23

The Strategic Architectures of the Vietnam War

After World War II and the Korean War, the Vietnam War represented a new kind of warfare. In the traditional sense, it was impossible to classify it simply as a war of combatant states and armies engaged in conventional battles. It was hardly a war in this old-fashioned sense of what American or European soldiers regarded war to be. One could not find or define a front until the last weeks of the war.

Vietnam presented for the first time a different set of problems for an American army that had a long history of operational learning. How does an army find, fix, and finish an enemy that it cannot find and engage at times and on terrain to its own strategic advantage, not the enemy’s? And how does it operate in the middle of a war surrounded by people whose language it cannot speak? Neither firepower nor technology was a war-winning discriminator if the target was so difficult to find. Success in the combat environment of Vietnam meant finding leaders who were capable of adapting and learning. It meant, in the best case, understanding the difference between Race’s preemptive and reinforcement policies, how they might affect Vietnamese behavior and motivation, and what policies created contingent incentives that could motivate military behavior to resist the NLF and Viet Cong.

Another difference was how this new kind of war was supported. In conventional conflicts, combatants are generally supplied from outside the locus of conflict. In a revolutionary conflict, the movement gets much of what it needs from the people it is trying to draw to its cause and seizes matériel and usable assets from the government it is trying to overthrow. That was one of the insights gained from the Malayan Emergency—isolate the insurgents from their source of supply. Malaya is a peninsula of some fifty thousand square miles with a narrow land border with Thailand1 and much of its territory, like Vietnam, uncultivated jungle. The insurgents could not benefit from an outside, geographically contiguous power to supply them. However, Vietnam offered no such advantage to COIN operators because geography worked against them. Vietnam had a porous, 1,200-mile border contiguous with North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, all countries providing routes for men and matériel to reinforce the revolutionary movement in South Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh Trail proved impossible to interdict from the air, and serious proposals to block it with ground forces were rejected.

North Vietnamese Strategic Architecture

If the Vietnam War was not a traditional war fought by conventional combatants, there was general agreement among American and Vietnamese military leaders that the NVA and the NLF/VC cadres in the south were trying to impose their will on the South Vietnamese population through a unique strategy that blended military, political, and psychological elements of coercion and persuasion.

The revolutionary movement’s theory of victory was a simple one: Overthrow South Vietnam as a corrupt, reactionary, neocolonialist, capitalist society and replace it with another, fairer, redistributive, classless, Marxist-Leninist society. Use violence wherever, whenever, and against whomever it is advantageous to do so. Negotiate when you have to, but never abandon the vision of overthrowing the enemy society.

The revolutionary war was exactly what the communists had said it was. The conflict was partly military and displayed at certain moments the undeniable features of war recognizable to any World War II or Korean War veteran. But it was also a nonmilitary conflict, waged by an implacably hostile, politically sophisticated revolutionary movement determined not only to overrun South Vietnam’s government but to overthrow the entire society underpinning it and impose a new communist-designed social order. On the military level, the counterstrategy under which the GVN, ARVN, and MACV fought had proven just barely adequate over the long years of warfare up until 1972. However, the political, nonmilitary strategy under which South Vietnam and the United States operated was never a match for the comprehensive struggle that the revolutionary movement designed and executed. The GVN, with its powerful American ally, never went through the thought process of designing an effective counterrevolutionary or counterinsurgency strategy.

Le Duan’s leadership adhered to the concept of sustaining Phase 2 guerrilla operations while carefully preparing for the ultimate Phase 3 military offensive. As one of the early revolutionary leaders in the South and as head of COSVN until 1957, Le Duan never lost sight of his vision of a total military victory, however long it took: “Defeat of the enemy militarily is indispensable for the victory of the resistance and the revolution.”2 His leadership dominated the 1968 Tet Offensive, the 1972 Easter Offensive, and the victorious 1975 offensive drive south that ended at the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Le Duan constantly probed for the US/GVN breaking point, even if it meant gambling with tens of thousands of lives. For him, the end state of the Vietnam War was not the Paris Accords in 1973. It was North Vietnam’s military victory in 1975.

