Learning to Forget

US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq

David Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804786423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

Learning to Forget analyzes the evolution of US counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine over the last five decades. Beginning with an extensive section on the lessons of Vietnam, it traces the decline of COIN in the 1970s, then the rebirth of low intensity conflict through the Reagan years, in the conflict in Bosnia, and finally in the campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately it closes the loop by explaining how, by confronting the lessons of Vietnam, the US Army found a way out of those most recent wars. In the process it provides an illustration of how military leaders make use of history and demonstrates the difficulties of drawing lessons from the past that can usefully be applied to contemporary circumstances.

The book outlines how the construction of lessons is tied to the construction of historical memory and demonstrates how histories are constructed to serve the needs of the present. In so doing, it creates a new theory of doctrinal development.

1

THE ARMY’S COUNTERINSURGENCY WAR IN VIETNAM

The American war in Vietnam is one of the most well documented and hotly debated events in the history of the United States. The literature on the war is vast, the historiography strongly contested, the debate never ending. Nancy Tucker argues that Vietnam is “the never-ending war,” with the conflict’s reverberations being felt long after the end of hostilities.¹

As John Prados has observed, study of the war has been somewhat atomized, with relatively few grand, overarching works that attempt to tell the story of America’s lost war in a single narrative.² That atomization diffuses possible “lessons” of the Vietnam War and enables the fashioning of multiple alternative “usable” narratives of the war. In revisionist strands of the literature there is a sense that, if only the particular aspect under discussion had been given more attention, then things might have been different and there might have been a “better war.”³ Indeed, some revisionist scholars argue that there was a better war the United States had in fact won before the vital domino of public opinion gave way.⁴ This contention that victory was possible if only something had been done differently has wide repercussions, not only for the historiography of the war but for the lessons that policy makers and strategists draw from it.⁵ If the war had been winnable, then arguments about the need to avoid future interventions would lose some of their force, and the Vietnam syndrome would cease to be a key point of concern for policy makers. In short, a “better war” would make military intervention palatable again.

Nowhere is this tendency to offer history as a lesson more prevalent than in the historiography of the US counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam. Gary Hess has divided those who argue that the United States could have prevailed in Vietnam into two groups. There are the “Clausewitzians,”⁶ who contend that a less restrained policy, such as increased bombing of North Vietnam or the invasion of Laos, Cambodia, or even North Vietnam, could have led to victory, and there are the “hearts and minders,” who believe that better execution of counterinsurgency in South Vietnam could have won the war.⁷ The question of whether a better counterinsurgency campaign was possible is at the heart of the tension between those who see Vietnam as “the unwinnable war” and those who perceive a “better war.” That tension was a point of conflict throughout the post-Vietnam era, and an improved understanding of the Army’s counterinsurgency war in Vietnam can help us better understand the context in which the various factions within the Army constructed their lessons of Vietnam.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ARMY’S COUNTERINSURGENCY WAR IN VIETNAM

The “hearts and minds” revisionist critique of the war argues that had the Army embraced counterinsurgency theory more fully, then a different result would have been possible. Proponents of this view, such as Larry Cable, Guenter Lewy, Andrew Krepinevich, and John Nagl, argue that the Army simply didn’t understand counterinsurgency and adhered to an “army concept” and doctrine centered on air mobility and massive use of firepower. General William Westmoreland pursued a costly strategy of attrition and ignored the promises of pacification. For these critics, Westmoreland’s opposition to the Marine Corps Combined Action Program, which used joint American-Vietnamese platoons to provide long-term security for hamlets, was a glaring missed opportunity. His focus on destroying the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and National Liberation Front (NLF) “main force” units in the unpopulated highlands rather than securing the Vietnamese population betrayed an adherence to an Army strategic culture that was deeply unsuited to the war in Vietnam.

Westmoreland also has his defenders. Dale Andrade, Andrew Birtle, John M. Carland, and Graham Cosmas have all argued that the “hearts and minds” school is both overly sanguine about the chances of success for a strategy that focused on securing the population of South Vietnam and underplays the sophistication of Westmoreland’s understanding of the situation in Vietnam. They frequently cite Westmoreland’s description in his memoirs of a “two-handed” strategy, where one (American) hand would keep the PAVN main force units at bay while the other (South Vietnamese) hand would pacify the countryside and secure the rural population from the NLF threat. Further, they argue that the number of American troops needed to pacify South Vietnam would have dwarfed even the 536,000 that eventually deployed there. In those circumstances, Westmoreland was correct to use US forces to “stem the tide” and let the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) focus on pacification.

