The 1960s witnessed the high tide of both … people’s wars and also of the Western reaction to them. No doubt the latter would not have existed without the former, but there can equally be no doubt that [as J. Bowyer Bell said in The Myth of the Guerrilla (New York: Knopf, 1971)] “the men of order by elaborating and extending their responses out of proportion to the reality of the threat” contributed greatly to the spread and the attractiveness of the original doctrine. This is not to imply that there should have been no response at all [but] a well-honed response required careful analysis … to ensure that American efforts were directed against the “export” of revolution, not the suppression of genuine revolution.
Professor Chalmers Johnson
Autopsy on People’s War1
It is axiomatic in military strategy that one can never factor out the enemy. When President Kennedy took office in 1961, it seemed at first that with his policy of “flexible response” the Army had come into its own and there was again a place for conventional strategy. But no sooner had we begun to adapt our doctrine to these new policies than our adversaries—the U.S.S.R. and China—changed the rules of the game. Suddenly the threat was not so much nuclear war or conventional war but “a whole new kind of warfare”—wars of national liberation and people’s war. What was not apparent at the time was that their emphasis on guerrilla war had much to do with the same issue that had caused the Army so much grief—the issue of nuclear weapons.
Faced with U.S. nuclear superiority in the post-World War II period, both the Soviets and the Chinese began to develop and expand their own nuclear capabilities. This would eventually eliminate their vulnerability to U.S. intimidation, but it was a long-term effort that would take years to accomplish. In the meantime, a counter-strategy to U.S. nuclear superiority had to be devised. The Soviets found such a strategy in “Wars of National Liberation.” Announced by Premier Nikita Khrushchev in January 1961 on the eve of President John Kennedy’s inauguration, it was essentially a low cost effort using surrogate forces in order to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States.
This “new kind of warfare” had an immediate effect on U.S. strategic thinking, especially since it seemed to be reinforced by Mao’s “people’s war” successes in winning the Chinese mainland and Castro’s activities in Latin America (activities made particularly galling by the U.S. humiliation at the Bay of Pigs). Returning from his meeting in Vienna with Khrushchev in 1961, President John F. Kennedy emphasized the need for a U.S. counterinsurgency capability. As he saw it:
In the 1940s and early fifties, the great danger was from Communist armies marching across free borders, which we saw in Korea.… Now we face a new and different threat. We no longer have a nuclear monopoly. Their missiles, they believe, will hold off our missiles, and their troops can match our troops should we intervene in these so-called wars of liberation. Thus, the local conflict they support can turn in their favor through guerrillas or insurgents or subversion.… It is clear that this struggle in this area of the new and poorer nations will be a continuing crisis of this decade.2
Twenty years later, it is hard to envision the force with which the concept of counterinsurgency struck the Army. Its impact was particularly powerful, both because of the partial doctrinal vacuum that still existed as a result of the “massive retaliation” era, and because it was pushed by President Kennedy himself, who “took the lead in formulating the programs, pushing both his own staff and the government establishment to give the matter priority attention.” Former Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor was brought in as the President’s special military representative and assigned the duties of monitoring counterinsurgency efforts, and the President himself sent a letter to the Army which indicated a need for new doctrine and tactics.3
Some appreciation of the effect can be gained from such publications as the March 1962 issue of Army, the influential publication of the Association of the U.S. Army, which was devoted to (in its own words) “spreading the gospel” of counterinsurgency. Reading it today sounds more like the description of a new liturgy rather than a discussion of strategic doctrine. Not all were taken in. The article reports that then Army Chief of Staff General George H. Decker “stoutly stood up to the President with the assurance that ‘any good soldier can handle guerrillas.’ ” The President’s response was “a brisk and spirited homily to the effect that guerrilla fighting was a special art,”4 and six months later General Decker was out, replaced as Army Chief of Staff by General Earle G. Wheeler. The Army leadership got the message, especially since “[President] Kennedy dropped a broad hint that future promotions of high ranking officers would depend upon their demonstration of experience in the counter-guerrilla or sublimited war field.”5 Counterinsurgency became not so much the Army’s doctrine as the Army’s dogma, and (as nuclear weapons had done earlier) stultified military strategic thinking for the next decade.
As had been the case with our fears of nuclear weapons and of China, “myths, self-fulfilling prophecies, and symbolic reassurance” also distorted our understanding of the guerrilla war challenge. There was the myth that such wars were something unique in the annals of warfare. Then there was President Kennedy’s self-fulfilling prophecy that he would bet nine to one that they would be the most likely wars of the future,6 and the symbolic reassurance that the American social structure could be exported to the rest of the world.
