The conduct of war is the art of employing the Armed Forces of a nation in combination with measures of economic and political constraint for the purpose of effecting a satisfactory peace … The ultimate objective of all military operation is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces in battle. Decisive defeat in battle breaks the enemy’s will to war and forces him to sue for peace which is the national aim …
FM 100-5, 1 October 19391
The effect that the fears, distortions, and misperceptions discussed in the previous chapter had on our doctrine was particularly damaging because, as Clausewitz made clear, “principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference.”2 As will be seen in Part II it was just such a faulty frame of reference that was responsible for many of our problems in Vietnam. It was not always so. As the above quotation illustrates, our pre-World War II Field Service Regulations provided a sound frame of reference for the conduct of war. As Clausewitz himself had said, “The original means of strategy is victory—that is tactical success—its ends, in the final analysis, are those objects which will lead directly to peace.”3 It is essential to note that although this 1939 definition carried us into total war in World War II, it also accommodated the later requirements of limited war, since it did not necessarily require the total submission of the enemy. What was required was sufficient military force to cause the enemy to sue for peace. In World War II this linkage dropped out of our war theories,4 for the national aim was no longer forcing the enemy “to sue for peace” but rather his unconditional surrender. The destruction of the enemy’s armed forces were therefore no longer means to an end so much as an end in itself. Unlike the earlier definition, this World War II definition could not accommodate the problems we faced in Korea after the Chinese intervention.
Because of this doctrinal deficiency our war theories became cloudy and confused. The first point of confusion was over the meaning of “victory.” With his frame of reference formed by his experiences in World Wars I and II, General MacArthur saw victory only in messianic terms—the total destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his unconditional surrender. In his testimony before the Senate during the “Great Debate” on the Korean war, General MacArthur called for just such a victory in Korea. General MacArthur said, “I believe if you do not [seek such a victory], if you hit soft, if you practice appeasement in the use of force, you are doomed to disaster.”5
Rejecting such an apocalyptic view, Senator Brian McMahon of Connecticut questioned General of the Army Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on what constitutes “victory in war”:
General, in the course of our history I believe there have been a number of instances in which we accomplished our objectives without what might be called a final and complete defeat of the enemy, such as was visited on Germany. Certainly in the War of 1812 we fought the British on the sea and on our own mainland to maintain the security of our commerce and the safety of our nationals. We didn’t insist on a military victory over England as essential, did we?… Now, in the Spanish-American War when we accomplished the liberation of Cuba, we didn’t proceed to Madrid to capture Madrid, did we?… We negotiated a treaty after accomplishing our objectives. I am reminded of one war, and one perhaps less well known, in 1798 to 1800, when we fought a limited naval war against France to protect our commerce and our shipping.… Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, who had insisted on an all-out war with France at that time, was retired as Secretary of State, and the President, Mr. John Adams, President Adams, accomplished a settlement of that thing through negotiation and by treaty.
The point that I want to make, General, to find out if you are in agreement with me, is that when you say that the object of the war is victory, you must have a definition of what constitutes victory, don’t you?
To which General Bradley replied, “I think you must, and you vary from being willing to accept a rather small thing that you start out to correct up to an objective which we set in World War II of unconditional surrender. There are many variations in between the two.”6
Elaborating on this theme, Senator William Knowland of California commented:
… The fact of the matter is, is it not, General, that we did not settle the controversy with the Spaniards being left in control of half of Cuba; we did not settle the Greek War with the Greek Communists being left in control of a substantial part of Greece; and we did not finish the War of 1812 with the British being left in control of New Orleans. While it is true that we did not carry the war into their home countries, nevertheless, we did clean up the particular situation in which we were involved.
