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Westmoreland was right:
Learning the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War
By Dale Andrade
More than thirty years after the fall of Saigon, historians still argue about the lessons
of the Vietnam War. Most fall into two schools of thought: those who believe that the
United States failed to apply enough pressure – military and political – to the
Communist government in Hanoi, and those who argue that the Americans failed to
use an appropriate counterinsurgency strategy in South Vietnam. Both arguments
have merit, but both ignore the Communist strategy, and the result is a skewed
picture of what sort of enemy the United States actually faced in Vietnam. The reality
is that the United States rarely held the initiative in Vietnam. Hanoi began a
conventional troop build up in South Vietnam beginning in the early 1960s, and by
the time of the US ground force intervention in 1965 the allies already faced a large
and potent conventional Communist army in the South. Simply employing a ‘classic’
counterinsurgency strategy would have been fatal from the beginning. Despite this
fact, the US military has tended to embrace flawed historical analysis to explain our
failure, often concluding that there was a ‘strategic choice’ in Vietnam – a right way
to fight and a wrong way. Most blame General William C. Westmoreland as choosing
the wrong way and argue that if he had eschewed a big unit ‘search and destroy’
strategy, the war might have turned out differently. However, this article argues that
this is untrue. Westmoreland could not have done much differently than he actually
did given the realities on the ground. The flawed interpretations of the Vietnam War
are not only bad history, but they also lead military and political policymakers to bad
decisions in current counter-insurgency strategy. As the US military finds itself
embroiled in unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it needs clear lessons
from America’s longest counterinsurgency campaign – the Vietnam War.
Keywords: Vietnam war; strategy; Westmoreland; Abrams
The US Army prides itself on learning from history. General Peter J. Schoomaker,
the former Army Chief of Staff, wrote that our ‘failures in Vietnam had grave
implications for both the Army and the nation.’ Failure is often the best teacher, he
argued, and the US Army has become ‘an adaptive and learning organization’
capable of studying the past so it can plan for the future.1
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For better or for worse, the Vietnam War continues to cast a long shadow over how
the United States makes policy and fights wars. It is the standard everyone
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wants to avoid. Yet after Vietnam, the Army turned its back on its experience there,
ignoring lessons in the mistaken belief that counterinsurgency was a thing of the
past. ‘No more Vietnams’ became the mantra for a generation of policymakers,
pundits, and military planners. The irony is that there probably never will be another
war like Vietnam – not because the United States now knows how to avoid such
wars, but because the situation there was unique.
Still, there are many lessons to be learned from Vietnam – tactical, operational, and
strategic – and the Army erred in waiting so long to look back on the wealth of
experience in Southeast Asia. As the Iraq war continues unabated, there is a
scramble to look back at past US counterinsurgency experiences, and Vietnam is
high on the list. But good lessons can only come from good history, and the Vietnam
War is not an easy study.
Since insurgency took hold in Iraq scores of articles and editorials have warned
against repeating the ‘mistakes’ of Vietnam. Many display a significant lack of
knowledge of the war. Military analyst Max Boot, for example, wrote, ‘The biggest
error the armed forces made in Vietnam was trying to fight a guerrilla foe the same
way they had fought the Wehrmacht.’2
This is a misleading caricature of the war, but the image of a big army stumbling
around after agile guerrillas has come to dominate the ‘lessons’ that are supposedly
being learned about Vietnam. If General Schoomaker’s characterization of the Army
as a learning institution is to be taken seriously, there needs to be a re-examination
of what the Army thinks it knows about the Vietnam War.
Flawed history
The misunderstandings began immediately after the war. Since the United States
lost, historians concentrated on what went wrong and who was to blame. There were
two basic schools of thought, both arguing that the United States failed to identify the
true nature of the war. In an insightful historiographical essay entitled ‘The Unending
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Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,’ Gary Hess called them ‘Clausewitzians’
and ‘Hearts-and-Minders.’3
Clausewitzians argued that the real centre of gravity was in Hanoi, and that the war
was really an invasion by North Vietnam. Therefore, goes the theory, Washington
erred in asking the military to wage a counterinsurgency, since the insurgency was
largely a sideshow.
The leading proponent of this point of view was Harry Summers, whose book On
Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argued that, since the insurgency in
the south was controlled from the north, the centre of gravity lay in Hanoi, not in the
population of South Vietnam. The Viet Cong guerrillas were secondary, he wrote,
and their presence ‘harassed and distracted both the United States and South
Vietnam so that North Vietnamese regular forces could reach a decision in
conventional battles.’4
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During the 1980s, the Army largely accepted this interpretation, because it took
much of the blame off the military, arguing instead that restrictions – such as offlimits enemy base areas in Laos and Cambodia and a secure home front in North
Vietnam – prevented a decisive victory. If the US military had been allowed to attack
these centres of gravity, went the thought process, it could have defeated North
Vietnam, cutting off its support to the Viet Cong and allowing the South Vietnamese
to defeat the insurgency piecemeal. In this view the guerrillas were merely an
extension of the main forces.
The Hearts-and-Minders argued just the opposite. According to this school of
thought, the war was fought by a conventionally minded military that ignored
counterinsurgency. Andrew Krepinevich, the author of The Army and Vietnam, was
the most articulate proponent of the position that the military failed to understand that
the guerrillas were the centre of gravity, and the Army’s failure to emphasize sound
counterinsurgency principles doomed the effort. Krepinevich argued that what few
steps the military did take were mere window dressing, a ‘fad’ left over from the
Kennedy administration’s love affair with Special Forces.
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Instead of actually implementing counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Krepinevich wrote,
the ‘Army prescribed no changes in organization nor any scaling down of the
firepower to be used in fighting an insurgency.’ The strategy used by the US
commander, General William C. Westmoreland, was to blame: ‘In focusing on
attrition of enemy forces rather than on defeating the enemy through denial of his
access to the population, MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] missed
whatever opportunity it had to deal the insurgents a crippling blow at a low enough
cost to permit a continued US military presence in Vietnam in the event of external,
overt aggression.’ There were still the North Vietnamese main forces to deal with,
but Krepinevich believed that they were secondary.5
While Krepinevitch was correct to argue that ‘winning the big battles is not decisive
unless you can proceed to defeat the enemy at the lower levels of insurgency
operations as well,’ he never explained how any counterinsurgency plan could
ultimately prevail if the main forces were allowed to lurk in the shadows, waiting to
attack and sweep away all the gains made by pacification. Krepinevitch believed that
the huge enemy offensives of 1972 and 1975 were the ‘ironic result of this misplaced
strategic emphasis,’ though his argument that a better counterinsurgency plan would
have, in itself, prevented the North Vietnamese onslaughts is unconvincing.6
The reality is that the Communists were able to employ simultaneously both main
forces and a potent guerrilla structure throughout South Vietnam, and any strategy
that ignored one or the other was doomed to failure. Yet only a few historians make
this point. One of them, Michael Hennessy, wrote in his history of US Marine Corps
strategy in Vietnam that the arguments represented by Summers and Krepinevich
are both wrong. Their ‘theorizings do not adequately account for’ the simultaneous
guerrilla and main force war. ‘But if neither the large unit nor guerrilla threats were
adequately countered,’ wrote Hennessy, ‘it must be argued that the criticisms of
Krepinevich and Summers indicate that US forces were not only poorly employed,
but were employed in numbers far from sufficient to tackle the problems of Vietnam.
Can it be that instead of too many men America failed to commit enough?’7 It would
seem so.
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The Communists’ ability to harness military and political capabilities all along the
spectrum of Maoist revolutionary warfare doctrine was unprecedented. A vast and
deeply rooted political infrastructure formed a permanent presence in South
Vietnam’s villages while increasingly large military formations could challenge South
Vietnamese forces on their own terms. It was the perfect insurgency – an ideal
melding of guerrilla and main force capabilities – yet the adherents of both the
‘Clausewitzian’ and ‘Hearts-and-Minders’ school of history virtually ignored this big
picture, instead making assumptions about its structure and capabilities that were
untrue. Both portrayals appear compelling because they offer a simple explanation
for the defeat in Vietnam: there was a strategic ‘choice’ – a right way and a wrong
way to fight – and the wrong choice was made.
General Westmoreland, the MACV commander, usually gets the blame for making
that choice. A leading proponent of this view is Lewis Sorley, whose book A Better
War, argued that Westmoreland foolishly used a search and destroy strategy that
could not possibly catch guerrillas dispersed throughout the countryside. His
successor,
General
Creighton
W.
Abrams,
Sorley
wrote,
switched
to
counterinsurgency to thwart the guerrillas in the villages rather than fruitlessly
chasing them in the jungle.
A Better War proposed that, upon taking command of MACV in June 1968, Abrams
halted Westmoreland’s ‘single-minded concentration on the Main Force war,’
because he ‘understood that the war was a complex of interrelated contests on
several levels, and that dealing with the enemy effectively meant meeting and
countering him on each of those levels.’8
Sorley is unswerving in his belief that Abrams was right and Westmoreland wrong.
‘Abrams brought to the post a markedly different outlook on the conflict and how it
ought to be conducted,’ wrote Sorley. ‘Pronouncing it “One War” in which combat
operations, improvement of South Vietnamese forces, and pacification were of equal
importance and priority, Abrams switched from “search and destroy” to “clear and
hold” ....’ In his admiring portrait of Abrams, Sorley presents a hero who should have
been listened to earlier because he understood the ‘correct’ way to fight such a war.9
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Yet Sorley makes no attempt to explain the vast operational differences faced by the
two MACV commanders during their respective command tenures. Between 1965
and 1967 the war was very much about the enemy main forces, which threatened to
overwhelm Saigon and were directly responsible for the US decision to intervene
with ground forces. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, when Abrams assumed command,
the enemy had suffered severe setbacks which forced them to scale back their main
force operations, allowing the Americans and South Vietnamese to place a greater
emphasis on pacification. But the North Vietnamese big units would be back, and in
the end Abrams could not stop them.
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When it counted – as American troops left Vietnam – the South Vietnamese were no
closer to pacifying the countryside than they had been on the eve of the American
troop buildup. And this failure stemmed from the same cause that had prompted US
intervention in the first place: in addition to a wide-ranging guerrilla presence, enemy
main forces were on the loose in large numbers. Abrams’s strategy proved no more
successful in containing or destroying them than Westmoreland’s had been.
Another work with a great deal of credibility within the Army is Learning to Eat Soup
with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, by John A.
Nagl, a serving Army officer. Like Sorley’s book, Nagl’s work is making the rounds
among Army officers. According to one report, General Schoomaker so liked the
book that he made it required reading for all four-star generals, and General George
Casey, the former commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, gave Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld a copy during a visit. 10
Nagl attempted to fit the Vietnamese model of revolutionary warfare into a Maoist
structure, but the Vietnamese, in the strategy and operational art they adopted, did
not really subscribe to that model. While the Chinese Communists had a large
amount of control over the outcome of their civil war – which was basically a local
conflict – the Vietnamese Communists faced much more powerful enemies in the
French and later the Americans. A high-level North Vietnamese analysis of the war
made clear that the leadership was well aware of this: ‘The revolution in the South
will not follow the path of protracted armed struggle, surrounding the cities by the
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countryside and advancing to the liberation of the entire country by using military
forces as China did, but will follow a Vietnamese path.’ 11
Nagl’s view of America’s role in Vietnam is equally skewed. His portrayal leaves the
impression of Viet Cong guerrillas sneaking from the jungle into villages and melting
back again whenever confronted. This war existed, but Nagl completely ignores the
enemy main forces. By December 1965, four months after the first influx of US Army
troops in South Vietnam, intelligence counted about 160 Communist main force
battalions (55 of them were North Vietnamese) in South Vietnam and the border
regions of Laos and Cambodia. 12 Had the Americans split up into small
counterinsurgency teams spread throughout the countryside, the increasing numbers
of North Vietnamese troops would have faced no resistance as they built up along
South Vietnam’s western border during late 1965 and early 1966. This would have
been disastrous for South Vietnam. As one US official noted, ‘You just can’t conduct
pacification in the face of an NVA division.’ 13 The reality is that US forces reacted to
the enemy on the ground – not the other way around.
