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American Strategy in Vietnam
A Critical Analysis
By Harry G. Summers Jr. Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-12155-0
CHAPTER 1
THE NATIONAL WILL: THE PEOPLE
Vietnam was a reaffirmation of the peculiar relationship between the American Army and the American people. The American Army really is a people's Army in the sense that it belongs to the American people who take a jealous and proprietary interest in its involvement. When the Army is committed the American people are committed, when the American people lose their commitment it is futile to try to keep the Army committed. In the final analysis, the American Army is not so much an arm of the Executive Branch as it is an arm of the American people. The Army, therefore, cannot be committed lightly.
General Fred C. Weyand Chief of Staff, US Army, July 1976
One of the more simplistic explanations for our failure in Vietnam is that it was all the fault of the American people—that it was caused by a collapse of national will. Happily for the health of the Republic, this evasion is rare among Army officers. A stab-in-the-back syndrome never developed after Vietnam.
By an ironic twist of fate, the animosity of the Officer Corps was drained off to a large extent by General William C. Westmoreland. On his shoulders was laid much of the blame for our Vietnam failure. According to a 1970 analysis, "For the older men, the villains tend to be timorous civilians and the left-wing press; for the younger men, they are the tradition-bound senior generals and the craven press. For one group, it is the arrogance of McNamara; for the other the rigidity of Westmoreland." Those then "younger men" now make up the majority of the Army's senior officers. For example, the Vietnam experience of the Army War College Class of 1980 was mostly at the platoon and company level. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, placing the blame on General Westmoreland was unfair, but, unfair or not, it did spare another innocent victim—the American people.
The main reason it is not right to blame the American public is that President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a conscious decision not to mobilize the American people—to invoke the national will—for the Vietnam war. As former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Phil G. Goulding commented, "In my four-year tour [July 1965-January 1969] there was not once a significant organized effort by the Executive Branch of the federal government to put across its side of a major policy issue or a major controversy to the American people. Not once was there a 'public affairs program' ... worthy of the name." Having deliberately never been built, it could hardly be said that the national will "collapsed." According to his biographer, President Johnson's decision not to mobilize the American people was based on his fears that it would jeopardize his "Great Society" programs. As he himself said,:
... History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: The Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society....
And the Generals. Oh, they'd love the war, too. It's hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That's why I am suspicious of the military. They're always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms.
What the military needed to tell our Commander-in-Chief was not just about battles and bombs and bullets. They needed to tell him that, as Clausewitz discovered 150 years earlier, "it would be an obvious fallacy to imagine war between civilized peoples as resulting merely from a rational act on the part of the Government and to consider war as gradually ridding itself of passion." They needed to tell him that it would be an obvious fallacy to commit the Army without first commiting the American people. Such a commitment would require battlefield competence and clear-cut objectives to be sustained, but without the commitment of the American people the commitment of the Army to prolonged combat was impossible.
Unfortunately, this fallacy was not obvious to either the military or its Commander-in-Chief, for the limited war theorists had excluded the American people from the strategic equation. With World War II fresh in their minds, they equated mobilizing national will with total war, and they believed total war unthinkable in a nuclear age. Even as astute a military strategist as General Matthew B. Ridgway saw dangers in mobilizing the American people for a limited war. Unfortunately nuclear weapons had obscured the realities of American military history. With the exception of the two world wars and the Civil War, all of our wars had been limited wars. They had only to hark back to the turn of the century when America was swept with war fever by cries of "Remember the Maine!" Yet, even though America was aroused, we fought the Spanish-American War without invading Spain or seizing its capital.
For most of our history, the support of the American people was built into our very force structuring. The Army consisted of a rather small standing force, backed up first by the reserve forces of the National Guard and Army Reserve, and ultimately by nationwide conscription. The American people had to give their approval through their elected representative in Congress before this Army could be mobilized and deployed. As recently as 1939 the Army's Field Service Regulations stated as the first principle of operations, "The Congress determines the strength and composition of the peace and war establishments and decides what citizens are available for military service." The regulation defined the Army as including not only the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the Army Reserve, but also the "unorganized militia (which) comprises all persons ... who have been or may be declared by the Congress to be liable to perform military duty in the service of the United States."
As The Federalist Papers clearly show, the Founding Fathers deliberately rejected the idea of an 18th century-type Army answerable only to the Executive. They wrote into the Constitution specific safeguards to ensure the people's control of the military. These safeguards would ensure civilian control of the military, and, in so doing, guarantee that the United States would not go to war without the initial support of the American people. This secondary effect is often overlooked. Contrary to popular mythology, maintaining public support was a constant problem during the Revolutionary War. As Brigadier General Dave Palmer pointed out in his book on American strategy during the American Revolutionary War, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were "Mostly men who had served in Congress and the Army during the Revolution." They knew from bitter experiences the difficulty of maintaining public support throughout the conduct of a war. "Drawing on their successful wartime experiences, they not surprisingly formally incorporated into the new constitution the informal but effective relationships developed in that war." The Constitutional requirement for a congressional declaration of war served a dual purpose. It insured public support at the outset, and through the legal sanctions against dealing with the enemy, it created impediments to public dissent.
After World War II this connection between the Army and the people was weakened in the name of insuring more rapid response to threats of American security. For the first time in our history a large standing military was maintained in peacetime and our reserve forces declined in importance. The unwitting effect of this was the creation of a neo-18th century-type Army answerable more to the Executive than to the American people. In June 1950, the President—without asking the Congress for a declaration of war—committed this Army to combat in Korea. The reaction to this action in the Congress should have warned us, as General Weyand put it, that the American people take a jealous and proprietary interest in the commitment of their Army.
