Hist Final outside reading

Was the Vietnam War

a conventional war or a war of insurgency, an "unconventional war"? The fact that this question is still debated more than two decades after the United States entered the war in force in 1965 testifies to the poverty of our real knowledge about that conflict despite the flood of books and articles and the widespread breast-beating and soul-searching prompted by the recent tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Neither scholars nor military professionals, whose self-imposed amnesia about Vietnam began to abate around the end of the 1970s, are anywhere near unanimity on this question. Yet it is one that points toward the heart of the central dilemma of the military in Vietnam: why, with its massive firepower, superior mobility, absolute command of the air, and immense technological edge, was the United States unable to defeat the numerically smaller, far less well armed and equipped Communist forces?

One early answer to the question was offered by Colonel Harry Summers, Jr., in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War.' The Army was unsuccessful in Vietnam, Summers says, because it fought the wrong kind of war. Pressured and encouraged by the Kennedy Administration to concentrate on counterinsurgency warfare and preoccupied with dealing with the threat of "people's war," the U.S. military failed to comprehend the real nature of the war in Vietnam. That war, whatever it might have been in earlier years, had become by 1965 a strategic offensive against the south by the regular forces of North Vietnam. A correct response to this threat would have been to orient "on North Vietnam—the source of war" and "isolate the battlefield by sealing off South Vietnam from North Vietnam." In other words, the Army should have fought a conventional campaign by establishing and holding a front from the Demilitarized Zone across the Laotian panhandle to the Thai border, thus sealing off South Vietnam. Summers's book has gone through several editions and has been widely read within the military, particularly in war colleges and other service schools. It also matches the mood of many senior officers.

Andrew F. Krepinevich's new book, The Army and Vietnam, is in some ways the flip side of Summers's book. Krepinevich, like Summers a career Army officer, also argues that the United States fought the wrong type of war in Vietnam, but this was due to the fact that the Army largely ignored counter-insurgency. Instead it fought a conventional-type conflict with heavy reliance on firepower, employing forces organized and equipped for the mid-intensity European battlefield.

Whereas Summers's account of the Vietnam War is based on standard secondary works such as Dave Richard Palmer's The Summons of the Trumpet3 and William Westmoreland's A Soldier Reports, Krepinevich has thoroughly combed the Army's official records, utilizing oral histories by Army historians as well as conducting some interviews of his own. Whether or not one accepts Krepinevich's entire argument, the results of his research are striking, for he demonstrates that the Army's apparent conversion to the gospel of counterinsurgency during the early 1960s was largely cosmetic.

Summers believes that in the early 1960s "counter-insurgency became not so much the Army's doctrine as the Army's dogma and... stultified military strategic thinking for the next decade."s Krepinevich shows that the coun terinsurgency vogue in the 1960s had remarkably little impact on Army doctrine, training, or force structure. The Army saw little difference between the type of warfare it had been preparing for all along and counterinsurgency:

"Unable to fit the president's prescriptions into its force structure, oriented on mid- and high-intensity confict in Europe, the Army either ignored them or watered them down to prevent its superiors from infringing upon what the service felt were its proper priorities. "6 The Army's reaction to White House-level prodding was a flurry of boards, articles, studies, and briefings, but little real change in its organization or training. As late as 1964, the Army had still not produced a field manual dealing specifically with counterinsur-gency, and it was not until 1969, four years after U.S. combat troops first went to Vietnam, that the Army War College devoted a "block of instruction" (three weeks) to counterinsurgency. At a lower level, the infantry school at Ft. Benning, Georgia did devote slightly over half of its time to "insurgency related instruction" in 1965, but "only 16 percent of the instruction focused primarily on counterinsurgency." In fact, much of the Army's response to the push for counterinsurgency education and training took the form of slightly modifying or relabeling existing courses as "counterinsurgency." So far as actual field training and exercises were concerned, Krepinevich finds that "the essence of counterinsurgency-long-term patrolling of a small area, the pervasive use of night operations, emphasis on intelligence pertaining to the insurgents' infrastructure"— was rarely given much attention.

Instead, trainees were run through exercises and courses in mock "Viet Cong villages" (often covered with snow in the winter months). The Army often lumped counterinsurgency together with preparation for other exotic forms of warfare such as air rescue, ranger operations, underwater demolition, and long-range reconnaissance. All of these received relatively little attention compared to the many weeks devoted to training and preparation for large unit mid-intensity-style operations in Europe. Even the four Army brigades that composed the so-called Special Action Forces, designed for deployment to Third World countries to back up Special Forces groups in contingency operations, received little specialized training and were not even given much orientation toward the part of the world to which they were assigned. Most telling of all is the fact that, aside from these four brigades, the Army remained unwilling to commit any of its major units to the counterinsurgency mission.