Interestingly, the Army’s embrace of the interpretations put forth by Sorley and Nagl
comes in spite of its own official history, which provides a balanced and detailed
account of the war. In the volume on combat operations during 1965–66, entitled
Stemming the Tide, author John Carland concisely sums up the situation faced by
Westmoreland: ‘Without military security, none of the other political, social, and
economic programs sponsored by Saigon and Washington would make much
headway. In that respect, how [Westmoreland] waged the war would change with the
nature of the threat and how the situation was developing.’ 14
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In another official Army volume, a history of MACV from 1962 through 1967, author
Graham Cosmas traces the complex history of the command and its struggle to craft
a strategy that combined military and political realities. The even-handed account
concludes, ‘General Westmoreland’s disposition of his forces and conduct of
operations were sound within the strategic limitations under which he had to work
[and he had] no alternative to waging what amounted to a defensive war of attrition
while trying to rebuild the Saigon government and restart pacification.... However,
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nothing that he could do in the south would affect the will and capacity of the North
Vietnamese to continue the war. Hence, he was unable to bring the conflict to an
end.’ 15
Despite such clear analysis, the current belief about strategy in Vietnam is apparent:
Westmoreland was wrong and Abrams was right. Therefore, if the Army looks to the
strategy used by Abrams and rejects that employed by Westmoreland, the ‘mistakes’
of Vietnam might be avoided in the future.
Indeed, this thinking is now deeply entrenched within the military. In an article in the
influential Army War College journal Parameters, author Robert M. Cassidy (also a
serving Army officer), cites Sorley when he concludes that Abrams put the war back
on course after Westmoreland had fumbled it. Unfortunately, he claims, this ‘came
too late to regain the political support for the war that was irrevocably squandered
during the Westmoreland years....’ Like Sorley, Cassidy wonders what might have
happened with ‘Abrams at the helm, back in 1964.’16
All of these interpretations suffer from two fundamental problems. First, they make
no attempt to examine what the Vietnamese Communists were actually thinking and
doing. What was their strategy? How were they organized? None of the authors cited
above make any attempt to define or explain the enemy faced by the Americans in
Vietnam, instead treating it as an amorphous and two-dimensional entity. Nagl’s
book, for example, mentions the North Vietnamese Army only once, leaving readers
with the impression that it was shadowy guerrillas doing the fighting. Second, the
authors discussed above assume that Westmoreland misunderstood the enemy he
was facing and that he made poor choices in how to fight them. Had he done things
differently, they argue, the war might have been won. These conclusions are
inaccurate.
The enemy
The popular conception of the enemy in Vietnam is that it was a grassroots
insurgency sprung from the population’s discontent with an illegitimate government
in Saigon and the presence of a foreign invader. There is some accuracy to this
image. South Vietnam was plagued by an insurgency and there was much popular
support for it – neither of which can be understated – but the
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key ingredient throughout the entire war was North Vietnam. Hanoi controlled the
insurgency’s leadership, Hanoi mustered the bulk of the main force units, and Hanoi
sent the supplies south to keep the war going.
Certainly the classic building blocks of a successful insurgency were there. The
government of Ngo Dinh Diem, established in South Vietnam following the Peace
Accords of 1955, spent precious years consolidating power while the Communists
laid down roots in the countryside. Despite Diem’s attempts to attack the Communist
political movement, it continued to grow; and in 1960 Hanoi formed the National
Liberation Front to control and cultivate the evolution of the insurgency, adding to the
already potent political infrastructure a burgeoning guerrilla force called the People’s
Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, called the Viet Cong by both Americans and the
South Vietnamese) which quickly moved from small bands to increasingly large and
deadly units. Within two years the insurgency was capable of launching attacks
against government outposts and small military formations. By 1963 the guerrillas
were formed into even larger units – main forces, mostly battalions and regiments –
which were a serious threat to South Vietnam.
Making the situation even worse, Hanoi began adding its own main forces to the mix.
By 1963 North Vietnam’s army (the People’s Army of Vietnam – PAVN) was already
beginning to infiltrate units southward to bolster the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. And
it was the combined Northern and Southern Communist main force units, operating
in battalion size or larger, that were threatening the Saigon government with collapse
and precipitated America’s commitment of ground troops.
Very few insurgencies make it to the stage where they can use what Mao called
‘mobile warfare’ (also ‘manoeuvre warfare,’ frequently called ‘main force warfare’),
wherein the guerrillas become main forces and can engage and defeat the
government troops on their own terms. Indeed, the Chinese Communists used their
main forces to drive the Nationalists from the mainland, but the Vietnamese
Communists took it one step further, employing both guerrilla and main force warfare
simultaneously almost from the beginning of their war against the Americans.
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Even during the war against the French, the Communists strove to build a large and
modern army. By mid 1950, Communist strength stood at about 250,000 men
organized into regular forces, regional forces, and guerrilla forces. Almost half of
them – 120,000 men – were in the regular forces, which consisted of divisions, each
with an order of battle that included three regiments of infantry, plus artillery,
antiaircraft, and support units. This was very much an offensive organization, and the
Communists strove to make it increasingly modern and powerful, a process which
would continue right up until their final victory in 1975.17
Although the Chinese and the Soviets convinced Hanoi to accept a diplomatic
settlement that divided Vietnam into north and south in July 1954, North Vietnam’s
leaders knew that military power was the key to reunification. Beginning in
September 1954 the Party Central Committee decided to ‘build the People’s Army’
spurred on by Party Chairman Ho Chi Minh’s admonition that ‘The current duty of the
armed forces is to strive to become a regular army.’
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By mid 1954 the PAVN was 330,000 strong, organized into an increasingly
conventional order of battle. Modernization became the primary objective, and two
years later, according to an official Communist history, North Vietnam’s army was
‘concentrated into 14 infantry divisions and five independent infantry regiments, four
artillery and anti-aircraft divisions, and a number of regiments and battalions of
engineers, signal troops, and transportation troops with a relatively uniform table of
organization and equipment.’ 18
Changing course
Even at the earliest stages of the war, three crucial factors allowed Hanoi to pursue
its goal of building a modern army and using it in South Vietnam. The first was
international military support from China and later from the Soviet Union. Despite
several rifts that pushed the North Vietnamese and Chinese apart, Beijing continued
to send military aid. Chinese sources show that between 1964 and 1975 Hanoi
received more than 1.9 million ‘guns’ (small arms) and almost 64,000 artillery pieces,
plus ammunition, as well as almost 600 tanks and 200 aircraft. These figures alone
should make it clear that these were not mere ‘guerrillas’ 19
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The second factor, secure base areas in North Vietnam as well as neighboring Laos
and Cambodia, gave the Communists the ability to move troops and supplies to the
southern battlefield with virtual impunity – and to do so with little fear of having to
fight on their own home ground. These were advantages that very few insurgencies
ever realize, and Hanoi played them well.
The third factor was the combination of guerrilla and main forces. During the period
between 1960 and 1965 Hanoi, acting through the National Liberation Front, built
increasingly large Viet Cong units in South Vietnam aimed at battling the South
Vietnamese military on its own terms. The building process was slow, however.
Small battles, aimed at weak points within the South Vietnamese rural defences,
were the norm, but in some cases the fighting became more intense.
In December 1962, a Viet Cong main force company from the 261 st Battalion joined
local force guerrillas and occupied the village of Ap Bac, 65 kilometres southwest of
Saigon in the Mekong Delta. For two weeks the Communists held sway over the
village, then on 2 January 1963 the South Vietnamese sent elements of the 7th
Division to push the Viet Cong out. Although the Viet Cong were finally pushed out of
Ap Bac, poor decision making and a lack of aggressiveness by South Vietnamese
commanders highlighted many of the problems that would continue to plague the
ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) for the rest of the war. Eighty South
Vietnamese soldiers and three US advisers were killed while only eighteen Viet
Cong died.20
Hanoi continued to escalate the war. In December 1963, the Communist Party
Central Committee held its ninth Plenum, during which it ‘affirmed that the formula
for the revolutionary liberation required a combination of political and military
strategies’ but noted that ‘the armed struggle would be the direct deciding factor in
the annihilation of the armed forces of the enemy.’
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In addition, concluded the Plenum, ‘[W]e should strive to take advantage of
opportunities to secure a decisive victory in a relatively short period of time.’21 The
best way to win, according to another Communist history, was for the North
Vietnamese to ‘send individual regular main force units (battalions and regiments)
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from the North into South Vietnam and to form large main force armies on the
battlefields of South Vietnam.’22 The use of these new and ‘very large and powerful
military forces [would] create a fundamental change in the balance of forces between
ourselves and the enemy.’23
North Vietnamese troops moved into South Vietnam almost immediately. According
to an official history of the PAVN 312th Division, ‘In the spring of 1963, the first
battalion of the division was sent South, 600 cadre and enlisted men, crossed the
Ben Hai River [the Demilitarized Zone],’ where they engaged a South Vietnamese
Army company. In the spring of 1964 a second battalion went south, this time to the
coastal region of central South Vietnam. These units would form the core of the
burgeoning North Vietnamese main force presence in the South, in particular the
PAVN 325th Division, which moved south in March 1964. 24
In September 1964, the Party Central Committee reinforced its previous decisions on
main force war with a decision ‘to mobilize... the entire armed forces to concentrate
all our capabilities to bring about a massive change in the direction and pace of
expansion of our main force army on the battlefield, to launch strong massed combat
operations at the campaign level, and to seek to win a decisive victory within the next
few years.’25 During a meeting held from 25 to 29 September 1964, the Politburo
ordered the Central Military Party Committee and the PAVN General Staff to prepare
a strategic plan and ‘to conduct battles of annihilation to shatter a significant portion
of the enemy’s regular army.’ Communist leaders were particularly anxious ‘to
completely defeat the puppet army before the US armed forces had time to
intervene.’26
To reinforce the decision, that same month Hanoi sent General Nguyen Chi Thanh to
South Vietnam to oversee personally the main force expansion and to direct the
coming campaign as the leader of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN),
Hanoi’s political headquarters and military theatre command for the southern half of
South Vietnam. Thanh was a conventional soldier, not a guerrilla leader, and he
brought with him ‘many high-level cadre with experience in building up main force
units and in leading and directing massed combat operations.’27 Thanh’s orders
from the Central Military Party Committee were to ‘launch a campaign during the
1964–1965 winter-spring period aimed at destroying a significant number of puppet
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regular army units and [to expand] our liberated zones,’28 which he planned to
accomplish with ‘powerful main force “fists”.’29
The fighting escalated immediately. Beginning in late 1964 a series of multi-battalion
battles punctuated the Communists’ main force emphasis and showed clearly that
South Vietnam was going to lose the war without US intervention.
