by Neil Sheehan
The anti-vehicle system would consist of acoustic detectors distributed every mile or so along all truckable roads in the interdicted area, monitored 24 hours a day by patrol aircraft, with vectored strike aircraft using SADEYE to respond to signals that trucks or truck convoys are moving. The patrol aircraft would distribute self-sterilizing Gravel over parts of the road net at dusk. The self-sterilizing feature is needed so that road-watching and mine-planting teams could be used in this area. Photo-reconnaissance aircraft would cover the entire area each few days to look for the development of new truckable roads, to see if the transport of supplies is being switched to porters, and to identify any other change in the infiltration system. It may also be desirable to use ground teams to plant larger anti-truck mines along the roads, as an interim measure pending the development of effective air-dropped anti-vehicle mines.
The cost of such a system (both parts) has been estimated to be about $800 million per year, of which by far the major fraction is spent for Gravel and SADEYES. The key requirements would be (all numbers are approximate because of assumptions which had to be made regarding degradation of system components in field use, and regarding the magnitude of infiltration): 20 million Gravel mines per month; possibly 25 million button bomb-lets per month . . .
Apart from the tactical counter-measures against the barrier itself, one has to consider strategic alternatives available to the North Vietnamese in case the barrier is successful. Among these are: a move into the Mekong Plain; infiltration from the sea either directly to SVN or through Cambodia; and movement down the Mekong from Thakhek (held by the Pathet Lao-North Vietnamese) into Cambodia.
Finally, it will be difficult for us to find out how effective the barrier is in the absence of clearly visible North Vietnamese responses, such as end runs through the Mekong plan. Because of supplies already stored in the pipeline, and because of the general shakiness of our quantitative estimates of either supply or troop infiltration, it is likely to be some time before the effect of even a wholly successful barrier becomes noticeable. A greatly stepped-up intelligence effort is called for, including continued road-watch activity in the areas of the motorcade roads, and patrol and reconnaissance activity south of the anti-personnel barrier.
Chapter 9
Secretary McNamara’s Disenchantment:
October, 1966 - May, 1967
Highlights of the Period: October, 1966-May, 1967
Starting late in 1966, the Pentagon study recounts, doubts about the effectiveness of American policy in Vietnam began to shred the unity of the Johnson Administration, with Secretary of Defense McNamara emerging as the leader of a group of “disillusioned doves.”
Here are highlights of the months of doubt and debate:
OCTOBER 1966
Mr. McNamara, returning from South Vietnam, told the President in a memorandum that “pacification has if anything gone backward” and the air war had not “either significantly affected infiltration or cracked the morale of Hanoi.” He recommended a limit on the increase of forces and the consideration of a halt in the bombing, or of shifting targets from the Hanoi-Haiphong areas to infiltration routes, to “increase the credibility of our peace gestures.”
The Joint Chiefs, in their memorandum to the President, opposed any cutback in the bombing; they proposed a “sharp knock,” including strikes at locks, dams and rail yards. They said that the military situation had “improved substantially over the past year” and called the bombing “a trump card.”
NOVEMBER 1966
Mr. McNamara gave the Joint Chiefs a new troop authorization for 469,000 men by the end of June, 1968, below the military request. The study comments that from then on “the judgment of the military . . . would be subject to question.”
Mr. McNamara told the President there was “no evidence” that additional troops “would substantially change the situation,” and that the bombing was yielding very small marginal returns” with “no significant impact” on the war in the South.
JANUARY 1967
The Central Intelligence Agency, in a study, estimated 1965-1966 air-war casualties in North to be 36,000—“about 80 per cent civilians”—making the civilian casualty toll about 29,000.
FEBRUARY 1967
The President approved a “spring air offensive,” including attacks on power plants, the mining of rivers, and the relaxation of restrictions on air raids near Hanoi and Haiphong.
MARCH 1967
General Westmoreland asked for 200,000 more troops, for a total U.S. force in Vietnam of 671,616.
APRIL 1967
The Joint Chiefs transmitted the Westmoreland troop request, and called for the mobilization of reserves, proposing “an extension of the war” into Laos and Cambodia and possibly North Vietnam.
The President asked Gen. Westmoreland if the enemy could not increase troop strength also and added: “If so, where does it all end?”
MAY 1967
Assistant Secretary of State William P. Bundy opposed ground operations against North Vietnam as likely to provoke China; he also warned—as did the C.I.A.—of the possibility of a Soviet reaction to the mining of Haiphong harbor.
Walt W. Rostow, in a memo to the President, urged a cutback in the bombing.
