The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

To listen to American field commander General William C. “Westy” Westmoreland, the U.S. military effort in the Vietnam War followed a succession of strategic concepts and wound its way through a series of phases. At a certain level, this description is true. Westmoreland deployed troops surrounding American bases when the Johnson administration was beginning the major U.S. ground involvement in the war. That approach became the “enclave” strategy. Then Westmoreland, who headed the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), threw his key entering combat force—the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), or “the Cav”—into South Vietnam’s Central Highlands to stem the adversary’s advances. There came a time when his strategy focused on clearing the land around Saigon and another when Westy focused overwhelmingly on the area near the demilitarized zone, labeled I or “Eye” Corps on U.S. military maps. Under Westmoreland’s successor, General Creighton W. Abrams, strategy placed much greater emphasis on pacification. If you were seeking military medals for Vietnam, for example, the army awarded campaign ribbons for service during eight different phases of the war, roughly corresponding to periods in which particular approaches were prevalent.

But there are strategies, and there is strategy. Military theory distinguishes several “levels” of warfare. Man to man in the field or unit to unit in a combat zone, there are tactics. On an intermediate plane, there is what theorists like to call the “operational level of war.” Some also distinguish a “grand strategic” level, whereas others include that plane with the operational. The strategies and phases of the Vietnam War enumerated here correspond to maneuvers at the operational level. In truth, there was only one strategy in the Vietnam War—to kill the enemy—what the military calls “attrition” or “attrition warfare.” As early as June 24, 1965, in a cable to Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman General Earle G. Wheeler, Westmoreland declared that Vietnam would be “a war of attrition.”¹

Attrition is not only a strategy, but also a phenomenon of war. All forces suffer losses. As they do, their capabilities and effectiveness progressively diminish. Indeed, the JCS’s definition of “attrition” incorporates both these aspects.² The degradation of capability that occurs with combat losses is what makes attrition desirable as a strategy. Classical theorists trace the use of the concept as far back as the Peloponnesian War, and it was the German writer Hans Delbrueck who first adopted the term “strategy of attrition,” which he contrasted with Carl von Clausewitz’s strategy of annihilation.³ World War I, especially the battle of Verdun, carried the notion of an attrition strategy far from its origins, which Delbrueck had seen as flexible and malleable, a mixture of politics and strategy and, above all, of maneuver and battle. World War I framed a meaning that became the exact opposite. Firepower and other means combined to inflict losses that would bring the adversary to exhaustion in the reframed notion of attrition. This concept especially favored a nation-state with great resources and large-scale firepower—hence, its attractiveness for American military commanders.

The helicopter assault, large-scale sweep, search-and-destroy, and clear-and-hold operations that figured in the Vietnam conflict were tactics. At the higher level, MACV—whether under Westmoreland or Abrams or their successors—had a force-deployment strategy, but not an operations strategy. MACV constantly calculated and recalculated optimal deployments in terms of their potential to inflict losses on the adversary, something very different from generals’ ordering out their corps and divisions to conquer objectives they set. Sending the Cav to the Highlands and then eventually to I Corps as part of a steady concentration of American combat power there was important operationally but made little difference in terms of strategy.

Probably the most influential work on the American way of war in Vietnam is Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr.’s book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War.⁴ Summers frames his discussion in terms of the principles of war that are taught to young officers in training and shows how standard practices in Vietnam had vitiated many of them. In particular, Summers argues that the United States failed to define its strategic goals and thus lacked clear objectives. His treatment of firepower and maneuver explicitly faults attrition, but at a more tactical level.

