person of Westmoreland himself, was trying to change the longstanding basis for the order of battle calculations. Although they had been a component of the order of battle since before Westmoreland arrived in Vietnam, and MACV had continued to carry them for some three years under Westmoreland's command, he now decided that the enemy's Self-Defense Forces and Secret Self-Defense Forces no longer belonged in the tabulations. In earlier statements he had described these forces as dangerous, only the year before observing that "you have your political cadres that are non-military, but play a very important role in their war of insurgency."7 But now he said otherwise.
There was a larger and indeed fundamental issue involved in defining, assessing, and enumerating various elements of the enemy's apparatus, and it went to the very essence of the conflict. Ronald Smith, a senior officer in CIA's South Vietnam analytical branch, was one who understood this, maintaining that MACV's manipulation of the order of battle was so serious that it "misrepresented the very nature of the war we were fighting."8 That essential point was later emphasized in a comprehensive analysis of the war prepared on contract by the BDM Corporation with a view to identifying strategic lessons learned: "MACV's preoccupation with viewing the OB in classic military terms prevented the command from assessing the enemy in the context of a much broader people's war, in which the enemy mobilized civilians to assist his efforts."9
And, concluded BDM's analysts, "many military intelligence personnel and commanders reflected an unfortunate lack of appreciation of the importance of the VCI [Viet Cong infrastructure] in the communists' scheme of things. Further, White House insistence on showing an enemy OB under 300,000 contributed to the obdurate position on OB taken by MACV J-2 and by senior DIA officials."10
WESTMORELAND WAS VERY clear that it was his own decision to remove the Self-Defense Forces and Secret Self-Defense Forces from the order of battle. In an apparent effort to justify the excisions, he now began to refer to the "military" order of battle. Later still he took to calling the document the "so-called" order of battle. Colonel (later Major General) George Godding, who was then in MACV J-2, confirmed what Westmoreland himself had said: "It was General Westmoreland's decision to take the Self-Defense Forces and Secret Self-Defense Forces out of the enemy order of battle. We basically accepted this."11
Removing these two categories from the order of battle had a huge and immediately beneficial impact—on paper—on reaching the crossover point. David Maraniss described the process aptly as an exercise in "political mathematics." In a postmortem assessment conducted in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board reported to the President that "MACV's method of bookkeeping on enemy strength, unfortunately, had been designed more to maximize the appearance of progress than to give a complete picture of total enemy resources."12
This new Westmoreland outlook emerged at just the time special studies undertaken by MACV J-2 under General McChristian's guidance had come up with the most accurate and best estimates yet of enemy forces in the very categories Westmoreland wanted to eliminate. Begun in the autumn of 1966, a study known as "Ritz" concentrated on the enemy's irregular forces, while a companion assessment called "Corral" dealt with political cadres. At the end of May 1967 Colonel Gains Hawkins, MACV's top order of battle specialist, briefed Westmoreland on the results of these two studies, significantly greater numbers in both categories than had previously been carried.
According to Hawkins, Westmoreland reacted with alarm. "What will I tell the President?" he reportedly asked. "What will I tell the Congress? What will be the reaction of the press to these high figures?"13 Later Westmoreland admitted in a deposition that he had reacted to the briefing by observing, "We've got a public relations problem here." When McChristian brought Westmoreland a proposed cable reporting the new
figures to higher headquarters, he recalled, Westmoreland told him, "If I send this cable to Washington it will create a political bombshell." Westmoreland declined to approve it, instructing McChristian to leave the cable with him. This was, said McChristian, "the first time he had ever questioned my intelligence."14 Nevertheless McChristian was not surprised, saying of Westmoreland: "I don't think he ever knew anything about intelligence. I don't think he ever got interested in it. I don't think he appreciated it."15
With the new numbers—198,000 in the irregular category and 88,000 for the political order of battle—the order of battle total would have reached 429,000. That compared to just under 300,000 then being reported by MACV.16
In a later interview Westmoreland said of the new estimate: "I did not accept his recommendation. I did not accept it. And I didn't accept it because of political reasons—that was—I may have mentioned this, I guess I did—but that was not the fundamental thing: I just didn't accept it." Asked to explain the political reason, Westmoreland said, "Because the people in Washington were not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate this thing, and neither was the media." Westmoreland later said of the new estimate, "I was not about to send to Washington something that was specious. And in my opinion, it was specious."17