Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

by Tsouras, Peter

  In Malaya the British had forced the peasants to live in “strategic hamlets” which ensured good local government at the same time as they protected the population and separated it from the guerrillas. Such strategic hamlets had naturally been a major theme of Thompson’s teaching when he arrived in Saigon to advise Diem, and an ambitious building program had indeed been implemented. Unfortunately, however, the program proved to be far too ambitious for the resources allocated to it, even when those resources actually found their way down the chain of command to the hamlets themselves, which was rarely the case. Corruption and back-handers at every level sucked off the necessary financial and logistic means, while politics and propaganda conspired to conceal this fact from the resource-giving authorities. Many of the hamlets were built only on paper, while most of the rest involved the enforced creation of masses of homeless people who were thereby thrown directly into the arms of VC recruiting sergeants. Nor did proposals for land reform fare any better, since many of the rich absentee landlords were influential friends and supporters of the Saigon political élite. If the government had deprived them of their land, it would at the same time have been depriving itself of its key backers.

  Thompson had pondered these failures long and hard by the time he arrived in Secretary McNamara’s office, and he was more than ready to explain his proposed solutions in detail. He especially demanded a unified chain of command for the COIN effort, clearly ring-fenced as a distinct entity, and completely separate from all the confusing overlaps, inefficiencies and vaguenesses that normally applied to both the South Vietnamese and US command hierarchies. Then he wanted far more resources allocated to the building of strategic hamlets, but this time guaranteed by trusted local authorities, each subject to strong US supervision, so that everything would be done properly and carefully, with the minimum of corruption. The scheme could not be applied to the whole country all at once, as Diem had tried to do it, but should begin with relatively small areas and then expand systematically outwards as and when solid bases had been fully established. In Thompson’s view each village should contain a small group of US civilian and military personnel led by a junior officer or NCO who would possess sufficient personal qualities and initiative to help the local people to organize themselves, and hence keep the program as a whole well on track.

  In the event Thompson was relieved to find that McNamara was a very receptive host, not only willing to hear him out, but even actively egging him on. The Secretary of Defense was a man who perpetually asked questions of everyone he met, and now he revealed that during the final months of the Diem regime he had come to distrust the uncritically optimistic answers that he had been getting back from the higher echelons of the CIA and the Pentagon, particularly on the progress of counter-insurgency in the Mekong Delta. He now needed to hear more independent voices who could point him in the direction of new policy guidelines. He remembered that President Kennedy had made great play with the idea of teaching counter-insurgency doctrine to the US military, but that the impetus had fallen on stony ground, and the lessons had never been properly absorbed.4

  The military had insisted on clinging to their time-honored answers to conventional warfare problems, such as “firepower” and “mobility,” and were too little prepared to understand that in an insurgency war it was far more important to win hearts and minds. In McNamara’s opinion that situation had to be reversed as a very high priority and, provided he explained it all properly to the new President, he was sure that it could be. The main reason was that Lyndon B. Johnston was currently taking his advice pretty straight about matters of this type, since he did not see Vietnam as his number one priority in December 1963. From the perspective of the White House, Pentagon politics and Indochinese insurgencies seemed to be little more than irritating distractions from the main project, which was to build a “Great Society” within the United States. Yet McNamara was convinced that if Vietnam were not given serious and urgent attention, the security situation there would only degenerate until it came to dominate the whole political horizon in Washington.

  Between them, McNamara and Thompson agreed that for the time being they effectively held the con on Vietnam, and so they sat down to sketch out their five key objectives, together with some of the key obstacles that would have to be overcome. The objectives were these:-

  1. Ring-fencing the COIN chain of command, to free it from interference from the many agencies, both South Vietnamese and American, which were currently making coherent policy-making impossible. In particular this implied a much stronger coordinating role for the US ambassador in Saigon, who at that moment was the newly-arrived but very shrewd Republican patrician, Henry Cabot Lodge.5 It was essential to give him day-to-day control over all military and intelligence agencies, since the Pentagon in particular had already shown that it instinctively distrusted COIN thinking—or indeed any solution that included the words “political” or “civilian.” Equally the ambassador would have to adopt a newly tough posture towards the South Vietnamese government itself, since in the past it had all too often failed to follow through on US-sponsored initiatives. In the new Thompson–McNamara view the situation had now become too important to the essential interests of the USA for the theoretical independence of its Southeast Asian ally to continue to be allowed the full respect normally expected by diplomatic protocol. The tail, in short, could no longer be allowed to wag the dog.

  2. The careful building of a revitalized strategic hamlet program, including increased participation by US professional soldiers and civilians, plus a major effort to identify, support and protect effective South Vietnamese local administrators, teachers, medical and agricultural staff. Thompson had learned by bitter experience how badly these things could go wrong unless they were carefully and closely monitored, so he was determined not to make the same mistakes again. He was particularly anxious to involve the US Army and Marines in low level civic action, in units of no more than four, eight or twelve men, rather than the companies of 120 or more that still seemed to be their favoured tactical grouping. Despite the anguish that he knew it would cause among the straight-laced champions of the conventional line army, he demanded an immediate doubling of the Green Berets, to be followed by a gradual subsequent expansion until their numbers approached those of Armor Branch. Yet in order to avoid overstraining the active army worldwide, there would be a major call-up of reservists and National Guard personnel.