Again General Bradley replied, “We restored it in some cases to the status quo when we started the war and won our point. That boils down then to the question of what our point is.”7
Senator Bourke K. Hickenlooper of Iowa again raised the issue of “victory” with Secretary of State Acheson. “I understand that it is our policy to have a victory in Korea; it’s our policy to have peace in Korea. [It is] what we expect to do to accomplish it that bewilders me.” Secretary Acheson replied that U.S. strategy was to limit the geographic boundaries of the war “as the least dangerous and most effective way of coming to a situation where both the attack stops and the desire to renew it stops” and to wear down the enemy by attrition so that “they will suffer very disastrous losses to themselves, and a great many harmful results will happen to them in the way of the losses of their trained manpower and the absorption of the resources of China in a fight which is of no real profit to China,”8 Secretary Acheson went on to say that it was the U.S. intention to gain victory not on the battlefield but through discussion and agreement.
Another point of confusion was over the definition of limited war. General MacArthur complained that “my whole effort since Red China came in there has been to get some definition, military definition, of what I should do.”9 Commenting on a statement by then Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk that “what we are trying to do is maintain peace and security without a general war …” MacArthur replied, “That policy seems to me to introduce a new concept into military operations … the concept that when you use force, you can limit that force … The very term of ‘resisting aggression,’ it seems to me that you destroy the potentialities of the aggressor to continually hit you.… When you say, merely, ‘we are going to continue to fight aggression,’ that is not what the enemy is fighting for. The enemy is fighting for a very definite purpose—to destroy our forces in Korea,”10 It is important to note that, General MacArthur’s comments notwithstanding, the U.S. strategy in Korea after the Chinese intervention was not so much one of limiting the means as it was one of tailoring the political ends so that they could be accomplished within the military means that our political leaders were willing to expend. In the Korean war “limited war” was defined in terms of limited objectives. As our post-Korean Field Service Regulations stated, “The nature of the political situation at any time may require employment of armed forces in wars of limited objective. In such cases, the objective ordinarily will be the destruction of the aggressor forces and the restoration of the political and territorial integrity of the friendly nation.”11 As Senators McMahon and Knowland and Secretary of State Acheson had said, and as our 1954 doctrine acknowledged, in neither the past nor the present was “victory” defined only as total destruction of the enemy. Victory was the achievement of the political ends for which the war was being waged. As Clausewitz had written:
… In war many roads lead to success, and … they do not all involve the opponent’s outright defeat. They range from the destruction of the enemy’s forces, the conquest of his territory, to a temporary occupation or invasion, to projects with an immediate political purpose, and finally to passively awaiting the enemy’s attacks.…
Bear in mind how wide a range of political interests can lead to war, or … think for a moment of the gulf that separates a war of annihilation, a struggle for political existence, from a war reluctantly declared in consequence of political pressure or of an alliance that no longer seems to reflect the state’s true interests. Between these two extremes lie numerous gradations. If we reject a single one of them on theoretical grounds, we may as well reject all of them, and lose contact with the real world.12
In Korea the Army had learned the right lesson—that political considerations may require wars of limited objective—but it drew the wrong conclusions from that lesson. In what appears today to have been almost a fit of pique, the 1954 Field Service Regulations, while introducing the concept of “wars of limited objective,” removed “victory” as an aim in war. As the manual said, “Victory alone as an aim of war cannot be justified, since in itself victory does not always assure the realization of national objectives.”13 Defining victory only in terms of total victory, rather than more accurately as the attainment of the objectives for which the war is waged, was a strategic mistake. It not only obscured the fact that we had won a victory in Korea (where the status quo ante was restored and has been maintained for almost 30 years), it also went a long way toward guaranteeing a lack of victory in Vietnam.
But even though we dropped victory as an aim in war, the overall doctrinal effects of our Korean war experience were beneficial. As a result of that war we shed our World War II delusions about total war. As Brigadier General Dave Palmer commented in his analysis of Vietnam, in historical terms it was limited war, not total war that was the norm. “Most wars, it can be argued, have been limited,” he said. “One can dig way back in history to say that the final Punic War—when Rome defeated Carthage, slaughtered the population, razed the city, plowed under the ruins and sowed the furrows with salt—was not in any way limited.… But it is hard to find other examples; in some manner or other a limiting factor was always present.”14
Unfortunately this was not to last. Another kind of total war—nuclear war—came to dominate our doctrine, and the fear of World War III soon distorted the lessons of Korea. Paradoxically these changes did not occur during the “massive retaliation” era but instead came into being after we had adopted the doctrine of flexible response. The 1962 Field Service Regulations (which governed our initial ground force involvement in Vietnam and remained in effect until 1968) introduced two major changes in our doctrine. First was the introduction of the concept of a “spectrum of war,” and the second was the redefinition of limited war to limit the means rather than the objective.