This argument can be traced through the basic decision documents on the war. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s formulation in a March 16, 1964, memorandum, repeated in many variations over the years, stated simply: “We seek an independent, non-communist South Vietnam.”⁵ When McNamara’s assistant secretary for international security affairs, John T. McNaughton, attempted to define U.S. aims that November, he came up with four:

1. To protect U.S. reputation as a counter-subversion guarantor.

2. To avoid domino effect especially in Southeast Asia.

3. To keep South Vietnamese territory from Red hands.

4. To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods.⁶

McNaughton’s immediate superior, William P. Bundy, led an interagency working group on Southeast Asia that further formulated the goals: get Hanoi to stop its support and direction of the insurgency in the South and to cooperate in ending insurgent operations, “re-establish an independent and secure South Vietnam,” and maintain the security of other non-Communist states in Southeast Asia.⁷ It was McNaughton again who produced the most famous version of U.S. goals in March 1965:

70%—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as guarantor).

20%—To keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

ALSO—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

NOT—to “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay in if asked out.⁸

A month later, President Lyndon B. Johnson approved the essential U.S. Vietnam policy in a decision document called National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 328. That paper gave presidential authorization to a “general framework of continuing action” by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the State Department but contained no definition of American goals.⁹ After NSAM 328, presidential decision memoranda would be uniformly confined to immediate policy concerns or individual programs. Through the end of the Vietnam War, there would be no policy document of equivalent scope and vision. In sum, during the period of major U.S. combat engagement in Vietnam, no American president adopted an official formula of U.S. goals in Vietnam. Below the level of presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, the various enumerations of goals were not consistent. Was the object to influence Saigon, Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, or all of them, or was it to do something else? The inconsistency afforded no clear guide to crafting a concrete strategy.

During the summer of 1965, President Johnson made his decision to commit American ground forces to South Vietnam in large numbers. In the course of LBJ’s deliberations, JCS chairman Wheeler sent a team to Saigon under General Andrew J. Goodpaster, then director of the JCS Joint Staff, to study how U.S. forces could be used. The result of their efforts amounted to the closest Washington came to elaborating an actual “strategic plan” for the Vietnam War, except that Goodpaster’s study was only that—a study—with no standing as a device with which field commanders had to comply. It was an assessment of the chance of victory if the United States did everything it could do. During the course of the team’s trip, Goodpaster heard yet more talk about objectives. South Vietnamese general Nguyen Duc Thang put the local ally’s view on the table at a meeting on July 16: to stop and destroy forces coming from North Vietnam, to destroy National Liberation Front (NLF) forces in the South, and to protect South Vietnamese manpower in order to inhibit insurgent recruitment. This formula implicitly accepted an attrition strategy.¹⁰

Goodpaster’s study explicitly discussed “strategy,” putting it within the framework of assumptions regarding Chinese and Soviet behavior (those nations would not intervene) and restrictions on the use of allied forces (no invasion of North Vietnam, no use of nuclear or chemical weapons, and no “mass bombing of population per se”). “Victory” was also defined as something between ending the insurgency and containing it sufficiently to obviate the need for the employment of U.S. combat troops. Within that framework, the study’s authors wrote:

The strategy … envisages establishing in Southeast Asia a heavy preponderance of US/SVN military power over the VC/DRV [Vietcong/Democratic Republic of Vietnam], provides a concept for the employment of these forces in the next six to eight months, sets forth objectives and weight of attack for an integrated, interrelated effort involving operations against North Vietnam and operations in South Vietnam, together with action against infiltration in Laos and elsewhere, and indicates broad factors of timing, priority, and coordination between these principle courses of action.

The forces sent to Vietnam would maintain a high tempo of military action to gain and retain the initiative, keeping the adversary off balance while “destroying the war-supporting potential of North Vietnam.” Wading through the minutiae of this 128-page study reveals that it contains a scheme for force deployment and employment, but that there was no holy grail.¹¹

In February 1966, after American forces had been fighting in South Vietnam for some months, President Johnson held a conference at Honolulu to review progress. Attended by most of the senior leaders of both the United States and South Vietnam, including field commanders such as General Westmoreland, the Honolulu meeting became the setting for the MACV commander’s request for a major new troop reinforcement. It was also the occasion when Johnson famously mouthed his incantation that in Vietnam the United States would “nail the coonskins to the wall.”¹² There would be no change in strategy, only escalation to higher levels of troop deployment.