US/GVN Strategic Architecture

A successful strategic architecture required American–South Vietnamese agreement on aligning four things: (1) a clearly stated policy that made a compelling case to the American and South Vietnamese people for why the GVN deserved such a massive American national commitment to nation building resulting in the sacrifice of nearly sixty thousand American lives; (2) a political strategy that undermined the revolutionary movement’s preemptive social and economic policies with GVN policies that were at least equally preemptive and compelling in the areas of land reform, taxes, military recruitment, and administrative staffing; (3) a military strategy in which MACV, CORDS, ARVN, and GVN agencies integrated their officers, troops, and personnel into organizations where they could truly plan and interoperate together; and (4) operations that balanced conventional and COIN operations because, as events showed, the ARVN had to be capable of both.

North Vietnam succeeded in its own efforts at nation building. If ever there was a case of effective “armed nation building,” it was the NLF/NVA operating in South Vietnam over thirty years. Race has made their playbook intelligible to any COIN student for forty years.

For the US government, a strategic architecture of nation building would have required more intrusive policies affecting GVN political elites at the national level. Policy implementation would have required painstaking negotiations with GVN leaders resulting in bilateral agreements or memoranda of understanding about how South Vietnamese ministries operated both internally and locally at the provincial and district levels. It would have addressed criteria of accountability, such as how the rural administration was staffed and how the ARVN officer corps was staffed, and so on. Execution of such agreements would have required diplomatic, MACV, and CORDS personnel who spoke Vietnamese, displayed deep knowledge about Vietnamese public administration and cultural protocols, and were effective in building relationships of trust with their counterparts. The US Country Team never thought comprehensively in these terms; neither did Washington, which had to provide the authority and funding.

Action in the field would have meant creating the necessary leverage to influence the GVN’s administrative apparatus to appoint honest, effective ministers; create new, preemptive policies that drew in the rural population; and impose rigorous methods of accountability inside Vietnamese ministries. The United States and the Allies of course did precisely these things after World War II in the cases of defeated Axis states such as Germany and Japan, but they never imagined that they would or should intrude into the affairs of a sovereign client state like the Republic of Vietnam. It would have meant that the GVN, CORDS, and AID budgets needed to be broader in scope, reaching down into Vietnamese governmental layers where American expenditures would be contingent on effective administrative and military performance and accountability.

Instead, MACV, CORDS, and USAID tried to work with the government as they found it—as an anointed client. Working with the GVN, the US government discovered that South Vietnamese leaders would not change their administrative infrastructure, personnel, or governing modus operandi in any fundamental way, reinforced as they often were by the ARVN, police, paramilitary forces, and Phoenix operatives. The revolutionary movement’s armed, coercive, ideologically motivated echelons had the strategic edge. They were shrewder and wilier because, despite their appalling losses, they were always prepared to outwait the Americans. Patience turned out to be a strategic discriminator.

The Johnson administration’s decision to intervene failed to address the essential nature of the war it was getting the armed forces of the United States into. It was a cognitive meltdown involving endless skirmishes among political and military policy makers about whether it was a war at all. Victory was a term looming in the background. What did it mean? In the Vietnam War, victory went to the side that was the best organized for the conflict it planned and was prepared to fight, remained the best organized for the long haul, and best understood how to wear down and outwait the enemy.

In a broad geopolitical sense, the fighting during the Vietnam War never threatened the stability of the international system the way the Third Reich represented a menacing threat to the world in 1939.3 Vietnam did not produce strategic resources essential to the survival of the “Free World” in the same way a Rommel victory at El Alamein, for example, would have threatened Middle East oil supplies. Indeed, no one in Embassy Saigon could find a policy statement on file about what the US strategic interest was in Vietnam in 1968.4

At a conference thirty-five years after the war ended, the late Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke5 could not articulate one. Neither could former secretary of state Henry Kissinger6 whose address preceded Holbrooke’s. Kissinger outlined the requirements for a strategy without defining one for Vietnam. “When we consider going to war, we need a global strategic analysis that explains to us what the significance of this is. The purpose of a war is some definition of victory; stalemate is not a strategy, and victory needs to be defined as an outcome that is achievable in a period sustainable by American public opinion.”

