by Neil Sheehan
• High-level civilian authorities, including Secretary McNamara, began to have serious doubts about the effectiveness of both the air and ground war as early as the fall of 1965, but they continued to recommend escalation as the only acceptable policy, despite their doubts.
• A secret Defense Department seminar of 47 scientists—“the cream of the scholarly community in technical fields”—concluded in the summer of 1966 that the bombing of North Vietnam had had “no measurable effect” on Hanoi. The scientists recommended building an electronic barrier between North and South Vietnam as an alternative to the bombing. [See Document # 117.]
The Pentagon account of this period of the war—from July, 1965, to the fall of 1966—forms another section in the series presented by The New York Times.
The study, ordered by Secretary McNamara in 1967 and prepared by a team of 30 to 40 officials and analysts to determine how the United States became involved in the war in Indochina, consists of 3,000 pages of analysis and 4,000 pages of supporting documents.
Open-Ended Strategy
When President Johnson decided in July, 1965, to accept General Westmoreland’s request for 44 combat battalions and to endorse his search-and-destroy strategy, he “left the U.S. commitment to Vietnam open-ended,” the study declares.
“Force levels for the search-and-destroy strategy had no empirical limits,” it adds. “The amount of force required to defeat the enemy depended entirely on his response to the build-up and his willingness to continue the fight.”
“The basic idea” underlying the search-and-destroy strategy, the study says, “was the desire to take the war to the enemy, denying him freedom of movement anywhere in the country . . . and deal him the heaviest possible blows.” This concept replaced the static-defense and enclave strategies, which called for fewer American troops, and which had been tried briefly in the spring of 1965.
General Westmoreland intended his original allotment of 44 battalions to be only a stopgap measure, the account says. They would be used to blunt the enemy offensive that threatened to overwhelm the fragile Saigon Government, but more men would quickly be needed if the allies were to win.
To find out how much “additional force was required to seize the initiative from the enemy and to commence the win phase of the strategy,” Secretary McNamara flew to Saigon on July 16, 1965, for a four-day visit. While he was there he received a cablegram notifying him that President Johnson had approved General Westmoreland’s request for 44 battalions and the use of his search-and-destroy strategy.
According to the study, General Westmoreland then reported that he needed 24 additional American battalions, or 100,000 men, for the “win phase,” which would begin in 1966.
He also outlined, as quoted in the study, his over-all strategy, based on a three-phase build-up:
“Phase I—The commitment of U.S./F.W.M.A. [United States/Free World Military Assistance] forces necessary to halt the losing trend by the end of 1965.
“Phase II—The resumption of the offensive by U.S./ F.W.M.A. forces during the first half of 1966 in high-priority areas necessary to destroy enemy forces, and reinstitution of rural-construction activities.
“Phase III—If the enemy persisted, a period of a year to a year and a half following Phase II would be required for the defeat and destruction of the remaining enemy forces and base areas.
“Withdrawal of U.S./F.W.M.A. forces would commence following Phase III as the GVN [Government of Vietnam] became able to establish and maintain internal order and to defend its borders.”
According to the Pentagon study, General Westmoreland’s plan shows that “with enough force to seize the initiative from the VC sometime in 1966, General Westmoreland expected to take the offensive and, with appropriate additional reinforcements, to have defeated the enemy by the end of 1967.”
Secretary McNamara was seriously concerned, the Pentagon account says, about whether the United States could “win” in Vietnam. He was worried lest the United States “become involved more deeply in a war which could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion.”
Thus while he was preparing for his July 16 trip to Saigon, the Secretary asked Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for an assessment of “the assurance the U.S. can have of winning in South Vietnam if we do everything we can.”
General Wheeler’s answer, prepared by a study group of officers and civilians in the Defense Department, was: “Within the bounds of reasonable assumptions—there appears to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will—and if that will is manifested in strategy and tactical operations.”
According to a memorandum to the study group from Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, on the working definition of “win,” it “means that we succeed in demonstrating to the VC that they cannot win.”
This definition, the Pentagon analyst writes, “indicates the assumption upon which the conduct of the war was to rest—that the VC could be convinced in some meaningful sense that they were not going to win and that they would then rationally choose less violent methods of seeking their goals.”
Secretary McNamara got this assurance, the study goes on, and, armed with it, he recommended on his return from Saigon on July 20 that President Johnson meet General Westmoreland’s request for 100,000 additional troops.
“The over-all evaluation,” Secretary McNamara wrote the President, “is that the course of action recommended in this memorandum stands a good chance of achieving an acceptable outcome within a reasonable time in Vietnam.”
“U.S. and South Vietnamese casualties will increase, just how much cannot be predicted with confidence,” the Secretary added, “but the U.S. killed-in-action might be in the vicinity of 500 a month by the end of the year . . . . United States public opinion will support the course of action because it is a sensible and courageous military-political program designed and likely to bring about a success in Vietnam.”