The American strategic approach became explicit at Honolulu. There, General Westmoreland was handed a paper that McNaughton had prepared for Secretary McNamara. According to Westy, Bundy had also worked on the document, and it represented a joint product by the defense secretary and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The paper set specific, mostly quantified results for MACV to achieve during 1966. The last of them was to “[a]ttrite, by year’s end, VC/PAVN [People’s Army of Vietnam] forces at a rate at least as high as their capacity to put men into the field.”¹³ As General Westmoreland put it in retrospect in his memoirs, “Those goals, provided me in a formal memorandum, in effect spelled out the way the war was to be pursued, not only in 1966 but into the future.”¹⁴ General Phillip C. Davidson, a close Westmoreland associate and later his intelligence chief, would similarly write: “Here was the directive which established American strategy from 1966 to 1969 and which formally made the strategy of attrition the first priority of the United States in South Vietnam.”¹⁵

The strategy of attrition may have become explicit at the Honolulu conference, but in fact it had been Washington’s default position all along. This approach was more than a reflexive effort to bang away at the enemy. From very early on, attrition had included parallel initiatives to do exactly the things that South Vietnamese general Nguyen Duc Thang had mentioned. The adversary was to be prevented from reinforcing his troops in battle and denied opportunities to recruit among the population. Then, his battle losses could be counted on to make attrition effective. Indeed, only under those circumstances could attrition be effective. The elements of this approach can be summarized as isolation of the battlefield, pacification of the villages, and main force combat.

Efforts to isolate the battlefield began as early as 1960, when the annual plan prepared by the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group—the predecessor to Westmoreland’s MACV—included an initiative for “border control.” It is noteworthy that this attempt tried to counter Hanoi’s creation of a “Truong Son Strategic Supply Route”—known to Americans as the Ho Chi Minh Trail—and that it began as soon as the existence of the trail was known, indeed within months of the trail’s creation. Border control was the rationale for U.S. support for the inception of a ranger force within the South Vietnamese army, for an expansion of South Vietnamese special forces, for naval patrols intended to prevent seaborne infiltration, for the beginnings of the CIA’s Village Defense Program among the montagnards (which led to the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups), for a later CIA “Border Scout” force, for ground operations by a MACV special mission force (the Studies and Observation Group), and for a series of schemes to block the borders by minefields, garrisons, and the invasion of Laos in order to establish a physical block across the neck of Indochina below the demilitarized zone.¹⁶

An imperfect measure at best, border control could never suffice to isolate the South Vietnamese battlefield. The border was too long, the wilderness along much of it too vast, the points of entry too numerous, and Hanoi’s resourcefulness in expanding the trail at least equal to Washington’s inventiveness in trying to block it. The fallback was to increase the cost of infiltration. The U.S. bombing of North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder) in part had a diplomatic purpose in signaling Hanoi, but its military rationale lay precisely in increasing the cost of Hanoi’s support for the war in the South.¹⁷ The bombing of southern Laos (Operation Steel Tiger) had no purpose other than adding to that impact and thus reinforcing the effects of border control. But the combination of bombing and border control never successfully isolated the battlefield. Numerous postwar studies and many wartime intelligence reports on North Vietnamese infiltration show that a steady stream of reinforcements arrived in the South.