Given this attitude, the Army's approach to defeating the Communist forces in Vietnam was almost predetermined: seek out the enemy's large units employing maximum firepower and helicopter-style mobility, orient on the threat from North Vietnam, and emphasize attrition of the enemy's manpower and supplies. This style of war in Vietnam has been criticized and defended before, but Krepinevich argues that this employment of forces was not so much a decision as an instinct. Westmoreland's forces had to fight as they did in Vietnam because that was the only way the U.S. Army of the 1960s was organized, trained, educated, and equipped to fight. It was the only sort of war any of the senior level officers had ever experienced.

(Krepinevich points out that only very junior U.S. officers were ever sent to such places as the British jungle warfare school in Malaya.) Krepinevich contends that the United States never really varied from its adherence to conventional war in Vietnam. Although he gives high marks to such programs as the Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons, Strike Teams, and certain CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) programs, he emphasizes that all of these promising experiments operated on the margin of the MACV's (Military Assistance Com-mand, Vietnam) mainstream activities, which continued to be devoted to big-unit, firepower-intensive conventional missions. Even General Creighton Abrams's public declaration of adherence to a "One War Strategy" made little practical difference at the operational level. Krepinevich points out that Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, often singled out by critics as the epitome of the Army's wrongheaded "body-count"-oriented approach to the war, served as commander of the 9th Infantry Division well after Abrams's assumption of command.

All in all, Krepinevich convincingly demonstrates that the Army, far from being misled and distracted by the counterinsurgency fad of the 1960s, re-mained-and remains-markedly unaffected by it. Underlying his masterful account is, of course, the assumption that had it been done differently, had the military adapted its doctrine, training, and force structure to counterin-surgency, the outcome in Vietnam would have been far different. But would it? It may be that the character and composition of U.S. and Vietnamese armed forces had more to do with their ultimate fate in Vietnam than their doctrine and training.

The character of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) is well known. It was an organization that suffered chronic problems of leadership, morale, and motivation—a product of the all-pervasive politicization, corruption, and nepotism which the Vietnamese Army never managed to shake off. Indeed, it could not shake them off because these practices were deeply embedded in the South Vietnamese ruling elite from the days of Ngo Dinh Diem to the final months of the Thieu regime.?

Krepinevich has much to say about the South Vietnamese Army's short-comings. He is especially critical of what he characterizes as the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group's propensity to create a conventional army for Vietnam modeled on the U.S. Army. Counterinsurgency training was neglected in favor of unrealistic large unit exercises such as division and corps maneuvers. Like many writers, he points to the battle at the village of Ap Bac in 1963, where vastly superior Vietnamese Army forces supported by helicopters and armored personnel carriers were defeated by a battalion of Vietcong, as dramatic evidence of ARVN incompetence even after eight years of U.S. tutelage. Yet, Ap Bac was a conventional battle and ARVN's failure was due, not so much to lack of counterinsurgency training, as to lack of ability to carry out any type of coordinated combat operations. To paraphrase a popular musical of the time, so far as the question of ARVN training and doctrine was concerned, "It ain't just a question of misunderstood; deep down inside them, they're no good!"

The same might apply to the question of counterinsurgency doctrine and the U.S. Army. Krepinevich paints a devastating picture of the two general officers who headed the American military assistance effort in Vietnam in the early 1960s, Lt. Gen. Lionel C. McGarr and Lt. Gen. Paul D. Harkins.

Military Assistance Group Commander McGarr would often stay away from his headquarters for two to three days at a time directing his staff by means of tape recordings which "were often so garbled that the staff had to call McGarr to find out what he wanted done." One senior officer referred to him as "a stuffed shirt," and said the brass "couldn't get McGarr out [of Vietnam] fast enough."* As for Harkins, he became well known for his oft-reported predictions of impending Communist defeat in Vietnam together with his relentless suppression of any reports from subordinates that tended to suggest the contrary.

"It wasn't a retirement, it was a relief," said one

Army general of Harkins's early departure from Vietnam in November 1963.10

Yet McGarr and Harkins had not appointed themselves. McGarr was a former head of the Army Command and General Staff School while Harkins was the hand-picked choice of JCS Chairman General Maxwell Taylor. What was it about the U.S. Army in the 1960s that allowed such men to be appointed to posts for which they were so manifestly unsuited? What was it, in fact, that made it so difficult for the Army to adapt to conditions in Vietnam and so easy for it to embrace false or misleading measures of progress-whether Harkins's "improvements" in ARVN performance or the ody count of General Westmoreland? These are some of the most serious questions raised by Krepinevich's thought-provoking work