Air University Review, January-February 1983

Vietnam: What Manner of War?

IT IS a heartening development that both the American public and the armed forces seem to be showing a new willingness to think about the Vietnam War and its meaning. It is not clear whether we have yet achieved a new and better understanding.

For nearly a decade after American withdrawal from Vietnam, the principal inclination even of the military was to repress the unpleasant Vietnam experience, to seek escape from the war's various traumas by treating the unconventional conflict in Vietnam as a military aberration not likely to recur, while returning to preparations for supposedly more satisfactory kinds of conflict against major conventional military powers. The main trouble with this latter tendency is the likelihood that it is further unconventional wars in the Third World that are, in fact, more probable.

NEVERTHELESS, the simple promise that we may be ready for renewed study of and thought about Vietnam has been more encouraging so far than the actual quality of many of the new writings about the war. Michael Maclear's The Ten Thousand Day War, for example, one of the most widely heralded of the new books, is also one of the most acute disappointments.* Labeled by its publisher as "the first authoritative, documentary account of the Vietnam War, bringing together the testimony of the principals of both sides as well as vividly telling the stories of the combatants, and including material based on exclusive interviews," it is indeed based on a wide variety of testimony from major participants on both sides. But the testimony and the narrative and analysis rise too rarely above the inherent limitations of television journalism. This is not surprising, since the origins of the book lie in a Thames television series; but a book might have permitted something more than the brief vignettes that are the staple of television.

*Michael Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam: 1945-1975 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981, $17.50), 368 pages.

Still, greater depth rarely appears. For example, neither moral insensitivity nor a hawkish attitude toward the war is required to arouse qualms about the single-dimensional quality of Maclear's account of one of the major incidents of war protest at home, the Kent State shootings, when we are told no more than that:

On 4 May the Ohio National Guard, with loaded rifles, surrounded the campus at Kent State. As the guardsmen lined up on a slope overlooking the massed group of young demonstrators, a witness recalls a sudden volley of fire: Some kid yelled, "These are live bullets," and this guy says "My God, this girl is hurt" and he picks her up and she has this bloody spot on her jacket and there was blood coming out of her mouth.

Four students had been shot dead, two of them girls. Eleven others lay bleeding; a scene of carnage on green lawns. In a sorrow that reached across America, the father of one dead girl said, "My child was not a bum." Within a few days 450 colleges closed in protest. (p. 297)

There is not a word about the obscene insults that were being chanted at the young, nervous, inadequately trained guardsmen. Maclear's version reflects as little comprehension as the equally young and immature protesting students showed at the time that most Americans can hardly be expected to be goaded indefinitely by insults to their country without being provoked into occasional violent outbursts. The students were not bums, but they were recklessly inviting trouble. The shooting was wrong, indefensible, an outrage; but the circumstances were not so simple as the book would make them.

For all its variety of testimony, there is in fact an overarching simplicity about The Ten Thousand Day War. Yet the simplicity is also the root of such strength as the book attains, and it offers the main reason why the book has to be taken seriously despite its flaws. The simple unifying threat is the idea of the inexorability of the triumph of Vietnamese nationalism against any intruders: Japanese, French, or American. The Canadian author regards Ho Chi Minh as the unchallengeable embodiment of that Vietnamese nationalism. Any Vietnamese rival to Ho was by definition a doubtful patriot, no matter what his pretensions. Anyone who questioned Ho's leadership in effect questioned the Vietnamese people's right to their own country. Because Vietnam obviously was and is their country; and because the Vietnamese were there to stay and any invader in must eventually go home, Ho and his people were bound to prevail. These ideas are hardly new, but Maclear's contacts with Vietnamese who fervently believe them permit him to advance the argument with considerable force and sometimes with moving eloquence.

IMPLICIT in this argument, furthermore, is the belief that the struggles of the Viet Minh against the French and the Vietcong against the Americans were parts of a single war. With Maclear, this interpretation is not only implicit but explicit, and he draws frequent parallels between the French and American experiences and argues that the Americans continually repeated the mistakes the French had already made. In perceiving the post-World War II conflicts in Vietnam as a single Ten Thousand Day War extending from 1945 to 1975, Maclear shares common ground with the authors of an otherwise very different book, the first volume of the official Air Force history of the war, The Advisory Years to 1965, by Robert F. Futrell with the assistance of Martin Blumenson.* By tracing in a wealth of detail events in Vietnam from 1945 onward, long before the United States Air Force took on even an advisory role, the official historians also treat Ho Chi Minh's struggle for leadership of his own kind of independent Vietnam as a continuous succession of episodes: the war against the French blending seamlessly into the war against Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors in South Vietnam in which the American military role became increasingly conspicuous and less merely advisory.

