Offensive action is necessary to achieve decisive results and to maintain freedom of action. It permits the commander to exercise initiative and impose his will upon the enemy; to set the pace and determine the course of battle; to exploit enemy weakness and rapidly changing situations, and to meet unexpected developments. The defensive may be forced on the commander, but it should be deliberately adopted only as a temporary expedient while awaiting an opportunity for offensive action or for the purpose of economizing forces on a front where a decision is not sought. Even on the defensive the commander seeks every opportunity to seize the initiative and achieve decisive results by offensive action.
FM 100–5, 19 February 19621
The key to understanding the principle of The Offensive is contained in the first sentence of the definition: “Offensive action is necessary to achieve decisive results and to maintain freedom of action.” The task of achieving “decisive results” requires an appreciation of the difference between the strategic offensive and the tactical offensive. As Clausewitz explained:
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.… Insofar as [a tactical battlefield victory] is not the one that will lead directly to peace, it remains subsidiary and is also to be thought of as a means.…2
In other words, The Offensive is strategic when it leads directly to the political objective—the purpose for which the war is being waged. When it does not lead directly to the objective it is subsidiary and its value is tactical rather than strategic. One Clausewitz calls an end, the other a means. “All these ends and means must be examined by the theorist,” he said, “in accordance with their effects and their relationship to one another.”3
In his analysis of these ends and means, Clausewitz then goes on to discuss three broad military objectives—destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, occupation of the enemy’s country, and destruction of the enemy’s will to resist. The quickest way to attain your ends is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces or the occupation of his territory. If that is not immediately possible then one should concentrate on what Clausewitz calls “wastage” of the enemy—making the war more costly to him through laying waste to the enemy’s territory, increasing the enemy’s suffering, and wearing the enemy down in order to bring about a gradual exhaustion of his physical and moral positions. Yet another way is to destroy his will by operations that have “direct political repercussions.”4
The second task inherent in the principle of The Offensive—“maintaining freedom of action”—is obscured by the title of the principle itself. This principle in reality has to do with maintaining initiative through both offensive and defensive action. It was further obscured by our Vietnam-era manual which discussed the principles of war only at the tactical level. The result was that it was not apparent that both the strategic offensive and the strategic defensive each have tactical offensive and defensive dimensions. While the Vietnam-era manual would lead one to believe there are only two ways to wage war-through offense or defense-there are in fact four variants. To find how the strategic offensive and strategic defensive could be combined with the tactical offensive and tactical defensive it was necessary to go back before the turn of the century. They are found in Colmar, Baron von der Goltz’s The Conduct of War which was translated and republished by faculty members at the U.S. Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, the precursor of the present Command and General Staff College. Baron von der Goltz concisely portrayed the four variants in tabular form:5
TABLE I
Some of this thinking survived through World War II. The 1939, 1941, and 1944 editions of the Field Service Regulations mentioned the “strategically defensive mission” in their discussion of the principle of The Offensive. Emerging from World War II with overwhelming superiority, the need for the strategic defensive was evidently forgotten and all references to it dropped from our doctrine. This omission, together with the evolution of the principles of war from strategic to tactical, blurred the distinction between strategic and tactical operations. This was particularly damaging since the United States had deliberately opted for the strategic defensive (i.e., containment) in conflicts involving the Soviet Union, China, and their client states. As Norman Podhoretz pointed out in the March 1980 Commentary:
In refusing to do more in Korea than repel the North Korean invasion—in refusing, that is, to conquer North Korea as the commanding general, Douglas MacArthur, and his supporters on the Right wanted to do—the United States under Truman served notice on the world that it had no intention of going beyond containment to rollback or liberation.