  Of vital importance to this decision was the dramatic moment when Army Chief of Staff, General Harold K. Johnson, confronted the President. The general had made it plain the Army could not make a commitment to Vietnam without calling out the Reserves and National Guard. LBJ had agreed and then reneged out of fear of the political backlash. General Johnson put his stars on President Johnson’s desk, and for once LBJ backed down.

  Of paramount importance in calling up the Reserve Components was the leading role given to the Army Reserve’s Civil Affairs units. These units were filled with experts from civilian life in just about every form of civil government from sewage treatment to the protection of arts and monuments and in a wide range of commercial and industrial skills. In World War II such units had restored shattered governments and economies, while at the same time demonstrating the value of the democratic model. Thompson felt the constructive orientation of these citizen soldiers was just the right fit for COIN. By the same token there would be an insistence on “the minimum use of force” and the maximum respect for ordinary Vietnamese civilians. Equally a target was set for 90 percent of all US aid to South Vietnam to be dedicated to programs which supported civilian rather than purely military operations.6

  3. A major program to buy out the absentee landowners, in order to return land to the farmers who actually lived on it and worked it. Thompson saw this as the real key to winning the hearts and minds of the local peasant hierarchies, and an essential accompaniment to the strategic hamlet program. By giving land to the peasants he would win their loyalty and create s
trong democratic local government structures to replace the existing fragile and undemocratic ones imposed from Saigon. In many ways Thompson saw the small but ultra-rich group of absentee landowners as a worse destabilizing factor in Vietnamese society than the VC—but a great deal less difficult to neutralize.

  4. The rule of law and eradication of corruption were aspirations of the Vietnamese people every bit as powerful as their desire to own their own land. The military and local government authorities should therefore in future be held strictly accountable for all their actions, and governed by due legal process by an independent judiciary. Assassination and torture were to be outlawed as instruments of state policy, and much greater funds dedicated to the welfare—and it was hoped conversion—of prisoners. The South Vietnamese police should be built up and supervized by sophisticated anti-corruption measures. All this was truly revolutionary in the security environment created by the Diem regime.

  5. A reduced role in local-level counter-insurgency for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), but an increased role in protecting the borders from infiltration from North Vietnam. According to the new Thompson-McNamara thinking, the ARVN was ineffective in the village war, but could be more effective as a conventional force, thereby obviating the need for a major deployment of US troops to fulfil this role.

  If the 20,000 US military advisers currently in-country could be quietly increased to, say, 80,000, it would not seriously disrupt the American military posture worldwide, but it could offer a solid backbone for a battle-ready and effective Vietnamese Army. Considerable “Vietnamized” forces of tanks, armored personnel carriers (APCs) and some helicopters would be needed in border areas, supported by as big a tactical air force as the Vietnamese could operate. However, there was no need for more than a small US Air Force in support except in times of great crisis, and an assessment was made that any strategic bombing campaign into North Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia was doomed to be counter-productive. Since there were no strategic targets worthy of the name, it would be a complete waste of Air Force assets (let alone involving the Strategic Air Command!) to undertake such a campaign. On the contrary, all the experience of earlier wars showed that strategic bombing only strengthened the target population’s will to resist, as well as winning it precious international sympathy. The large scale use of American air power in this campaign would therefore surely undo all the “hearts and minds” progress that was being made on the ground, and so it was not contemplated.

  At the same time as they set out their objectives, Thompson and McNamara naturally considered the obstacles they were likely to encounter. The big two were both deeply political, inside Washington and Saigon respectively. What was being proposed was a radical shake-up of the whole chain of command within the Pentagon—where McNamara was already deeply unpopular for his independent business-based solutions in many other areas—and within the South Vietnamese military dictatorship, which was excessively centralized, undemocratic and corrupt. In effect the Thompson—McNamara agenda represented a radical “anti-militarist” program, in the interests of democracy and civilian primacy. In order to succeed it would require the sustained support of the President over a long period of time, together with some favorable spin in the media. The American people would have to be persuaded not only to get behind a COIN effort that would last for decades rather than months or years, but also that it had to be won by civilian rather than military means.

  There was of course also a distinct military dimension to the problem, since the VC guerrillas were roaming free in the South Vietnamese countryside, assassinating government agents, organizing logistic and political bases, and from time to time engaging the ARVN in some large scale firefights. Behind them lay a growing potential for North Vietnamese Army (NVA) intervention, as increasingly large parties of regular troops were identified making their way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia into the South. The border they had to cross was notoriously long, permeable, mountainous and jungle-clad. It did not make a defensive line that was easy to hold, although on the other side of the coin it certainly demanded a debilitatingly long and difficult march from the heavily-burdened infantry who were being ordered to invade the South. They had to operate at the far end of a perilously over-extended line of communication.