*Robert F. Futrell with the assistance of Martin Blumenson, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The Advisory Years to 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air History, 1981, $ 15.00), 398 pages.

THE concept of a single Vietnamese struggle for independence in a continuous war, always at least a debatable concept, has become a renewed focus of controversy with the publication of On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War by Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., of the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College.** Making an impressive effort to define the place of the Vietnam War in the mainstream of military history and particularly to set the war's strategy into the context of Clausewitzian strategic thought, Colonel Summers argues that it is a historical error now as it was a strategic error during the war to regard the French and American wars in Vietnam as a single, continuous conflict.

**Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato: California: Presido Press, 1982, $12.95), 225 pages. Essentially the same work was also published in a limited-circulation editon as On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, n.d.), 137 pages. A summary of its major arguments appeared as Harry G. Summers, Jr., "Vietnam Reconsidered," The New Republic, July 12, 1982, pp. 25-31.

Ho Chi Minh necessarily mounted the uprising against the French by unconventional means, following the model of Communist revolutionary war. But the United States in its Vietnam War, Colonel Summers contends, committed the basic strategic error of beginning with the wrong answer to Carl von Clausewitz's first question for statesmen and military commanders in any war, "to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature."¹

Mesmerized by Nikita S. Khrushchev's proclamation of "wars of national liberation" and caught up in the fascination with unconventional war that marked the early 1960s and especially the military attitudes of the John F. Kennedy administration, American strategists assumed that the conflict in Vietnam was a new kind of war and sought to fight the war in terms of Khrushchev's paradigm, as on our part a counterinsurgency struggle. But in fact, Summers argues, not only was guerrilla insurrection an old rather than a new kind of war to begin with, but altogether the Vietnam War could and should have been waged by the United States in accordance with the classical principles of war. The final triumph of North Vietnam in 1975, resembling the German blitzkrieg of 1940 more than any unconventional mode of war, revealed the true nature of the conflict that the Vietnamese Communists had been waging against the United States from the beginning of the American phase of the war.

Colonel Summers poses a fundamental question for strategists and historians alike. If he is correct in his contention that the North Vietnamese waged primarily a classical kind of war with insurgency secondary against the Americans, then The Ten Thousand Day War, to a less conspicuous extent the first volume of the Air Force official history, and many other books about the Vietnam War are as wrong in their diagnosis of the nature of the war as Summers thinks our basic strategy was--and therefore the country stands all the more in danger of repeating the error by misjudging the nature of some possibly similar future war. Did the Communist proclamation of wars of national liberation so cast a spell over American policymakers and strategists that, believing they were fighting a new kind of war in Vietnam, they ignored what was conventional in the conflict and therefore failed to apply basic principles of war? Does such a history as The Ten Thousand Day War with its theme of the continuity of the Vietnamese war of national liberation from 1945 to 1975 tend to perpetuate the delusive spell?

There is surely a degree of merit in Summmers's interpretation. It is clear enough their some sort of bundle of misperceptions caused the Americans to ignore, if riot the strategic profundities of Clausewitz, then at least the elementary principles of war. Here The Advisory Years to 1965 is helpful, because in this official history a theme yet more central than the continuity of the war from its French through its American advisory phases is the failure through the Americans' advisory years to heed the principle of unity of command. Futrell and Blumenson are not so rash as to suggest that with the simple addition of unity of command the advisory process to 1965 might have been a success, which finally it was not; but their book strongly suggests that the lack of unity was severe enough to be a virtual guarantor of failure.

For the first major Air Force unit to go to Vietnam, the chain of command was chaotic. Assigned to Vietnam late in 1961, the unit was Brigadier General Rollen H. Anthis's 2d Advanced Echelon (ADVON). In operational matters, General Anthis was responsible to Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) and thence to the Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC). For Air Force administrative and logistical matters, however, and even for operational matters that could be construed as strictly Air Force, Anthis was responsible to Thirteenth Air Force. At the same time, Anthis was Air Force section chief of the Vietnam Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). He wore his separate hat as 2d ADVON commander because by law MAAGs could not command operational forces; but despite the complexity added to the command structure so that Anthis could command operations anyway, in the sequel he merely provided base logistic support to the principal Air Force operational activity at the time, Operation Farm Gate, without actually commanding it; MAAG seemed to command Farm Gate after all, so far as these knots could be unraveled.

