Militarism [is] an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. [While] we deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war, [we believe] the United States cannot act upon the ancient heresy that might makes right.…
We deny the obligation of all citizens to support their Government in times of grave National peril applies to the present situation. If an Administration may with impunity … deliberately create a condition of war anywhere on the face of the globe … representative government itself is imperiled.
American Anti-Imperialist League, 18991
One of the most important contributions Clausewitz made to the theory of war was his concept of “friction.”
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war … Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal … Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.2
Clausewitz was talking about the battlefield, but there is also a kind of friction that exists between the American people and its Army. As General Fred C. Weyand observed, “Americans have a long and proud tradition of irreverence toward and distrust of their military.”3
American antimilitarism springs from a variety of causes—historical, cultural and social. It has been a constant since the beginning of the Republic. As far as the Regular Army went, it was even true in wartime. Someone once remarked that the old British doggerel about the professional soldier, “It’s Tommy this, and Tommy that, and chuck him out, the brute … But it’s ‘Savior of his Country,’ when the guns begin to shoot,” never applied here in America. It was the “citizen soldier”—the National Guard and the Army Reserve—not the regular who fought America’s wars and who was the traditional “Savior of his Country.”
Antimilitarism then was not something unique to Vietnam. It is part of what makes Americans what they are. “There is no use agonizing over it,” General Weyand said. “If we cannot be loved, we can be trusted and respected.”4 But not only were we not “loved” during the Vietnam war, even trust and respect were denied by a great many Americans. This was a crucial failing, for, as Chaplain (Colonel) Charles F. Kriete observed:
[War] requires for its successful pursuit the mobilization of a moral consensus of the legitimacy of both the objectives of violence and the means by which these objectives are pursued …
Societies in which communication is open, which safeguard pluralism with legal sanctions, and which normally tolerate a high degree of political dissent find it much more difficult to develop and maintain a consensus of commitment to the legitimacy of strategic objectives. Yet the maintenance of that consensus is one of the key objectives of national strategy, in both a political and a military sense, for when it fails, the war is lost.5
Instead of building this moral consensus and taking action to smooth the natural friction that exists between the American people and their Army, Vietnam war policies tended to aggravate it. One of the most damaging aggravations was the decision to grant draft deferments for students. As General Westmoreland wrote, “The policy contributed to anti-war militancy on college campuses in that young men feeling twinges of conscience because they sat out a war while others fought could appease their conscience if they convinced themselves the war was immoral.”6
The student draft deferments, along with the decision not to ask for a declaration of war and not to mobilize our reserve forces, were part of a deliberate Presidential policy not to arouse the passions of the American people. The effect of this was that we fought the Vietnam war in cold blood. This cold-blooded approach to war was not unintentional. It was an outgrowth of the limited war theories that reduced war to an academic model. As we go back and read the writings of the political scientists and systems analysts on limited war, they are noteworthy for their lack of passion. The horror, the bloodshed and the destruction of the battlefield are remarkably absent. Clausewitz warned about those who would “exclude all moral factors from strategic theory and … reduce everything to a few mathematical formulas.”7 The academics could be excused for this omission, but we in the military knew better. It was the job of those of us who had seen war firsthand to add this missing dimension to their academic theories. We knew the true nature of war. We knew the truth of Clausewitz’s observation that:
Kindhearted people might … think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, [but] pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed … It would be futile—even wrong—to try and shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.8
But through fear of reinforcing the basic antimilitarism of the American people we tended to keep this knowledge to ourselves and downplayed battlefield realities. In order to smooth our relations with the American people we began to use euphemisms to hide the horrors of war. We became the Department of the Army (not the War Department) and our own terminology avoided mention of the battlefield. We did not kill the enemy, we “inflicted casualties”; we did not destroy things, we “neutralized targets.”9 These evasions allowed the notion to grow that we could apply military force in a sanitary and surgical manner. In so doing we unwittingly prepared the way for the reaction that was to follow.
We had concealed from the American people the true nature of war at precisely the time that television brought its realities into their living rooms in living color. As a result, to many Americans Vietnam became the most destructive, the most horrible, the most terrible war ever waged in the history of the world. This viewpoint has persisted in the face of all historical evidence to the contrary.