During what General Matthew Ridgway called "The Great Debate" on the Korean war (the 1951 Joint Senate Armed Forces and Foreign Affairs Committee Hearings), one of the major topics was the issue of Constitutional control over the military. In their findings the committee emphasized that "The United States should never again become involved in war without the consent of the Congress." They were particularly concerned that the Korean war not set a precedent for the commitment of the Army without congressional consent.
Presaging what was to follow in the Vietnam war, the military witnesses did not see the criticality of this point. For example, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon asked General MacArthur "Do you believe that we should have declared war against the Koreans or against the Chinese?" MacArthur answered that we were in fact practicing war—a limited war to which he objected but a war nonetheless. When asked about the constitutionality of the war he replied that "the actions of the United Nations might well be regarded as (the) declaration of war." Senator Harry P. Cain of Washington later raised the same question and MacArthur answered "I have never given special consideration to the technical question of whether a declaration of war should be made or not."
Senator Cain later asked then Secretary of Defense George Marshall, "Tell me what modern day factors require a formal declaration of war against our enemies?" General Marshall agreed it was an important question but evaded the issue and laid the blame on the complications of collective action. During the questioning of General of the Army Omar Bradley (then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) by Senator William Knowland of California and Senator Cain, General Bradley said "Someone might question whether technically or not (the Korean war) was a war because normally Congress declares war and I don't believe Congress has declared a war.... The question of when you declare a war in this case, how you do it, and how you explain to the people the exact nature of it I don't know."
It is often forgotten that the attempt to fight without mobilizing the American people and without a declaration of war by the Congress almost came to grief in Korea. As General Maxwell D. Taylor wrote:
The national behavior showed a tendency to premature war-weariness and precipitate disenchantment with a policy which had led to a stalemated war. This experience, if remembered, could have given some warning of dangers ahead to the makers of the subsequent Vietnam policy. Unfortunately, there was no thoroughgoing analysis ever made of the lessons to be learned from Korea, and later policy makers proceeded to repeat many of the same mistakes.
With all the warnings that the Korean war provided about the importance of mobilizing the national will and legitimizing this mobilization through a declaration of war, how could we go so wrong in Vietnam? Part of the answer is in the temper of the times.
The Vietnam war coincided with a social upheaval in America where the old rules and regulations were dismissed as irrelevant and history no longer had anything to offer. There were those who proclaimed it a new age—the "Age of Aquarius." Even the term sounds banal today, but in the mid-1960s respected speakers at Leavenworth and Carlisle were warning the Army that we were entering a new phase—"post-industrial society," "Consciousness Three"—and "relevancy" was the watchword.
In December 1979, social commentator Tom Wolfe was asked about the collapse of these notions. He answered by saying that in the 1970s the flower children in Haight-Ashbury began appearing in health clinics with diseases unknown since the Middle Ages. They had learned the hard way why there were rules on personal hygiene and regulations about public sanitation. He prophesied that in the decade ahead, Americans will relearn the necessity for the societal rules that were ignored or abandoned in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Like the flower children, the Army and the military establishment went through its own version of the Age of Aquarius. We thought the rules for taking America to war were hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date. Like society, we became confused between form and substance. Legalistic arguments that the form of a declaration of war was out-of-date may have been technically correct, but they obscured the fact that this form was designed to be an outward manifestation of a critical substance—the support and commitment of the American people.
A formal declaration of war was seen as a useless piece of paper, in much the same light as many saw the marriage certificate. In the 1960s and early 1970s there were many, especially among the trendy and sophisticated, who saw marriage as an antiquated institution. By avoiding marriage they thought that they could avoid the trauma of divorce, just as some thought that by avoiding a declaration of war they could avoid the trauma of war. But thousands of years of human nature and human experience are not so easily changed. By the late 1970s it had become obvious that formal institutions had societal value. This reaction was summed up by Washington Post writer Judith Martin in her "Miss Manners" column. Someone wrote questioning the worth of a marriage certificate, since it was just a piece of paper. She replied, "Miss Manners has a whole safety deposit box full of pieces of paper."
Pieces of paper do have value. A marriage certificate—or a declaration of war—legitimizes the relationship in the eyes of society and announces it to the world. It focuses attention, provides certain responsibilities, and creates impediments to dissolution. While neither a marriage certificate nor a declaration of war are guarantees for staying the course, these legal forms are of immense value to society.
But in the early 1960s we were under the delusion that we could disregard not only the form of a declaration of war but also its substance—the mobilization of the American people. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was quoted as saying:
The greatest contribution Vietnam is making—right or wrong is beside the point—is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.
But "right or wrong" was not beside the point and neither was the intangible of "public ire." Vietnam reinforced the lessons of Korea that there was more to war, even limited war, than those things that could be measured, quantified and computerized. A bitter little story made the rounds during the closing days of the Vietnam war:
When the Nixon Administration took over in 1969 all the data on North Vietnam and on the United States was fed into a Pentagon computer—population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, number of tanks, ships, and aircraft, size of the armed forces, and the like.
The computer was then asked, 'When will we win?'
It took only a moment to give the answer: 'You won in 1964!'
The story had a bite, for by every quantifiable measurement there was simply no contest between the United States, the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, and a tenth-rate backward nation like North Vietnam. Yet there was one thing that did not fit into the computer—national will, what Clausewitz calls the moral factor. We have seen earlier that President Johnson deliberately avoided mobilizing the national will so as not to jeopardize his Great Society programs. The North Vietnamese, after their experience with the French, had every reason to believe that American morale could be our weak strategic link. Knowing they did not have the military means to defeat us, they concentrated on this weakness. It was not a new strategy. "When we speak of destroying the enemy's forces," Clausewitz wrote, "we must emphasize that nothing obliges us to limit this idea to physical forces: The moral element must also be considered."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Strategy in Vietnam by Harry G. Summers Jr.. Copyright © 2014 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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