The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), was created in February 1962 largely to unscramble the perplexities, but it was not altogether helpful. General Anthis continued to represent both PACAF and Thirteenth Air Force. Furthermore, MAAG/Vietnam continued in existence, and Brigadier General Robert R. Rowland replaced Anthis as MAAG chief of Air Force section, adding air other complication. And as an example of the continuing anomalies, Air Force liaison officers with Vietnamese army divisions instead of being under Anthis's command were assigned to MAAG. To aggravate all the other command problems from the Air Force perspective, finally, neither MACV nor MAAG Vietnam ever included adequate Air Force representation; so the key Vietnam commands never fully appreciated what the Air Force might have contributed.

It is possible, of course, that violating the principle of unity of command may have had many causes--such as traditional interservice jealousies--not at all connected with Colonel Summers's idea that the whole nature of the Vietnam War was misperceived. Yet the official Air Force history seems to support consistently the implication that command arrangements went awry because Washington persisted in regarding the Vietnam War as a different kind of war from World War II or Korea and therefore went on failing to do certain things that would probably have been done almost automatically if a mind-set attuned to the 1941-45 and 1950-53 experiences could have been generated. One such thing left undone was the creation of a unified command located in the theater of war and possessing ample strategic and operational autonomy and ample representation of all the armed forces. But a mind-set attuned to the World War II experience never developed in Washington during the course of the Vietnam War. Instead, command arrangements were improvised on the assumption that somehow this war was fundamentally different--and at the root of this assumption was the misperception focused on by Colonel Summers. Mesmerized by the faddish notion that the Communists were challenging us with a new kind of insurrectionary war, we neglected to install the kind of command system that American experience would otherwise have demanded as appropriate to any war.

To say that the Vietnam War was not a wholly new kind of war, however, is not necessarily to deny that it was in important dimensions truly different after all. For example, Colonel Summers in insisting that it was a mistake to regard the American phase of the Vietnam War as different in kind from World War II goes on to argue that it should have been possible for our government to generate sustained public support for the struggle in Vietnam just as there had been such public support for World War II. He appears to be suggesting that it was largely a misguided public relations approach that soured the public.

In order to smooth our relations with the American people we began to use euphemisms to hide the horrors of war. . . . We did not kill the enemy, we "inflicted casualties"; we did not destroy things, we "neutralized targets." These evasions allowed the notion to grow that we could apply military force in a sanitary and surgical manner. (pp. 35-36)

When it turned out that people died horribly nevertheless, Summers contends, then the American public felt betrayed and came to regard the war as perhaps the cruelest war ever. Yet Summers's argument here is much too facile. World War II generated sustained public support because it clearly involved vital national interests, not because the public imagined that its killing was sanitary. World War II generated sustained public support also because through most of it, there was visible progress toward victory. No mere skill in public relations could have maintained support for the war in Vietnam when those crucial ingredients were missing.

To be sure, Summers's argument is that at least the second of the crucial ingredients, the visible progress toward victory, should not have been missing, if the war had been properly understood. If the American government had not been obsessed by the idea of a Communist revolutionary war and instead had recognized that it ought to have been applying classic strategic principles, then the war could have been won. More specifically, Summers pursues his argument to suggest that to the extent that there were in fact elements of unconventionality in the Vietnam conflict, the South Vietnamese forces should have been assigned, and properly prepared, to cope with subversion and insurgency, while the American forces focused on fighting and defeating the enemy's conventional forces and strategy.

Naturally, Summers's argument is a good deal more sophisticated than this brief summary can suggest. His effort to perceive the Vietnam War within the whole context of military history and classic, particularly Clausewitzian, strategic thought is wholly admirable and merits careful study. And yet--I suspect that Michael Maclear's The Ten Thousand Day War, notwithstanding its journalistic simplicities and its romanticization of Ho Chi Minh and his cause, comes closer to some basic truths about the Vietnam War than does Colonel Summers's much more rigorous probing. If the Vietnam War was not a wholly new kind of war for Americans, it was not by any means a repeat performance of World War II or Korea either, and thinking about it in classic Clausewitzian strategic terms would have produced no magical means to attaining American objectives. In particular, Maclear is essentially correct in depicting Ho Chi Minh and his cause as embodying Vietnam nationalism. Even for as embodying Vietnamese nationalism. Even for those Vietnamese who fought against Ho, were fighting against part of themselves. The enemy with whom America contended in Vietnam confronted us with what was for America a new kind of war after all--in that to win, it was the United States that would have had to dam up the flow of nationalism in a country so distant that Americans could not remain indefinitely, yet if we failed not only to stop the flow but to dry up its source, the nationalism against which we contended would break free and then reach flood strength once more as soon as we departed.