Holbrooke opined more expansively on American Vietnam policy and military strategy:

And so we failed the first test [presumably a strategy that could have worked]. Our beloved nation sent into battle soldiers without a clear determination of what they could accomplish and they misjudged the stakes. And then we couldn’t get out, as Henry [Kissinger] spoke already to that point. We fought bravely under very difficult conditions. But success was not achievable. . . . I cannot escape the feeling that in the end, whatever we did, the long-term outcome would have been the same. And ironically, that outcome is precisely the one that Secretary [Hillary R.] Clinton outlined to you earlier this morning as she talked about the remarkable state today of U.S.-Vietnamese relations.7

Holbrooke’s reference to Clinton was her remarks in the opening address at the conference. She put substance to the irony:

The progress between Vietnam and the United States has been breathtaking. . . . An entire generation of young people has grown up knowing only peace between Vietnam and America, and the relationships that they are forming through educational and cultural exchanges, through new businesses and social networks are drawing us even closer together.8

Neither the Johnson nor Nixon administrations formulated an effective policy to enable an authoritarian regime like the GVN to combat the implacable hostility of the revolutionary movement in its midst. The GVN was by and large powerless to eliminate the terrorist explosions against vulnerable urban targets of opportunity, the daily kidnappings and assassinations of its officials in the countryside, or the never-ending ambushes of its police, paramilitary personnel, and soldiers. These epiphenomena occurred year after year in a never-ending cycle of bloodletting and social trauma throughout the society. The revolutionary movement was a force that clearly intended to continue such bloodshed. It accepted the mounting casualties until the South Vietnamese social fabric began inexorably to unravel.

When this process accelerated after the NVA invasion in 1975, individuals’ allegiance to law and order, or right and wrong, had become irrelevant. The GVN was doomed because there was no civic culture to sustain it. Individual not collective survival would emerge as the dominant choice; it was every man for himself. The revolutionary movement understood the social pathologies it was creating, and it was skilled in provoking the GVN and the Americans to overreact, often with massive firepower. The revolutionary movement was prepared, as it did, to fight a thirty-year war. Few democratic societies, much less a South Vietnamese authoritarian one, possess the fortitude to fight and win such a long war, not without first offering its population a compelling vision for why victory would be worth the sacrifice.

US losses were staggering for a “limited-intensity conflict”: 58,1779 American servicemen dead, 153,30310 wounded. A total of more than 8.7 million American men and women served in the Vietnam War.11 South Vietnamese casualties were much higher: 260,000 for all services12 and two million civilian casualties. North Vietnamese official reports of casualties are even higher: 1.1 million North Vietnamese military killed and 600,000 wounded. In addition, there were two million North Vietnamese civilian casualties in the north and another two million in the south.13

The armed forces of the United States deployed to Vietnam with services that organized themselves as if they were still fighting World War II or the Korean War, with war-fighting strategies and doctrines that were much better suited to fighting in conflicts where conventional militaries functioned in the same way they always had, where civilian populations could be protected behind an expanding front, and where military government was essentially a postwar activity. The same was true of the diplomatic and intelligence establishments. They, too, functioned as they had traditionally operated, without intensive area training or insistence on language skills. Some Vietnam War historians have addressed the issue of MACV’s size and cumbersome structure and inability to learn in the middle of a shooting war. Nagl points out that General Westmoreland resisted a recommendation that he establish an intermediate headquarters between himself and his field commanders so that he could have freed himself and part of his MACV staff from their day-to-day operational responsibilities and devoted more time to defining and analyzing the larger issues of the war.14

Undertaking such questioning and innovation was not how the World War II and Korean War veterans had been trained to assume high command. They came from a professional “can-do” military culture where confidence in firepower produced decisive results. They did not view their command jobs as theoretical exercises in questioning what they believed were proven strategies or doctrines. They had seen these doctrines validated when they had served as junior officers in combat assignments. The innovative ideas that were percolating up from the Vietnam junior officers in the field, some of whom displayed a sophisticated understanding of the war’s issues, never gained any solid institutional footing upon which to base a reexamination of fundamental assumptions about the nature of the war.