Professor Peter L. Berger of Boston College recently reexamined his opposition to the Vietnam war in a thoughtful and introspective article.10 He observes that the anti-war movement was a primary causal factor in the American withdrawal from Indo-China, and acknowledges that Hanoi’s victory was a “human catastrophe of monumental dimensions.” He notes U.S. political and military decline as a result of the war and a “world situation in which totalitarianism has grown stronger and in which peace is more precarious.” Finally he observes that Vietnam has left America ‘a sick society.’ “Anyone who participated in the anti-war movement in any public form,” he says, “must ask himself about his responsibility for these events.”
Having said that, however, he still defends his opposition. “I continue to believe that the war was marked by a distinctive brutality which cannot be subsumed by some general statement that ‘all war is hell,’ ” he says. Noting what he calls the “exceptional cruelty” of the methods of warfare, he condemned the “systemic and intrinsic … free-fire zones, napalm bombing of villages, the generation of refugees, defoliation and kindred destruction of the countryside, the torture of prisoners, the assassination of political suspects.… I found it morally intolerable that my country should be engaged in [such actions] … It was this outrage that originated and sustained my opposition to the war. I believe that very similar sentiments motivated a very large number of Americans … I am not prepared to repudiate this moral response now … despite the disastrous consequences to which my own and many others morally motivated actions contributed, I cannot now indulge in confessions of guilt.”
As Professor Berger said, his views are widely shared. To many civilians it is axiomatic that the Vietnam war was the cruelest ever waged. To those of us who experienced war firsthand, this is hard to understand. To the evidence of Vietnam cruelty portrayed by the horrible picture of the little girl running down the road seared with napalm, one asks about the tens of thousands of little girls incinerated in the fire bomb raids on Dresden and Tokyo in World War II only to be told, “But that was different.” To the terrible picture of the Saigon police chief shooting the Viet Cong terrorist, one asks about the summary justice of the French Maquis or the Italian partisans and their photographs of Mussolini and his mistress strung up by their heels, only again to be told, “That was different.” To those condemning the remark of the Army captain in the Delta that “we had to destroy the town in order to save it,” one quotes the Continental Congress’s orders, “If General Washington and his council of war should be of the opinion that a successful attack may be made on the [British] troops in Boston, he [may] do it in any manner he may think expedient, notwithstanding the town and the property in it may thereby be destroyed.”11 Yet again the answer, “That was different.” And the critics were right. It was different. All of America’s previous wars were fought in the heat of passion. Vietnam was fought in cold blood, and that was intolerable to the American people.
We should have known better. The lessons were there in the Korean war. But, as General Taylor commented earlier, we never learned those lessons. We proceeded to make the same mistakes again in Vietnam. The repugnance of the American people toward a war of attrition, with its grisly measurement by body count was spelled out in 1951 in the minority report of the Joint session of the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations on the Korean war:
The policy of the United States in Korea, as outlined in the testimony of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and others is that of destroying the effective core of the Communist Chinese armies by killing that government’s trained soldiers, in the hope that someone will negotiate. We hold that such a policy is essentially immoral, not likely to produce either victory in Korea or an end to aggression. At the same time such a policy tends to destroy the moral stature of the United States as a leader in the family of nations.
War in any form is abhorrent. War means other humane ways of settling disputes have failed. Only a nation without regard for the sanctity of human life could be committed to a policy of prolonged war with no intent at winning a victory. American policy, in every war in which this Nation has engaged, has been designed to win the conflict at the earliest possible moment with the least possible loss of human life—especially American life, but also the lives of those who oppose us.12
Change “Korea” to “Vietnam” and “Chinese Communists” to “Vietnamese” and this statement could have been reissued 20 years later. As we should have foreseen, our statement of progress in Vietnam given in terms of people killed did not reassure the American people. Instead it inflamed American idealism and further eroded public support for the war.
The North Vietnamese were quick to seize the strategic advantage provided by this erosion of public support. Author Tom Wolfe commented on what he called “the Johnson Administration’s attempt to fight a ‘humane’ war and look good in the eyes of the world”:
There was something out-to-lunch about it, however. The eyes of the world did not flutter for a second. Stories of American atrocities were believed by whoever wanted to believe them, no matter what actually occurred.… If the United States was seriously trying to win the battle of world opinion—well, then, you had a real bush-league operation. The North Vietnamese were the uncontested aces.
