Air University Review, May-June 1986
THE images were familiar. In late March, when American crews flying U.S. choppers hauled Honduran troops to the front to repel a reported Nicaraguan invasion, parallels to Vietnam were too easily drawn. Americans, as in 1962, were supporting a friendly force and doing so with many of the same proscriptions against going into combat. As before, the rhetoric from Washington raised the specter of advancing Communist revolutionaries threatening regional nations and, ultimately, our national security. Even the flora of Central America conjured up memories of those Asian jungles where so much American blood was spilled.
Central America is not, in fact, Southeast Asia. Vietnam was a full day away by Boeing 707; Managua is an hour and a half from Texas, as the Bear flies. The enemy in Southeast Asia was hard to define and diffuse in purposes that could be construed as being as much anticolonialist and pronationalist as Communist. Comandante Daniel Ortega and his cohorts claim to be interested only in turning Nicaragua into a Marxist-Leninist state and say that they will leave their neighbors alone if they are not threatened. Nevertheless, the feeling among many in Washington is that the Sandinistas are Communist revolutionaries dedicated to the spread of subversion throughout Central America and the hemisphere.
Our purpose is not to draw parallels or make contrasts with Southeast Asia. Neither do we intend to oppose or to advocate sending Americans to fight in Central America. Rather, we simply ponder the possibility that someday U.S. Air Force planes may go into action in the region.
If that day ever comes, what role should air power play? Can we draw applicable lessons from the twelve years of experience we brought back from Indochina?
The U.S. Army, it has been said, went into Korea a very poor army but came out strengthened by the experience. It was that fine force that landed in Vietnam in 1965 to fight there in much the same way it fought in Korea. The U.S. Air Force, however, purposely disregarded lessons that might have been learned in Korea.
In the years after the Korean armistice, the Air Force viewed that war as an aberration which would not be repeated. In the 1950s, the Strategic Air Command was in its heyday as we built an institutional Air Force capable of laying waste to the Soviet Union under the aegis of the doctrine of massive retaliation. The Tactial Air Command, by comparison, was relegated to the role of a "junior SAC," with planes, crews, and training optimized for delivering somewhat smaller nuclear weapons. The Air Force that went to war in the midsixies played out a repertoire more suited to World War II than either Korea or Vietnam.
After 1975, while incorporating some tactical lessons learned into our Red Flag program, the Air Force again decided to ignore its most recent combat experiences because, once again, we preferred to think that we had been engaged on a never-to-be-repeated diversion from the true course of the employment of strategic air power. Consequently, we have not properly analyzed issues pertaining to strategy, institutional roles, organizational structure, and the impact of air power on the perceptions of the public at large. Do we have the doctrinal foundation, force structure, and inventory suited for fighting the kind of protracted, quasi-conventional war that we might have to deal with should we be sent to Central America? Are we flexible enough to make the adjustments necessary to accommodate the differences between fighting the Sandinistas and the Soviets, or would we simply play out the scenarios with which we are familiar? Would we try to fight in Central America as we would if we were fighting in Central Europe? If we do, we could lose.
It is time to take a hard look at history. In our rush to "put Vietnam behind us," we run the risk of losing its important lessons. Conventional wisdom points to Linebacker II as the ultimate bombing campaign, that effort which "brought them to their knees." Perhaps it was a fitting way to end the participation of American air power. While Linebacker II was hardly a Dresden or a Hamburg in its scope, the spirit that inspires the often-heard suggestion that "had we done in '65 what we did in December '72, we would have won the war then" comes to us from the skies over the Rhine, half a world and a generation removed from the realities of Southeast Asia. The color of the flag over Ho Chi Minh City and the ease with which it was placed there a mere two years after our B-52s won "peace with honor" should prompt us to look beyond the readily apparent.
E. H. T.
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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