A McNamara-McNaughton memo to the President recommended a bombing cutback to the 20th parallel, a troop increase of only 30,000 and what the study calls basically “a recommendation that we accept a compromise outcome” and “scaled-down goals.” Study says these were “radical positions” under the circumstances.
Chapter 9
Secretary McNamara’s Disenchantment: October, 1966–May, 1967
—BY HEDRICK SMITH
The Pentagon’s secret study of the Vietnam war discloses that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara sought in October, 1966, to persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to cut back the bombing of North Vietnam to seek a political settlement—17 months before Mr. Johnson made that move on March 31, 1968.
In May, 1967, the study reveals, Mr. McNamara went a step further and advocated that the Johnson Administration stop trying to guarantee a non-Communist South Vietnam and be willing to accept a coalition government in Saigon that included elements of the Vietcong.
What the study terms his “radical” proposal for scaling down American objectives in the war called for Saigon to negotiate with elements of the guerrilla movement not only for a political compromise but also for a cease-fire.
Mr. McNamara’s disillusionment with the war has been reported previously, but the depth of his dissent from established policy is fully documented for the first time in the Pentagon study, which he commissioned on June 17, 1967.
The study details how this turnabout by Mr. McNamara—originally a leading advocate of the bombing policy and, in 1965, a confident believer that American intervention would bring the Vietcong insurgency under control—opened a deep policy rift in the Johnson Administration.
The study does not specifically say, however, that his break with established policy led President Johnson to nominate him on Nov. 28, 1967, as president of the World Bank and to replace him as Secretary of Defense.
But Mr. McNamara has previously revealed that in both May and August of 1967 the subject of his possible departure from the Administration came up in talks with President Johnson, and the Pentagon study depicts both periods as critical points in the internal maneuvering on military strategy. In May Mr. McNamara was pressing his proposals to scale down the war, and in August President Johnson decided to expand the air war against the Secretary’s advice.
The account of the Johnson Administration from late 1966 onward is that of a government wrestling with itself as the views of some senior policymakers changed under the pressures of protracted war.
Three identifiable camps are described: the McNamara group—the “disillusioned doves,” as the analysts put it—trying to set limits on the war and then reduce it; the military faction, led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. William C. Westmoreland,
the commander in Vietnam, pressing for wider war; and President Johnson, as well as senior civilian officials at the White House and State Department, taking a middle position.
At each stage, the primary issues of debate were much the same: the size of American troop commitments; the effectiveness of the bombing of North Vietnam, which began on a sustained basis in March, 1965, and the proposed expansion of the air war and of the ground war in the South.
Beginning in late 1966, the study relates, President Johnson was being urged by the military leaders to step up the air war sharply and to consider allied invasions of Laos, Cambodia and even North Vietnam. Repeatedly the President was pressed to mobilize reserves to provide the manpower for a larger war.
The military leaders reacted to Secretary McNamara’s proposals for a reduction of the air war with what the study calls “the stiffest kind of condemnation” and they “bombarded” him with rebuttals.
According to the study, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned on May 24, 1967, that halting the bombing north of the 20th Parallel would be “an aerial Dienbienphu”—a reference to the disastrous French military defeat in May, 1954, just before the negotiations that ended the French Indochina war.
The Joint Chiefs, the study relates, saw an “alarming pattern” in Mr. McNamara’s over-all strategy—one, they declared, that would undermine the entire American war effort.
Their most vehement criticism was directed against the Secretary’s memorandum to President Johnson on May 19, 1967. That paper gave a discouraging picture of the military situation and a pessimistic view of the American public’s impatience with the war, and said:
“The time has come for us to eliminate the ambiguities from our minimum objectives—our commitments—in Vietnam. Specifically, two principles must be articulated, and policies and actions brought in line with them: (1) Our commitment is only to see that the people of South Vietnam are permitted to determine their own future. (2) This commitment ceases if the country ceases to help itself.
“It follows that no matter how much we might hope for some things, our commitment is not:
“. . . To ensure that a particular person or group remains in power, nor that the power runs to every corner of the land (though we prefer certain types and we hope their writ will run throughout South Vietnam),
“To guarantee that the self-chosen government is non-Communist (though we believe and strongly hope it will be), and
“To insist that the independent South Vietnam remain separate from North Vietnam (though in the short-run, we would prefer it that way).” The material in italics and in parentheses is in the McNamara memorandum.
Specifically, the Secretary urged that in September, 1967, after the South Vietnamese presidential elections, the United States “move” the Saigon Government “to seek a political settlement with the non-Communist members of the NLF [National Liberation Front, or Vietcong]—to explore a ceasefire and to reach an accommodation with the non-Communist South Vietnamese who are under the VC banner; to accept them as members of an opposition political party, and if necessary, to accept their individual participation in the national government—in sum, a settlement to transform the members of the VC from military opponents to political opponents.”
