Every military operation must be directed toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective. The ultimate military objective of war is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight. The objective of each operation must contribute to this ultimate objective. Each intermediate objective must be such that its attainment will most directly, quickly, and economically contribute to the purpose of the operation. The selection of an objective is based upon consideration of the means available, the enemy, and the area of operations. Every commander must understand and clearly define his objective and consider each contemplated action in light thereof.
FM 100–5, 19 February 1962 1
The original intent was to begin each of the chapters in Part II with a discussion of the relevant principle of war extracted from our Vietnam-era Field Service Regulations, the 19 February 1962 edition of Field Manual 100–5. Theoretically, these principles form the basis for Army strategic and tactical doctrine and should therefore provide a framework for analysis of our Vietnam strategy. Since the principles of war are by definition of universal application, they should also provide a basis for the evaluation of North Vietnamese strategy. As the analysis began, however, it was found that the Vietnam-era manual discussed the principles of war only in terms of their tactical application. Significantly, their strategic application was missing. In order to discover this missing dimension, it was necessary to go back to the beginning.2
The first official American codification of the principles of war was in War Department Training Regulations 10–5, 23 December 1921. In its discussion of the principles of war this manual stated that “their application to the preparation for war and the direction of war is called strategy. Their application to specific battles and operations is called tactics.” This distinction was especially evident in its discussion of The Objective, where both its strategic and tactical dimensions were emphasized. Strategically, “the selection of objectives depends on political, military, and economic conditions, which vary in force and effect.… The objective assigned military forces must be in consonance with the national objective.” Its discussion of the tactical dimension did not vary appreciably from the 1962 definition quoted above.3 By 1939, however, the strategic and tactical principles had begun to diverge. Although still side by side in the manual, the strategic principle of The Objective was discussed under “conduct of war,” defined as “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 tactical principle was discussed in the next paragraph as “the ultimate objective … the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces in battle.”4 After World War II the strategic definition dropped out completely, only to be reintroduced in 1954 as a result of our Korean war experiences. “Since war is a political act,” the introductory chapter to the manual stated, “Its broad and final objectives are political; therefore, its conduct must conform to policy and its outcome realize the objectives of policy.”5
It is revealing that during the course of the Vietnam war there were changes in both the strategic and tactical definitions of The Objective. What had been a clear relationship between military strategy and political objectives was lost in an abstruse discussion of national objectives, rejection of aggression, deterrence and the whole concept of a spectrum of war.6 The new definition obscured the Clausewitzian dictum that “the political object—the original motive for the war—will determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires.”7 In tactics, there was an even more startling change. While the 1962 edition still discussed The Objective as requiring “the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight,” the 1968 edition reduced this to “defeat of the enemy’s armed forces.”8 We had eliminated the very factor that was to cause us the greatest difficulty—the psychological objective of destruction of the enemy’s will to fight. This was especially paradoxical since this was ostensibly what we were trying to do in Vietnam, having been denied the objective of destruction of the enemy’s armed forces.
Our loss of focus on The Objective was particularly damaging, since this is the driving principle of war. Clausewitz’s clarification of the importance of the objective was one of his main contributions to understanding the nature of war. He emphasized that war was not waged for its own sake but was waged to obtain a particular aim—what Clausewitz called the political object of war. As he said, “the political object is a goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”9 This loss of focus also exacerbated a common American failing—the tendency to see war as something separate and apart from the political process. World Wars I and II had been not so much wars as crusades to punish evil. Even so astute a military professional as General of the Army Douglas MacArthur saw war in this light. As he told the Senate, “the general definition which for many decades has been acceptable was that war was an ultimate process of politics; that when all of the political means failed, we then go to force.”10 This statement reflected the rejection of the Clausewitzian belief that “it is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.”11 The truth of this dictum was brought home with a vengeance during the Vietnam war and its aftermath.