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The Communists claimed victory, calling the battles ‘the first full-fledged campaign to
be conducted by COSVN main force units’ in southern South Vietnam .30 The PAVN
history notes that by the end of January 1965, main force units (both North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong) ‘had fought five regiment-level and two battalion-level
battles’ in a little over one month.’ By February Hanoi believed that the South
Vietnamese Army ‘was in danger of annihilation.’ 31
To stave off defeat, American Marines landed at Danang in March 1965, followed in
May by the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 1 st Brigade of the 101st Airborne
Division in July. By the end of the year the 1 st Cavalry Division and the 1st Infantry
Division were also deployed, bringing the total of US Army personnel in country to
116,800.32
The Communists’ emphasis would remain on main force warfare, despite the fact
that such a strategy would certainly bring their troops face-to-face with the fearsome
force of American firepower. However, argued historian and North Vietnamese
specialist William Duiker, to do anything else would have been ‘unpalatable’ to
Hanoi. ‘To downgrade the level of insurgency and retreat to the stage of guerrilla
warfare would be to lose the initiative on the battlefield.’33
The scene was set for the next round of fighting – the ‘American war.’ Clearly, events
show that ‘classic’ guerrilla war was not the Communists’ main vehicle for victory. As
the United States was building up its ground forces in South Vietnam, Hanoi was
also adding more units to the battlefield. During the spring of 1965 Hanoi sent seven
new regiments to South Vietnam, along with ‘scores of sapper, artillery, and other
specialty branch battalions [which] poured down the Annamite Mountain chain,
marching to the battlefront.’ 34
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Communist histories leave no doubt that building and using Hanoi’s main forces was
the primary strategy during 1964 and 1965. Guerrilla war, though important, was
secondary at this point. ‘In practical terms,’ concluded one official Communist
history, ‘it was impossible to use a protracted guerrilla war to gain victory through a
general insurrection. Instead, we had to advance “in the direction of securing
incremental victories, pushing the enemy back step by step, and progressing toward
a general offensive insurrection,” using political struggle and armed struggle side by
side, but the armed struggle had to follow the laws of war, which are to destroy the
enemy’s combat strength.’35
Westmoreland’s dilemma
The Communist emphasis on main force combat changed everything in South
Vietnam. What had been primarily a guerrilla war in 1961 evolved into the use of
increasingly formidable units in 1963, and two years later it was moving toward even
larger armed confrontations with the introduction of North Vietnamese units.
Concentrating on counterinsurgency during those first few years did little to hinder
Viet Cong recruitment – and it did absolutely nothing to stop the North Vietnamese
buildup. Therefore, General Westmoreland, who took command of MACV in June
1964, would have been foolish to view the situation as purely an insurgency. As he
wrote in his memoirs, ‘The enemy had committed big units and I ignored them at my
peril.’36
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Westmoreland understood the dual nature of the threat he faced, yet he believed
that the enemy main forces were the most immediate problem. By way of analogy,
he referred to them as ‘bully boys with crowbars’ who were trying to tear down the
house that was South Vietnam. The guerrillas and political cadre – which he called
‘termites’ – could also destroy everything, but it would take them much longer to do
it. So while he clearly understood the need for pacification, his attention turned first
to the ‘bully boys,’ whom he wanted to drive away from the ‘house.’ 37
This thinking did not come so much from a ‘conventional mindset’ on the part of
Westmoreland but rather from watching the situation on the ground in South
Vietnam. On 6 March 1965, two days before the first US Marines waded ashore near
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Danang, Westmoreland sent a report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlining the
situation as he saw it. Much of the country ‘has been steadily deteriorating since mid1964,’ he wrote, and in some parts of South Vietnam the ‘deterioration process must
be regarded as critical.’ Throughout the country ‘the Viet Cong hold the initiative,’
and they ‘are implanting a sense of the inevitability of [Communist] success.’ South
Vietnamese forces were ‘on the defensive and pacification efforts have stopped.’ 38
Within a few months, these observations were borne out. On 7 June Westmoreland
reported that the war ‘is in the process of moving to a higher level. Some PAVN
forces have entered SVN and more may well be on the way.’ In the near term, he
predicted, things would get even worse. The Viet Cong ‘have not employed their full
capabilities,’ and only a handful of regiments had been committed by the
Communists. ‘In most engagements, VC main force units have displayed improved
training and discipline, heavier firepower from a new family of weapons... and a
willingness to take heavy losses in order to achieve objectives.’39
The South Vietnamese, on the other hand, were continuing to disintegrate. ‘The Viet
Cong are destroying [ARVN] battalions faster than they can be reconstituted,’
warned Westmoreland.40 In addition, the South Vietnamese ‘are beginning to show
signs of reluctance to assume the offensive and in some cases their steadfastness
under fire is coming into doubt.’ Westmoreland concluded that the situation would
only get worse. ‘I believe that the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North
Vietnam] will commit whatever forces it deems necessary to tip the balance and that
the GVN [government of Vietnam, or South Vietnam] cannot stand up successfully to
this kind of pressure without reinforcement.’41
The only solution was increased American intervention in order to stave off South
Vietnam’s inevitable defeat. Westmoreland asked for 44 maneuver battalions, 10 of
them from third countries, such as South Korea and Australia. Within six months total
US strength in country was 184,300. Although Westmoreland believed that he could
‘reestablish the military balance’ by the end of 1965, he cautioned General Earle G.
Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that reaching Washington’s objective of
‘convincing the DRV/VC they cannot win’ was out of the question. The Communists
are ‘too deeply committed to be influenced by anything but application of
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overpowering force.’ The MACV commander believed that the ‘infusion’ of allied
ground forces ‘will not per se cause the enemy to back off.’42
Page 156
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Despite the obvious need for immediate action to correct the dangerous course of
events, Westmoreland understood that the war was not going to be a conventional
one. He knew full well that this was a new kind of conflict, one which would be
‘focused upon the population – that is, upon the people.’ He realized that after the
initial danger to South Vietnam was past the focus of the conflict would change.
‘There is no doubt whatsoever that the insurgency in South Vietnam must eventually
be defeated among the people in the hamlets and towns,’ he wrote in one of his
planning documents. ‘However, in order to defeat the insurgency among the people,
they must be provided security,’ which he believed would be twin-faceted. The first
was to keep the enemy main forces away from the population, the second was to
prevent ‘the guerrilla, the assassin, the terrorist, the informer’ from undermining the
South Vietnamese government by worming their way into the countryside. American
engagement of the ‘hardcore’ enemy main forces would ‘permit the concentration of
Vietnamese troops in the heavily populated areas around the coast, around Saigon
and in the Delta.’43
This became the accepted course of action at the highest levels. During a meeting in
Saigon during July 1965, which included South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van
Thieu and US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the allies set forth the
division of labour. The Americans would ‘stop and destroy units coming from DRV
into South Vietnam’ and ‘destroy all major VC main force units’ in South Vietnam.
The South Vietnamese job was ‘to engage in pacification programs and to protect
the population.’44
It is difficult to see why this plan has come to be regarded as controversial by so
many historians. Those who argue that there was a choice between an approach
that first sought to neutralize the enemy main forces and one that would have
instead emphasized pacification and counterinsurgency ignore the stark realities on
the ground. South Vietnam was on the verge of outright defeat. Once the decision
was made in Washington to commit US forces to the survival of South Vietnam,
there was no other way to approach the issue. Westmoreland did the only thing he
could. It is logical to place the strongest forces – the Americans – in a position to
tackle enemy main force units, while the South Vietnamese – who had failed to deal
with those very same main forces – turned their attention instead toward area
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security – in areas populated with their own people, with whom they shared
language and culture.
Alternatives
Was there another way forward? Two major issues arose at the time, but neither
really provided solutions. The first was the so-called enclave strategy, first put forth
by Ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor and later endorsed by Army Chief
of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, which proposed confining US forces to zones
centreed in base areas around populated coastal cities in order to minimize the
number of US troops. The South Vietnamese Army would do the fighting in the
countryside while the Americans protected the population.
Page 157
This was unworkable for two reasons. First, if the South Vietnamese military was on
the ropes – as all reports clearly indicated – there was little likelihood that they would
suddenly rally and defeat the Communists simply because the Americans were
watching their backs. Second, it was naive to assume that, as foreigners, Americans
could pacify towns and villages.
In addition, Westmoreland believed that enclaves were, in the words of one
observer, an ‘inglorious, static use of US forces in overpopulated areas’ and that
leaving them in vulnerable enclaves along the coast ceded the initiative to the
enemy. In an interview after the war he pointed out that an enclave strategy ‘in effect
turned over the major portion of Vietnam to the enemy, where he had free rein, and
we would just be holed up in small enclaves .... I didn’t feel that from enclaves you
could hurt the enemy.’ President Johnson, who at first approved the cautious idea,
finally rejected enclaves after deciding that ‘We can’t hunker down like a jackass in a
hailstorm.’45
Some historians also point to a second issue, a plan which might have provided an
alternative: PROVN, ‘A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of
Vietnam,’ a study published in March 1966. The study purported to be a nationbuilding blueprint that ‘stressed that pacification should be designated as a major
American-South Vietnamese effort.’ Lewis Sorley has portrayed PROVN as the
corrective to Westmoreland’s strategy, and because of this, he has written, it was
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doomed from the start. MACV, Sorley wrote, ‘was obligated to reject out-of-hand the
PROVN findings, because they of course repudiated everything Westmoreland was
doing.’46
Westmoreland did reject some of the findings, though he agreed with most of study’s
core principles. In a memo to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral U.S.G.
Sharp, Westmoreland called the study ‘an excellent overall approach in developing
organization, concepts, and policies to defeat communist insurgency in South
Vietnam.’47
But PROVN was no solution to the war, nor was it really an alternative to
Westmoreland’s strategy. What did the PROVN Study actually say? First, it outlined
several ‘obstacles’ to an allied victory in South Vietnam, the first of which was a ‘wellled and adequately supported communist political-military machine’ that threatened
South Vietnam. The second obstacle was ‘an inefficient and largely ineffective
[South Vietnamese] government’ that was ‘neither representative of nor responsive
to the people.’ These were, of course, the two major reasons why the United States
had intervened with its own main forces in Vietnam in the first place.48
Page 158Page
The study conceded that the all-important first step was the elimination of enemy
main forces. According to the study’s ‘Concept of National Operations,’ the
prerequisite to pacification was: ‘The deployment of US and FWMAF [Free World
Military Assistance Forces] to destroy PAVN and Main Force VC units and base
areas and to reduce external support.’ This was precisely what Westmoreland
sought with his ‘big unit war.’ PROVN acknowledged, ‘Rural Construction can
progress significantly only in conjunction with the effective neutralization of major
forces. The bulk of US-FWMAF and designated ARVN units must be directed
against base areas and against lines of communication in SVN, Laos and
Cambodia.’ Until the main forces were out of the way, according to the study,
pacification would be ‘a secondary mission.’49
In the final analysis, the PROVN study was unsatisfactory and unrealistic. The
Defense Department’s voluminous study of the war – the so-called Pentagon Papers
– concluded that there were ‘some major gaps’ in the study’s evidence and many of
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its recommendations were ‘vague and hortatory.’ One of its most blatant
weaknesses was PROVN’s ‘unstated assumption that our commitment in Vietnam
had no implicit time limits [and] it proposed a strategy which it admitted would take
years – perhaps well into the 1970s – to carry out.’ In the end, claimed the Pentagon
Papers, ‘the report did little to prove that Vietnam was ready for pacification.’ 50
Critics also point to a program already in place in Vietnam as one which could have
borne fruit – if Westmoreland had allowed it to do so. Beginning in 1965 the US
Marines began joining rifle squads with South Vietnamese territorial force militia
platoons into Combined Action Platoons (CAP). These combined teams lived,
worked, and fought side by side in villages throughout I Corps as they prepared the
South Vietnamese to fight on their own. One account has claimed that the Marine
Corps CAPs ‘just might have been a viable alternative to MACV’s “big battalions”
strategy.’ 51
Westmoreland agreed that the program was effective, but he did not encourage
Army units to participate because he believed that the main forces were too big a
threat to warrant such a dispersal of manpower. The MACV commander also feared
that breaking units into such small groups risked their being defeated by bigger
Communist formations. Indeed, by 1966, increasingly large North Vietnamese units
were entering I Corps, causing the Marines to devote 35% of their time to operations
using larger units – a marked increase from the 1 1% the year before – and by 1967
Marine operations in support of pacification ‘fell seriously behind its goals,’
concluded Andrew Birtle in his study of Army counterinsurgency doctrine. ‘By the
end of 1968 not a single CAP village had progressed to the point where the marines
could withdraw their men.’ 52
This was not necessarily because the program was inadequate, but rather because
the enemy held the initiative – and no single pacification program was going to
change that. As one important study concluded, by 1967 the increasing numbers of
North Vietnamese forces in I Corps meant that ‘in the experience of the Marines the
purely counter-guerrilla and counterinsurgency operations played less and less a
part in their war’ as the North Vietnamese turned up the
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Page 159
operational heat in I Corps. ‘In fact, even against their will [the Marines] were
compelled to reorient themselves against the PAVN. It was not counter-insurgency
doctrine that skewed America’s strategy; rather, the basic parameters of limited war
are what stayed a full response to the northern threat.’ 53
The CAP program did experience increasing gains between 1968 and 1970 (the year
of the CAP program’s end), but the reality was that the situation on the ground – not
simply a matter of ‘choice’ – meant the Marine effort was always small. CAPs never
amounted to more than 3% of total Marine manpower in South Vietnam, and only 90
villages (less than 20% of the total number in the region) in the Marines’ area of
operations ever saw a CAP team. 54
Westmoreland and pacification
According to many accounts, pacification was all but ignored during the first three
years of the war. It certainly could have received more attention than it did, but
MACV strategy was not the main reason that it did not. Indeed, it was Westmoreland
who implemented many pacification programs and presided over ultimate reform in
the effort. The term the ‘other war’ is often used to describe the secondary role
pacification played in the US strategy, but the record shows something quite
different.