Although there were those who saw “revolutionary war” springing full-blown from the breast of Khrushchev or Mao Tse-tung in 1961, this type of warfare actually has a long history. Clausewitz himself devoted a chapter of On War to “The People in Arms.” Long before either Khrushchev or Mao were born, external powers were seeking to profit from the internal instability of their neighbors. As Professor Geoffrey Blainey of the University of Melbourne found, from 1815 to 1939 “at least 31 wars had been immediately preceded by serious disturbances in one of the fighting nations.”7 He goes on to say that “civil strife was particularly dangerous when a group or interest in the disturbed nation had strong bonds with another nation … Of the civil disturbances which preceded international war in the period from 1815 to 1939, at least 26 of the 31 disturbances formed links with the outside nation which ultimately went to war.”8
And the United States itself was no stranger to guerrilla war. Our own experience during the Indian Wars, the Philippine Insurrection, and the Mexican border skirmishes were reflected in our Field Service Regulations. The 1939 edition devoted four pages to this subject, including two and one-half pages on combating guerrilla warfare. Especially as a result of our World War II experiences with “partisan warfare,” we saw guerrilla warfare as an adjunct to normal conventional operations, designed for “… harassing or delaying larger forces and causing losses through attrition … destroying signal communications, gaining military information, assisting regular forces to reconquer the country or make incursions on the enemy’s lines of communications and supply.”9
It was precisely in this light that we saw enemy guerrilla actions in Korea, and we devised tactics to deal with the guerrilla problem. It is interesting to note that during the “Great Debate” in 1951, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia asked General of the Army Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if we had learned anything in Korea. General Bradley replied:
Yes, I think we have learned a few lessons. We certainly have been up against one type of warfare which we never had before, and that is the guerrilla type, in which you have infiltration of your lines by large groups.… How helpful it will be in the future, no one knows, but certainly it is something that we should have experience in.10
The lesson we had learned in Korea was to orient U.S. forces on the external rather than the internal threat. Although from time to time the United States detached military units to assist in counter-guerrilla operations, such operations were the primary responsibility of the South Korean government. This military division of responsibility was a reflection of U.S. political policy toward Korea. As a sovereign nation the problem of internal security was the responsibility of the Government of the Republic of Korea, and the role of U.S. forces was (and is) limited to protecting South Korea from external attack. There were many reasons why we did not see the war in Korea as a model for the war in Vietnam. First, as we have seen, it was many years after the end of that war before we realized that we had actually won a victory there. Second was the continuing trauma of the intervention of Chinese troops. Perhaps more important, however, was the belief that the war in Vietnam was a whole new kind of war where the lessons of the past had no application.
The reason this was so can best be understood in terms of Kautsky’s “symbolic reassurance.” The Soviet Union and China used the symbol of revolutionary war to advance their own ends, and President Kennedy had reacted to that symbol with the doctrine of counterinsurgency. From our perspective it appeared that the strategies were in balance. But they could only remain in balance as long as our adversaries were in fact waging a “revolutionary war.” For almost the entire Vietnam war we believed and acted on the enemy’s people’s war propaganda even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. As late as 1973, General William C. Westmoreland said, “An understanding of the American ground strategy in Vietnam begins with an understanding of the nature of the war the enemy waged, for that always affects the nature of the riposte. The Communists in Vietnam waged a classic revolutionary war.”11 One of the better known strategists in this “new kind of war,” Sir Robert Thompson, explained how “classic revolutionary war” differed from conventional war:
… Revolutionary war is most confused with guerrilla or partisan warfare. Here the main difference is that guerrilla warfare is designed merely to harass and distract the enemy so that the regular forces can reach a decision in conventional battles.… Revolutionary war on the other hand is designed to reach a decisive result on its own.12
General Westmoreland was exactly right that “an understanding of the nature of the war … always affects the nature of the riposte.” But with hindsight it is clear that by Sir Robert Thompson’s own definition, he was exactly wrong in seeing the war as “a classic revolutionary war.” The guerrillas in Vietnam did not achieve decisive results on their own. Even at the very end there was no popular mass uprising to overthrow the Saigon government. Their actions fit precisely Sir Robert Thompson’s definition of partisan warfare—they harassed and distracted both the United States and South Vietnam so that North Vietnamese regular forces could reach a decision in conventional battles.
It was only at the very end that this fact became apparent. In 1973-74, a colloquium was held at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Thirty-one distinguished panelists (including General Westmoreland) critiqued the failures of our counterinsurgency strategy. Before their findings could be published, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and it became clear that their deliberations had obscured rather than illuminated the true nature of the war. As the organizers of the panel, Professor W. Scott Thompson and Colonel Donaldson D. Frizzell, concluded sadly in their Afterword:
There is great irony in the fact that the North Vietnamese finally won by purely conventional means, using precisely the kind of warfare at which the American army was best equipped to fight.… In their lengthy battle accounts that followed Hanoi’s great military victory, Generals Giap and Dung barely mentioned the contribution of local forces.13
Having said all this, however, is not to say there was no value in counterinsurgency doctrine. It has much to offer a nation faced with internal insurgency, but South Vietnam faced not only internal insurgency but also outside aggression and counterinsurgency doctrine could only be part of the answer. Second, to give credit to its originators, “President Kennedy and his advisors saw counterinsurgency as first and last a political task to be carried out under civilian management.”14 If it had remained at that level it could have been a valuable adjunct to U.S. military operations in Vietnam which should have been focused on protecting South Vietnam from outside aggression, leaving the internal problems to the South Vietnamese themselves.