Mr. McNamara acknowledged that one obvious drawback would be “the alleged impact on the reputation of the United States and of its President,” but argued that “the difficulties of this strategy are fewer and smaller than the difficulties of any other approach.”
President Johnson, the study recounts, preferred the middle ground of piecemeal escalation—what the study calls “the slow squeeze”—to either the “sharp knock” advocated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the shift toward political and military accommodation favored by Mr. McNamara.
It is “not surprising,” the Pentagon analysts remark, that the President did not adopt the McNamara approach in view of his need to keep “the military ‘on board’ in any new direction for the U.S. effort in Southeast Asia.” This is evidently an allusion to reports at the time that some high-ranking officers were in the mood to threaten resignation if the McNamara policy was adopted.
Satisfying neither extreme, President Johnson “was in the uncomfortable position of being able to please neither his hawkish nor his dovish critics with his carefully modulated middle course,” the study asserts.
During the prolonged internal debate, the Pentagon account discloses, such issues as stalemate in the ground war and civilian casualties of the air war were of much more concern to some policy makers than the Administration publicly acknowledged.
Press dispatches from Hanoi in late 1966 stimulated what the analysts call an “explosive debate” in public about civilian casualties. Privately, the analysts add, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a summary of the bombing in 1965 and 1966 that estimated that there had been nearly 29,000 civilian casualties in North Vietnam—a figure far higher than Hanoi itself had ever used.
The Pentagon study also discloses that early in 1967 the growing stalemate on the ground became a concern of high civilian officials—even, at times, of President Johnson himself.
On April 27, the study notes, the President met with General Westmoreland and General Wheeler, who urged him to grant General Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 more troops—a request the two officers repeated nearly a year later—but Mr. Johnson was wary.
Their discussion was recorded in notes, found in Pentagon files and quoted in the study. [See Document #125.]
“When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions?” the President asked. “If so, where does it all end?”
When General Westmoreland conceded that the enemy was likely to match American reinforcements, President Johnson turned to the worry that Hanoi might ask Communist China for help.
“At what point,” he asked, “does the enemy ask for volunteers?”
The only recorded reply from General Westmoreland was, “That is a good question.”
The real ceiling on the American commitment, the analysts suggest several times, was imposed primarily by President Johnson’s refusal to be pushed by the military leaders into asking Congress to mobilize reserve forces—both former servicemen on inactive status and organized units of these servicemen.
Mobilization, the analysts assert, became the “political sound barrier” that President Johnson would not break.
A Pessimistic Report
For Mr. McNamara and his influential aide John T. McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, the first frontal challenge to the basic trend of policy came in October, 1966, and grew out of doubts that had been mounting for nearly a year.
As early as November, 1965—eight months after the American decision to intervene with ground forces—the Secretary of Defense warned President Johnson that the major new reinforcements he was approving could “not guarantee success.” And in January, 1966, Mr. McNaughton, the third-ranking official in the Pentagon, voiced fear that the United States had become caught in “an escalating military stalemate.”
In mid-October, Secretary McNamara returned disturbed from a trip to South Vietnam. He had been the intended target of a Vietcong assassination squad that was discovered only a few hours before his arrival in Saigon—a point to which he seemed to allude in his report to the President. “Full security exists nowhere,” he said, “not even behind the U.S. Marines’ lines and in Saigon [and] in the countryside, the enemy almost completely controls the night.” [See Document #118.]
The Pentagon study notes that in this Oct. 14 memorandum, Mr. McNamara for the first time recommended cutting back sharply on military requests for reinforcements. Such requests had previously been given almost routine approval in Washington.
In September, 1966, Adm. U. S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of forces in the Pacific, had pressed on behalf of General Westmoreland for an increase in the projected strength of American forces in South Vietnam from 445,000 to 570,0
00 by the end of 1967. Actual strength was 325,000 men, and still rising.
On Oct. 7, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged what the Pentagon study calls “full-blown” mobilization of 688,500 Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine reservists to help provide more troops for Vietnam and also to build up the armed forces around the world.
In his Oct. 14 memorandum, Mr. McNamara told President Johnson that he was “a little less pessimistic” than he had been a year earlier because the allied military campaign had “blunted the Communist military initiative” and prevented a total collapse in Saigon. But he went on to say that this had not produced results in what he called “the ‘end products’—broken enemy morale and political achievements” by the South Vietnamese Government.
Discussing Saigon’s struggle to win the people’s allegiance, Mr. McNamara showed none of the confidence of high American officials in the early sixties that the mere introduction of Americans would revitalize the South Vietnamese civilian and military leadership.