Pacification was always at the centre of South Vietnamese planning, though the
outcome rarely lived up to expectations. The Strategic Hamlet program in 1962–63
failed because the government forced peasants to relocate from their ancestral
villages. Later programs avoided that short-sighted pitfall, but they were no more
successful. In early 1964, the Chien Thang (‘Victory’) program envisioned an ‘oil
spot’ strategy, with police and paramilitary forces moving from secure areas and
spreading out to contested villages as they grew stronger. American advisers were
involved, but the South Vietnamese military still did not give it much support, leaving
civilian agencies to do most of the work. General Westmoreland enthusiastically
supported such programs, but was frustrated by the lack of a balanced civil–military
effort. By February 1965 he had concluded that pacification had so many problems
that, in itself, it could not take back the initiative from the Communists. 55
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As American troops arrived in Vietnam in mid 1965, Westmoreland turned back
toward pacification. In September he wrote in a key directive that ‘the war in Vietnam
is a political as well as a military war.... [T]he ultimate goal is to regain the loyalty and
cooperation of the people, and to create conditions which permit the people to go
about their normal lives in peace and security... .’ The trick was to find a way to do
this – and accomplish it in the face of increasing pressure from enemy main forces.
56
Page 160
Integration of military operations and pacification was always one of Westmoreland’s
goals, despite the popular belief that he was single-mindedly wedded to a
conventional war approach. In January 1966, Westmoreland wrote, ‘It is abundantly
clear that all political, military, economic and security (police) programs must be
completely integrated in order to attain any kind of success.’ He believed it was a
‘misconception’ to regard pacification as ‘a function which can be set aside and
handled by some single mission element or agency. Almost every aspect of US
activity in South Vietnam bears directly on pacification.’ Westmoreland wanted
pacification plans at the provincial level to be based ‘upon the integration of the
military and civilian effort,’ and he looked to the Communists as an example, noting,
‘The Viet Cong have learned this lesson well. Their integration of effort surpasses
ours by a large order of magnitude.’ 57
This attitude was reflected in MACV’s campaign planning for 1966 (submitted in the
fall of 1965), which, in addition to chasing enemy main forces, also called for
‘clearing operations on a systematic basis to purge specific areas of Viet Cong
elements as a prelude to pacification.’ It was not enough simply to drive the main
forces (or even destroy them), concluded the directive: ‘[A]n area cannot be
considered pacified until these Viet Cong activities have been identified and either
destroyed or removed, and until the services and activities of the Government of
Vietnam have been fully reinstated.’58
Of course, strategic thinking was one thing, battlefield realities another. While
Westmoreland wanted to combine both pacification and the main force fight, it was
not to be. In a message up the chain of command, he confessed, ‘The threat of the
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enemy main forces has been of such magnitude that fewer friendly troops could be
devoted to general area security and support of [pacification] than visualized at the
time our plans were prepared for the period.’59
While Westmoreland believed that pacification was crucial – and that it had to be
primarily a South Vietnamese task – Saigon did not always agree. Vietnamese
officials often balked at using their troops to secure the countryside, arguing that
such a job was ‘secondary.’ Historian Richard Hunt wrote, ‘Americans could not
serve as surrogates for South Vietnamese officials or government-run programs. The
critical variable in pacification was the ability of the South Vietnamese themselves.
To be effective, the government had to follow up military operations with reliable
services and dependable security.’60
Westmoreland continued to urge the South Vietnamese to take responsibility for
pacification, using his senior commanders to ‘intensify’ pressure on Saigon officials
to support pacification and to convince them that the new mission should not be
regarded as a ‘backseat of military operations,’ but rather the most important mission
they could fulfill.61
In addition to South Vietnamese indifference, pacification languished under a
disjointed and ineffective administrative system run through the US Embassy. This
needed to be changed, and when President Johnson in 1966 demanded a
revamping of the moribund pacification system, sending his envoy, Robert W.
Komer, to get the job done, Westmoreland fully supported the undertaking. Despite
objections from his staff, the MACV commander said, ‘I’m not asking for the
responsibility, but I believe that my headquarters could take it in stride and perhaps
carry out this important function more economically and efficiently than the present
complex arrangement.’ 62
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In May 1967, with extensive personal support from Westmoreland, the basic building
block of the pacification program – the Civil Operations and Rural Development
Support (CORDS) organization – was formed. Under MACV, the military would take
over what had been a divided and ineffective program run by the civilian agencies in
Saigon. While CORDS did not take off until after the 1968 Tet Offensive decimated
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the Communists’ hold over much of the countryside, all of the programs used to
good effect then were begun under Westmoreland.63
Stalemate
Westmoreland’s strategy worked in the sense that it saved South Vietnam from
immediate defeat, pushed the enemy main forces away from the populated areas,
and temporarily took the initiative away from the Communists. South Vietnam was
preserved in the short term, but there was much more to be done. In addition to
operations aimed at trying to bring the North Vietnamese into pitched battles,
Westmoreland also struck at base areas inside South Vietnam that were crucial to
the enemy’s logistical pipeline.
These operations badly hurt the Communists. According to one analysis, ‘American
search-and-destroy missions disrupted the planned operations of the Viet Cong and
thus made it more difficult for the Communists to seize the initiative. This became
increasingly obvious to Hanoi in late 1965 and early 1966.’64 Another concluded, ‘If
we look at the battlefield in January 1967 [according to the three phases of Maoist
warfare], the communists had been pushed back from the offensive to at best the
equilibrium phase and in many areas to the initial or defensive stage.’ 65
Communist histories make it clear that their troops were suffering from the constant
search and destroy missions, especially those that targeted logistical base areas
inside South Vietnam, such as Operations JUNCTION CITY in January 1967 and
CEDAR FALLS the following month – both in the region north and west of Saigon.
According to one account, the ‘many logistics bases of the region... were subject to
very fierce enemy attacks’ that decimated their supply lines. North Vietnamese
soldiers were reduced to eating ‘bamboo shoots, wild leaves, and roots.’ The result
was increased Communist reliance on the Cambodian base areas – which remained
off-limits to US attacks. 66
In addition to a lack of food, Westmoreland’s attacks against the enemy’s internal
bases hampered the infiltration of new North Vietnamese troops, though not enough
to have a decisive effect. A Communist resolution published in May 1967 admitted
that
‘we
are
still
encountering
problems
in
obtaining
replacements
and
reinforcements’ inside South Vietnam, which allowed the Americans and South
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Vietnamese ‘to seize a number of areas and gain control over a larger portion of the
population.’ 67
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By spring 1967, the consensus among the Communist leadership was that the high
intensity main force campaign was unsuccessful, and thus the North Vietnamese
shifted their strategy. Military planners turned away from General Nguyen Chi Thanh
and his main force emphasis (Thanh died in Hanoi in July 1967), opting instead for a
standoff strategy. North Vietnamese units now rarely sought out battles with the
Americans, and main force units either split up or faded into the jungles to await new
developments. During 1967, US intelligence statistics counted 1,484 attacks by
‘small units’ – usually defined as company size or smaller – up by more than 80%
over the previous year. It was the largest such increase of any year during the war.
The years 1965 and 1966 saw the largest percentage of attacks by battalion-size
units or larger – even greater than in 1968 and 1972, the years of the two biggest
offensives of the war. 68
Despite the change in enemy strategy, Westmoreland continued to seek out the
enemy main forces, though by mid 1967 they were even less likely to stand and
fight. This was the high-water mark of US intervention. The Americans had stemmed
the tide, but could not do enough to turn it back. The Communists, though battered
and bloodied, still maintained the initiative, able to attack at will and retreat across
the border if unsuccessful.
Westmoreland had failed. Despite succeeding early in the war against the enemy
main forces, he did not see that, in a way, he had been lucky. For almost two years
the North Vietnamese chose to fight a war that often played to the American
advantages of technology, mobility, and firepower. Once Hanoi realized its error and
backed off from main force attacks, they were more successful. Of course, the main
forces were still there – they were just more dispersed – and the Communists could
use them again when the appropriate time came.
On the other hand, Westmoreland should not receive all the blame. The roots of the
attrition strategy lay in Washington, not Saigon, and they were misguided from the
start. That Westmoreland was ultimately unable to do more than temporarily keep
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the enemy main forces away from the South Vietnamese population was a result of
the White House decision to declare major Communist base areas in Laos,
Cambodia, and North Vietnam off-limits to attack. The result was that the allies
would always be on the strategic defensive in South Vietnam, awaiting attacks from
the North Vietnamese, who could limp back cross the border to recover whenever
they were bloodied. In June 1968, as he was leaving his post in Saigon, General
Westmoreland completed a lengthy review of the war, ‘Report on the War in
Vietnam,’ in which he (along with Admiral U.S.G. Sharp, the Commander-in-Chief,
Pacific) argued that US policy preventing an invasion of North Vietnam or any
meaningful attacks against Communist base areas in Laos and Cambodia ‘made it
impossible to destroy the enemy’s main forces in a traditional or classic sense.’ 69
Hanoi could not have agreed more. According to the official PAVN history, this was
crucial to their ultimate victory: ‘A solid rear area was a factor of decisive strategic
importance to the victory of the resistance and was of decisive importance for our
army to mature and win victory,’ it concluded. By making those base areas off-limits
to attack, the United States gave North Vietnam an unbeatable advantage. 70
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Another problem was the way attrition came to be defined in Vietnam. Killing enough
soldiers to curtail his capacity to fight on is a basic tenet of warfare through the ages.