  After Thompson and McNamara had thought through their plan and consulted other advisors for about a month, the Secretary of Defense finally felt ready to present it all to the President as a firm recommendation. Distracted as he was by the many other cares of his new office, LBJ was more than ready to wave it through without argument. As a civilian himself he was quite happy to buy into the idea that pacification should be led by civilians, and in any case he accepted that, despite all military criticisms, Robert McNamara was still very much the head of the Pentagon. If the man in that particularly key position was saying that the military should be subordinated to civilians, there was ostensibly little alternative to accepting his opinion. As a first mark of his commitment to this policy the President immediately applied his charms to persuading the civilian Cabot Lodge to remain in station as ambassador in Saigon. At the same time General Maxwell D. Taylor, who had originally been earmarked as Lodge’s successor, was tactfully diverted to a prestigious ambassadorial role with NATO in Brussels—not so many miles away from his triumphant 1944 battlefield at Bastogne.

  Saigon, South Vietnam: January 1964

  When Thompson returned to his office in Saigon in early January there was already a fierce bureaucratic battle in full swing between the newly-empowered US ambassador and the entrenched interests at the head of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), the CIA and the other US agencies. It soon became clear that Ambassador Lodge was winning. He was not personally easy to work with, and he was certainly making a lengthy list of enemies by his new tough policies, but he was industrious, effective and respected by his staff. With the backing of the President he was now able to bang heads together and move towards a coherent chain of command. Many old Vietnam hands reported how refreshing it was to see someone “cutting through the BS” and forcing the cozy mandarins to see some reality at last.

  When it came to relations with the new Vietnamese government, led by Generals Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”) and Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Lodge found a mood of unprecedented willingness to cooperate with the Americans at all levels. There was still a widespread sense of relief that the oppressive Diem regime had been removed, and a rare willingness to pull together. As soldiers, moreover, the Vietnamese leaders were excited by the prospect that the Americans would relieve them of much of the burden of fighting the “village war” against the VC, thereby releasing the ARVN to operate in formed units in the frontier areas. Conversely they were made aware that if they did not accept a greater US primacy than had hitherto been the case, the new US administration would be ruthless in cutting its aid. Lodge spelled it out credibly that Lyndon Johnson was mainly interested in domestic politics, and did not think it was too late to pull out of Southeast Asia if full cooperation were not forthcoming. This was a threat that would not have carried as much weight while the internationalist Jack Kennedy had still been in office.

  There were naturally some sections of the ARVN which resented and resisted this new state of inter-allied relations, just as there was an influential section of the South Vietnamese political class which refused to accept the compulsory purchase of their estates, regardless of the generosity of the compensation to be paid. They felt the policy of eradicating absentee landowners was a direct assault on their traditional way of life, rather than on their finances. Of course many were compliant and willing to be bribed, especially those who had received no rent in recent years because their lands were controlled by the VC. Nevertheless there remained a hard core of opponents at the top of Saigon society.

  In these circumstances it soon came to Lodge’s ears that a second military coup was being plotted. The plan was that Major-General Nguyen Khanh would topple Big Minh on January 30, to resto
re what he called “national pride” in the face of “outrageous American demands.” If this coup had succeeded, the country would have been plunged back into chaos and any hope of building a systematic COIN policy could be forgotten. However, by a mixture of good luck, good intelligence work and an unprecedented US willingness to become directly involved, the coup was defeated, Nguyen Khanh was retired and persuaded to emigrate to Paris, and the Big Minh regime was saved. It was given a chance to consolidate its power throughout the army, the absentee landowners and the provincial governments, and despite some failures and even a few spectacular disasters, it generally succeeded very well. Stability was at last assured, at least for the medium term.7

  On the wider diplomatic plane the State Department announced to the world that the USA was going to commit greatly increased manpower and funds to its campaign to create a newly democratic style of government in Vietnam, and it appealed to all its allies to send aid and specialized assistance, especially in the form of specialist civilian workers, trained police and high quality infantry. Naturally the nations that were most beholden to America, and geographically closest to Indochina, were the most enthusiastic in their response: South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps unexpectedly, however, a wider circle of US allies also felt enough confidence in the new policies to overcome their natural suspicions of a situation which under Diem had seemed to be going from bad to worse. For widely different but equally understandable reasons Japan, Malaysia, India, France, West Germany and Israel felt they could send only civilian teams; but Britain and Canada caused a minor diplomatic stir when they also committed detachments of élite troops, and even Italy sent a combined battalion of construction engineers and a Bersaglieri security guard. In no cases were the contingents numerically large, but the key point of note was that they were fully dedicated for what everyone understood would be at least a ten-year mission.