President Johnson himself was hesitant to engage in such questioning.15 Indeed, Johnson once complained to his wife, “I can’t get out [of Vietnam], and I can’t finish it with what I have got. And I don’t know what the hell to do!” He moaned, “I’m not temperamentally equipped to be commander in chief.”16 Johnson never systematically questioned his top military commanders on whether their war-fighting strategies would succeed. “If I left that war and let the communists take over South Vietnam,” President Johnson reflected years later to his biographer, “then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser, and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”17 President Johnson reluctantly decided to intervene and dispatched US forces to Vietnam incrementally. He did so in response to worry that he would be perceived as weak by his political opponents. That is not a sound rationale for a policy to escalate a military-assistance mission into an expeditionary, interventionist war.

Despite his recognition that his advisers had “no plan for victory militarily or diplomatically,” Lyndon Johnson remained resolved to do only what was necessary to avoid defeat in Vietnam. Fixated on short-term expedients and lacking a comprehensive estimate of what the war might cost the United States in the long term, the president focused on the more easily discernible price of withdrawal. Pulling out [once the incremental buildup was underway], Johnson confided to one of his most trusted advisers [in a telephone conversation with Secretary McNamara], made him “shudder to think what all of ’em would say.”18

Presidents who do not probe deeply into the substance of interventionist policies where large military forces are deployed in combat risk failure. Neither President Johnson nor his first national security advisor, the late McGeorge Bundy, was particularly interested in Vietnamese history or culture, the origins of Vietnamese nationalism, or the NLF as a revolutionary movement. Johnson in 1966 complained to his director of the CIA about the lack of intelligence about North Vietnamese intentions. Why couldn’t the CIA penetrate the interior of the government in Hanoi, he remonstrated?

I thought you guys had people everywhere, that you knew everything, and now you don’t even know anything about a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them. Get them to drop their answers in a bottle and put the bottle in the Pacific.19

That remark may have been a president in a private moment of frustration, but it did reveal the virulent lack of curiosity about the adversary he and MACV were up against. Bundy, even forty years later, still exhibited the same total lack of interest in the Vietnamese:

It was clear from the beginning that Bundy was distinctly uninterested in the topics of Vietnamese nationalism and the origins of the communist insurgency [speaking to a collaborator, Gordon M. Goldstein, with whom he was proposing to write a retrospective analysis of the Vietnam War]. . . . Bundy had no enthusiasm for examining the Vietnamese calculus of interests that contributed to war with the United States. The decision to Americanize the Vietnam War in 1965, Bundy told me, was a decision made in Washington, and not in Hanoi. It was inherently a presidential [italics in original] decision, he argued, and thus had to be studied through the prism of the two men he served who held ultimate authority for questions of war and peace—President Kennedy and President Johnson.20

How Bundy—one of the premier national security authorities of his generation, a scion of two Boston Brahmin families on his maternal side, a Yale Skull and Bones alumnus, a noted professor of government at Harvard in the early 1950s, dean of the faculty at Harvard at the age of thirty-four, in short, exhibit A of Halberstam’s “the best and the brightest”21—could retrospectively make a statement forcefully claiming such incuriosity about the Vietnamese revolutionary movement is astonishing.

Equally astonishing are Robert McNamara’s regrets for not having confronted President Johnson with his views during 1967 and 1968, which indicated that the American military in Vietnam could neither succeed nor prevent the continued erosion of popular support for the war. Bob Woodward in 2009 interviewed both Bundy and McNamara late in their lives. Both were thinking about how posterity would view their actions. Bundy said, “I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation, and execution. If I have learned anything, I should share it.”22 He certainly did not think such sharing included any knowledge about the Vietnamese; he never was interested in them.