However, in Vietnam it sometimes became an end unto itself. There was much talk
about a ‘crossover point’ where the number of enemy soldiers being killed would
outstrip the ability to replace them. Westmoreland was quoted as saying in 1967,
‘We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled
their country to the point of national disaster for generations.’7 1 This was an
unrealistic hope. As British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson
observed, ‘all the people of North Vietnam had to do between 1965 and 1968 was to
exist and breed’ in order to thwart the attrition strategy. 72
Indeed, various studies showed that there was no way to kill enough enemy soldiers
to prevent them from continuing to fight. A joint CIA–Defense Intelligence Agency
report showed that in a ‘worst case scenario’ the enemy was losing about 300,000
men per year. With local recruitment in South Vietnam running at about 85,000,
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Hanoi had to make up 220,000 men per year. But more than 120,000 young men in
North Vietnam reached draft age each year, more than enough to supplement other
men already in the draft pool. Other intelligence reports were more pessimistic,
predicting that North Vietnam would have more than enough draft-age men for the
foreseeable future. 73
A major statistical study published just after the war concluded, ‘It was becoming
apparent as early as late 1966 that the US military strategy of attrition was in
trouble.’ After more than two years of American operations, the number of North
Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam amounted to less than 2% of North Vietnam’s
male labour force. At the current rate of loss, Hanoi could continue fighting at the
same rate for about 30 years.74
Reports such as these finally led Secretary of Defense McNamara, one of the
architects of the numbers game, to conclude in November 1966, ‘We have no
prospects of attriting the enemy force at a rate equal to or greater than his ability to
infiltrate or recruit.’ 75
The other kind of attrition was one of will: kill enough soldiers to show the leaders in
Hanoi that they could not win. This was a pillar of US strategy from the early 1960s,
and it culminated in the ‘gradual escalation’ policy used both in troop increases as
well as bombing North Vietnam. The Johnson administration hoped to ‘convince’
Hanoi that it could not succeed in the South, but from the beginning it was clear that
this would not work.
While Washington had been hoping Hanoi would back off, Westmorland believed
such an approach was futile. In a report to Washington in October 1966, he wrote
that the enemy ‘believes that his will and resolve are greater than ours. He expects
that he will be the victor in a war of attrition in which our interest will eventually
wane.’ 76
However, it would be another year before it was clear to everyone that Hanoi was
never going to back down. McNamara said it best. ‘Nothing can be expected to
break [the Communists’] will other than the conviction that they cannot succeed,’ he
wrote to President Johnson just before his resignation in November 1967. ‘This
conviction will not be created unless and until they come to the conclusion that the
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US is prepared to remain in Vietnam for whatever period of time is necessary.’ It was
ironic that one of the men most responsible for attrition strategy was now backing
away from it.77
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So what was left? The two cornerstones of US strategy – applying military force
sufficient to convince Hanoi to cease fighting, and destroying more enemy troops
than he could replace – had failed, despite the American battlefield successes in
1965 and 1966. Pacification would have made little difference in these early years –
even if the South Vietnamese had been willing to make it a priority – because the
security situation in the countryside was still not stabilized.
But the ultimate symbol of American strategic failure was still to come – the Tet
Offensive. In January 1968, the Viet Cong (relatively few North Vietnamese units
were involved) attacked almost every major city and town; and, though all were
pushed back and as many as 50,000 enemy soldiers and guerrillas were killed, the
offensive proved to be a political victory for the Communists. Despite more than two
years of fighting by allied forces, they could not take and hold the initiative, and now
the United States was running out of time.
A different war?
In July 1968 General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s deputy, took command of
MACV. Historian Lewis Sorley argued that Abrams ‘brought to the post a radically
different understanding of the nature of the war and how it ought to be prosecuted’
and that he executed a ‘dramatic shift in concept of the nature and conduct’ of
operations that ‘differed in almost all important respects’ from that of his
predecessor.78
There is little evidence to support this. Sorley quotes former officers claiming that
Abrams intended to use a new strategy, 79 but no record has emerged of any
disagreements raised by Abrams as the deputy MACV commander over
Westmoreland’s conduct of the war. In fact, General Phillip B. Davidson, the MACV
intelligence chief between 1967 and 1969, wrote, ‘Abrams never spoke of any new
strategy nor did he voice any dissatisfaction with large-unit search and destroy
operations.’ 80 Westmoreland himself recalled no disagreements over strategy. ‘He
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[Abrams] and I consulted about almost every tactical action,’ Westmoreland claimed.
‘I considered his views in great depth because I had admiration for him and I’d
known him for many years. And I do not remember a single instance where our
views and the courses of action we thought were proper differed in any way.’ 81
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In the end, it is a meaningless debate because both MACV commanders could only
do so much. The ultimate advantages held by the Communists – off-limits base
areas, a plentiful manpower pool in the North, and a relatively weak South
Vietnamese government and military – were perhaps too formidable to overcome.
But Abrams had one advantage. The post-Tet Offensive environment allowed him to
do things that Westmoreland could not do. The enemy main forces that faced the
Americans in 1969 were, for the most part, well away from the population, and the
guerrilla cadres in the villages had been decimated during the Tet attacks. The war
was now much more a ‘classic’ insurgency, though the enemy main forces were still
very dangerous. As Robert Komer, the first chief of CORDS, observed, ‘It was the
enemy’s losses, perhaps, as much as CORDS and Vietnamese government efforts
which led to the striking pacification expansion between 1969 and 1972.’82
Although he was under no illusions about his new job, Abrams had plenty of
optimism for the future. The Communists had lost upwards of 35,000 soldiers and
guerrillas during the Tet Offensive, including a large percentage of their covert
political underground cadre, the glue that held the insurgency together in the
villages. The enemy’s weakness (however temporary) meant that allied operations
could move forward with much less resistance than had been the case only eight
months earlier. In October Abrams reported, ‘There’s more freedom of movement
throughout Vietnam today than there’s been since the start of the US build up.’ He
credited stepped-up allied operations as well as the weakened state of the enemy.
‘This situation presents an opportunity for further offensives operations.’83
Attrition remained a goal, and Abrams – like Westmoreland before him – intended to
chase the enemy wherever he could. ‘[I]s there a practical way to cause significant
attrition [to the enemy] while he’s in this condition?’ the MACV commander asked his
subordinates on 4 July 1968. ‘Because ... the payoff is getting a hold of [the enemy]
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and killing as many of them as you can.’ 84 His deputy, General Frederick W.
Weyand, reflected this thinking. During a meeting a few weeks later he said, ‘I think
the biggest thing we can do [now] is just to kill VC, and I mean these main units.’ 85
In order to do this, Abrams used most of his units in large operations aimed at
denying the enemy access to the population – much as Westmoreland had done. In
the fall of 1968, he moved the 1st Cavalry Division to the region west of Saigon,
using the unit’s airmobility to run constant offensive operations along the border
where it would ‘be in a good posture for pouncing on any new [enemy] units coming
over from Cambodia.’ 86 In I Corps he used the 101st Airborne Division in the
controversial A Shau Valley campaign in an attempt to prevent the North Vietnamese
from moving men and materiel from the Laotian base areas and into the populated
coastal regions. In the Central Highlands, the 4th Infantry Division continued its wideranging operations aimed at keeping the enemy back over the border. Indeed, many
of Abrams’s operations could be called ‘search and destroy’ – such as the large-unit
sweep in May 1969 that included the controversial battle on ‘Hamburger Hill’ in the A
Shau Valley. As Westmoreland pointed out, ‘There was no alternative to ‘search and
destroy’ type operations, except, of course, a different name for them.’ 87
These operations paid off, and throughout the summer and fall of 1968, the enemy
remained on the ropes, giving General Abrams some breathing room. ‘The enemy
has made a major decision to shift his emphasis from the military to the political,’
Abrams reported. ‘This decision was forced upon him by the enemy’s own
recognition of his rapidly deteriorating military posture; and as a result, there
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will be a decided change in his ground tactical activity and deployment.’ The enemy’s
‘reduced military capabilities’ gave the allies the perfect chance to ‘pull the rug’ from
under Communist attempts to reassert control over the population. 88
In October 1968, Abrams outlined his operational concept up the chain of command.
‘Another point evident in the enemy’s operational pattern is his understanding that
this is just one, repeat, one, war,’ he wrote to Admiral John S. McCain, the new
Commander-in-Chief, Pacific. ‘He knows there’s no such thing as a war of big
battalions, a war of pacification, or a war of territorial security, Friendly forces have
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got to recognize and understand the one war concept and carry the battle to the
enemy, simultaneously, in all areas of conflict. In the employment of forces, all
elements are to be brought together in a single plan – all assets brought to bear
against the enemy in every area, in accordance with the way the enemy does
business.’ 89
This was really a change in name only. It is clear that Westmoreland had also
wanted to accomplish all these things in concert but found it impossible to do so.
Indeed, MACV’s goals for 1969 – submitted less than two weeks after the ‘one war’
pronouncement – remained broad and strikingly familiar. ‘All elements’ of allied
forces were to be involved in a ‘campaign to destroy the VC infrastructure, guerrillas,
local forces, main forces, and remaining NVA in-country,’ reported Abrams, goals
that differed little from Westmoreland’s. Abrams also understood that it would remain
a primary focus of US forces to ‘maintain an adequate posture against the NVA
forces,’ both in South Vietnam and lurking in Cambodia.90 Once again, US forces
would be required to deal with enemy main forces, which really meant that whenever
they showed up, pacification would become secondary. ‘One war’ did nothing to
change the battlefield calculus. 91
Communist retrenchment
Clearly the Tet Offensive was a military setback for the Communists. By mid 1968,
‘our offensive posture began to weaken and our... armed forces suffered attrition,’
admitted the official PAVN history. ‘[M]ost of our main force troops were forced back
to the border or to bases in the mountains.’ Many of those still in South Vietnam
‘were forced to disperse down to the company and platoon level, and some
regiments were even forced to disperse down to the squad level.’92
In April the North Vietnamese issued COSVN Directive 55, part of which stressed the
need to alter the old strategy. One passage read: ‘Never again, and under no
circumstances are we going to risk our entire military force for just an offensive. On
the contrary, we should endeavor to preserve our military potential for future
campaigns.’ 93
Three months later, the Communists published a document that would define the
shape of the war for the next few years. Called Resolution 9, it lauded the ‘victories’
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of the Tet Offensive, observing, ‘We gained very great successes under extremely
difficult, harsh, and complicated conditions [that] forced the enemy to go from a
policy of escalation to one of gradual de-escalation and to sink deeper into a
defensive and deadlocked position.’
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However, heavy losses among the Communist forces (not admitted to in the
resolution) and the allied strategy of ‘vigorously push[ing] forward the rural
pacification program’ made it necessary to alter course. Resolution 9 ordered, ‘We
must urgently step up guerrilla warfare, forcing the enemy to stretch thin his forces
.... We must firmly grasp and more properly apply the combat method which
combines small-scale attacks’ with the larger-scale attacks emphasized in previous
years. Particular emphasis would be placed on rebuilding the political infrastructure
lost during the Tet Offensive.94
It was clear, however, that the guerrilla war phase was meant to be temporary. In
December 1969, General Giap wrote ‘Only through regular war in which the main
force troops fight in a concentrated manner’ could the Communists ‘create conditions
for great strides in the war.’95
Accelerated pacification
In November 1968, the allies launched the Accelerated Pacification Campaign
(APC), a three-month blitz to regain control of many of the villages lost during Tet.