But as we will see in Part II, we failed to distinguish between these two tasks. Counterinsurgency took on a life of its own. As Harvard researcher J. Bowyer Bell found, “Even before Vietnam justifiably absorbed the attention of America, guerrilla-revolution had become a fashionable challenge to be met in elegant and complex ways but ways which needed the talents, the scope, the capacities, and the experience of various available careerists.”15 It got so bad that, according to Professor Chalmers Johnson, “by 1967 the various counterinsurgency committees and task forces had proliferated to such a degree that a senior U.S. official [the State Department’s Director of Intelligence and Research] warned against a possible “bureaucratic interest” in the existence of people’s war.”16 There appeared to be something in it for everybody. As J. Bowyer Bell put it:
… For the American intellectual theoreticians of order, the nature of the appropriate response—intricate and highly calculated reforms to transform Vietnamese society—fit the prejudices and aspirations of the moment … the guerrilla could be met by using the advanced tools of social science for the betterment of man … [Accordingly] the guerrilla threat was magnified because it was unconventional, requiring revolutionary reforms usually so difficult to force on static societies.…17
For the military, counterinsurgency appeared to give us a whole new mission—civil affairs activities, establishment of schools and public health systems, assistance to police, and other forms of “civic action.” According to Blaufarb, “There was a brief period in the late 1960s when military intellectuals were advancing the notion that the U.S. Army was the arm of the government best equipped to carry out in the field the entire range of activities associated with ‘nation-building.’ ”18 This change in orientation was reflected in the 1968 successor to the Field Service Regulations which stated that “the fundamental purpose of the U.S. military forces is to preserve, restore, or create an environment of order or stability within which the instrumentalities of government can function effectively under a code of laws.”19 We had come a long way from the pre-Vietnam war doctrine that called for “the defeat of an enemy by application of military power directly or indirectly against the armed forces which support his political structure.”20
By obscuring the true nature of military force, our own doctrine contributed to the subsequent failure of U.S. national policy in Vietnam. As Clausewitz had said, the primacy of policy in war rests on the assumption that “policy knows the instrument it means to use” and that “only if statesmen look to certain military moves and actions to produce effects that are foreign to their nature do political decisions influence operations for the worse.”21 The effect of this doctrinal confusion was emphasized by then Chief of Staff (and former MACV Commander) General Fred C. Weyand in 1976:
… The major military error was a failure to communicate to the civilian decisionmakers the capabilities and limitations of American military power. There are certain tasks the American military can accomplish on behalf of another nation. They can defeat enemy forces on the battlefield. They can blockade the enemy’s coast. They can cut lines of supply and communication. They can carry the war to the enemy on land, sea, and air. These tasks require political decisions before they can be implemented, but they are within the military’s capabilities.
But there are also fundamental limitations on American military power … the Congress and the American people will not permit their military to take total control of another nation’s political, economic, and social institutions in order to completely orchestrate the war.…
The failure to communicate these capabilities and limitations resulted in the military being called upon to perform political, economic, and social tasks beyond its capability while at the same time it was limited in its authority to accomplish those military tasks of which it was capable.22
NOTES
1. Johnson, Autopsy on People’s War, p. 44.
2. President John F. Kennedy quoted in Johnson, Autopsy on People’s War, p. 22.
3. Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counter-Insurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance 1950 to the Present (New York: The Free Press, 1977), p. 52. See also Virgil Ney, “Evolution of the United States Army Field Manual: Valley Forge to Vietnam,” Combat Operations Research Group Memorandum 244, January 1966, p. 104.
4. Lloyd Norman and John B. Spore, “Big Push In Guerrilla Warfare,” Army, March 1962, p. 34.
5. Ibid, p. 33.
6. Ibid.
7. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 71.
8. Ibid, p. 83.
9. FM 100–5, August 1949, p. 231.
10. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Part 2, p. 1009.
11. W. Scott Thompson and Donaldson D. Frizzell (ed), The Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1977), p. 279.
12. Sir Robert Thompson, Revolutionary War in World Strategy 1945–1969 (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970), pp. 16–17.
13. Thompson and Frizzell, The Lessons of Vietnam, p. 279.
14. Blaufarb, The Counter-Insurgency Era, p. 65. (Emphasis added)
15. J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla: Revolutionary Theory and Malpractice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 257–58.
16. Johnson, Autopsy on People’s War, pp. 29–30.
17. J. Bowyer Bell, The Myth of the Guerrilla, p. 257.
18. Blaufarb, The Counter-Insurgency Era, p. 287.
19. Department of the Army, Field Manual 100-5, Operations of Army Forces in the Field (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, September 1968), pp. 1–6.
20. FM 100–5, September 1954, p. 5.
21. Clausewitz, On War, VIII:6, pp. 607, 608. (Emphasis added)
22. Weyand, CDRS CALL, July-August 1976, pp. 5–6.