The late James C. Thompson Jr., a junior Harvard professor, had a firsthand opportunity to observe the decision-making milieu in Washington where Bundy and McNamara occupied central positions. He was in a position “to watch the slide down the slippery slope during five years (1961–1966) of service in the White House and Department of State.” He published an account of his experience in the April 1968 issue of The Atlantic. Written nearly fifty years ago, its relevance persists because it reads like a national security policy primer, useful today in assessing the Iraqi and Afghan Wars. Thompson asked, “Where were the experts, the doubters, and the dissenters? The answer is complex but instructive.” He made telling points about expertise and effectiveness.

“In the first place, the American government was sorely lacking in real Vietnam or Indochina expertise” (italics above and below are in original). He pointed out that the State Department treated Vietnam until 1954 as an adjunct of Embassy Paris. French-speaking Foreign Service personnel of narrow European experience largely staffed Embassy Saigon and the Vietnam Desk at State from 1954 onward. “A recurrent and increasingly important factor in the decision-making process was the banishment of real expertise.”

Thompson assessed the Vietnam policy process this way:

Even among the “architects” of our Vietnam commitment, there has been persistent confusion as to what type of war we were fighting and, as a direct consequence, confusion as to how to end that war. . . . Was it, for instance, a civil war, in which case counterinsurgency might suffice? Or was it a war of international aggression? . . . Who was the aggressor—and the real enemy? The Viet Cong? Hanoi? Peking? . . . And confused throughout, in like fashion, was the question of American objectives; your objectives depended on whom you were fighting and why.23

President Johnson had surrounded himself with many of the most able people from the Kennedy administration, yet he never found a substantive voice with which to explain either to himself or to the American people why deploying twelve divisions, scores of warships, thousands of aircraft, and over half a million men, who sustained tens of thousands of deaths and casualties, was done in pursuit of a core national security interest of the United States. Once he ordered those deployments, he did not as commander in chief compel the right questions to be asked about what those forces should accomplish for a client state he so poorly understood. The end state was never clear. Such a state of strategic affairs within the highest councils of government is not a basis for convincing a skeptical American public.

Given the high casualties on both sides, it is a serious challenge for anyone on either side to assert that fighting the Vietnam War was worth even a small fraction of those lives. The historical, what-if counterfactuals of the Vietnam War continue to engage American politicians as well as historians to the present day. Two works by Fredrik Logevall and Mark Moyar about the decision to escalate offer new and fundamentally differing insights and documentary evidence into how the war could have been avoided24 or conducted without the intervention of ground forces.25 Two other writers about Vietnamization, Lewis Sorley and Rufus Phillips, among the most recent and responsible, draw attention to some of the lessons of the war. All of these writers would do well to consider Race’s incisive analysis of the effectiveness of the revolutionary movement or Elliott’s magisterial two-volume work. Their works drive to deeper insights, not simply because both were there as participants and observers, but because they became Vietnamese speakers, interviewed Vietnamese at length, cross-checked what they learned against documentary sources, and let the Vietnamese on both sides speak for themselves.

Elliott, perhaps, anticipating these revisionist writers by almost a decade, preempts some of the alluring “if-only” speculations. For example, he offers the counterfactual that had the United States been in Vietnam with five hundred thousand troops at the end of World War II, or had the GVN existed in 1945 as it had in 1972 with more than one million armed troops, it probably could have easily defeated the Viet Minh guerrillas of that period. But he quickly dismisses his own straw man as pointless speculation. The second counterfactual is closer to the events: whether the belated land reform of the Thieu government after 1968 had taken place earlier or whether a change in US military strategy and tactics in 1965 rather than 1968 would have enabled the GVN to defeat the revolutionary movement.26 Again, it is tempting to think so. However, the movement had repeatedly demonstrated how aggressively it could recover from any military setback inflicted on it by MACV or the ARVN. Elliott points to Kissinger’s clause in his Foreign Affairs article in 1969: “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