Such a plan, had it been tried in 1966, would have been impossible in the face of
enemy main forces; but Abrams concluded that by late 1968 that the Communists
were weak enough that allied forces needed to use only a small percentage of their
forces as a screen against large enemy attacks, using the rest to support
pacification. ‘The order of the day is to intensify your offensive against the
infrastructure, guerrillas and local force units, while maintaining unrelenting pressure
on the VC/NVA main force units,’ Abrams told his subordinate commanders. 96
Unquestionably, the degree of American attention to pacification rose considerably
during the APC. Before the campaign, concluded one Defense Department study,
the US military supported pacification with a mere 0.5% of its operations. By the end
of January 1969, fully half of all US ground operations were pacification related. 97
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When the APC concluded at the end of January 1969 the allies had achieved their
stated goal of moving at least 1,000 ‘contested’ hamlets to the ‘relatively secure’
category (on the official statistical scale, called the Hamlet Evaluation System, or
HES). Out of 1,317 targeted hamlets, 195 of them – less than 15% – remained on
the ‘contested’ list at the end of the APC. Overall, Communist control throughout
South Vietnam dropped from 17% to 12%. About half of the upgraded hamlets were
in the Mekong Delta, South Vietnam’s most populous region. 98
Communist sources back up MACV’s optimistic reports. One North Vietnamese
official candidly acknowledged that, in their weakened state, the Communists were
unable to halt the gains made by the government’s ‘very fierce and sweeping
pacification operations.’99 By the spring of 1969, according to the official PAVN
history, the population living within ‘liberated areas’ of III Corps (the region in central
South Vietnam that included the capital, Saigon) had shrunk to 840,000, a net loss of
460,000 people that the South Vietnamese government had ‘gained control over.’ In
southern III Corps south of Saigon and in the Mekong Delta region, in the
southernmost part of the country, allied military operations and pacification ‘gained
control over an additional one million people’ and resulted in a sharp decrease in
local recruitment of guerrillas.100
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In order to compensate for their losing situation, the Communists struck back with a
greater emphasis on terrorism. The number of people assassinated in hamlets
targeted by the APC rose by 86% over incidents in October and November 1968.101
However, American officials remained skeptical of pacification’s ultimate success.
Analysis from virtually all US government departments concluded that the
pacification campaign’s gains were ‘inflated and fragile’ and speculated that it would
not take much for the enemy to erase government progress. 102 According to
historian Richard Hunt, there was concern that the pacification campaign’s success
was ‘based on unique circumstances: heavy dependence on US Army operations to
keep the enemy at bay and the absence of a strong challenge from the enemy.’103
MACV was saying much the same thing, concluding that pacification progress was
tenuous and that the South Vietnamese were not capable of making additional gains
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on their own. In response to a wide-ranging query from the White House on the
situation in Vietnam, General Abrams had responded that, despite improvements in
the South Vietnamese Army, continued US support ‘would be required indefinitely to
maintain an effective force’ because it was ‘not capable of attaining the level of selfsufficiency and overwhelming force superiority that would be required to counter
combined Viet Cong insurgency and North Vietnamese main force offensives.’ 104
This did not mean that pacification was pointless, only that it was likely to be fleeting.
For the moment, though, government gains in the countryside continued to come.
After 1968 security within South Vietnam grew steadily. By late 1971, more than
11,000 hamlets were considered under government control – or 96% of the South
Vietnamese population.105
Pacification operations also had an effect on the Communist guerrillas. According to
a MACV intelligence study, Viet Cong local force strength fell from 80,000 guerrillas
in December 1967 to about 43,800 in January 1970. During the same time frame
enemy local force militia numbers dropped from 37,700 to 20,300. The Viet Cong
were caught in a deadly cycle: years of hard fighting followed by heavy casualties
during the Tet Offensive had eroded their strength, allowing the allies to regain
security in large parts of the countryside. This pacification success in turn cut off the
Communists’ main source of recruits needed to recoup their losses, ensuring that
their total numbers would continue to decline. Ironically, this success was the
essence of attrition, something which both the new administration and the American
public was fed up with. As a RAND Corporation study noted, ‘Attrition is pushing
pacification, not vice-versa.’106
But in the end Abrams – like Westmoreland – could not prevent the enemy main
forces from returning, and no amount of pacification could change that.
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A Communist history said it best. ‘[N]o matter what efforts they [the allies] made,
they could not reverse their strategically passive posture or overcome their basic
political weaknesses and morale problems, but in the short term at least they were
able to achieve concrete successes.’ 107
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Washington’s war
A new president, Richard M. Nixon, entered the White House in January 1969,
bringing with him new priorities, in particular a promise to extricate the nation from
Vietnam ‘with honour.’ Negotiations with Hanoi were ongoing – if not productive –
and the new administration quickly established a priority on training the South
Vietnamese Army to stand alone while preparing to withdraw US troops.
By the spring of 1969, it was clear that General Abrams would have a much
narrower mission than did Westmoreland before him. Withdrawal of American troops
was at centre stage, while Vietnamization and negotiations with the Communists
formed the twin backdrops. In addition, Abrams was ordered by his superiors ‘to
conduct the war with a minimum of American casualties.’ 108 As National Security
Adviser Henry Kissinger pointed out, Abrams was ‘doomed to a rearguard action,’
and ‘the purpose of his command would increasingly become logistic redeployment
and not success in battle.’ The MACV commander ‘could not possibly achieve the
victory that had eluded us at full strength while the [US] forces were constantly
dwindling.’ 109
Good soldier that he was, Abrams accepted the role, though he naturally had
misgivings. Told in April by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Wheeler, that
the White House was determined to push for early withdrawal of US combat units,
Abrams tactfully responded that while he understood ‘the pressure for U.S. troop
reductions and Vietnamizing the war, my impression was that it would be reasonably
deliberate so that U.S. objectives here would have a reasonable chance of
attainment.’ 110 However, Abrams was warned by his superiors that, while MACV
would continue to ‘call the shots,’ he should realize that Washington might overrule
any decisions made in Saigon.1 11
American troops were steadily withdrawn from Vietnam, beginning in July 1969 with
the 3rd Marine Division in northern South Vietnam and two brigades of the US Army
9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta. Further redeployments followed quickly,
and by mid 1971 more than 138,000 US Army soldiers had departed Vietnam. 112
As Abrams adapted to the realities of fighting a war with diminishing manpower, he
altered his tactics. This has been interpreted by some historians as a sea change in
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the war. ‘Tactically, the large-scale operations that typified earlier years now gave
way to numerous smaller operations,’ wrote Lewis Sorley. ‘[I]nstead of a smaller
number of operations by large, and therefore somewhat unwieldy, units, current
operations featured fuller coverage by widely deployed and more agile smaller units.’
Sorley argued that this allowed the Americans to find the enemy and then bring in
‘larger and more powerful forces ... at the critical point.’ Behind this American
forward deployment, the South Vietnamese were ‘positioned to block access to the
population, [forcing the enemy] to either fight on unfavourable ground or allow
pacification to proceed unimpeded.’ Simultaneously, according to Sorley, Abrams
‘discovered’ that the enemy relied on a logistical ‘nose’ for its offensives, pushing
supplies from the cross-border base areas into South Vietnam to support North
Vietnamese units.113
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In reality, US operations differed little between Westmoreland and Abrams. As a long
list of after-action reports makes clear, under both commanders the basic operating
unit was the battalion, which was split into companies and platoons to patrol and
search, coming together when contact with the enemy was made. Both commanders
targeted enemy base areas inside South Vietnam in an attempt to disrupt their
forward deployment of supplies (some of the largest operations during 1966 and
1967 were aimed at these logistical supply areas), and both commanders relied on
the South Vietnamese to provide security for the population while US troops were
searching for the enemy and screening against infiltration.
Sorley’s contention that Abrams emphasized small unit operations implies that
Westmoreland did not. This is untrue. During the last quarter of 1965, the 1 st
Infantry Division, which operated north and west of Saigon in one of the most
dangerous main force environments in the country, conducted 2,919 operations with
units smaller than a battalion and only 59 with larger forces.114 Most other units
recorded similar statistics. One study showed that between 1966 and 1968 there
were ‘nearly 2 million Allied small unit operations’ nationwide. Obviously, they made
up the largest proportion of the total number of troop sweeps and other military
missions. Yet the preponderance of small patrols made no significant difference in
the enemy’s overall ability to operate freely. Concluded the study: ‘Three-fourths of
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the battles are at the enemy’s choice of time, place, and duration.’115 That was true
for Abrams as well as Westmoreland.
In the final analysis, the biggest difference Abrams faced was Vietnamization. Under
the Nixon administration, the war was to be turned over to the South Vietnamese –
to win or lose on their own. However, it was difficult to see how Saigon could
maintain a steady emphasis on pacification and take on the mission of fighting
Communist main forces. This was the same problem that had confronted the United
States in 1964 on the eve of its entrance into the ground war, and it remained largely
unresolved fours years later. An official US Army history concluded, ‘When the
United States finally relinquished the conduct of the war to South Vietnam, the South
Vietnamese armed forces would find themselves so preoccupied with providing
security for the people that they would find it almost impossible to carry on the fight
against the enemy’s conventional forces, a task thus far borne by Americans.’ 116
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Main force resurgence
As the United States was withdrawing from Vietnam, the North Vietnamese were
rebuilding. In keeping with the long-standing tradition of emphasizing a modern
military, the Communists again took great strides to bring their main forces back to
combat readiness.
Despite US and South Vietnamese successes while the Communists were on the
ropes, the continued existence of base areas in the rugged mountains and jungles of
western South Vietnam, as well as in Laos and Cambodia, allowed them to rest and
rebuild. ‘Our main force units in the base areas firmly held their positions and
consolidated their forces,’ continued the Communist history. ‘By the beginning of
1970, although we still faced many difficulties, our army was able to maintain our
main forces on the battlefield. This was a very important victory.’ 117
In January 1970, the Party Central Committee held its 18th Plenum in Hanoi and
called for a ‘new’ phase of the conflict and that again ‘stressed the role of our main
force troops.’ 118 The Communist leadership concluded that a pure guerrilla strategy
would be no more successful now than it had been earlier in the war. Historian
William Duiker observed that ‘in an implicit recognition that the Americans could not
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be defeated unless the revolutionary forces could achieve military parity on the
battlefield, influential military planners called for a heightened effort to modernize the
PAVN.’ The way forward would be ‘long and complicated,’ but Communist planners
predicted a decisive period arriving in late 1970 or early 1971.119
The military leadership met in February 1970 to discuss the plans. Four infantry
divisions were to be increased in ‘combat power and mobility,’ while two others that
were in use as reinforcement and training were to be ‘converted’ into full-fledged
combat units. In addition, PAVN’s Artillery Branch ‘formed a number of new field
artillery units’ that were to be assigned to infantry divisions – just as modern Western
armies would do. Their armament included 122 mm and 130 mm guns, among the
most powerful artillery pieces in the Communist arsenal and on a par with US
equipment. Armor, which had seen almost no use in the war up to this point, was
also upgraded. PAVN had two armoured regiments – both with Soviet-made T-34
and T-54 tanks – and the North Vietnamese command sent them to Laos, where
they would be close to the battlefield. 120
PAVN grew steadily, and by the end of 1971 had an overall strength of 433,000 men
– up from about 390,000 in 1968. Forty-six percent of these troops were ‘technical
specialty branch troops’ (such as communications, sapper, artillery, and armour), up
from 30% in 1965. This was a much more sophisticated and well-trained fighting
organization than that faced by General Westmoreland.
As always, the Communists could remain just outside South Vietnam in order to
rebuild and bide their time. But President Nixon was a much different war leader than
his predecessor, and in 1970 he agreed to allow US troops to invade the enemy
base areas in Cambodia – something for which both Westmoreland and Abrams had
argued. In late April 1970, MACV received permission to launch a limited incursion
into Cambodia, which resulted in the razing of North Vietnamese base areas.
