Air University Review, November-December 1976

Making Sense of Vietnam

General Westmoreland has stated that American arms suffered no defeat in Vietnam, but what of American political goals, the ultimate objective of all military action? Whether we classify Vietnam as a victory or a defeat we cannot ignore it. The strategic fallout—Watergate, détente, recession, and American retrenchment abroad—has been too great. Our military policy is no longer "second to none" but "equal to any."

For our opponents the lesson is clear; irregular warfare is America's Achilles' heel. The giant struggled with Lilliputians and then stumbled home. He was not out-thought as much as he was out-fought. He had found that warfare in the back alley was not the same as in the great arena.

It is imperative that we make sense of Vietnam and our role in it if we are to meet today's military challenges. We cannot assume that we have seen the end of irregular warfare. We must counter the Communist challenge throughout the spectrum of war; no longer can we concentrate on part of the spectrum and ignore the other.

To understand Vietnam, we must explore the historical development of irregular warfare and tie the recent tempest to the historical currents from which it emerged. Only then will we be able to sift through controversial rubble and identify those meaningful artifacts that correctly portray what happened and where we went wrong.

Robert Asprey, in War in the Shadows*, promised just such an analysis. He first sought to explain the historical development of irregular warfare and then to link it to its recent manifestation in Vietnam. Unfortunately, Asprey was not up to either task. What emerges from the 95 chapters of this work is a useful mini-encyclopedia of irregular warfare which purposely leads into a very emotional and opinionated account of the American role in Vietnam.

*Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975, $35.00), 1548 pages.

His scope is far too broad, and his quotations are too many and too long. One soon discovers that the author is hopelessly attempting to explain what he himself only partially understands. There is no overall scheme. The reader is not told why certain guerrilla wars are included and why others are left out. The unfamiliar reader may wonder if any were left out. The whole endeavor looks like a disorganized greenhouse where each potted insurgency is diligently labeled by date rather than by type and family. Once the reader overcomes his initial bewilderment, he will find much that has nothing to do with guerrilla war and should not be in the greenhouse at all.

Although some chapters are well done, Asprey's work in general suffers from an incautious use of the traditional sources, many of which are little more than campaign summaries of regulars fighting irregulars. They concentrate more on how the regular applies his art than how the irregular applies his. They explore little into the motivations of the irregular or the tactics he employs.

Asprey correctly understands that before he can link irregular warfare to Vietnam he must first link it to Lenin and Mao. His sources tell him where he has to go, but they give him few clues on how to get there.

Thus, in Part I of this work, entitled "Lenin's Heritage," we find little that would have interested or even concerned Lenin. In Part II, "Mao and Revolutionary Warfare," we find a very superficial analysis of Chinese revolutionary warfare and a very extensive treatment of World War II resistance movements which are more easily labeled reactionary warfare than revolutionary warfare.

Where Asprey puts himself adrift is in his inability to perceive the major distinctions among irregular forms of war. The traditional military histories tend to see modern revolutionary warfare as guerrilla war with a capital "G." Such a perspective conveniently places revolutionary warfare within the purview of a too-narrow form of military history.

This common misperception is readily seen in Asprey’s definition of guerrilla warfare as:

irregular forces fighting small-scale, limited actions, generally in conjunction with a larger political-military strategy, against orthodox military forces. (p. xi)

Here he incorrectly lumps all forms of irregular warfare together, with no appreciation of either their differences or their relationship to each other. He conveys the impression that the soul of this form of struggle is military rather than political. What Lenin and Mao practice in their respective revolutions was not a hybrid form of guerrilla warfare but political revolution. In each case, guerrilla warfare was only one of the several different types of violence employed.

We in the West traditionally have read too much into the term "guerrilla fare." It is a tactical way of fighting and nothing more. Whatever strategic significance it takes on reflects only the overriding political struggle which it humbly supports.

Both reactionary war and revolutionary war, the modern strategic forms of irregular war, are political struggles supported by appropriate violence. Reactionary wars seek to re-establish old orders, while revolutionary wars seek to create new ones. In tracing the origins of these wars, Asprey should have directed his attention to the political upheavals associated with the French Revolution and to the socialist movements of the nineteenth century.

A proper link between guerrilla warfare and political struggle could result from a careful analysis of the peasant uprisings against Napoleon in either Spain or Russia. Unfortunately, in dealing with these topics, Asprey is content with a traditional campaign summary and misses the significance of both of these two great conflicts in the historical development of irregular war.