With this framework for analysis we can now turn to an examination of how the principle of The Objective was applied during the Vietnam war. We will begin with an analysis of North Vietnamese actions using our own frame of reference. Not only are their doctrinal manuals not available, the material that is available primarily reflects North Vietnamese declaratory strategy which was designed to continue the smoke screen of revolutionary war to mask their own aggression. It was not until after their conquest of South Vietnam that they revealed (e.g., General Dung’s “Great Spring Victory”) the true nature of the war. Their smoke screen was so effective that we were blinded throughout the course of the war to the point that the majority of our analyses focused on revolutionary war and the Viet Cong. Volumes have been written on their organization, structure, doctrine and tactics. According to former CIA analyst, George Allen, one of the country’s foremost experts on Vietnam, such analysis distorted the true nature of the war:
The National Liberation Front was not … a viable, autonomous organization with a life of its own; it was a facade, a “front,” by means of which the DLD (the Vietnamese Communist Party) sought to mobilize the people in the south to accomplish its ends, and to garner international sympathy and support.12
The guerrilla himself may well have believed in the revolutionary cause and have believed that he was fighting for a revolutionary government in Saigon under southern leadership. Such beliefs were essential if his morale and fighting spirit were to be sustained. But the Viet Cong were only a means to an end. As General Weyand said in his analysis of Tet-68:
Applying the test of cui bono (for whose benefit) it can be seen that the real losers of Tet-68 were the South Vietnamese Communists (the Viet Cong or PRG) who surfaced, led the attacks, and were destroyed in the process.… Just as the Russians eliminated their Polish competitors [with] the Warsaw Uprising, the North Vietnamese eliminated their southern competitors with Tet-68. They thereby insured that the eventual outcome of the war would be a South Vietnam dominated and controlled, not by South Vietnamese Communists, but by the North Vietnamese.13
As we saw earlier, after Tet-68 the majority of the day-to-day combat in Vietnam was carried out by North Vietnamese troops, and the Viet Cong had been reduced to no more than 20 percent of the Communist fighting force.
Although most of the literature on North Vietnam and the Viet Cong is misleading, that is not to say that there were no analysts who were aware of the true nature of the war. The problem was that counterinsurgency dogma had so distorted our own frame of reference that such analyses did not fit the fashion of the time. For example, in 1963, a year before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, P. J. Honey, a lecturer in Vietnamese at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, wrote:
The clearest statement of the long-term objectives of the Lao Dong Party which has yet come to light is to be found in a secret party document captured by the French Expeditionary Corps in North Vietnam during the spring of 1952.… The ultimate aim of the Vietnamese Communist leadership is to install Communist regimes in the whole of Vietnam, in Laos, and in Cambodia …14
The proof of Honey’s analysis is in what Clausewitz called “judgements by results.” A Vietnam under the domination of the North was achieved on 2 July 1976 when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) with headquarters in Hanoi was proclaimed. Hegemony over Laos was achieved when the Pathet Lao seized control of Vientiane in August 1975. In Cambodia the attainment of the objective was delayed by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, who seized control of Phnom Penh in April 1975. On Christmas Day 1978, Vietnam launched a multidivisional cross-border attack on Cambodia to overthrow the Pol Pot government. On 7 January 1979, they announced the foundation of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Although sporadic fighting still continues, IndoChina is effectively under Vietnamese control.
In his 1973 analysis of North Vietnamese strategy John Collins, former director of Military Strategy Studies at the National War College and now a member of the Congressional Research Service, stated that “enemy strategy can be outlined quickly, since it was simple, concise, and consistent … the opposition knew what they wanted to do, they had the initiative, and they had the winning combination … Controlling and communizing all of Indochina have always been the foe’s overriding objectives.”15
In contrast with North Vietnam who could focus all of their attention on the conquest of South Vietnam, the formulation of U.S. objectives was much more complex. It is difficult to recall now that at the beginning Vietnam did not occupy center stage and was only subsidiary to a number of other issues facing the American President. Domestic issues, for example, were a major preoccupation. Even in the area of national security the primary concern was not Vietnam per se but the larger issue of the containment of Soviet and Chinese communism. The result was that American political objectives were never clear during the entire course of the war. University of Nebraska Professor Hugh M. Arnold examined the official justifications most often cited for America’s involvement in Indochina from 1949 through 1967.16 Compared to the one North Vietnamese objective, he found some twenty-two separate American rationales. They can be grouped into three major categories: from 1949 until about 1962, emphasis was on resisting Communist aggression; from 1962 until about 1968, the emphasis was on counterinsurgency; after 1968, preserving the integrity of American commitments was the main emphasis.
Only once during the early period from 1949 until 1962 did the United States seriously consider commitment of U.S. ground combat forces. This was in the spring of 1954 when the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was under siege. Then Army Chief of Staff General Matthew B. Ridgway commented on his aanalysis of the situation, beginning with his view on the relationship between the Army leadership and its civilian decision-makers:
The statesman, the senior civilian authority, says to the soldier (and by “soldier” I mean the professional military man—the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force as represented in the persons of the Chiefs of Staff): “This is our national policy. This is what we wish to accomplish, or would like to do. What military means are required to support it?”