After describing a raid on the Iron Triangle in North Vietnam, Wolfe notes that:
The North Vietnamese [were] blessed with a weapon that no military device known to America could ever get a lock on. As if by magic … in Hanoi … appears … Harrison Salisbury! Harrison Salisbury—writing in The New York Times about the atrocious American bombing of the hard-scrabble folks of North Vietnam in the Iron Triangle! If you had real sporting blood in you, you had to hand it to the North Vietnamese. They were champions of this sort of thing.… it seemed as if the North Vietnamese were playing Mr. Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times like an ocarina, as if they were blowing smoke up his pipe and the finger work was just right and the song was coming forth better than they could have played it themselves.
“And yet,” Wolfe concludes, “it couldn’t simply be blamed on Salisbury. No series of articles by anyone, no matter what the publication, could have had such an immediate strategic effect if there weren’t some kind of strange collapse of will power taking place back in the States …”13 Wolfe’s closing comments are important. There is a tendency in the military to blame our problems with public support on the media. This is too easy an answer. Certainly there were some like Salisbury who reported enemy propaganda, but the majority of on-the-scene reporting from Vietnam was factual—that is the reporters honestly reported what they had seen firsthand. Much of what they saw was horrible, for that is the true nature of war. It was this horror, not the reporting that so influenced the American people.14
There is an important lesson in this for the Army. Any future war will more than likely be as bloody as the war in Vietnam. It will probably also be carried into American living rooms by television reporters, for that is the nature of their craft. As we have seen earlier, attempts to hide the realities of war from the American people only inflame the problem. Censorship is not the answer. How then do we square the circle of the battlefield and the idealism of the American people?
In his analysis of the Vietnam war General Weyand pointed out the conflict arising out of American idealism and counseled what we must do in the future:
As military professionals we must speak out, we must counsel our political leaders and alert the American public that there is no such thing as a “splendid little war.” There is no such thing as a war fought on the cheap. War is death and destruction. The American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using “things”—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives. The enemy, on the other hand, made up for his lack of “things” by expending men instead of machines, and he suffered enormous casualties. The Army saw this happen in Korea, and we should have made the realities of war obvious to the American people before they witnessed it on their television screens. The Army must make the price of involvement clear before we get involved, so that America can weigh the probable costs of involvement against the dangers of uninvolvement … for there are worse things than war.”15
NOTES
1. “Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League,” October 18, 1899, in Henry Steele Commager (ed), Documents of American History, Vol. 2 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 11–12.
2. Clausewitz, On War 1:7, p. 119.
3. General Fred C. Weyand, “Serving The People: The Need For Military Power,” Military Review, December 1976, p. 8.
4. Ibid.
5. Chaplain (Colonel) Charles F. Kriete, “The Moral Dimension of Strategy,” Parameters, Journal of the US Army War College (Vol. VII, No. 2, 1977), p. 67.
6. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, p. 297. That student draft deferment policy continues to poison U.S. civil-military relations. As Arthur T. Hadley reported in an April 1980 article, “Those who avoided Vietnam through loopholes (or more correctly, loop-highways) in the draft, being in the main honorable men, now feel guilty. They relieve these feelings either by venomous attacks on all things military, including the draft; or, becoming 200 percent American, make Attila the Hun sound like Mother Goose and advocate colossal military expenditures.” (Arthur T. Hadley, “The Draft Debate: A Special Section,” The Washington Post, April 6, 1980, pp. El–E5).
7. Clausewitz, On War III:1, p. 178.
8. Ibid, I:1, p. 76.
9. This tendency still persists. For example, note the use of the bland phrase “Target Servicing” in our training literature to describe the destruction of an enemy attacking force.
10. Peter L. Berger, “Indo-China and The American Conscience,” Commentary, February 1980, pp. 29–39.
11. Palmer, The Way of The Fox, p. 103.
12. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Part 5, p. 3598.
13. Wolfe, Mauve Gloves, pp. 42–44.
14. But see former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service correspondent Robert Elegant’s analysis of the quality of Vietnam reporting, “A Reporter Looks Back at the Vietnam War,” Encounter, August 1981, pp. 73–90.
15. Weyand, CDRS CALL, July-August 1976, pp. 3, 4.