Turning off the tap on recruitment for the NLF also proved problematic. Pacification long remained the poor sister among American initiatives in South Vietnam. The U.S. Army Special Forces—the Green Berets—did much in this area, but their activities were part of the border-control effort among the montagnards and were limited by their numbers and deployment. The marines achieved notable successes with their Combined Action Platoons, which worked to enhance village security, but again these operations were quite limited. Combat battalions were only occasionally assigned to this work, and a major study of the U.S. Army and counterinsurgency finds that the military was poorly prepared for and not disposed to this kind of activity.¹⁸ The South Vietnamese military forces were always seen as the primary pacification resource, but they, like the Americans, preferred to commit their regulars to the main force war. President Johnson personally took a hand in energizing pacification in 1967 when he created a specialized pacification directorate called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. It permitted inroads in pacification, but success remained elusive. NLF recruiting was affected. Its military units were forced to become largely reliant on “fillers” in the ranks, who were actually from North Vietnam, but at that point in the war the insurgency already had more of the character of a conventional rather than an irregular war.¹⁹

All these types of activity also suffered from problems in measuring progress. With border control, authorities were not aware of North Vietnamese activities that they had not succeeded in detecting, so there was literally no way to judge effectiveness. With bombing, the U.S. command could easily measure inputs—sorties flown, tons of munitions expended, and so on—but damage assessment of the application of airpower was imperfect, even as it is today. Vietnam represented a quantum improvement over World War II due to the widespread availability of aerial photography and the new innovation of data processing, but the interpretation of bombing results remained in dispute throughout the war. As for pacification, all measures of progress were subjective and inherently soft.

In terms of meeting the needs of an attrition strategy, border control, bombing, and pacification were all contributors. Taken together, however, they were of marginal value to the overall picture. It is clear that isolation of the battlefield had an effect, but just what that effect might be could not be determined from any data available to U.S. leaders or field commanders. There is no evidence that the battlefield was ever isolated to an extent that made enemy operations impossible. As far as the success of attrition is concerned, the ultimate outcome would be up to main force units fighting in the jungles and paddies.

Ground operations had their own problems with “damage assessment.” As with the air campaign, it was always easier to describe the inputs than to know the outcomes. At the time of the Honolulu conference in February 1966, there were 208,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam in 66 battalions, which carried out a total of 57 battalion-size or larger operations that month, claiming 4,727 enemy dead. In December 1966, 385,000 American soldiers conducted 89 operations and claimed 3,864 North Vietnamese or NLF forces killed in action. A year later the equivalent numbers were 486,000 troops, 129 battalion operations, and 7,938 enemy losses. Three years later, in December 1969—the era of General Creighton Abrams after Westmoreland had left Vietnam and after the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals and official directives designed to reduce American casualties (operations were a main generator of casualties)—the 479,000 American soldiers still in South Vietnam conducted 90 battalion operations and claimed 9,936 enemy killed. With American forces down to 335,000 in December 1970, battalion operations still numbered 90 that month, with enemy dead claimed at 6,185. Battalion-size operations began a radical decline only after May 1971.²⁰

Any number of points can be made about these data, and the picture created can be true or false, depending on how the subject is framed. For one thing, South Vietnamese army battalion operations typically exceeded American and allied levels by a factor of anywhere from three to one to nine to one. South Vietnamese troops were notoriously ineffective compared with American soldiers and other “Free World Forces,” but the South Vietnamese contribution was a real one and must be factored in. Other points can be drawn from the data themselves. This comparison (except for February 1966, the month of the Honolulu conference) arbitrarily selected December of each cited year. It is apparent that American troop levels varied widely in those months, but the number of battalion-size operations was remarkably similar. But, then again, with roughly similar numbers of operations, the number of claimed enemy dead varied widely. It is not necessary to work through the calculations for the specific comparisons—interested readers can do that for themselves—to see that one cannot establish from these data a constantly improving trend toward “effectiveness.”

It happens that the period of the Vietnam War was a heyday of operations research and systems analysis—championed by Robert McNamara at the Pentagon but soon applied throughout the U.S. government. These and similar kinds of data were subjected to endless comparisons. Enemy battle deaths per total U.S. troops, per troops in maneuver units, per 1,000 troops, per the number of maneuver battalions, per operations carried out, per days of operations, or as a percentage ratio of adversary attacks, adversary operations detected, operations per weapons captured, enemy battle deaths per weapons captured—all are only a small selection of the different types of statistical comparisons made using these data.

