Failures of Generalship in Vietnam
From A failure in generalship
By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling
America’s defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America’s general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America’s generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.
Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America’s enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America’s political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of “another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.” In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America’s armed forces for counterinsurgency.
Despite the experience of their allies and the urging of their president, America’s generals failed to prepare their forces for counterinsurgency. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Decker assured his young president, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.” Despite Kennedy’s guidance to the contrary, the Army viewed the conflict in Vietnam in conventional terms. As late as 1964, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated flatly that “the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.” While the Army made minor organizational adjustments at the urging of the president, the generals clung to what Andrew Krepinevich has called “the Army concept,” a vision of warfare focused on the destruction of the enemy’s forces.
Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America’s generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department’s “Blowtorch” Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public’s commitment to the conflict began to wane.
America’s generals not only failed to develop a strategy for victory in Vietnam, but also remained largely silent while the strategy developed by civilian politicians led to defeat. As H.R. McMaster noted in “Dereliction of Duty,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff were divided by service parochialism and failed to develop a unified and coherent recommendation to the president for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America’s generals.
Having participated in the deception of the American people during the war, the Army chose after the war to deceive itself. In “Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife,” John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,” by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.
By the early 1990s, the Army’s focus on conventional war-fighting appeared to have been vindicated. During the 1980s, the U.S. military benefited from the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation’s history. High-technology equipment dramatically increased the mobility and lethality of our ground forces. The Army’s National Training Center honed the Army’s conventional war-fighting skills to a razor’s edge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and the futility of direct confrontation with the U.S. Despite the fact the U.S. supported insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola to hasten the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. military gave little thought to counterinsurgency throughout the 1990s. America’s generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past — state-on-state conflicts against conventional forces. America’s swift defeat of the Iraqi Army, the world’s fourth-largest, in 1991 seemed to confirm the wisdom of the U.S. military’s post-Vietnam reforms. But the military learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm. It continued to prepare for the last war, while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war.
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http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198
The soldiers did their jobs then no matter if they agreed with it or not. No matter what happened on a given day in Washington they still had to avoid bombs, bullets, tunnels and booby traps. They still had to see their friends get killed, say good-bye to others who had run out the clock and headed home and faced the rest of their lives with wounds they still had not discovered were penetrating their brains with PTSD and bodies with Agent Orange. The grunts of then turned into the veterans of today and for the vast majority of them have turned around to take care of the ones who came after them.
Some get a bit carried away thinking that if they utter a single word of protest against the operations in Iraq right now, they will be attacking the troops the way they feel they were attacked because of Vietnam. What they fail to see is that Iraq is in fact Vietnam repeated all over again from start to inevitable finish. How this ends is the way the experts, the honest ones anyway, have said it will end all along. With the Shiites taking control over their own country and the Sunnis fighting until the bitter end to take as much power back as they can. Iran will be very happy and Saudi Arabia will be very upset along with Turkey because of the Kurds and Iran equally unhappy about the Kurds freedom as well.
For the US and the few remaining allies still in Iraq, they will deal with what the Vietnam veterans had to face. They will be just as divided as they have been all along when it comes to pulling out and the necessity to begin it in the first place. Yet for the rest of their lives there is one thing that will trump what their ideas are and that is what their ideals are. They become brothers.
While they are risking their lives and one of them is killed, they will build a monument of boots, rifle and helmet, hanging the dog tags in reverence. They say farewell and for a short time they are allowed to grieve. The next hour or the next day, they are back risking their lives all over again. They don't have time to fully face the loss of a friend.
Today we still see Vietnam veterans gather at the Wall in Washington or the movable wall that travels across the nation. They weep when they see the name of someone they knew as if the death just took place. They weep simply at the sight of the black coldness holding so many stories within the white names engraved just as the names, faces and stories have been engraved into their hearts and they wonder what could have been. What we know is that there will be monuments built to the fallen of today's wars but even they will never come close to telling the whole story of the lives lost in service. Suicides will still be whispered at funerals instead of shouted into the doorways of law makers in Washington. Depleted Uranium will replace the deaths no one else faced when that killer was Agent Orange. Too many names, stories and lives gone no one has time to collect.
Today's veterans will deal with exactly what the Vietnam veterans had to deal with and still struggle with. Was it worth it? They will wonder if the plans had been better, if they had more boots on the ground, if the politicians had done a better job, what would have happened? They too will be torn between it being worth serving the nation and not worth where it took place as well as what came with it and after it. But this generation of "grunts" will do what Vietnam veterans did. They will speak their minds and take sides in the debate but they will not leave the side of a brother they served with. It is a bond that will not be broken. It is also the bond that will tug at their hearts and haunt their nights.
We can ask a lot of questions about the worthiness of occupying Iraq just as we did and still do about Vietnam but there is one question they should never, ever have to ask of us. When they need us, where were we? Where are we now that the Vietnam veterans still need us? The Gulf War veterans all but forgotten? The Korean veterans? The other veterans of lesser wars like Somalia, Bosnia? The few remaining WWII veterans? Where are we now that they need us and we would rather watch mindless TV for diversion instead of actually paying attention to how many were wounded or how many died in Iraq and Afghanistan or to the neighbor who wakes up screaming in the middle of the night and has the nerve to wake us up? Or when we get angry someone has the nerve to want to put in a shelter for the homeless veterans the government forgot all about? Or when we cross the street because we see a homeless person holding a sign that says "veteran" on it?
For me, I'm tired of debating about Iraq. The majority of the nation has chosen sides and Bush's approval rating is a reflection of that as well as the campaign donations the military members make going to candidates more strongly against what is being done, or not done, in Iraq. For me the priority has to be them. Taking care of them and what they need from us. I think most of the country feels the same way but what are you doing about it? Are you contacting your elected representative who does in fact work for you? Let them know our veterans are dying for their attention. Make a call tomorrow and for those who already call them often, I applaud you!
Let's get at least this right for their sake.
Senate prepares for GI Bill showdown
By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday May 6, 2008 16:40:38 EDT
A showdown Wednesday in the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee over improvements in GI Bill education benefits could hinge on whether the Veterans Affairs Department softens its opposition to changes that would have benefits differ by state and have schools — not veterans — receive monthly payments directly.
The committee, chaired by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, has 28 veterans’ benefits bills on its agenda, but Senate aides said the measures certain to get most of the attention are two competing GI Bill proposals, S 22 and S 2938.
S 22 is the bipartisan 21st Century GI Bill of Rights, which has 57 Senate cosponsors and is endorsed by all major military and veterans’ associations but is opposed by the Pentagon and VA.
S 2938, with the unwieldy name of The Enhancement of Recruitment, Retention and Readjustment Through Education Act, is a Republican alternative to S 22 that has 18 cosponsors, including one — Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. — who withdrew his support for S 22 to sign on with the other plan, which is endorsed by the Pentagon and VA.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/05/military_gibill_showdown_050608w/
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