In his final chapter of Misalliance addressing what happened between the governments of Ngo Dinh Diem and the United States, ending in the military coup and the execution of the Ngo brothers in 1963, Miller concluded, “From its formation to its dissolution, the alliance between Ngo Dinh Diem and the United States was defined by the politics of nation-building.”27 As the Vietnam War intensified over the next twelve years, American leaders conceived of nation building through the historical lenses of World War II. Nation building occurred after the fighting ended. After the Axis surrenders, nation building followed the constitutional templates and public administration dictates of the Allied victors occupying West Germany and Japan. By the mid-1960s, nation building had become a staple in the graduate syllabi of top American university political science departments.28

In Vietnam, nation building was something that was ancillary to the main business of war fighting. CORDS and COIN operations were the “other war,” even while these operations were undertaken simultaneously with main-force combat and the Operation Rolling Thunder air campaign. As Miller explains, nation building was conceived by the Americans and South Vietnamese in the early 1960s under Diem to be

a field of competition and contestation in which both Americans and Vietnamese advanced diverse ideas and agendas. . . . It soon became clear, however, that the conceptual and cultural divide between the two [governments] was wider than it had first appeared. The problems did not derive merely from the Ngo brothers’ abstruse and confusing pronouncement about the merits of [the Diem government’s policies]. They were also rooted in specific, practical disagreements between the Ngos and the Americans over the meaning of key concepts such as democracy, community, security, and social change. Such disagreements did not mean that every [American–South Vietnamese] nation-building initiative was doomed from the beginning. The two sides’ respective visions of development were not so dissimilar as to make collaboration impossible. Nevertheless the differences between them were real and substantial and were a key cause of the strains that were evident even in the alliance’s earliest days.29

How were the two sides going to collaborate if they were functioning inside two very different cognitive universes? The American universe saw nation building with a client state to be a challenge in the intricacies of effective public administration: the bedrock of a constitution underlying rule of law, rigorous standards of accountability expected inside any competent civil service, and the ability to throw a lot of money at a problem.

The Vietnamese universe saw nation building in completely different cultural terms. The Ngo brothers, to gain power, had to strike political accommodations among diverse and competing power constituencies and therefore potential rivals simply to gain power in 1954. There were power bases within the army, many with close ties to French military officers and colonial administrators, and diverse religious sects such as the Cao Dai (combining the three teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism with beliefs and practices borrowed from Catholicism and European spiritualism), with a stronghold in Tay Ninh Province west of Saigon. There was another nationalist religious group with broad popular appeal in the Mekong River delta known as the Hoa Hao, whose leaders during the 1940s used Japanese-supplied aid to establish armed militias that allied themselves with the Viet Minh at one point and later with the GVN. By June 1954, Hoa Hao warlords controlled several provinces in the delta and controlled thousands of fighters. There were other groups: the Binh Xuyen criminal cartel that controlled Saigon’s underworld and the Dai Viet Party, which had been a key player in anticommunist politics in Indochina since its founding in 1939. Miller’s early chapters sketch “this daunting collection of opponents and political rivals”30 out of which Diem and his military coup successors were trying to build an effective anticommunist, putatively democratic South Vietnam. They received billions of dollars31 during the twenty-year period between 1955 and 1975, and yet all of that aid failed. K. W. Taylor in his recently published history of the Vietnamese makes a strong defense of Diem and explains the diversity of his responses to the legacy of French colonialism, which “disgusted” him, and his failed attempts to find a noncommunist nation-building alternative.32

Because serious nation building was never even formally part of the American goal in Vietnam, development became the operative term to describe what US agencies actually did in the field. Development and nation building are two fundamentally different concepts driven by different behavioral conceptions of how leaders and the governed interact. Development is providing inputs with little regard for their behavioral outputs: how many VC or NVA the Americans or South Vietnamese killed or neutralized, how many wells they drilled in villages, or how many medical dispensaries they constructed. Such American reinforcement inputs failed to change Vietnamese behavior. Only contingent incentives motivating decisions by individual Vietnamese to assume the risk of death could do that.