At the Pentagon, the center for these mathematical manipulations of data was the Office of Systems Analysis within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. General Westmoreland complains vociferously about them in his memoir, writing that “over the months to come lesser civilian officials … constantly sought to alter strategy and tactics with naïve, gratuitous advice.”²¹ The advice might have been unsolicited, but it was not gratuitous. Statistical analysis demonstrated beyond doubt that neither U.S. troop levels nor the rate of operations drove adversary casualty rates. Rather, the North Vietnamese and the insurgents themselves determined the casualty rates because most enemy losses were incurred during their attacks.²² For example, a May 1967 systems analysis of combat narratives determined that less than 9 percent of engagements resulted from U.S. ambushes of the adversary and fewer than 6 percent from offensive operations in which the U.S. commander was aware of the enemy. Another 7 percent of battles began with chance encounters. All the rest flowed from various sorts of enemy-initiated action.²³ The considered opinion of the army’s official historian for the 1965/1966 period is that “Westmoreland would later claim that [his] operations had disrupted the enemy’s plans, kept him off balance, and induced high casualties among his troops. That may have been the case, but the situation was hardly clear cut, for the enemy usually controlled the tempo of the fighting and thus the rate at which he suffered casualties. Whether an engagement pitted a small American patrol against a few guerrillas or an American battalion against a main force unit, the enemy usually decided when to fight and when to withdraw.”²⁴ National Security Study Memorandum No. 1, prepared for the Nixon administration in early 1969, affirmed anew that 75 percent of engagements resulted from enemy action.²⁵ The pattern had not changed.

Indeed, the consensus among observers of the Vietnam War is that Hanoi and the insurgents suffered their greatest losses during the 1968 Tet Offensive, when they emerged to conduct countrywide attacks. Ironically, Hanoi wasted no time drawing the appropriate conclusion from the same data: the North Vietnamese quickly shifted after Tet to a different pattern of operations. They used small, elite units of sappers to make most attacks, reserving their main force troops and limiting losses by risking only small numbers of fighters.

In contrast, the Americans had evolved one formula and pretty much stuck to it. Their method was a matter of tactics, not strategy, but it was all about attrition. An American force would take the field and maneuver until it encountered the adversary. It would then fight to “fix” the enemy in place while summoning air and artillery support in the most massive amounts obtainable. Elements in the field might or might not be reinforced, but they would always rely on this fire support. General William E. DePuy, Westmoreland’s former operations staff chief who went on to command the First Infantry Division in the massive ground operations Cedar Falls and Junction City, nicely described this formula to reporters. He aimed, he said, to “find the enemy with the fewest possible men … and destroy him with the maximum amount of firepower.”²⁶ Colonel Sidney S. Berry Jr., an airmobile expert and brigade commander with multiple tours in Vietnam, similarly wrote in a 1967 essay widely praised in the army that a commander “uses his soldiers to find the enemy and supporting firepower to destroy the enemy. He spends firepower as if he is a millionaire and husbands lives as if he is a pauper.”²⁷ A different way to put this view—indeed, a prevalent view among many Vietnam veterans—is that American soldiers were used as bait to sucker the enemy into contact, after which he could be eliminated.

This approach placed great weight on technological means of warfare, for it was the machines of war—tanks, cannons, warplanes, and warships (for naval gunfire support)—that generated by far the greatest weight of support to troops in the field. The helicopter assault tactics that are often pictured in visions of American troops fighting in Vietnam were vehicles to carry infantry to battle, where they might fix the adversary and then smash him with their piled-on support. The imagery of the machine inherent in this approach is so compelling that one of the foremost analysts of the American way of war in Vietnam raised it to the level of a theory, “technowar,” in which ground war was carried out on an “assembly line.”²⁸