The soldier studies this problem in detail. “Very well,” he says to the statesman. “Here is what your policy will require in men and guns, in ships and planes.” …
If civilian authority finds the cost to be greater than the country can bear, then either the objectives themselves should be modified, or the responsibility for the risks involved should be forthrightly accepted. Under no circumstances, regardless of pressures from whatever source or motive, should the professional military man yield, or compromise his judgment for other than convincing military reasons. To do otherwise would be to destroy his usefulness.17
He then went on to analyze the situation in Indochina. Some of the factors in this analysis were revealed by his Chief of Plans and Operations, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin. As we saw in an earlier chapter, fear of China was a major consideration. General Gavin wrote that “the more we studied the situation the more we realized that we were, in fact, considering going to war with China … If we would be, in fact, fighting China, then we were fighting her in the wrong place on terms entirely to her advantage.… It seemed to us military planners that if an effort were made by the United States to secure Vietnam from Chinese military exploitation, and that if force on the scale that we were talking about were to be employed, then the Chinese would very likely reopen the fighting in Korea.”18
As a result of his analysis General Ridgway concluded that “we could have fought in Indo-China. We could have won, if we had been willing to pay the tremendous cost in men and money that such intervention would have required—a cost that in my opinion would have eventually been as great as, or greater than, that we paid in Korea.” General Ridgway went on to say that:
As soon as the full report was in, I lost no time in having it passed on up the chain of command. It reached President Eisenhower. To a man of his military experience its implications were immediately clear. The idea of intervening was abandoned, and it is my belief that the analysis which the Army made and presented to higher authority played a considerable, perhaps a decisive part in persuading our government not to embark on that tragic adventure.19
President Eisenhower and General Ridgway were looking at the situation in Vietnam in the traditional military frame of reference. Their concern was U.S. ability to “destroy the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight.” This frame of reference was obvious in a later conversation between President Johnson and former President Eisenhower in February 1965. In his biography, President Johnson relates that:
I asked him about the possibility of Chinese Communist or Soviet intervention in Vietnam, the two fears expressed to me so often by members of Congress. Eisenhower said that if they threatened to intervene we should pass the word to them, quietly but firmly, that they should take care “lest dire results occur.” He recalled how the armistice had been achieved finally in Korea. Talks had been going on inconclusively for a long time. When he became President, he passed three messages through secret channels to the Koreans and the Chinese. The gist of the messages was that if a satisfactory armistice was not signed promptly, he was going to remove the “limits we were observing as to the area of combat and the weapons employed.” He thought we should do the same if there were a threat of Chinese Communist intervention in Vietnam.
Eisenhower saw merit … putting an American division into Vietnam just south of the demilitarized zone to help protect the South, but he did not favor any large deployment at that time. Later in our talk he said that we could not let the Indochina peninsula fall. He hoped that it would not be necessary to use the six or eight divisions mentioned in some speculation. But if it should prove necessary, he said, “so be it.”20
This traditional frame of reference was also reflected by Lieutenant General James M. Gavin in a February 1966 article in Harper’s. Best remembered as advocating an “enclave strategy,” General Gavin also said that “if our objective is to secure all of South Vietnam [a strategy which General Gavin did not advocate] then forces should be deployed on the 17th parallel and along the Cambodian border adequate to do this. In view of the nature of the terrain, it might be necessary to extend our defenses on the 17th parallel to the Mekong River, and across part of Thailand. Such a course would take many times as much force as we now have in Vietnam.”21
But in the early 1960s, the traditional military frame of reference appeared to have no relevance. In 1962, we had adopted a whole new frame of reference—counterinsurgency. In his discussion of the Vietnam war, British researcher Gregory Palmer points out that:
The official view supported by the advice of Diem’s British advisor, Sir Robert Thompson, was that the appropriate strategy was counterinsurgency with emphasis on depriving the enemy of the support of the population by resettlement, pacification, good administration, and propaganda. This had two awkward consequences for American policy: it contradicted the reason given for breaking the Geneva declaration, that the war was really aggression from the North, and, by closely associating the American government with the policies of the government of South Vietnam, it made Diem’s actions directly answerable to the American electorate.22
This contradiction is reflected in the mission statement for the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). According to General Westmoreland, MACV’s objective was:
To assist the Government of Vietnam and its armed forces to defeat externally directed and supported communist subversion and aggression and attain an independent South Vietnam functioning in a secure environment.23
Even a cursory mission analysis reveals two divergent specified tasks. The first specified task—“To assist the Government of Vietnam and its armed forces to defeat externally directed and supported communist subversion and aggression”—is clearly a legitimate military objective, albeit one difficult to accomplish. The second specified task—to “attain an independent South Vietnam functioning in a secure environment”—is more a political than a military objective. The confusion over objectives inherent in the MACV mission statement was to plague our conduct of the war.