Nation building was about what a wealthy foreign benefactor did to affect GVN behavior and how it used its plentiful resources to change how a host government functions for its people. The State Department would have objected vehemently if change became too intrusive: “You can’t do that with a sovereign state!” Why not? the Johnson and Nixon White House staffs could have asked. By 1968, the United States had half a million men deployed to the theater risking their lives for South Vietnam, and the American people were by then paying billions each year to fund the war (in 1968, the figure was $35 billion; today’s present value would be $240 billion). Americans could have said to the South Vietnamese, “It’s our blood as much as yours, and our money as well as yours, that is sustaining South Vietnamese sovereignty in the face of a mortal threat to the regime and the society underpinning it.” Reading their enemies’ doctrinal literature told them as much. Such a forthright negotiation would have required early and careful judgment and timing about who had leverage over whom. For example, proposing such a negotiation with GVN leaders in 1968–1969 would have been too late. The Vietnamese by 1968 knew that the Americans would not carry out a threat of withdrawal. By then, the Johnson and Nixon administrations were too deeply invested in the war to pull out without admitting defeat.

Amplification of such a back-to-front national commitment would have required diplomats and soldiers trained and empowered by rigorously aligned policies, strategies, and operations designed to defeat the revolutionary movement. The US government would have needed to recruit and train thousands of American diplomats and soldiers who would have needed specific functional and linguistic qualifications. To be effective in their jobs, they would have needed Vietnamese-language fluency (and for some, literacy, so that Americans could read Vietnamese documents), knowledge of Vietnamese culture and history, and skills and experience across a broad range of academic disciplines (public administration, economics, banking, finance, education, law, and so on). With their Vietnamese counterparts, the Americans would have had to design a set of joint institutions where Americans and Vietnamese worked together inside various ministries, agencies, and military commands. Americans assigned to these joint organizations eventually might have worked themselves out of the job if the United States and South Vietnam together had won the war. It might have taken a decade or more. That was the paradigm for the wartime occupations during and after World War II. In Vietnam, realigning policy, strategy, and operations would have been a process of reverse engineering—from a defined end state specifying a polity that could function and establish legitimacy among the Vietnamese people. It would have required commitment to a long game where the narrative was compelling to the American people. It would have had to be equally compelling to the South Vietnamese.

The negotiation would have required Americans who understood that politics was at the heart of what their Vietnamese counterparts needed to form governmental coalitions, whether they were the Ngo brothers or their postcoup successors. South Vietnamese elites saw nation building through completely different cultural lenses than Americans. Vietnamese leaders, simply to gain power, had to build an effective coalition of opposing parties. All Vietnamese leaders had to strike political accommodations among very diverse and competing power constituencies, including potential rivals inside the military and other bases of power. That the Ngo brothers had succeeded in the 1950s and early 1960s was a major accomplishment. Any Vietnamese government had to accommodate a wide range of powerful rivals, ethnic groups, political parties, criminal enterprises, and economic interests. Americans would have required deep knowledge and skill to help their Vietnamese counterparts navigate through these constituencies to form stable political coalitions.

Effective nation building never happened. The GVN’s failure to create effective governmental institutions had a price. When the NVA attacked with twenty divisions in 1975, nation building was irrelevant because it was too late for the ARVN to function even as an effective conventional army to defend South Vietnam. The tragedy for the United States and its GVN client was that the American strategic architecture failed to motivate the South Vietnamese to defend their country themselves.

The failed strategic architecture of the Vietnam War left a profound and poisonous legacy within the American body politic. It left Americans with a deep loss of confidence that the nation’s political and military institutions are capable of great enterprises as they had demonstrated by winning World War II. Is the United States institutionally incapable of successfully intervening with expeditionary forces where nation building is required? Is military intervention in a faraway land, in an unknown foreign culture, against a ruthless adversary worthy of the United States’ fundamental values? Can Americans summon the will and the wisdom to insist that a foreign host nation undertake necessary measures for its own survival as a condition of continued American assistance, especially where its armed forces are sustaining large casualties in combat? Does the US government know how to stand up a host government to function on its own, be accountable to its people, and defend itself? Are the right strategic architectures blocked by the large institutional infrastructures in Washington? The post-Vietnam question is this: Are there certain kinds of conflicts, even for a superpower like the United States, that remain unwinnable?