Another aspect of the “assembly line” goes back to the question of deployment strategy. Units arriving in Vietnam were assigned to particular regions. Unlike a sector of a front line, these regions were “areas of operations” (AOs). Once in place, units patrolled and conducted all operations within their AO unless the high command ordered some change. The AOs corresponded to base camps prepared for the troops, with combat zones overwhelmingly concentrated in the South Vietnamese coastal plains. The Khe Sanh region near the Laotian border and the Central Highlands were exceptions, and few U.S. troops were deployed to the Mekong Delta region. In all these AOs, there were places where Americans would rarely venture, commonly called “Indian Country,” either because they were too heavily dominated by the adversary or because U.S. troop levels were simply insufficient. These zones were not ruled out, but instead they were made targets for “unobserved” fire, so-called harassment and interdiction (H&I). Artillery would shoot into H&I zones, and aircraft returning from missions that had bombs left would drop their weapons into these zones. Studies showed that in 1966 and 1967, nearly half of all artillery ammunition was expended in H&I fire. In some division AOs, the proportion went as high as 85 percent.²⁹

Some individual unit commanders objected to the H&I tactic and reduced its use in their areas. By definition, these bombardments were unobserved, so leaders had no idea what they had accomplished. The one observable consequence of H&I fire was that Vietnamese villagers were driven from homes destroyed by the shells and bombs. This result had a negative impact on pacification. Studies done for MACV by panels of officers or consultant groups such as the RAND Corporation recommended doing away with H&I fire. This did not happen until General Abrams held the command, and even when Abrams reduced reliance on the technique, the change was made in order to limit the cost of the war, not to eliminate an approach that was considered counterproductive. Dollar concerns finally ended the use of H&I fire in mid-1970.³⁰

The impossibility of accurate “damage assessment” for H&I fire suggests the extent of the difficulty that U.S. strategy faced in Vietnam. The measure of success for attrition had to be physical cost to the adversary, but the nature of the war made precise tracking of effects worse than difficult. Air commanders supplied figures on enemy “killed by air.” Air estimates were no better than H&I ones. Ground commanders gave out “body counts.” Body counts in Vietnam became notorious. It was rarely possible to tally enemy casualties after a fight because the North Vietnamese and NLF forces attempted to take their dead with them when they retreated from battle. Even when the enemy did not succeed in retrieving their lost soldiers, allied troops might be loath to wander through the jungle in search of bodies. It was also difficult to distinguish between dead civilians and enemy soldiers. All types of counts were essentially guesstimates, historian James William Gibson notes, because “the simplest aspect of false reporting concerns the many cases when troops and commanders invented enemy body counts out of thin air.” Because officer promotions were dependent on military success, which was calculated largely from body counts, the system built in a propensity for exaggeration. Thus Gibson concludes: “War-manager pressures for high body counts led to … systematic falsification of battle reports, routine violation of the rules of engagement and regulations covering treatment of prisoners, and systematic slaughtering of Vietnamese noncombatants. The production model of war simultaneously destroyed both its own troops and the Vietnamese people, but it could not produce victory.”³¹

To recapitulate, U.S. strategy in Vietnam anticipated isolating the battlefield, thus reducing the availability of troops to the opponent, and then using ground operations to exact a high toll on the enemy. This process was to lead to the attrition of the North Vietnamese and NLF forces and to their defeat in the field. These aims were made official in a February 1966 directive that set the immediate goal of inflicting sufficient losses at least to negate Hanoi’s rate of infiltration by the end of that year. The system of tactical reporting and statistical compilation was geared to facilitate a judgment that these goals were being attained.

