Bureaucracy At War

U.S. Performance In The Vietnam Conflict

Robert W. Komer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429717970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bureaucracy At War U.S. Performance In The Vietnam Conflict is an encyclopaedic analysis of many issues raised in the course of the Vietnam War. Komer questions the presence of the U.S in South-east Asia as well as tackling technical, strategic, tactical, military and non-military issues.

1
VIETNAM WAS DIFFERENT, AND WE KNEW IT

DOI: 10.4324/9780429036125-1

In analyzing the long and costly U.S. entanglement in Vietnam, with its many tragic consequences, it is important to look at performance as well as policy. Whatever the wisdom of U.S. intervention on the side of South Vietnam, the resulting immense disparity in strength and resources between the two sides would have suggested a different outcome—as indeed it did to successive U.S. administrations. Yet why did a cumulatively enormous U.S. contribution—on top of South Vietnam's own great effort—have such limited impact for so long? Why, almost regardless of the ultimate outcome, did U.S. intervention entail such disproportionate costs and tragic side effects?

The reasons are many, complex, and interrelated. They include the unique and unfamiliar—at least in U.S. experience—conflict environment in which we became enmeshed. We repeatedly misjudged the enemy, especially his ability to frustrate our aims by his tactics and to counterescalate at every stage. Another constraint was implicit in the incremental nature of our response, doing only what we believed minimally necessary at each stage.

As heirs to the French, we inherited their colonialist mantle, The Government of South Vietnam (GVN) were portrayed as our puppets— disadvantages which Hanoi and its captive National Liberation Front vigorously exploited. We suffered even more from the sharp contrast between the adversary we faced and the ally we supported—a tightly controlled, ideologically disciplined regime in Hanoi and a revolutionary Viet Cong apparatus versus a weak traditionalist regime barely governing a still half-formed nation in the South.¹

Thus, any serious analysis of U.S. performance in the Vietnam war must start from explicit recognition of how different it was from any major conflict in previous U.S. experience. Each war is different from the last, but most will concede that Vietnam was much more different from Korea than, say, Korea was from World War II. By almost any standard, Vietnam presented a highly atypical conflict environment to the U.S. and its allies. As Samuel Huntington has pointed out,

the situational characteristics of our Vietnamese entanglement were in many respects quite unique. The Vietnam problem was a legacy of Western colonial rule, which has just about disappeared from world politics. Vietnam was, in addition, the one European colony in which, for a variety of complex and unique historical factors, communist groups established an early ascendancy in the nationalist movement. In no other European colony—much less any American one—have communism and nationalism been more closely linked. The resulting problems were compounded by a combined heritage of Chinese and French cultural primacy which reinforced each other in emphasizing rule by an intellectual-administrative elite culturally and socially divorced from the mass of the population. The struggle for independence led to a divided country, again a sequence of events which seems unlikely to be duplicated in the future. Finally, the American involvement in Vietnam came at the end of cycle of active American concern with foreign affairs which seems unlikely to be repeated for some time in the future.²

Much more could be said about these many special circumstances which made Vietnam so prickly a nettle. Not least among them were all the sheer practical problems of coping with an unfamiliar conflict environment, strange culture patterns, and the like. Almost as unfamiliar was the very nature of the revolutionary conflict in which we became enmeshed: a largely political insurgency war. General Lewis Walt is a refreshingly candid witness on this score: "Soon after I arrived in Vietnam it became obvious to me that I had neither a real understanding of the nature of the war nor any clear idea as how to win it."³

Such unique circumstances do much to explain why the GVN, and later the United States, had such difficulty in coping with the threats which they confronted. They posed a whole series of real-life constraints, which largely determined what realistically could and could not be accomplished in Vietnam. Huntington concludes that they also may make Vietnam "irrelevant" as a source of lessons for the future. He warns about the danger of drawing "mislessons" from it.

It is true, of course, that "every historical event or confluence of events is unique" and its characteristics hardly likely to be precisely duplicated elsewhere.⁴ But even these circumstances are insufficient to explain why the U.S. and the GVN did so poorly for so long. Why is it that over sixteen years, with a massive investment of over $330 billion (in today's dollars) and direct intervention with over a half-million troops at peak, the U.S. was unable to devise a more successful response? Herein may lie some useful lessons of wider application.

Moreover, the author is one of those who contend that to a great extent U.S. policymakers realized how different Vietnam was and what difficulties we faced. Undersecretary of State George Ball was one well-known Cassandra, but there were many others. "There were all kinds of warnings that were heard and even listened to at the highest levels of government. At no point could anyone properly say, 'We didn't know it was loaded.'"⁵

Other analysts have also developed the thesis that the U.S. government knew what it was getting into, although more with respect to how the U.S. got progressively more enmeshed in Vietnam than with respect to its performance in the field. Take Leslie Gelb's fascinating "third hypothesis" that four Presidents and many of their advisers realized that the "minimal" steps they took were not adequate to solve the Vietnam problem and that "perseverance more than optimism was the touchstone of each new step." Daniel Ellsberg makes a similar argument, though he carries it to strange lengths.⁶ The extensive documents cited in the so-called Pentagon Papers provide ample evidence that decisionmakers generally acted with their eyes open at each stage, with no lack of pessimistic advice that the measures decided upon were "long shots," which might not suffice.⁷ Even the Nixon Administration's subsequent Vietnam policy during 1969-1972 seems to fit into this mold.