Even without this confusion the task was demanding enough. To veterans of the Korean war, the first objective—defeating externally directed and supported communist subversion and aggression—must have provoked a sense of deja vu. Given the political restrictions against carrying the war to North Vietnam, the words of General MacArthur in 1951 seemed to apply:
It seems to me the worst possible concept, militarily, that we would simply stay there, resisting aggression, so-called … it seems to me that [the way to “resist aggression” is to] 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 …24
But in Vietnam the situation was even worse. In the Korean war we had come to grips with General MacArthur’s complaint and reconciled our political and military objectives, while keeping our focus and attention on the external aggressor—North Korea and the Chinese Communist forces. Such an adjustment of objectives was not unusual in war. As Clausewitz said, “The original political objects can greatly alter during the course of the war and may finally change entirely since they are influenced by events and their probable consequences.”25
In Vietnam such an adjustment was never made. Instead of focusing our attention on the external enemy, North Vietnam—the source of the war—we turned our attention to the symptom—the guerrilla war in the south—and limited our attacks on the North to air and sea actions only. In other words, we took the political task (nation building/counterinsurgency) as our primary mission and relegated the military task (defeating external aggression) to a secondary consideration. As we will see in the next chapter, the effect was a failure to isolate the battlefield, but because of the confusion over objectives this fact was not readily apparent. Not only was it not apparent to the American field commander in Saigon, it was also not apparent to the decision-makers in Washington, whose decision-making process was dominated by a management approach heavily dependent on quantification—the so-called Planning Programming and Budget System (PPBS)—designed for “preparation for war” rather than for the conduct of war proper.
It is instructive to note that the 1921 definition of strategy quoted earlier in this chapter listed “preparation for war” and “direction of war” as distinct elements of strategy. They are distinct elements because “preparation for war” is primarily concerned with military economics, while “direction of war” (or “war proper”) is concerned with military strategy. Failure to understand this distinction led to the attempt to conduct “war proper” with decision-making apparatus designed for “preparation for war.” According to Gregory Palmer, this led to the concept of “progressive escalating pressure which would at some point cause Hanoi to cease to support the Viet Cong.” As he goes on to say:
Such a limited and specific aim, instead of the traditional military objectives such as victory or unconditional surrender, constituted a measurable and clear programmed output satisfying the requirements of PPBS. The principle of selection [of options] was to provide “maximum pressure” with minimum risk,” a military translation of the economists’ ratio of benefits and cost.26
But, as events were to prove, “measurable and clear programmed outputs” were no substitute for a well-thought-out comprehensive plan of war. As Clausewitz said:
War plans cover every aspect of a war, and weave them all into a single operation that must have a single, ultimate objective in which all particular aims are reconciled. No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter is operational objective. This is the governing principle which will set its course, prescribe the scale of means and effort which is required, and make its influence felt throughout down to the smallest operational detail.27
One thing we did not “intend to achieve” was victory. As we have seen, our doctrine specifically excluded it as an aim in war. Testifying before the Senate in 1966, General Maxwell Taylor said that we were not trying to “defeat” North Vietnam, only “to cause them to mend their ways.” General Taylor likened the concept of defeating the enemy to “Appomattox or something of that sort.”28 Such a war aim lacked polarity with that of our enemy, who was fighting by the old rules and who kept victory as their ultimate objective throughout the war.