Every claim by Washington that progress was being made and that the enemy was being defeated put new pressures on this system to generate data to substantiate the assertions. Thus President Johnson, in a speech delivered in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 15, 1967, declared that “there are many signs that we are at a favorable turning point.” A month later, Secretary of State Dean Rusk went further: “I would think we have made very, very substantial headway during 1966 on the conventional type of warfare…. We have a good deal of evidence, from prisoners, from documents and from what we know of their deployments, that the other side is having considerable difficulty in maintaining their forces.”³² Rusk’s assertion, of course, constituted an implicit assessment of the attrition strategy. Similar statements were made by Secretary McNamara and General Westmoreland. All this self-congratulation took place months ahead of the fall of 1967, when Washington threw caution to the winds in a political campaign to convince Americans that victory had become foreseeable and Westmoreland famously professed to see light at the end of the tunnel.

These features of the attrition strategy throw light on the bitter 1967 controversy, hidden at the time, regarding the size of the enemy’s forces, his so-called order of battle (O/B). That bureaucratic fight began in the spring of 1967 and involved differences between the CIA and the U.S. military over the number of NLF guerrillas and the adversary’s overall strength. If the guerrillas were far more numerous than allowed for by MACV’s enemy O/B, then the NLF’s local recruiting had to be much more successful than the U.S. military maintained, and enemy losses could not be coming anywhere near enough to attrite the Vietnamese opponent. If the enemy O/B was twice the size that MACV claimed, as certain CIA analysts insisted, then U.S. ground operations had hardly put a dent in the adversary. For the U.S. military to accept the veracity of the CIA estimates of the uncounted enemy meant conceding that the attrition strategy was a failure, which neither Westmoreland nor his military superiors were prepared to do.³³

The O/B dispute dogged Westmoreland and colored judgments about his leadership long after his service as MACV commander. During 1967, the military fought the CIA while it fought the North Vietnamese, and it “won” in the sense that its fraudulent estimates were accepted as Washington’s official judgment of the enemy. The practical effect of this piece of chicanery was to enshrine the system of measurement—statistical manipulation at the level of the national command authority standing on top of a pyramid of false reporting. One of the tragedies of the Tet Offensive, apart from anything else, was that although it demonstrated with blinding clarity the falsity of the official picture of the adversary, the military’s ability to claim huge enemy casualties in the Tet fighting took away much of the incentive to reform the system. “Body count” held sway more strongly than ever.

General Abrams succeeded Westmoreland as head of MACV shortly after Tet and presided over the period of U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam. He shifted the emphasis in military operations far more toward the pacification side of the war. Statistics on villages reaching secure status, miles of road traversable, and numbers of guerrilla infrastructure members “neutralized” acquired much greater status as measures of merit, but, in fact, Washington’s numbers addiction remained unchanged. It merely embraced a wider variety of questionable statistics. Perhaps the worst impact of attrition as the U.S. strategy in the Vietnam War was that it substituted statistical measures for visible goals. Leaders, commanders, and American citizens were enmeshed in a morass of murky data, with the real status of the conflict infinitely debatable. The only sure thing would be that, with the United States withdrawing from the war and antiwar sentiment growing constantly stronger, time worked in favor of Hanoi and the National Liberation Front.

1. Cable, Westmoreland to Wheeler (MAC 3240), June 24, 1965, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 3, Vietnam, June Through December 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), 42 (series hereafter cited as FRUS, with dates and volume titles).

2. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, JCS Publication 1, September 3, 1974 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), 39. See any edition of this dictionary. The definition is essentially identical to that in the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military Terms, available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/.

3. Hans Delbrueck, History of the Art of War Within the Framework of Political History, translated by Walter J. Renfroe Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985). This work first appeared in German in 1900.

4. Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982). This work was originally published a year earlier by the U.S. Army War College as On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context.

5. Memorandum, Robert S. McNamara, “South Vietnam,” March 16, 1964, in Neil Sheehan, Fox Butterfield, Hedrick Smith, and E. W. Kenworthy, The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times: The Secret History of the Vietnam War, edited by Gerald Gold, Allan M. Siegal, and Samuel Abt (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 278.

6. Memorandum, John T. McNaughton, “Action for South Vietnam,” November 6, 1964, in ibid., 365.

7. Memorandum, Southeast Asia Working Group (William P. Bundy), “Draft Position Paper on Southeast Asia,” November 29, 1964, in ibid., 374.