Although the Communists had a chance to move much of their most sophisticated
weapons before that attack, the loss of supply lines through Cambodia was a blow to
their war effort. 121
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A less successful incursion followed in early 1971, this time into Laos. The idea
came from President Nixon, who ordered MACV to plan for an invasion of the base
areas across the border, just southwest of the Demilitarized Zone in northernmost
South Vietnam. Abrams liked the idea, but there were several problems to be
overcome, including a new law – the Cooper-Church Amendment, passed by
Congress following the Cambodian incursion, which prohibited American troops from
entering either Cambodia or Laos. Abrams planned to use US helicopters to lift the
South Vietnamese into Laos, but the advisers would have to remain behind.
The invasion, launched in February 1971, succeeded in striking deep into the base
areas but was ultimately driven out by North Vietnamese forces. Although the South
Vietnamese failure was not complete (they did reach their objective deep in Laos
before turning back), images of soldiers clinging to the skids of American helicopters
gave the US public an impression of defeat.122
President Nixon publicly said the operation proved that ‘Vietnamization has
succeeded,’ but in private he was angry. The White House sent its military adviser,
Brigadier General Alexander M. Haig, to Saigon to find out what had happened. Haig
concluded that ‘it is obvious this is not a defeat’ for the South Vietnamese, but he
also believed that Abrams had been ‘slow in reporting, in taking the initiative to
correct the situation.’ 123
In reality, Vietnamization was not seriously tested by either the Cambodian or
Laotian operations. In both cases, heavy US support bolstered the South
Vietnamese, making up for weaknesses in planning and execution. But in the spring
of 1972, when US advisory strength had sunk to about 1,000 (down from a high of
9,400 in 1968), Hanoi launched its biggest offensive of the war, a conventional
combined arms assault against several targets throughout South Vietnam. More than
nine divisions of infantry and armour thrust at major South Vietnamese cities from
the Demilitarized Zone southward to Saigon. Although they captured only one
provincial capital, they succeeded in rendering several South Vietnamese units
combat ineffective – including the entire 3rd Infantry Division. 124
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This was a purely conventional assault. North Vietnam made no attempt to provoke
a ‘popular uprising’ of the sort the Communists hoped for during Tet 1968. According
to a State Department assessment, ‘One of Hanoi’s objectives was to force the GVN
to deploy all of its combat resources to meet the major main force thrusts.’ This, the
study continued, would permit the guerrillas to ‘return to former strongholds in the
South Vietnamese countryside.’ Although damaging the pacification program was
not Hanoi’s main objective, this main force thrust managed to turn back many of the
gains made during years of pacification efforts. 125 During the months preceding the
offensive, statistics showed that only 3.7% of the population lived under Communist
control, but by the end of July the number had risen to 9.7%. More than 25,000
civilians died in the fighting and almost a million became refugees. These figures
paled in comparison to those of the 1968 Tet Offensive, but that was because in
1972 the North Vietnamese were less concerned with taking over villages,
concentrating instead on destroying South Vietnamese military units.126
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Abrams marginalized
Despite General Abrams’s desire to break the war down into small units fighting to
maintain population security, the reality was that he presided over three of the
biggest conventional operations of the war. While the Cambodian incursion was
successful, the invasion of Laos was not, and the defence against the 1972
Communist offensive, though a military defeat for the North Vietnamese, highlighted
continuing deficiencies in the South Vietnamese military. As the Americans were
leaving, the South Vietnamese were only partly rising to the task of their own
defence, calling into question Vietnamization’s success.
President Nixon blamed Abrams for much of the problem, and his displeasure
stemmed from the 1971 operation into Laos. On 23 March, presidential adviser H.R.
Haldeman recorded in his diary that Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger, ‘feel that they were misled by Abrams’ as to what the incursion could
actually accomplish, and once it became clear that it was ‘basically a disaster,’ they
wanted to ‘pull Abrams out.’ He remained only because it was considered more
trouble than it was worth to change commanders in midstream. 127
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Nixon never again trusted the MACV commander. He called Abrams ‘incompetent’
and continued to think about relieving him. Historian Stephen Randolph’s research
into newly declassified records shows that from 1971 on, Nixon’s ‘mistrust and
disrespect’ for the MACV commander ran deep, and it would ‘remain a constant
theme until General Abrams’s change of command’ in 1972. Kissinger believed,
‘Abrams doesn’t understand, he’s proven totally insensitive to the political
environment.... Abrams has done nothing – he’s not taken care of the South
Vietnamese.’ But by this late date, firing the MACV commander and appointing a
new one would have only confused things. When the North Vietnamese launched
their 1972 offensive, the president told Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral
Thomas Moorer to keep a tight rein on Abrams, because ‘he’s not gonna screw this
one up.’ 128 He told the 7th Air Force commander, General John W. Vogt, ‘to
bypass Abrams’ in the bombing campaign that stepped up during the offensive. 129
Nixon’s displeasure should not be seen as a negation of Abrams’s accomplishments
in Vietnam, but it does highlight just how different the situation had become. General
Abrams left Vietnam in June 1972, following his old boss General Westmoreland into
the job of Army Chief of Staff. Both commanders had faced very different challenges
and circumstances, but both had failed in the end.
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The legacy
The debate over US strategy in Vietnam, in particular the notion that there was a
right way to fight and a wrong way, obscures the fact that throughout the struggle the
United States was really only reacting to Hanoi’s strategy. Today, the debate has
often become ideological, skewing the facts and ignoring the realities. War is a twosided affair, and to argue that Vietnam was America’s to win or lose makes no
sense. After the American Civil War, a gathering of former Confederate officers
argued about the cause of their defeat, blaming everything from the performance of
General Robert E. Lee and other officers to the fecklessness of the political
leadership. When asked his opinion, General George Picket answered, ‘Gentlemen,
I have always thought that the Yankees had something to do with it.’ 130
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
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In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese ‘had something to do with it.’ America’s failure
was partly a consequence of policy decisions – in particular allowing the enemy to
maintain huge base areas in Laos and Cambodia (not to mention North Vietnam
itself) – and South Vietnam’s ultimate flaws, but the rest stemmed from the
Communists’ flexibility and their ability to hold the military and political initiative
throughout most of the war. The strategy conducted by the North Vietnamese was
arguably like no other in history. It was the epitome of insurgencies: a combination of
large main force units, a well-entrenched guerrilla movement with deep roots in the
South Vietnamese countryside, and the support of two powerful sponsors – China
and the Soviet Union. All of this, combined with the ability to attack South Vietnam
over and over again, with no threat of a serious retaliation, was an unprecedented
advantage.
To simply argue that the US military ignored pacification does not begin to address
the problem of countering such a threat. Both Westmoreland and Abrams found
themselves in a quandary: unless a significant part of their forces sought out the
enemy main forces, there could be no security in South Vietnam. Therefore, the key
to either general’s plan had to be the ability to keep the main forces away from the
population – whether the operational method was called ‘search and destroy’ or ‘one
war’ made little difference.
What did matter, however, was the ability to stop the North Vietnamese from
bolstering the insurgency with manpower and supplies – the single greatest danger
facing the allies. Judged by that standard, both generals failed. Despite the progress
made by pacification in the years 1967 through 1972, it could not have made a
significant difference in the end. As historian Hennessy wrote, ‘The numerous calls
made during the war to end search and destroy reveal a failure on the part of the
critics to comprehend the tremendous operational flexibility afforded the local Viet
Cong by the presence of their large-scale regimental and divisional-fighting units.
These large units had to be denied free maneuver and the ability to mass prior to
attacking targets they selected.’ 131
Indeed, both MACV commanders were caught on the horns of the same dilemma.
While Westmoreland concentrated on the main forces and failed to prevent a
guerrilla offensive in 1968, Abrams placed great emphasis on pacification and failed
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to prevent a conventional buildup in 1972. In the end neither commander had the
resources or the opportunity to handle both threats simultaneously.
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Counterinsurgency is not only about good planning, it is also about numbers. Without
sufficient forces to dominate the operational area on a constant basis, there is simply
no way to disrupt the guerrillas and at the same time foster pacification programs.
This is as true today as it was then. As the Vietnam War fades further into history, it
continues to influence the Army, and there can be no doubt that it will continue to
have a lasting effect. General David H. Petraeus, the current commander of the
Multi-National Force, Iraq, wrote in his doctoral dissertation, ‘The American Military
and the Lessons of Vietnam,’ that the war ‘cost the military dearly. It left America’s
military leaders confounded, dismayed, and discouraged.’ Perhaps even more
importantly, Petraeus concluded, ‘Vietnam planted in the minds of many in the
military doubts about the ability of US forces to conduct successful large-scale
counterinsurgencies.’ 132
But that is exactly what the United States again finds itself fighting, and the
comparison with Vietnam is inevitable. Unfortunately, the decades-old debate over
that war has only muddied the historical waters at time when clarity is very much
needed. No matter how the war in Iraq ends, it seems likely that it will soon replace
Vietnam as the military’s new touchstone for lessons learned. Taking the wrong
lessons from Vietnam – indeed failing even to correctly recall what really happened
there – will surely colour how and what we learn from Iraq.
Notes
1.
Gen. Schoomaker’s foreword in Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, ix.
2.
Boot, ‘The Lessons of a Quagmire.’
3.
Hess, ‘The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War.’
4.
Summers, On Strategy, 76.
5.
Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, 259.
6.
Ibid., 268.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
7.
Hennessy, Strategy in Vietnam, 186–87.
8.
Sorley, A Better War, 8, 18.
9.
Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles, xix.
(44 of 57)
10. Jaffe, ‘As Iraq War Rages, Army Re-Examines Lessons of Vietnam.’
11. Le Duan, Letters to the South, introduction, xv. It is worth reiterating that all
guerrillas prefer to fight a ‘conventional’ war, and they will if they can – or if they
are allowed to do so.
12. Thayer, ‘How to Analyze a War Without Fronts: Vietnam, 1965–72,’ 789.
13. MACV Weekly Intelligence meeting, 17 February 1970, Sorley, Vietnam
Chronicles, 376.
14. Carland, US Army in Vietnam, Combat Operations, Stemming the Tide, 357.
15. Cosmas, US Army in Vietnam, MACV, 489–90.
16. Cassidy, ‘Back to the Street Without Joy,’ 75, 78.
17. Viet Minh Armed Forces Order of Battle and High Command, 6 Feb 51, ID File
#643165, Army Intelligence Document File, ACOS G-2, box 4132, Entry 85, RG
319, NARA.
18. Victory in Vietnam, 5, 8–14, 431.
19. Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 136.
20. See Toczek, The Battle of Ap Bac.
Page 176
21. Victory in Vietnam, 124.
22. Col. Gen. Tran Van Quang (Chief Drafter), Editorial Direction, Sen. Gen. Doan
Khue, Sen. Gen. Van Tien Dung, Col. Gen. Tran Van Quang, Review of the
Resistance War Against the Americans, 52. This report was published under
the auspices of the ‘Guidance Committee for Reviewing the War, Directly
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(45 of 57)
Subordinate to the Politburo’ [Ban Chi Dao Tong Kiet Chien Tranh Truc Thuoc
Bo Chinh Tri ] and is labeled ‘Internal Distribution Only’ [Luu Hanh Noi Bo].
23. Lt. Gen. Pham Hong Son, The Vietnamese National Art of Fighting to Defend
the Nation, 69.
24. Tran The Long et al., The Victory Division, 28. See also the memoirs of the
312th Division’s commander, Col. Gen. Hoang Cam, The Ten Thousand Day
Journey, 73–74; Long, The Victory Division, 27–28. Also see Pham Gia Duc,
325th Division, Volume II, 40.