Any lingering doubt as to whether this was the policy of the United States rather than the policy of the Democratic party was removed when the Republicans came into office in 1952 under Eisenhower. Far from adopting a bolder or more aggressive strategy, the new President ended the Korean war on the basis of the status quo ante—in other words, precisely on the terms of containment. And when, three years later, he refrained from going into Hungary, he made it correlatively clear that while the United States would resist the expansion of Soviet power by any and every means up to and including war, it would do nothing—not even provide aid to colonies of the Soviet empire seeking national independence and wishing to throw in their political lot with the democratic world—to shrink the territorial dimensions of Soviet control.…
The decision [of the Kennedy Administration] to go into Vietnam … followed upon the precedent of Korea in the sense that Vietnam too was a country partitioned into Communist and non-Communist areas and where the Communists were trying to take over the non-Communists by force. The difference was that whereas in Korea the North had invaded the South with regular troops, in Vietnam the aggression was taking the form of an apparently internal rebellion by a Communist faction. Very few people in the United States believed that the war in Vietnam was a civil war, but even if they had, it would have made little difference. For whatever the legalistic definition of the case might be, there was no question that an effort was being mounted in Vietnam to extend Communist power beyond an already established line. As such, it represented no less clear a challenge to containment than Korea.6
In other words, in pursuit of its policy of containment the United States entered the Vietnam war on the strategic defensive. As we will see, our failure to appreciate what this strategic posture entailed contributed to our ultimate failure.
The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, had a clear appreciation of the relationship between the strategic and tactical dimensions of the offensive. Their overall posture throughout the course of the war was the strategic offensive with the conquest of South Vietnam as their objective. After their initial attempt to gain their objective with guerrilla forces alone they launched a tactical offensive in 1964 with the commitment of regular forces. Frustrated by the massive commitment of U.S. combat ground forces, and their defeat in the battle of the Ia Drang in November 1965, they reverted to the tactical defensive. As they had done earlier against the French, their objective was to wear us down. This time, however, they had an added advantage. Because of our public decision not to invade North Vietnam they were able to accomplish this with an economy of force effort—Viet Cong guerrillas supplied and augmented by selected North Vietnamese regular units—while preserving the bulk of their regular forces in their homeland sanctuary. As Clausewitz said, “Resistance is a form of action aimed at destroying enough of the enemy’s power to force him to renounce his intentions,”7 and while generally on the tactical defensive, the North Vietnamese assumed the tactical offensive when it suited their purpose.
The most striking examples were the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the Eastertide Offensive in 1972. During Tet 1968 both the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong suffered heavy losses but, while it may have been a tactical failure, it was a strategic success since, by eroding our will, they were able eventually to capture the political-initiative.
“Suppose a small power is at war with a greater one,” Clausewitz said; “if the political initiative lies with the smaller power, it should take the military offensive.”8 The North Vietnamese evidently thought such a moment had arrived in the spring of 1972. American public opinion was decidedly against the war, the bulk of U.S. ground combat forces had been withdrawn, and the Army of South Vietnam was still building. Leaving only one division as a strategic reserve, in March 1972 they went on the tactical offensive with a 12-division invasion of South Vietnam. But they overplayed their hand. The Army of South Vietnam supported by massive U.S. air power held firm and beat back the North Vietnamese with terrible losses—one estimate runs as high as 100,000 casualties.9 Not only was it a tactical defeat, it had the potential for being a strategic defeat as well, but unfortunately, neither the United States nor South Vietnam was able to take advantage of it. Again North Vietnam switched over to the tactical defensive. They reconstituted their forces, kept enough pressure on South Vietnam to keep its army disposed in a counter-guerrilla mode, and waited for political conditions to improve. In the spring of 1975, the time had arrived and North Vietnam again went on the tactical offensive, this time with a 17-division conventional attack with the object of total military victory and the conquest of South Vietnam. This time they were successful.
