The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  “They [the Americans] didn’t want to pacify,” concluded Tran Van Don, one of the South Vietnamese generals who led the plot against President Diem in 1963. “They wanted to make war.”

  The enemy learned how to deal with the American approach. Two years later, the Communists purposely would encourage it as they neared the launch of their city-centric Tet Offensive, taking actions that would lure American forces into the countryside and borderlands. As Truong Nhu Tang, the former Viet Cong official, put it, the result of the Americans’ concept of the war was that they never really participated significantly in the most important fight in Vietnam: “The military battlefield upon which the Americans lavished their attention and resources was only one part of the whole board of confrontation. And it was not on this front that the primary struggle was being played out.”

  But the Army, like a football team that had shown up at the wrong stadium and played its game there anyway, would continue to insist that it was not responsible for the outcome of the war. In a poll of 976 teachers and students at the Army’s Command and General Staff College conducted in February 1972, 40 percent of those asked blamed “the politicians,” and 21 percent blamed “the general lack of commitment” among American youth. Only 5 percent thought the Army was at fault for conducting the war poorly. (The rest provided a variety of other answers.) Retired Army Col. Anthony Wermuth was even more emphatic, insisting in 1977 that “the American Army fought magnificently in Vietnam.” Gen. Alexander Haig agreed, arguing, “The war was not lost on the battlefield in any sense of the word.” So did the man probably as responsible for the war as anybody, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, whose view was that “our American leadership, I think, has been superb. I don’t know of any improvement that anyone could make to the general tactics and the strategy, under the ground rules which have been decided for the armed forces.”

  As such comments indicate, during the Vietnam War there was a lack of willingness among general officers to examine their own performance, as well as a lack of curiosity about it. “By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity,” causing otherwise intelligent men to act stupidly, wrote Neil Sheehan in one of the best books about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie.

  One result of such attitudes was the end of the relief of generals. If in Korea the Army had begun to find it difficult to relieve generals, during Vietnam it found it all but impossible. Firing senior officers would have been seen as a confession of failure. Furthermore, in a hazy war with a muddled strategy, what constituted success was less clear, so rewarding it and punishing failure became even more difficult. The result was that by the arrival of the Vietnam War, firing a general officer amounted to an act of dissent, a public questioning of the way the Army worked, because it involved someone who had risen through a demanding process over two decades. To say that he was not fit for a position was tantamount to a rejection of the process that had produced him. So where relief was once a sign that the system was working as expected—rewarding success and punishing failure—it had become seen inside the Army as a hostile critique of the system. As Gen. Westmoreland put it, “If an officer progresses through the United States Army’s demanding promotion system to reach the rank of general, he is, except under the most unusual circumstances, clearly competent, even if he may not be the best man for every assignment.”

  The Marine road not taken

  Despite Maxwell Taylor’s claims, there were alternatives available. In 1964, John Cushman, then a lieutenant colonel, twice briefed Gen. Westmoreland on classic counterinsurgency techniques he was employing in a province in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Both times, Westmoreland conveyed utter boredom. “No reaction, no questions, no exploration, no curiosity,” recalled Cushman, who later became a lieutenant general and an important figure in the Army’s post-Vietnam recovery.

  Tucked away at the northern end of South Vietnam, the Marine Corps was less under Westmoreland’s control and was able to take the counterinsurgency idea further. The Marines developed a different concept of the war, arguing that the way to win was not to pursue the enemy through the unpopulated jungle but instead to move small units into villages to try to protect the people and cut them off from the enemy, separating the foe from his base of supply of recruits, food, and other necessities of war. “The Vietnamese people are the prize,” Marine Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak wrote in a 1966 memorandum, while attrition, he said, is “the route to defeat.” Neil Sheehan reports that President Johnson read a copy of Krulak’s memo that summer and met with Krulak, but essentially blew him off. Later that year, Krulak commented to a fellow Marine general regarding the overall war effort, “I am deeply concerned that the enemy has played the tune, and induced us to dance to it.” But by focusing on villages instead of territory, the Marines could not display to visiting officials on their maps that they controlled large swaths of land. This inability would antagonize Army leaders.

  The Marines established a three-layered approach. First, they would use operations of battalion size and larger to go after main forces and reduce their ability to move freely. Second, smaller counter-guerrilla patrols would aggressively seek to constrain Viet Cong movements in population centers; recognizing that the VC lived by requisitioning rice from farmers in the rich lands along the coast, the Marines launched operations to cut off those supplies. Third, and most memorably, they would put small numbers of infantrymen into the villages themselves. The notion was to separate the people from the enemy and to protect and arm the people so that they would feel able to talk and cooperate with the Americans or their Vietnamese allies. Under this program, called Combined Action Platoons (CAPs), the Marine Corps, starting in August 1965, put teams of soldiers—the goal was thirteen Marines, a Navy corpsman (that is, a medic), and around thirty-five Vietnamese militiamen—into nearly eighty villages. The teams actually had only about thirty people on average, in part because Army leaders did not like the program and directed the Marines to man it by taking people from units already in Vietnam.