From the point of view of the political scientists who formulated the limited war theories, the spectrum of war undoubtedly represented a truer picture of the world than the more simplistic concepts of war and peace. According to the 1962 manual, this spectrum ranged from cold war—“a power struggle between contending nations”—through limited war to general (nuclear) war. As the manual said, “The dividing line between cold war and limited war is neither distinct nor absolute.”15 But there was a major difference between cold war and limited war. Cold war was essentially a peacetime posture with a heightened state of tension; limited war was a wartime posture involving actual hostilities. Erasing the line between war and peace was to prove a serious flaw. It contributed to our failure to declare war over Vietnam, as well as to the credibility gap that developed between the government and the American people. The social critic and strategist Herman Kahn once remarked that academicians see the world in terms of shades of gray, while the average person sees things in black and white. But in so doing the academician can make a mistake that the average man can never make. He can confuse midnight and noon. While the new breed of strategists might have had difficulty with the distinction between peace and war, the American people were to prove they knew the difference full well.
This spectrum of war also led to the second doctrinal change. The 1962 manual dropped the concept of “wars of limited objective” which we had adopted after the Korean war and introduced the concept of limited means. According to the manual, “The essential objective of United States military forces will be to terminate the conflict rapidly and decisively in a manner best calculated to prevent its spread to general (nuclear) war.”16 On the face of it there is nothing intrinsically wrong in placing limits on military means, so long as your opponent follows suit and mutual deterrence is maintained. It is especially valid when applied against a nuclear-armed adversary when both sides have an interest in avoiding nuclear war. In such cases what Clausewitz called “polarity” exists. As he said, “The principle of polarity is valid only in relation to one and the same object, in which positive and negative interests exactly cancel one another out.”17 Our publicly expressed fears of the horrors of nuclear war lessened the polarity between us and the Soviet Union and cost us a major strategic advantage—what Professor Edward N. Luttwak called escalation dominance—the ability to pose a threat to the enemy to raise the level of warfare beyond his ability (or willingness) to respond.18 In like manner the polarity with China was also weakened by our publicly expressed fears of becoming involved in a land war in Asia. This lack of polarity was to lead us into an untenable strategic position where the enemy’s territory was inviolable while the territory of our ally was open to attack.
NOTES
1. FM 100–5, 1 October 1939, p. 27.
2. Clausewitz, On War, I:2, p. 141.
3. Ibid, II:2, p. 143.
4. War Department Field Manual 100-5, Field Service Regulations: Operations (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 15 June 1944), p. 32.
5. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Part I, p. 40.
6. Ibid, pp. 960–61.
7. Ibid, p. 1083.
8. Ibid, p. 1800.
9. Ibid, pp. 30–31.
10. Ibid, pp. 39–40, 68. (Emphasis added)
11. Department of the Army Field Manual 100-5, Field Service Regulations: Operations (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 27 September 1954), p. 6.
12. Clausewitz, On War, I:2, p. 94.
13. FM 100–5, September 1954, p. 7.
14. David Richard Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.–Vietnam in Perspective (San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1978), p. xix.
15. Department of the Army Field Manual 100-5, Field Service Regulations: Operations (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 19 February 1962), pp. 4–5.
16. FM 100–5, February 1962, p. 9.
17. Clausewitz, On War, I:1, p. 83.
18. Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 41–42. There were those who saw the danger in this kind of unilateral disarmament. In his 1958 U.S. Army War College student thesis, “The Mirage of Limited War,” Colonel Francis X. Bradley pointed out this fault in our concepts of limited war. Comparing conflicts between nations “to a world-wide poker game without limits,” he observed that if a nation doesn’t “bet” it can’t win, if it refuses to run risks it can easily be bluffed.