The Pentagon account declares: “Never again while he was Secretary of Defense would McNamara make so optimistic a statement about Vietnam—except in public.”
By November, 1965, the situation in South Vietnam had undergone important changes, the study says.
The Phase I deployment of American troops, which was now nearing its 175,000-man goal, had apparently stopped deterioration in the military situation.
But at the same time, the narrative relates, the enemy had unexpectedly built up strength much faster than the American command had foreseen.
Where there were estimated to be 48,550 Communist combat troops in South Vietnam in July, 1965, American intelligence officials believed by that November that there were 63,550. And the number of North Vietnamese regiments had increased during these months from one to eight, according to the intelligence officials.
“The implications of the build-up were made abundantly clear by the bloody fighting in the Iadrang Valley in mid-November,” the study says. In this first big battle of the Vietnam war, units of the United States First Cavalry Division fought numerically superior North Vietnamese forces for several weeks in the western part of the Central Highlands, along the Cambodian border. More than 1,200 of the enemy were reportedly killed in the fighting, which also left more than 200 Americans dead.
The Pentagon study says that the carefully calculated American strategy, with its plans for the number of American troops required to win, “did not take escalatory reactions into account.”
While the study does not deal with this subject at length, the public record shows that the Johnson Administration had repeatedly said during early 1965 that North Vietnam was infiltrating large quantities of men and supplies into the South.
In February, for example, the State Department published a white paper entitled “Aggression From the North,” asserting that North Vietnam was responsible for the war in South Vietnam and that Hanoi had infiltrated more than 37,000 men.
The public record also shows that Secretary McNamara devoted a major part of
a televised news conference on April 26, 1965, to a charge that North Vietnamese had stepped up their infiltration. “The intensification of infiltration,” Mr. McNamara said, “has grown progressively more flagrant and more unconstrained.”
Despite these frequent public statements about the build-up, in November, the Pentagon account says, General Westmoreland suddenly found it necessary to request a vast increase in troops for the Phase II part of his plan. The general said he would need 154,000 more men.
As the general explained his needs to Adm. U. S. Grant Sharp, commander of American forces in the Pacific, who was his immediate superior:
“The VC/PAVN build-up rate is predicated to be double that of U.S. Phase II forces. Whereas we will add an average of 7 maneuver battalions per quarter the enemy will add 15. This development has already reduced the November battalion-equivalent ratio from an anticipated 3.2 to 1, to 2.8 to 1, and it will be further reduced to 2.5 to 1 by the end of the year.”
In response to General Westmoreland’s request for 154,000 men, Secretary McNamara detoured on his way from a Paris meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and flew to Saigon.
On his return to Washington on Nov. 30, Secretary McNamara wrote a memorandum to President Johnson in which he began to reveal doubts about the ground war. While recommending that the United States send a total of nearly 400,000 men to Vietnam by the end of 1966, the next year, he warned:
“We should be aware that deployments of the kind I have recommended will not guarantee success. U.S. killed-in-action can be expected to reach 1,000 a month, and the odds are even that we will be faced in early 1967 with a ‘no decision’ at an even higher level. My over-all evaluation, nevertheless, is that the best chance of achieving our stated objectives lies in . . . the deployments mentioned above.” [See Document #107.]
While Secretary McNamara and President Johnson were considering troop increases up to nearly 400,000 men—the number of Americans in South Vietnam was then 184,000—news accounts were speculating that the troop ceiling might go as high as 200,000. This was the figure used, for example, in The New York Times’s dispatch on Mr. McNamara’s visit to Saigon on Nov. 28.
The Pentagon study does not say what decision President Johnson reached on Mr. McNamara’s Nov. 30 recommendation. But the analyst does say that on Dec. 13, in another memorandum, Mr. McNamara outlined for the President an approved troop deployment of 367,000 men for 1966 and 395,000 men for June 1967.
Then on Dec. 16, the study reveals, Secretary McNamara received another request from General Westmoreland, raising to 443,000 men the total he needed by the end of 1966. And on Jan. 28 the Secretary received a new request, this time increasing the total to 459,000 men.
Neither General Westmoreland’s requests nor President Johnson’s approvals were made public. At a news conference on Feb. 26, 1966, the President said, “We do not have on my desk at the moment any unfilled requests from General Westmoreland.” There were 235,000 American soldiers in South Vietnam at the time.
The Pentagon narrative suggests two possible interpretations for the rapid ballooning of the number of troops required:
“It can be hypothesized, that from the outset of the American build-up, some military men felt that winning a meaningful victory in Vietnam would require something on the order of one million men.
“Knowing that this would be unacceptable politically, it may have seemed a better bargaining strategy to ask for increased deployments incrementally.
“An alternative explanation is that no one really foresaw what the troop needs in Vietnam would be and that the ability of the D.R.V./VC to build up their effort was consistently underrated.
“This explanation seems, with some exceptions, to be reasonable. The documents from the period around July 1965 seem to indicate that [General Westmoreland] had not given much thought to what he was going to do in the year or years after 1965.”