There was also another critical area where we lacked polarity. Concentrating our attention on South Vietnam’s internal problems rather than on the external enemy led to defining the ground war in terms of South Vietnam alone, a geographic definition that lacked symmetry with that of our enemy who made no secret of the fact that he was fighting the Indochina war and who used Laos and Cambodia with impunity. Unlike the China sanctuary which at least made some strategic sense in avoiding a wider war against a major adversary, the sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia were a self-inflicted wound. The myth of their neutrality gave North Vietnam an immense tactical and strategic advantage that plagued us throughout the war.29
When the Nixon administration came into office in January 1969, they were aware of the inadequacy of our objectives in Vietnam. Kissinger reports that Vietnam was discussed at the new administration’s first meetings of the National Security Council. The military’s lack of strategic thought is revealed in Kissinger’s comment that their briefings “did not offer imaginative ideas to a new President eager for them.” Kissinger goes on to say, “For years, the military had been complaining about being held on a leash by the civilian leadership. But when Nixon pressed them for new strategies, all they could think of was resuming the bombing of the North.”30 In June 1969, a new mission was given to MACV. As Kissinger reports:
The new mission statement [which went into effect on August 15] focused on providing “maximum assistance” to the South Vietnamese to strengthen their forces, supporting pacification efforts, and reducing the flow of supplies to the enemy.31
This new mission statement formally announced our movement into the third category of political objectives—preserving the integrity of American commitments—which had been under way since Tet-68. Through Vietnamization, resisting aggression and nation building were to become a responsibility of the South Vietnamese government. Our military objective was now withdrawal, an objective accomplished in January 1973.
The confusion over objectives detailed above had a devastating effect on our ability to conduct the war. As Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard found in a 1974 survey of Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam, “almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives.” Kinnard goes on to say that this “mirrors a deep-seated strategic failure: the inability of policy-makers to frame tangible, obtainable goals.”32
NOTES
1. FM 100–5, 19 February 1962, p. 46.
2. Partly as a result of this book, the principles of war have been revised to include both their strategic and tactical dimension and are contained in the 1981 editions of both Field Manual 100–1 The Army, and Field Manual 100-5 Operations. An extract of these new principles is contained in Appendix A.
3. Quoted in Maneuver in War by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Andrew Willoughby, USA (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Military Service Publishing Co., 1939), p. 27.
4. FM 100–5, 1 October 1939, p. 27.
5. FM 100-5, 27 September 1954, p. 7.
6. FM 100–5, 19 February 1962, p. 4, and FM 100-5, 6 September 1968, pp. 1–2.
7. Clausewitz, On War, I:1, p. 81.
8. FM 100–5, 6 September 1968, p. 5–1.
9. Clausewitz, On War, I:1, p. 87.
10. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Vol. 1, p. 45.
11. Clausewitz, On War, I:1, p. 88.
12. Interview at USAWC on 3 March 1980.
13. Weyand, CDRS CALL, July-August 1976, p. 5.
14. P. J. Honey, Communism in North Vietnam, Its Role in the Sino-Soviet Dispute (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1963), pp. 168, 170.
15. John M. Collins, Grand Strategy: Principles and Practices (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1973), pp. 250–51.
16. Hugh M. Arnold, “Official Justifications for America’s Role in Indochina, 1949–67,” Asian Affairs, September/October 1975, p. 31.
17. General Matthew B. Ridgway, Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956), pp. 271–72.
18. Lieutenant General James M. Gavin, “A Communication on Vietnam,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1966, p. 16. The Hanoi Delta planning force was “eight divisions plus 35 engineer battalions and other auxiliary units.”
19. Ridgway, Soldier, p. 277. Eight Army divisions and one Marine division were committed in the Korean war, while seven Army divisions, a division equivalent, and two Marine divisions were ultimately committed to Vietnam.
20. Johnson, The Vantage Point, p. 131.
21. Gavin, “A Communication on Vietnam,” p. 18.
22. Palmer, The McNamara Strategy, pp. 99, 100. According to a 17 April 1981 National Review article (“No More Vietnams,” pp. 403–4), the roots of the decision to concentrate on the internal war (counterinsurgency) rather than the external North Vietnamese threat grew out of the Geneva Conference on Laos in the fall of 1961. Believing Soviet assurances of Laotian neutrality, President Kennedy approved only internal support to South Vietnam and delayed making a decision on a proposal to “man the northern borders.” From this point on counterinsurgency tactics dominated strategy.
23. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, p. 57.
24. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Part I, pp. 39, 40, 68.
25. Clausewitz, On War, I:2, p. 92.
26. Palmer, The McNamara Strategy, p. 108.
27. Clausewitz, On War, VIII:2, p. 579.
28. 89th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “To Amend Further the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 as Amended,” Vietnam Hearings, 1966, pp. 440, 460.
29. A myth still perpetuated today in such books as William Shawcross’s Side Show: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). This myth flies not only in the face of reason but also in the face of the Hague Convention of 1907 which states, “A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate counteraction.” It is informative that, in his 4 August 1981 letter to the author, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that “the so-called neutrality of Laos would not, in my judgment, have been an obstacle [to sealing the DMZ].”
30. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 238.
31. Ibid, p. 276.
32. Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (Hanover, New ampshire, University Press of New England, 1977), p. 25.