This review began by describing the new willingness to think about Vietnam exemplified by the recent books on the war as a heartening development. Notwithstanding its large merits, however, Colonel Summers's On Strategy represents almost a subtle kind of reversal of that willingness. In its insistence that the Vietnam War was after all a classical armed struggle to which the experiences of World War II directly applied and for which the United States should have developed a classical, Clausewitzian strategy, the book looks not so much at the real war in Vietnam as at the war that the American armed forces would have liked it to be. There is, as I have conceded, a measure of truth in Summers's insistence that the Vietnam War was not a new kind of war; but the measure is not full enough to sustain the book. If we are not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, we must face up more candidly to what was distinctive about Vietnam among American wars and learn to deal better with the distinctive problems of revolutionary wars in the Third World. We must be sure we are not simply kidding ourselves when we dream up retrospective schemes whereby American public support for the war might have been sustained. We must be candid with ourselves particularly about whether some other country's nationalism can be redirected if not repressed and about whether the United States ought to try to do such a thing in the first place.

As a corrective to some lines of wishful thinking into which Americans are especially liable to fall, The Ten Thousand Day War thus remains worth reading even if it will sometimes infuriate the Air Force reader. Worth reading also, I must finally emphasize, is the first volume of the official Air Force history. Here the problem is not that the book will infuriate but that it may prove sleep-inducing. The Advisory Years to 1965 bears the names of two authors who have often written with superb readability, even under the constraints of official history. But readability has somehow been squeezed out of this volume, and even the Air Force specialist in any given topic that it covers will have to force himself to stay with it. Nevertheless, staying with it will be rewarded. In its analysis of the repetitive, endless frustration of the early years of American involvement in Vietnam--in its unblinking analysis of American mistakes, partly, of course, those of ignoring classical principles of war, but in large part also those of trying to wrestle the Vietnam War into a classical American conception of war and failing--the Air Force volume is exactly the sort of hard look at unpleasant truths that we need. We can hope, however, that subsequent volumes of official history can continue to look hard without requiring the reader to work quite so hard in overcoming stylistic deficiencies.

A HIGHLY detailed reference volume and a very different type from those so far reviewed is Shelby L. Stanton's Vietnam Order of Battle.* It should prove exceedingly useful, nevertheless, to those who in the future try to take a hard, analytical look at the military history of Vietnam but want to make sure that they keep their facts straight. The compiler, a retired Army captain and Vietnam veteran of the 82d Airborne Division, emphasizes identifying and summarizing the Vietnam service records of Army units, but he includes data on all military units, the other American armed forces as well as allied forces, that made up the anti-Communist order of battle. He includes maps of deployment locations, illustrations of badges and insignia both official and unofficial, and pictures of and data concerning weapons and equipment. Where appropriate, the units and their dates and places of deployment are carried down to the company level. All major code names of operations are defined, and so are many military acronyms and colloquialisms of the war era--a valuable contribution in itself, because making sense of the slang and jargon of the war will be a daunting task for future historians.

*Shelby L. Stanton, Vietnam Order of Battle (Washington, D.C.: U.S. News Books, 1981, $49.95), 396 pages.

Not since World War I has an order of battle publication been part of the official history programs of the American armed forces. When working on World War II history, I have often wished for a reference work on that war comparable to Stanton's on Vietnam. Vietnam Order of Battle may look at first glance like a coffee-table book or "buff's" book; but the historians and military analysts who we hope are about to expand further the serious study of the war ought to leave their libraries' copies of it dog-eared.

1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1976), Book I, Chapter 1, p. 88.

Russell F. Weigley (M.A., Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of History, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Dartmouth College, and the U.S. Army War College. Dr. Weigley is the author of The American Way of War: A History of the United States Military Strategy and Policy and Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign for France and Germany, 1944-1945. He is a prevous contributor to the Review.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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