Citing a document of General Westmoreland’s Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, the study goes on: “The words of the MACV history of 1965 indicate something of this. ‘The President’s July 28 announcement that the U.S. would commit additional massive military forces in SVN necessitated an overall plan clarifying the missions and deployment of the various components. [The general’s] concept of operations was prepared to fulfill this need.’ ”
“If this is a true reflection of what happened,” the analyst says, “it would indicate the MACV’s plan of what to do was derived from what would be available rather than the requirement for manpower being derived from any clearly thought out military plan.”
In April, 1965, when President Johnson secretly changed the mission of the Marines at Danang from defense to offense and thus commited the United States to the ground war in Vietnam, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam was relegated to a secondary role, the Pentagon study declares. Discussing this bombing campaign, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, the study adds:
“Earlier expectations that bombing would constitute the primary means for the U.S. to turn the tide of the war had been overtaken by the President’s decision to send in substantial U.S. ground forces. With this decision the main hope had shifted from inflicting pain in the North to proving, in the South, that NVN could not win a military victory there. Rolling Thunder was counted as useful and necessary, but in the prevailing view it was a supplement and not a substitute for efforts within SVN.”
By the summer of 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder’s scope and pattern of operation had also been determined, the narrative relates.
To emphasize American power, it goes on, the bombing of the North would proceed “in a slow, steady, deliberate manner, beginning with a few infiltration-associated targets in southern NVN and gradually moving northward with progressively more severe attacks on a wider variety of targets.”
Because Operation Rolling Thunder was considered “comparatively risky and politically sensitive,” all bombing strikes were carefully selected in Washington. Targets were chosen in weekly packages, the study says, and each target package “had to pass through a chain of approvals which included senior levels of O.S.D. [Office of the Secretary of Defense], the Department of State and the White House.”
Attacks were also permitted against certain broad categories of targets, such as vehicles, locomotives and barges, which were defined in Washington. In this type of attack, known as armed reconnaissance, the final selection of a specific target was left to the pilot.
The number of sorties—individual flights by individual planes—was gradually increased, the account relates, from 900 a week during July to 1,500 a week in December, 1965. By the end of the year 55,000 sorties had been flown, nearly three-fourths of them on armed reconnaissance.
While the list of targets was also lengthened, Secretary McNamara continued to keep the Hanoi-Haiphong area and the Chinese border area off limits through the end of 1965.
The study reports that the original purpose of Rolling Thunder, “to break the will of North Vietnam,” was changed during the summer of 1965 to cutting the flow of men and supplies from the North to the South.
This change in the Government’s internal rationale, the analyst writes, brought it in line with the publicly expressed rationale, which had always been an infiltration cutoff.
The rationale was changed, the study declares, because it was recognized that “as a venture in strategic persuasion the bombing had not worked.”
In fact, intelligence estimates commissioned by Secretary McNamara showed that by the end of 1965 the bombing had had little effect on North Vietnam.
In November, 1965, the Defense Intelligence Agency told Mr. McNamara that while the “cumulative strains” resulting from the bombing had “reduced industrial performance” in North Vietnam, “the primarily rural nature of the area permits continued functioning of the subsistence economy.”
And, the agency’s estimate continued, “The air strikes do not appear to have altered Hanoi’s determination to continue supporting the w
ar in South Vietnam.”
In the analyst’s view, “The idea that destroying, or threatening to destroy, North Vietnam’s industry would pressure Hanoi into calling it quits, seems, in retrospect, a colossal mis-judgment.” The analyst continues:
“NVN was an extremely poor target for air attack. The theory of either strategic or interdiction bombing assumed highly developed industrial nations producing large quantities of military goods to sustain mass armies engaged in intensive warfare. NVN, as U.S. intelligence agencies knew, was an agricultural country with a rudimentary transportation system and little industry of any kind.
“What intelligence agencies liked to call the ‘modern industrial sector’ of the economy was tiny even by Asian standards, producing only about 12 per cent of the G.N.P. of $1.6-billion in 1965. There were only a handful of ‘major industrial facilities.’ When NVN was first targeted, the J.C.S. found only eight industrial installations worth listing.”
“NVN’s limited industry made little contribution to its military capabilities,” the account continues. “The great bulk of its military equipment, and all of the heavier and more sophisticated items, had to be imported. This was no particular problem, since both the U.S.S.R. and China were apparently more than glad to help.
“The NVN transportation system was austere and superfically looked very vulnerable to air attack, but it was inherently flexible and its capacity greatly exceeded the demands placed upon it.
“Supporting the war in the south was hardly a great strain on NVN’s economy. The NVA/ VC forces there did not constitute a large army. They did not fight as conventional division or field armies, with tanks and airplanes and field artillery; they did not need to be supplied by huge convoys of trucks, trains or ships. They fought and moved on foot, supplying themselves locally, in the main, and simply avoiding combat when supplies were low.”