The most comprehensive critique of “hearts and minds” revisionism has not come from those who focus on issues of strategy but rather those who study the implementation of pacification at the tactical level. Province-level studies, such as those by David Elliott, Jeffrey Race, James Trullinger, and Eric Bergerud, have been particularly effective in illustrating just how deep the problems with pacification efforts were. These studies all show a resilient NLF, an ineffectual and illegitimate South Vietnamese government, and a US military that was unable to effect change, despite concerted attempts to carry out pacification. Bergerud describes how the 25th Infantry Division in Hau Nghia province employed many of the principles of classic counterinsurgency doctrine yet was unable to make any inroads into the NLF’s control of the province. When reading province-level analyses, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the NLF was far more deeply embedded into rural South Vietnamese society than the South Vietnamese government was and that US efforts at pacification were bound to fail.

A key point of contention between the two schools is the extent to which US pacification efforts improved as the war wore on. Central to this is the status of an internal Army report: Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam (or PROVN). PROVN was a 1966 study commissioned by Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson to reappraise the situation in Vietnam. PROVN identified deep, structural problems with the pacification effort and argued that “the critical actions are those that occur at the village, district and provincial levels. This is where the war must be fought; this is where that war and the object which lies beyond it must be won.”⁸ Some “hearts and minds” scholars, such as John Nagl and Andrew Krepinevich, argue that PROVN represented both a comprehensive critique of Westmoreland’s strategy and a viable counterinsurgency strategy that could have won the war.⁹ More recent scholarship by Dale Andrade and Andrew Birtle has pointed out that while PROVN was critical of some aspects of the war and argued that the United States should reorganize its pacification efforts and push harder for Government of Vietnam (GVN) reform, it also firmly endorsed Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition and the US forces’ focus on the main unit war in the highlands.¹⁰ According to Birtle and Andrade, while the document criticized elements of US performance, it was nowhere near the transformative, revolutionary document that “better war” advocates claimed. In fact it endorsed the central points of Westmoreland’s approach and supported his conventional campaign.

After PROVN, there was a reorganization of the pacification effort and a new organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (or CORDS), that placed all civilian and military pacification activities under a civilian—Robert W. Komer—and then made the head of CORDS deputy commander of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam). This new agency would centrally plan all pacification activities and replace the chaos of multiple programs from multiple agencies. Further, in 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), together with Army Special Forces and the South Vietnamese government, launched the Phoenix Program, a controversial operation to target the “Viet Cong infrastructure,” the political and support apparatus of the NLF in the villages, and to disrupt it by killing or capturing NLF cadre. These initiatives, together with the replacement of Westmoreland with General Creighton Abrams, were, some revisionists claim, a sign of long-overdue progress in the war. As Lloyd Gardner has noted, the “hearts and minds” revisionists claim that “when General Westmoreland was replaced, a better war was fought and the light at the end of the tunnel [was] relit.” It is this alleged rekindling of the “light at the end of the tunnel” that we must concern ourselves with, for although the orthodox historiography has strongly criticized any contention that the war was winnable, much of that criticism revolves around the strategic choices that Westmoreland faced or the viability of the PROVN report. The contention that General Abrams fought a “better war,” one primarily made by Lewis Sorley, garnered very favorable coverage at times in the postwar era, and the claim deserves closer examination.

THE BETTER WAR? ABRAMS’S STRATEGY

Abrams took over as commander, US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, in June 1968. Abrams, with his often-rumpled appearance, ever-present cigar, and abrupt manner, was a stark contrast to his predecessor, General William Westmoreland, the one-time superintendent of West Point. He was also more popular among journalists, so much so that the New York Times ran an article declaring that “General Abrams deserves a better war.” It is from this article that the “better war” narrative derives its name. Abrams, so the narrative goes, was responsible for a dramatic turnaround in US fortunes by finally implementing a strategy that emphasized securing the population of South Vietnam from attack rather than chasing after the wraithlike North Vietnamese Army in the unpopulated highland jungles near the Cambodian border. This school of thought, which strongly challenges the orthodox view of Vietnam as an unmitigated failure, takes advantage of the fact that the Vietnam historiography has overwhelmingly focused on the pre-1968 era, before Abrams took over.¹¹ This “better war” narrative was at the core of the version of “Vietnam” advanced by counterinsurgency advocates in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and is therefore central to postwar contentions over the lessons.