  The key to the Marines’ CAP effort was their sustained presence in these villages. They developed a familiarity with the local people and their living conditions and thereby understood what “normal” looked like, so they were able to detect aberrations from everyday patterns. “In the process of operating within the same area over a prolonged period, an intelligence network was eventually established,” wrote historian Michael Hennessy. One CAP that was almost entirely surrounded by enemy forces survived in part because the local woodcutters would see the enemy move in and warn the Marines. It was hardly a hand-holding program. Marines in the program accounted for just 1.5 percent of all Marines in Vietnam but suffered 3.2 percent of casualties—and inflicted 8 percent of enemy casualties. In other words, they were hit disproportionately, but they were effective militarily. These efforts would become the road not taken in Vietnam: the harder but better alternative to firepower-oriented search-and-destroy operations.

  The Army’s leaders in Vietnam, being focused on big battles as the way to win the war, objected vigorously to the Marine programs. Maj. Gen. Harry Kinnard, who commanded the first full Army division sent into Vietnam, reported later that he was “absolutely disgusted” with the Marine Corps. “I did everything I could to drag them out and get them to fight. . . . They just wouldn’t play. They just would not play. They didn’t know how to fight on land, particularly against guerrillas.” DePuy felt similarly, telling the historian Krepinevich that “the Marines came in and just sat down and didn’t do anything. They were involved in counterinsurgency of the deliberate, mild sort.” Westmoreland felt that the Marine Corps leadership back in Washington was meddling in his war; he wrote in his diary in 1965 that “I detect a tendency for the Marine chain of command to try to unduly influence the tactical conduct of III MAF [Marine Amphibious Forc
e] which is under my operational control.”

  DePuy, then chief of operations for Westmoreland, reportedly urged him to order the Marines to launch large-scale operations. Westmoreland dismissed the Marine programs as too troop-intensive, too consuming to implement across Vietnam—a view that ignores the fact that the Marine program was intended to spread like an oil spot, with Marines expanding areas of security and Vietnamese forces filling in behind them. Westmoreland’s senior intelligence officer in 1967–68 was Lt. Gen. Phillip Davidson, who had served under Patton in World War II and then, during the Korean War, had served as chief of plans and estimates under Maj. Gen. Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief. In Vietnam, Davidson said, “Westmoreland’s interest always lay in the big-unit war. Pacification bored him.” The Army remained focused on killing the enemy rather than protecting the population. It would not explore the Marine alternative, despite the fact that it was a more cost-effective option. As Thomas Thayer pointed out, it was far cheaper to pay the enemy to quit fighting than to kill him. The cost of bringing in a Communist defector under the amnesty program called Chieu Hoi (“Open Arms”) averaged out to less than $350, with a total of 176,000 such turncoats during the war. The cost of killing an enemy combatant with firepower, by contrast, averaged out to $60,000. Of course, we do not know how many stayed turned, while the dead stayed that way.

  As Gen. DePuy put it to Daniel Ellsberg, then a trusted counterinsurgency specialist, over lunch in his 1st Infantry Division headquarters, “The solution in Vietnam is more bombs, more shells, more napalm . . . till the other side cracks and gives up.” His view would prevail, as the Army, by late 1966, had 95 percent of its combat battalions in Vietnam carrying out search-and-destroy operations—a term coined by none other than DePuy, who drily noted, “It turned out to be infelicitous.” In one two-month operation in 1967, code-named Junction City, American forces killed fewer than two thousand Viet Cong while firing 366,000 artillery rounds and dropping more than 3,000 tons of bombs.

  By 1967, the new Marine commander in Vietnam, Lt. Gen. Robert Cushman, was ready to give up the struggle with the Army. “I soon figured out how Westy liked to operate and tried to operate the same way, and get on with the war and not cause a lot of friction for no good reason,” he said years later. In February 1968, Westmoreland, not quite mollified, established a forward headquarters near the Marines to keep an eye on them. The move was taken as a sign of distrust. “I thought it was the most unpardonable thing that [the U.S. military headquarters in] Saigon ever did,” said Maj. Gen. Rathvon Tompkins, commander of the 3rd Marine Division. Marines continued to believe that a counterinsurgency campaign built around protecting the Vietnamese people and separating them from the Viet Cong would have worked. “Westmoreland never understood it thoroughly,” Gen. Krulak said at Annapolis in 1969. “He doesn’t yet.”

  DePuy’s search-and-destroy approach was a constant in Army operations, from Korea to Vietnam and then into the first years of the Iraq war, in 2003–4. In each war, Army officers often maintained, the Americans could have prevailed if only they had been allowed to unleash all their firepower. The problem with this hawkish view is that it has never been proven, while the lavish application of firepower that did occur over several years in Vietnam tends to argue against it. Those who say that more bombing would have led to success offer no explanation for why the bombardment of Laos did not succeed. The campaign there, not subject to political constraints, was extremely heavy, with some 8,500 sorties by B-52s in 1970 alone—more than twice as many sorties as there were in South Vietnam that year—yet it did not succeed in cutting the flow of supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “The allies had enormous firepower, combat support and the ability to move forces quickly,” noted the Pentagon’s Thayer. “But the communists won.”