We may have looked on Vietnam too much as an exercise in containing global Communist expansionism, but much evidence exists of realistic analysis and high-level grasp of the nature of the problem we confronted in Vietnam itself. After all, we had plenty of time to learn—including some twenty years between 1945 and our direct intervention in 1965. As far back as the French days, many were pointing out the essentially political nature of what began as an anticolonial struggle, became a revolutionary war, and evolved into more of an outright invasion of South Vietnam as the revolution failed. Even in the early Fifties, the United States persistently urged France to build a legitimized indigenous government as the key to the viability of a non-Communist Vietnam. American stress on building such a government in Saigon after 1954 is another case in point. By the late Fifties it was official doctrine that a major threat to Southeast Asia (SEA) was from externally supported insurgency. In 1957 SEATO's second Annual Report stated that "subversion which has always been a major problem is the main threat we now face."⁸

The Pentagon Papers amply document "the persistent pessimism about non-Communist prospects and about proposals for improving them, almost unrelieved, often stark—and in retrospect, creditably realistic, frank, cogent—that runs through the intelligence estimates and analyses from 1950 through 1961."⁹ The weakness of the Diem regime and its growing estrangement from the people were repeatedly pointed out. The record is full of perceptive insights, not just from intelligence or outside sources but from inside the U.S. and GVN operating agencies as well. That by March 1964 this realism had permeated the highest echelons in Washington is evident from such somber analyses as that in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 288.¹⁰

Nor was there any dearth of advice on how to fight insurgency through land reform, rural development programs, paramilitary and police techniques, resettlement (as in Malaya), or other unconventional means. For example, in early 1961 Kennedy saw a report from Brigadier General Edward Lansdale which dissented with vigor from both the strategy of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) and its complacency. "Lansdale thought that it was essentially a guerrilla war and that it was going very badly."¹¹ He was a recurrent source of such advice, as were Rufus Phillips and George Tanham, who headed AID's rural programs in the early Sixties. Sir Robert Thompson and Dennis Duncanson, who for four years (1961-1965) headed a British Advisory Mission in Saigon, gave similar operational advice, based on their Malayan experience, to both the U.S. and the GVN. Even earlier (during 1956-1961) the Michigan State University Advisory Group was making similar suggestions.

The chief actors too—Vietnamese and American—were hardly unaware of the atypical nature of the conflict, the fact that it was not just another conventional limited war. John Kennedy with "counterinsurgency," Lyndon Johnson with his "other war," Robert McNamara in his trip reports, and many others sought broader focus. Harriman, Forrestal, and Hilsman in the early Sixties argued for a more rounded politico-military approach. According to Arthur Schlesinger, the doubters feared that "the more elaborate the American military establishment . . . the more it would be overwhelmed by brass, channels, and paperwork, the more it would rely on conventional tactics, and the more it would compromise the Vietnamese nationalism of Diem's cause. Worse, the growth of the military commitment would confirm the policy of trying to win a political war by military means."¹² Ambassadors Durbrow, Taylor, Lodge, and Bunker were strong advocates of political reforms and pacification, of strengthening GVN administration, or of going after the Viet Cong political infrastructure. Lodge called the latter the "heart of the matter." All this was more than lip service. It was fully reflected in the policy documents and message traffic of the time.

Of course, one can carry too far assertions about our broad perceptions. Certainly, some were far more perceptive than others, civilians perhaps more so than soldiers, as is hardly surprising in a basically political struggle. But almost from the outset, the civilians let Vietnam be looked at too much as a military problem, which unbalanced our response. While many perceived the essentially political and revolutionary nature of the conflict, we miscalculated both its full implications and what coping with it required. We consistently underestimated the strengths of the enemy and overestimated those of our GVN allies. We also tended to underestimate the great value of allowing the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos.

Politically, we failed to give due weight to the revolutionary dynamics of the situation, the popular appeal of the Viet Cong, the feebleness of the Diem regime, or the depth of factionalism among traditional South Vietnamese elites. We only grasped belatedly the significance of the steady attrition of GVN authority and cadres in the countryside, an enfeeblement of political authority which was directly linked to how the Viet Cong conducted the war. Thus there were serious perceptual delays in our recognition of the extent of the threat.¹³ Administratively, neither the fledgling GVN nor its U.S. ally fully realized the crucial importance of effective civil administration to a viable counterinsurgency effort. And however well we eventually perceived the key role of the Viet Cong political infrastructure, our detailed intelligence on it remained exceedingly poor till the end.

Militarily, we underestimated the enemy's guerrilla and terror potential, Hanoi's ability to escalate, and the ability of the Viet Cong (VC) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to frustrate a much larger and better-equipped force by hit-and-run tactics stressing economy of force and evasion. One of our greatest military frustrations in Vietnam was the difficulty of pinning down an elusive enemy. Essentially, Hanoi was able to control the rate of its own losses by hit-and-run tactics, evasion and use of sanctuaries, which led to military stalemate.¹⁴

Nonetheless—however flawed our understanding of many crucial aspects of the problem we confronted—we grasped the overall nature of the problem itself far better than our accomplishments in dealing with it would suggest. Yet if, by 1960 at any rate, we at least broadly perceived the atypical nature of the Vietnam problem, why were we so slow to give adequate weight to it, to enrich our operational understanding, and to translate this into more responsive efforts of a type and on a scale more commensurate with the need?

NOTES

1. 1. George K. Tanham and Dennis J. Duncanson, "Some Dilemmas of Counterinsurgency," Foreign Affairs, October 1969.
2. 2. Samuel P. Huntington, Military Intervention, Political Involvement, and the Unlessons of Vietnam, the Adali Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Chicago, IL, 1968, p. 1.
3. 3. General Lewis Walt, Strange War, Strange...