Certainly, Abrams made some significant changes on taking command. Rather than pursue Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition, he preferred to emphasize his “One War” concept—that there was not one war against enemy main forces units, one war to pacify the countryside, and one war in the air against North Vietnam, but that all these operations were deeply intertwined and would be treated as such in future. Abrams explained,

We preach it as “one war,” just one war . . . we mean the province chief and the district chief, the RF [Regional Forces] and the PF [Popular Forces] and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units and the Police. Everybody in here has got to work together . . . the Americans shouldn’t do anything, really, in the way of operating that the district advisor isn’t in on, doesn’t know about . . . this is really a complex environment to work in.¹²

The three-month-long Accelerated Pacification Campaign, launched in November 1968, was the epitome of this “one war” concept. Known to the US military as the APC, its objective was to reestablish the South Vietnamese government’s (or GVN) presence in the countryside in the wake of the Tet Offensive through a three-month special effort. Conceptually, there was little new to the APC. It employed the same pacification tools as previous campaigns: emphasis on the use of Regional Forces and Popular Forces (RF/PF) to secure hamlets, the establishment of a part-time militia (the People’s Self-Defense Force/PSDF) to provide extra personnel, the Chieu Hoi (or Open Arms) program for encouraging NLF desertions, and the nascent Phuong Hoang/Phoenix program for targeting the NLF infrastructure (political cadres and supporters) in the hamlets.¹³ What was new was the firm support of the US Army in executing it. Abrams was not only instrumental in securing Vietnamese backing of the plan, but he also directed that population security be the primary operational objective for US and Vietnamese forces over the three months of the campaign.

Territorial security was the centerpiece of the APC, and it is worth noting, as some critics do,¹⁴ the emphasis on the coercive elements of counterinsurgency, rather than the “hearts and minds” aspects of doctrine that had been emphasized by counterinsurgency advocates earlier in the 1960s. A briefer made the point explicit when he noted, “There’s no question that pacification is either 90 percent or 10 percent security, depending on which expert you talk to. But there isn’t any expert in the world that will doubt that it’s the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent. You just can’t conduct pacification in the face of an NVA [North Vietnamese Army] division.”¹⁵ Without security, a necessary but not sufficient condition, development work and good governance programs would be impossible. As Robert Komer explained, the objective was to quickly spread a thin “security blanket” over the countryside, which he argued would “achieve greater results more quickly by seeking to expand a diluted form of government control while destroying enemy forces and infrastructure than by seeking a high degree of security and efficient administration.” The focus therefore would not be on improving GVN governance but on gaining as much territory as possible in advance of any possible cease-fire.

On its own terms, the APC was a major success. US and RVNAF forces moved into and secured over a thousand hamlets, the number of Hoi Chanh (NLF deserters under the Chieu Hoi program) greatly exceeded the plan’s goal, and the number of hamlets rated “secure” under the Hamlet Evaluation Survey (HES)¹⁶ jumped from 70 percent to 86 percent between November 1968 and June 1969.¹⁷ The APC set the pattern for future operations: The GVN’s Central Pacification and Development Council developed a comprehensive and ambitious Pacification and Development Plan for 1969 while Abrams—although never explicitly disavowing Westmoreland’s attrition strategy—placed heavy emphasis on population security in his 1969 Combined Campaign Plan.¹⁸ Not only did the planning follow the pattern of the APC, but so did the results, at least for a time: The period from 1969 through 1971 marked the high point of GVN control over the countryside, with HES indications showing almost total control over the countryside by mid-1971.¹⁹

The statistics that measured control were not uncontroversial. Richard Hunt notes the problems that creep in when such data become an end in themselves: “Rather than merely being a means to identify trends and collect uniform data on the countryside, HES became, in the absence of any other clear and universally accepted standard, one of the principal yardsticks of progress and inferentially a measure of individual performance.”²⁰ If this happened, then HES figures were just as liable to be inflated as the notorious “body count” was earlier in the war. William Colby—head of the pacification effort—though generally supportive of HES as an indicator of trends, offered the important qualifier: “Some of the statist...