8. Draft memorandum, John T. McNaughton, “Annex—Plan for Action in South Vietnam,” March 24, 1965, in ibid., 432.

9. National Security Action Memorandum no. 328, April 6, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 2, Vietnam, January Through June 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), 537–39.

10. Memorandum of Conversation, Department of State, “Meeting with GVN,” July 16, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 3, Vietnam, June Through December 1965, 159.

11. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Report of an Ad Hoc Study Group, Intensification of Military Operations in Vietnam: Concept and Appraisal, July 14, 1965, in ibid., 181–87, quote on 183–84. FRUS reprints only the executive summary. The full report, much richer and meriting detailed examination, is in National Security File: Country File Vietnam, box 37, Lyndon Baines Johnson Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Tex.

12. Quoted in William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Dell Books, 1980), 208.

13. Memorandum, Department of Defense, “1966 Program to Increase the Effectiveness of Military Operations and Anticipated Results Thereof,” February 10, 1966, in FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 4, Vietnam, 1966 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1998), 218.

15. Phillip C. Davidson, Secrets of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1990), 360.

16. The effort to isolate the battlefield is treated in detail in John Prados, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War (New York: Wiley, 1999).

17. Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989).

18. Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

19. Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995).

20. All these figures are from official U.S. Department of Defense data. See Comptroller, Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Unclassified Statistics on Southeast Asia,” in The Air War in Southeast Asia, edited by Rafael Littauer and Norman Uphoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 267–72.

22. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

23. Memorandum, Department of Defense (Systems Analysis), “Force Levels and Enemy Attrition,” May 4, 1967, in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 5 vols., Senator Gravel ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 4:462.

24. John M. Carland, The United States Army in Vietnam: Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide, May 1965 to October 1966 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2000), 356.

25. National Security Study Memorandum 1, “Vietnam,” Congressional Record, 92d Cong., 2d sess., May 11, 1972.

26. Quoted in “General Westmoreland: A Recipe for Victory?” Newsweek, December 5, 1966, 53.

27. Quoted in James William Gibson, The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 103 (emphasis in original).

29. John M. Hawkins, “The Costs of Artillery: Eliminating Harassment and Interdiction Fire During the Vietnam War,” Journal of Military History 70, no. 1 (2006): 91–122.

32. Rusk on Meet the Press, April 16, 1967. Both quotes in Legislative Reference Service (today known as the Congressional Research Service), “Statements by Executive Officials in 1967 and 1968 on Progress in Vietnam (Excerpts),”in U.S. Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, Hearings: Vietnam: Policy and Prospects, 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), 431–43, quotations on 435 (Johnson) and 434, 436 (Rusk).

33. The O/B dispute became public in 1975 with testimony before the Pike Committee, which was investigating the U.S. intelligence community, and with Sam Adams, “Vietnam Coverup: Playing War with Numbers,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1975, 41–75. Adams was the CIA analyst who sparked the original critiques of the military’s view. The controversy acquired a substantial literature of its own after Adams’s charges were picked up by CBS Television and made the subject of a controversial documentary, which itself became the subject of a lawsuit by General William Westmoreland against CBS and Adams. Westmoreland’s lawsuit ended inconclusively. Adams’s major account is in War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1994). For Westmoreland’s point of view, see Davidson, Secrets of the Vietnam War; for a more balanced perspective, see Bob Brewin and Sydney Shaw, Vietnam on Trial: Westmoreland vs. CBS (New York: Atheneum, 1987). Most recent and revealing is C. Michael Hiam, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2006).

Brewin, Bob, and Sydney Shaw. Vietnam on Trial: Westmoreland vs. CBS. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

Clodfelter, Mark. The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of North Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1989.

Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

Hunt, Richard A. Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.

Prados, John. The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War. New York: Wiley, 1999.

Summers, Harry G. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982.