As a result, War in the Shadows, despite its extensive treatment, contributes little to our understanding of irregular war. Certainly the author does not (as he promised to do) historically link this type of war to Vietnam. The work has utility as a bibliographical source and a quick summary of guerrilla wars, but the conscientious reader should look elsewhere for serious analysis.

The motivating force behind War in the Shadows apparently is to give historical credence to the author's own opinionated perception of American policy in Vietnam. The lengthy historical treatment of irregular warfare seeks to prove the first part of the author's thesis:

American involvement and policy in Vietnam are a result of our ignorance of this type of war. Arrogance, the second part of the thesis, is thus founded on our already established ignorance. American military leaders who understood little of irregular war arrogantly thought they could suppress it with massive firepower.

Like his treatment of irregular warfare, Asprey's treatment of Vietnam is extensive yet superficial. It is very much a standard antiwar account. According to Asprey, Maxwell Taylor's recommendation to send American military forces to Vietnam in 1961 unknowingly opened the door to our eventual massive commitment. His proposal showed a lack of understanding of the political nature of this war and its indigenous, nonconspiratorial origins. General Westmoreland's strategy of "search and destroy" was also unsuited to the task at hand and fully demonstrated our arrogant belief in large units and massive firepower. The bombing of North Vietnam was an exercise in futility and strengthened rather than weakened the enemy's effort. The author calls strategic bombing a fallacious doctrine which in the nuclear age is little more than premeditated genocide.

As members of a professional officer corps trying to make sense of Vietnam, we might have hoped for a more objective account. But Asprey is so passionately against the American conduct of the war that many of his assertions border on the absurd. For example, he states:

Almost nothing good can be said about the American military performance in Vietnam . . . . Herein lies the anomaly. The American military establishment in 1974 occupies a more powerful position in the American Government than equivalent military plants in either China or the U.S.S.R. In fighting authoritative governments founded on force, the American Government is gradually succumbing to that form of government itself (pp.1532 and 1534)

To substantiate such generalizations, the author does not hesitate to research and interpret selectively. He relies heavily on the antiwar literature of his journalist colleagues. His last four chapters are little more than a running commentary on Vietnam articles carried by The (London) Times.

To balance Asprey's account, the reader should look at Robert Thompson's Peace Is Not at Hand; General Westmoreland's A Soldier Reports; General Taylor's Swords and Plowshares; Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake; and Bernard Fall's Last Reflections on a War. These books offer further opinions, not definitive conclusions, but at least they show that Taylor's recommendation to introduce American soldiers was not without some logic. If "search and destroy" was unsuited to the task at hand, there were few alternatives. Air power, despite its early misuse in the graduated bombing of North Vietnam, probably vindicated itself at Khe Sanh and in Linebacker II.

Subsequent events both in the United States and Vietnam have dated much of what Asprey has written. Certainly the American military is not the threat to world order that he perceived it to be during the Vietnam conflict.

Like all perceptions of Vietnam, each has its measure of truth, and for this reason we cannot cast Asprey^’s work totally aside. Some of his criticisms enjoy a measure of validity and are well worth contemplating and remembering. For example, his basic thesis that American policy in Vietnam reflected ignorance and arrogance is partially true. Vietnam did show that we really had not done our homework concerning this type of war. Can we deny that we were a little smug in believing that good old American know-how and firepower would overcome many of the perceived difficulties of our involvement?

Of Asprey's criticisms of the military role in Vietnam, three seem particularly useful for the future. First, we need a greater awareness of the political nature of this type of war, especially as it relates to military action. Second, we have to achieve a more discriminating and austere use of our firepower. Finally, we require a much deeper study of the nature of war by our officer corps. In essence, we have to come to grips with the intellectual challenge of irregular warfare, to take the weapons we already have and employ them with new imagination.

Asprey's major criticism of our military policy in Vietnam was that it showed little appreciation for the long-term political goals upon which success depended. This criticism was essentially true, but there was a constitutional question that the author failed to acknowledge. The military does not make political policy; it carries it out. In this context our military strategy was very responsive to the immediate political goals projected. When we consider the shortsightedness of our political policy, it is not surprising that our military strategy stumbled.

