Air University Review, July-August 1983

An On Strategy Rejoinder

Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr.,USA

I was most honored to have not one but two reviews of my book, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982), in the January-February 1983 issue of Air University Review, especially by such distinguished reviewers as Professor Russell F. Weigley and Colonel Kenneth J. Alnwick.*

*Dr. Russell F. Weigley, "Vietnam: What Manner of War?" pp. 116-20; Colonel Kenneth J. Alnwick, "Strategic Choice, National Will, and the Vietnam Experience," pp. 133-36.

I was particularly gratified by Professor Weigley’s emphasis on the distinction between the First Indochina War between the French and the Viet Minh and the Second Indochina War between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. What was not so gratifying, however, was to find that I had failed to make it clear that my condemnation of American counterinsurgency doctrine was rooted in precisely this critical differentiation.

In retrospect it is apparent that our doctrine failed to discriminate between the counterinsurgency role of a colonial power like France in Indochina, Britain in Malaya, or, for that matter, earlier American actions during the Philippine Insurrection; and the role an external non-colonial power like the United States could play in support of an independent ally like the Republic of Vietnam. Failure to make this distinction led to American overinvolvement in the internal affairs of South Vietnam, the sapping of South Vietnamese confidence and initiative, and the unintentional undermining of the very government we had been sent to support.

In On Strategy I did not intend to imply that counterinsurgency tasks like pacification and nation-building were unimportant; what I meant to stress was that these were tasks only the South Vietnamese themselves could hope to accomplish. We could help them, but we could never do it for them. In short, what should have been more explicit in my analysis was that the problem the United States faced in South Vietnam (and faces today in El Salvador) was not counterinsurgency per se but the much more difficult and demanding task of coalition warfare in a counterinsurgency environment.

From Colonel Alnwick’s review it appears that what I meant to imply with the statement that the United States ought to have oriented its efforts against North Vietnam was not entirely clear. For example, I did not intend to advocate a ground invasion of the north. As Colonel Alnwick argues so persuasively, not only would such actions have been contrary to our national policy of containment, it would also have risked Chinese intervention in the war. My argument was intended to suggest that, rather than involve itself with South Vietnam’s internal affairs, the United States ought to have assumed the strategic defensive along the Demilitarized Zone and across Laos so as to block infiltration routes and thereby provide a shield behind which the South Vietnamese could reorder their own society. Whether this would have been as successful as our similar efforts in the Korean War is certainly debatable. What is not debatable is that, unlike counterinsurgency, such efforts would clearly be appropriate military tasks for an outside power in support of an ally like South Vietnam, which was faced with not only an externally supported insurgency but the possibility of cross-border invasion as well. (And we must not forget it was just such a cross-border blitzkreig, not a guerrilla uprising, that led to South Vietnam’s ultimate collapse.)

Professor Weigley and Colonel Alnwick both remind us that while Vietnam is over and done with, Third World insurgencies are still alive and well. To this, I would only add the reminder of Berkeley Professor Chalmers Johnson’s findings in his 1973 Autopsy on People’s War—that as we fashion our responses to such threats, we must "ensure that American efforts [are] directed against the ‘export’ of revolution, not the suppression of genuine revolution."

Colonel Summers is at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.

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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