25. Victory in Vietnam, 137.
26. Military Region 8, 515–516.
27. Victory in Vietnam, 137.
28. Ibid., 137–38.
29. Lt. Gen. Le Van Tuong, ‘The Keen Strategic Vision... of General Nguyen Chi
Thanh,’ 148.
30. Victory in Vietnam, 141.
31. Ibid., 141, 143.
32. Army Build-Up Progress Rpt., 21 Dec 1965, 13, Center of Military History
(hereafter referred to as CMH).
33. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, 260.
34. Victory in Vietnam, 144.
35. Pham Hong Son, The Vietnamese National Art of Fighting to Defend the
Nation, 75.
36. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, 149.
37. Ibid., 175.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(46 of 57)
38. Telegram, Commander, MACV to JCS, 6 March 1965, Foreign Relations of the
United
States:
Vietnam,
January-June
1965
(Washington,
D.C.:
US
Government Printing Office, 1996), 400–01. Hereafter referred to as FRUS.
39. Telegram, Commander, MACV to JCS, 7 June 1965, FRUS, Vietnam January–
June 1965, 733.
40. Westmoreland Cable COMUSMACV 20055, 14 June 65, sub: Concept of
Operations – Force Requirements and Deployments, South Vietnam, 6,
Historians files, CMH.
41. Telegram, Commander, MACV to JCS, 7 June 1965, FRUS, Vietnam January–
June 1965, 734.
42. Telegram, Commander, MACV to Chairman, JCS, 30 June 1965, FRUS, June–
December 1965, 76.
43. Msg, COMUSMACV to CINCPAC, 21 June 65, sub: Concept of Operations –
Force Requirements and Deployments, South Vietnam, 1–3.
44. Memo of Conversation, 16 July 1965, sub: Meeting with GVN, FRUS, June–
December 1965, 159.
45. Hay, Tactical and Material Innovations, 142 (first quote); Kutler, Encyclopedia
of the Vietnam War, 191 (second and third quotes).
46. Lewis Sorley, ‘To Change a War,’ 102.
47. Msg, COMUSMACV to CINCPAC, May 27 1966, sub: PROVN Study, 1,
Historians files, CMH.
48. ‘A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam
(Short Title: PROVN),’ 20 May 1966, vol. 1, 3, Historians files, CMH. Hereafter
referred to as PROVN Study.
Page 177
49. PROVN Study, vol. 1, 5 (first and second quotes), 112 (third quote).
50. The Pentagon Papers, vol. 2, 577–78.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(47 of 57)
51. For example, see Donovan, ‘Combined Action Program.’
52. Birtle, U.S. Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–
1976, 399–400.
53. Hennessy, Strategy in Vietnam, 181.
54. Hunt, Pacification, 108; Cosmas and Murray, U.S. Marines in Vietnam, 146.
55. See Hunt, Pacification, 29–30.
56. MACV Directive 525–4, 17 September 1965, sub: Tactics and Techniques for
Employment of US Forces in the Republic of Vietnam, 1–2, Historians files,
CMH.
57. Msg, Westmoreland to Brig. Gen. James L. Collins, 7 Jan 66, Westmoreland
Papers, CMH.
58. MACV Directive 525–4,17 Sep 1965, sub: Tactics and techniques for
employment of US Forces in the Republic of Vietnam 3 (first quote), 8, 13
(second quote).
59. Msg, COMUSMACV to CINCPAC, 26 Aug 66, sub: Concept of Military
Operations in SVN, Historians files, CMH.
60. Hunt, Pacification, 61–62.
61. For example, see Memo for the Record, Lt. Gen. William B. Rosson, 25
November 1966, sub: Commander in Chief Meeting, Westmoreland Papers,
CMH.
62. Westmoreland Historical Briefing, 17 October 1966, quoted in Scoville,
Reorganizing for Pacification Support, 38.
63. For background on CORDS, see Andrade and Willbanks, ‘CORDS/Phoenix.’
64. McGarvey, Visions of Victory, 5.
65. Kennedy, ‘Hanoi’s Leaders and Their South Vietnamese Policies, 1954–1968,’
273.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(48 of 57)
66. Su Doan 9, 96.
67. Tran Tinh, Collected Party Documents, vol. 28, 490.
68. Thayer, ‘How to Analyze a War Without Fronts,’ Table 5.3, 801.
69. Sharp and Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, 292.
70. Victory in Vietnam, 444.
71. Quoted in Lewy, America in Vietnam, 73.
72. Thompson, No Exit From Vietnam, 60.
73. CIA-DIA rpt, 30 Mar 68, sub: The Attrition of Vietnamese Communist Forces,
1968 –69, quoted in Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam,
chapter 11, note no. 6, 411.
74. Thayer, ‘How to Analyze a War Without Fronts,’ 835.
75. Pentagon Papers, vol. 4, 370.
76. Memo for the Record, Westmoreland, 23 October 1966, sub: Assessment of
the Situation in South Vietnam, October 1966, 3, Historians files, CMH.
77. Quoted in Berman, Lyndon Johnson’s War, 94.
78. Sorley, ‘The Conduct of the War,’ first two quotes 180, third quote, 174.
79. For example, see Sorley’s quotation from General Bruce Palmer that although
Abrams might ‘privately agree’ that Westmoreland’s strategy was wrong, ‘I’ve
got to be loyal to him.’ Ibid., 178.
80. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1945–1975, 571.
81. William C. Westmoreland Interview, 4 Apr 1983, 7, 19, US Marine Corps Oral
History Collection. Also see Smith, U.S. Marines in Vietnam, footnote 10.
82. Komer, ‘Commentary,’ 163.
83. Msg, Abrams MAC 13840 to McCain, 13 Oct 68, Abrams Papers, CMH.
84. Weekly Intelligence meeting, 4 July 1968, Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles, 12.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(49 of 57)
85. Weekly Intelligence meeting, 20 July 1968, Sorley, Vietnam Chronicles, 21.
86. Msg, Abrams MAC 14472 to McCain, 28 Oct 1968, Abrams Papers, CMH.
Page 178
87. Westmorland, ‘A Military War of Attribution,’ 65.
88. Msg, COMUSMACV to Cmdrs I FFV, II FFV, XXIV Corps, IV Corps, 24 Nov 68,
Historians files, CMH.
89. Msg, Abrams MAC 13840 to McCain, 13 Oct 1968, subj: Operational Guidance,
Abrams Papers, CMH.
90. Msg, Abrams MAC 14329 to Wheeler, 24 Oct 68, Abrams Papers, CMH.
91. An official MACV history of the ‘One War’ concept read more like a publicity
broadside than a historical narrative. ‘Through his strategic planning General
Abrams developed the theme for the “one war” symphony, orchestrating it to
blend combat operations with pacification in a new harmony,’ it gushed. ‘To
thwart the offensive, he instructed his commanders to accommodate the enemy
as he sought to do battle, to anticipate enemy moves, and to destroy him
before he reached vital objectives. Through an aggressive free-world effort the
Allies would be afforded an excellent opportunity to strike a crushing blow....’
See ‘One War,’ MACV Command Overview, 1968–1972, undated (circa
May/June 1972), 14–15, 32, Historians files, CMH.
92. Victory in Vietnam, 249–50 (first quote), 237 (second quote).
93. COSVN Resolution 55, quoted in Hoang Ngoc Lung, The General Offensives of
1968–69,18.
94. COSVN Resolution 9, July 1969, 17, 29, 31, Historians files, CMH.
95. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, 306.
96. Msg, Abrams MAC 14143 to subordinate commanders, 20 Oct 1968, sub:
Operational Guidance-Adjusting to Enemy Current Operations, Abrams Papers,
CMH.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(50 of 57)
97. ‘Southeast Asia Analysis Report,’ Feb 1969, 40, CMH.
98. Rpt, Accelerated Pacification Campaign, 1 Oct 1968–31 Jan 1969, sub: A
Statistical Study of APC Results as Reported in the Hamlet Evaluation System,
31 Mar 1969, CMH.
99. Tran Van Tra, History of the Bulwark B-2 Theater, vol 5, Concluding the 30Years War, Foreign Broadcast Information Service translation, JPRS 82783, 2
Feb 1983, 37.
100. Victory in Vietnam, 246–47.
101. See Office of the Asst Sec of Def (Comptroller) ‘Southeast Asia Statistical
Summary,’ table 2, 11 Apr 1973.
102. Summary of Interagency Responses to NSSM 1, 22 Mar 1969, FRUS, Vietnam,
January 1969-July 1970, 13 1. See also Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in
South Vietnam, 336.
103. Hunt, Pacification, 202–203.
104. Quoted in Clarke, The U.S. Army in Vietnam, Advice and Support, 345.
105. Out of a total South Vietnamese population of 17.9 million, 11.3 million lived
‘under GVN control.’ The Communists had outright control of 3.6% of the
population. Brig. Gen. Tran Dinh Tho, Pacification (Washington, D.C.: US Army
Center of Military History, 1984), 165.
106. See Graham A. Cosmas, ‘MACV History, 1968–1972,’ draft chap. 20, 31,
quoted words 33–34, Historians files, CMH.
107. The Resistance War in Eastern Cochin China (1945–1975), Vol 2, 395.
108. Msg, JCS 3957 to CINCPAC and COMUSMACV, 3 Jul 1969, MACV J-3 Force
Planning Synopsis for Gen. Abrams, vol. 2, Historians files, CMH.
109. Kissinger, White House Years, 272–73.
110. Msg, Abrams MAC 4967 to Wheeler, 19 Apr 1969, Abrams Papers, CMH.
111. Msg, Wheeler JCS 5988 to Abrams, 16 May 1969, Abrams Papers, CMH.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(51 of 57)
Page 179
112. Army Activities Rpt, 8 Nov 1972, 3. US Army strength reached a high of
365,600 (total military: 542,400) men in April 1969; two years later it stood at
227,600 (total military: 301,900).
113. Sorley, ‘The Conduct of the War,’ 183–84.
114. Quarterly Command Rpt, 1st Inf Div, 31 Dec 1965, Historians files, CMH.
115. ‘A Comparison of Allied and VC/NVA Offensive Manpower in South Vietnam,’
Southeast Asia Analysis Rpt, Oct 1968, 33–38.
116. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973, 348.
117. Victory in Vietnam, 251–52.
118. Ibid., 253.
119. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, 307.
120. Victory in Vietnam, 265–66.
121. For an account of the Cambodian incursion, see Shaw, The Cambodian
Campaign; Andrade, Breakthrough Cambodia.
122. For an account of the Lam Son 719 see Davidson, Vietnam at War, 637–73.
123. Handwritten memo, Haig to Kissinger, undated, sub: Lam Son 719, Haig files,
National Archives.
124. For a complete account of the offensive see Andrade, America’s Last Vietnam
Battle.
125. US State Dept. Research Study, 17 Jul 1972, sub: Vietnam: The July Balance
Sheet on Hanoi’s Offensive, 4, Historians files, CMH.
126. MACCORDS Study, 16 Sep 1972, sub: Impact of Enemy Offensive on
Pacification, 2.
127. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, 259.
Dale Andrade, Westmoreland was right, p145-181
(52 of 57)
128. Randolph, ‘A Bigger Game: Nixon, Kissinger, and the 1972 Easter Offensive,’
184 (first quote), 351–52 (second quote), 183 (third quote).
129. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, 436.
130. Quoted in Gilbert, Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 1.
131. Hennessy, Strategy in Vietnam, 182.
132. Quoted in ‘Petraeus on Vietnam’s Legacy,’ Washington Post, 14 Jan 2007.
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