  Another view, heard more often outside the military, was that neither the Marine approach nor a more intensive use of firepower would have worked, because both represented doomed attempts by an outside force to counter the fundamental facts of culture and politics in a far-off part of the world quite foreign to the Americans. The most comprehensive and balanced study of American pacification efforts in Vietnam concluded that it probably would not have led to eventual success, for much the same reason that the attrition strategy did not work: The price, in blood, money, and time, was more than the American people would be willing to pay. “Given the iron determination of the communists to unite Vietnam, their patience and resilience, their strategic and tactical flexibility, on the one hand, and the systemic problems of the Saigon government, on the other, the answer is no,” wrote Richard Hunt. “The advocates of pacification hoped it would cause a fundamental transformation of South Vietnam. But even if that transformation had occurred, it would most likely have taken too long and would in any case have exhausted the patience of the American people, inevitably eroding support in the United States.” Ironically, this entire argument about whether to work with the people would be repeated almost word for word four decades later in Iraq and Afghanistan—the major difference being that a small group of Army officers who rallied around the new American commander in Iraq in 2007, Gen. David Petraeus, would become the main proponents of the new counterinsurgency school, following the path not taken in Vietnam.

  Less heard in this debate were the voices of the South Vietnamese military, which favored the local security approach long before the Americans became attuned to it. Its commanders have argued that a strategy based on providing security in villages could have worked—especially if the Americans had been better focused on enabling the South Vietnamese people to carry more of the load. “Tactics employed by the CAPs were founded on three basic principles: tactical mobility, economy of force, and credible permanence,” recalled Lt. Gen. Truong. “The basic tactical idea was to lay out a screen of ambushes on the approaches to the hamlet instead of putting up a static defense wall around it. . . . By virtue of this quality of elusive mobility, the CAP seemed to be everywhere but never predictably anywhere.” The effect of this was to deny Viet Cong fighters crucial sources of manpower, food, and taxes, he concluded. “The advantages of the CAP were obvious. It provided continuous protection to the village; it trained and motivated a local self-defense force; and it was a potential source for the type of intelligence that would ultimately break the enemy infrastructure.” Lt. Gen. Dong Van Khuyen, a former chief of staff of the South Vietnamese general staff, argued that the village defense approach was effective in part because it was consistent with Vietnamese traditions of local self-government. “Had it been fully developed and implemented, the enemy would have been beaten at his own game,” he wrote in 1978. “Since the Communist infrastructure and guerrillas could operate only if supported and sheltered by the people, then only the people could single them out and destroy them.”

  That approach was flatly rejected by senior American commanders. Instead, as Westmoreland himself put it, the United States engaged in “a protracted war of attrition”—never a good bet to win the support of the American people, especially in a small, hot country on the far side of the world. Nor did it make fundamental sense in operational terms. Search and destroy was a tactically offensive approach, but it was carried out while the American military was in a strategically defensive position, sitting in South Vietnam and waiting for attackers to move in from the North. This meant that even if the United States could pour firepower onto the battlefield, the enemy could moderate the pace of combat at will and, as a result, adjust its casualty rate—which undercut the attritionist approach. Even DePuy, that most aggressive of commanders, was surprised, when leading the 1st Infantry Division, at the difficulty his units had in finding and pursuing the enemy. “It turned out they controlled the tempo of the war better than we would admit,” he said decades later. “We beat the devil out of ’em time after time, and they just pulled off and waited and regained their strength until they could afford some more losses. Then they came back again. . . . So we ended
up with no operational plan that had the slightest chance of ending the war favorably.”

  In other words, the enemy was allowed to determine the time, place, and pace of battle and so, to a surprising extent, could regulate his level of casualties. This, in turn, called into question the entire strategy of attrition. And that meant that the American strategy was essentially a recipe for an open-ended war that could not be won. “As long as they could control their losses, there was no way you could bring the war to any kind of a conclusion,” DePuy would conclude in 1985. A strategy of attrition might possibly have succeeded only if the United States had been willing to fight a much broader and riskier war, sending several divisions to invade North Vietnam and also to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. It was not willing to take that risk, especially given the possibility that such a campaign would have provoked a large-scale Chinese intervention, as had happened in Korea in 1950. So, like a full-blown counterinsurgency approach, this remains a road not taken, an unknowable theoretical alternative.

  c. In personnel policy

  In Colorado Springs, one evening in March 1976, four military officers were discussing American personnel policies in the Vietnam War. “If you attempted to run a business like that, it would go under,” commented an Air Force officer.

  “Ours did,” an Army infantry major responded.

  There is an old military saying that amateurs talk tactics, while professionals talk logistics. In fact, real insiders talk about personnel policy, which as they know shapes the American military to a surprising extent. Even had the Vietnam War been better conducted by American generals in the field, the personnel policies put in place by generals back at the Pentagon still might have undercut the American effort. During the American foray in Vietnam, the Pentagon used an approach to personnel that verged on the bizarre, with troops coming and going under a policy of individual one-year rotations and commanders moving on at about the time they began to understand their tactical situation. “It’s the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” Gen. Donn Starry said later.