For example, our political policy of gradualism may have been well suited to resolving the Cuban missile crisis, but diplomacy is not war, and making gradualism the foundation of our bombing policy defied all historical experience. The large American build-up in Vietnam was necessary to meet the immediacy the battlefield, but it made the draft major political issue and in the end undermined the entire war effort. Such examples clearly reflect that a much greater understanding of irregular warfare, politics, and their relationship was required of the country's leadership.

Questions of political policy rest constitutionally with our political leadership, but the strategic costs of Vietnam were too high for military leaders today to return simply to an apolitical approach. They must wait to be asked; but when asked, military men must take the long-term view in identifying those aspects of political policy that are not suited to military action and those that are. We, as military men, cannot challenge the political policies of our civilian leadership as Asprey suggests, but we can prepare ourselves to make better use in the future of opportunities afforded us to help shape such policies when we are asked to comment about their military implications.

Asprey's use of arrogance in describing our military role in Vietnam relates to our massive use of firepower. The implication is that it was totally inappropriate and a "quick-fix" of our doctrinal deficiencies. Certainly our use of massive firepower was not always suited to our long-term goals in Vietnam, but was it totally inappropriate? We are a technological people; bringing massive firepower to the battlefield is what we do best in war. It is a strength we should not have ignored, and it served us well against the large North Vietnamese units which infiltrated the South.

What hurt us in Vietnam was that we were not always able to use our firepower properly in the other war, the war against the guerrillas. As war moves down the spectrum from high to low intensity, the demand for discrimination and austerity of firepower becomes increasingly crucial to success. Nothing can destroy months of pacification effort faster than a few stray artillery rounds or a mistargeted bomb. The problem is a complex one and only partially solvable by technology.

In irregular warfare, the combatant plays a much more decisive role as an individual than he does in conventional war. The historical experience is clear: In this type of war the careless use of firepower by individuals will ensure the failure of the most astute political or military strategies. This was a challenge which we did not "arrogantly" ignore, but it was also one we did not sufficiently meet. Better sensors, smart bombs, and sensitive targeting systems are not enough; the demands are more intellectual. Each combatant must be disciplined in the use of his weapon. The revolutionary leader achieves this by political indoctrination; we must achieve it by education.

We can partially relieve the combatant of the pressure to employ his weapon on "some" target with sound command policies, recoverable ordnance, and less emphasis on such arbitrary measures as body count, structures destroyed, and sorties flown. True discrimination and austerity, however, can be achieved only when each individual combatant is capable of seeing beyond simply stated command policies into the real political nature of the struggle. He must be able to fathom the adverse impact in political terms of an improper use of his weapon. It is not so much a question of "arrogance," as Asprey contends, but of awareness and understanding, particularly among our junior officer corps.

While the major challenge of irregular warfare is intellectual, Vietnam is proof that we have to study war in all its diverse forms. In Vietnam we found ourselves embroiled in a conflict which was part conventional, part irregular. The demands of each are often incompatible with the other and in turn require their own unique approaches.

Asprey asserts that we should offer more courses in the humanities at the service academies and encourage our career officers to do more nonmilitary reading. While there is merit to these proposals, our problem already seems to be one of too much nonmilitary reading. We in the military spend considerable time, for example, studying tech orders and regulations, but is such reading really military? Does it develop the professional or the technician?

Technicians can adapt more easily to the challenge of conventional war, but irregular war demands the broader understanding of a professional. Our current task thus should be to raise the general understanding of all types of war among all our officers. Such an increase in study and understanding hopefully will bring forth innovative approaches suited to the diverse challenge of war as well as novel uses for already existing weapons.

Such a task need not be fulfilled by pressure from outside the military, as Asprey contends. We do not have to reorient our thinking, but to do more of it.

Tactical Air Command offers three excellent courses entitled, "Foreign Internal Defense," "Psychological Operations," and "Unconventional Warfare," which not only address the problems of irregular warfare but the possible uses of air power to solve these problems. These courses, combined with a more general study of war as offered by our professional service schools, could do much to increase the career officer's general understanding of war and politics.

We should never expect irregular warfare to he our forte, but neither should it be our Achilles' heel. To make sense of Vietnam and benefit from it, we are going to have to do our own study of war. We cannot expect historians like Robert Asprey, who write for other ends, to do it for us. War is our profession, and at the heart of any profession is the quality of knowledge upon which it is founded. In today's world, the study of war is beyond the purview of just the senior leadership; it must be pursued by the entire officer corps. If not, then Asprey's thesis of ignorance and arrogance will be more a premonition about our future than an epitaph on our recent past.