That the Vietnam war was in the final analysis a conventional war best understood in terms of conventional military strategy is attested by North Vietnamese Senior General Van Tien Dung’s account of the final offensive to conquer South Vietnam.10 As we have seen, prior to this offensive North Vietnam was on the tactical defensive. Having been burnt severely in 1972 when they prematurely went over to the tactical offensive, one of their principal concerns was the state of American resolve. In October 1974 the Political Bureau and Central Military Party Committee of North Vietnam held a conference to hear its General Staff present its strategic combat plan. According to General Dung, one of the first problems raised was the question “Would the United States be able to send its troops back to the south if we launched large-scale battles that would lead to the collapse of the puppet troops?” Their conclusion was that “the internal contradictions within the U.S. administration and among U.S. political parties had intensified:
The Watergate scandal had seriously affected the entire United States and precipitated the resignation of an extremely reactionary president—Nixon. The United States faced economic recession, mounting inflation, serious unemployment and an oil crisis. Also, US allies were not on good terms with the United States and countries who had to depend on the United States also sought to escape US control. US aid to the Saigon puppet administration was decreasing. Comrade Le Duan drew an important conclusion that became a resolution: “Having already withdrawn from the South, the United States could hardly jump back in, and no matter how it might intervene, it would be unable to save the Saigon administration from collapse.11
Preparation to resume the tactical offensive had been under way for some time. The North Vietnamese Rear Service General Department had been busy. As General Dung reports:
The strategic route east of the Truong Son Range [what we labeled the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”] was the result of the labor of more than 30,000 troops and shock youths. The length of this route, added to that of the other old and new strategic routes and routes used during various campaigns built during the last war, is more than 20,000 kms. The 8-meter wide route of more than 1,000 kms, which we could see now, is our pride. With 5,000 kms of pipeline laid through deep rivers and streams and on the mountains more than 1,000 meters high, we were capable of providing enough fuel for various battlefronts. More than 10,000 transportation vehicles were put on the road…12
They had also reorganized their combat forces. “To stage large scale annihilating battles,” said General Dung, “it was no longer advisable to field only independent or combined divisions. Larger mobile armies composed of various armed branches were needed … In 1974, Army corps were gradually formed and deployed in strategic areas most vital to insure mobility.”13 The North Vietnamese War Council next turned to a discussion of strategic objectives. According to General Dung:
While we discussed the 1975 strategic combat plan, another very important question was raised: Where to establish the main battlefield? On all the southern battlefields the enemy had deployed his forces in a strong and mobile position. Specifically, in the First Military Region adjoining the socialist north the enemy had five main-force divisions, and in the Third Military Region, including the Saigon defense line, the enemy had three main-force divisions from the three divisions in the Fourth Military Region.
As for the Second Military Region, including the Central Highlands, the two main-force divisions defending it were spread over many areas. However, the Central Highlands was a very mobile battlefield and had much potential for developing southward along Route 14, or eastward along routes 19, 7, and 21. This is an area of highlands with only small variations in altitude. There, one can easily build roads, develop his technical and mobile capabilities and bring his strength into full play. In short, this was an extremely important area strategically. The conferees unanimously approved the General Staff’s draft plan which chose the Central Highlands as a main battlefield in the large-scale, widespread 1975 offensive.14
At 0200 hours on 10 March 1975, the North Vietnamese began their offensive, striking first at Ban Me Thuot where they concentrated three divisions against one South Vietnamese regiment. Exploiting their tactical successes and taking advantage of the South Vietnamese government’s decision to abandon the highlands, they moved rapidly to consolidate their gains. As we will see in subsequent chapters, by skillful application of the principles of mass and maneuver General Dung’s 17-division offensive was able to defeat the Army of South Vietnam in detail. By 29 April, his four Army corps surrounded Saigon and on 30 April 1975, the South Vietnamese government capitulated. North Vietnam’s final offensive met the criteria imposed by our own doctrine. It achieved decisive results; it maintained North Vietnamese freedom of action; it permitted Senior General Dung to exercise initiative and to impose his will upon the South Vietnamese; it set the pace and determined the course of battle; and it exploited South Vietnamese weaknesses, the rapidly changing situation and unexpected developments.
In comparing U.S. strategy with that of North Vietnam, it became apparent that our error was not so much that we were on the strategic defensive (since the strategic defensive was in consonance with our national policy), but that we confused that posture with the strategic offensive. Our allies could see the difference. As Colonel Hoang Ngoc Lung, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, observed in a recent monograph for the U.S. Army Center of Military History, “The Americans had designed a purely defensive strategy for Vietnam. It was a strategy that was based on the attrition of the enemy through a prolonged defense and made no allowance for decisive offensive action.”15
The failure to distinguish between the strategic offensive and defensive can be seen in official statements on U.S. strategy. In his 1968 report on the war in Vietnam, Admiral U. S. G. Sharp, the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC) and the strategic commander for the Vietnam war, stated that the U.S. military goal was to provide a secure environment in which the citizens could live and in which all levels of legal government could function without enemy exploitation, pressure, or violence. “Our strategy to achieve this goal,” he said, “consisted of three interdependent elements-the ground and air campaign in South Vietnam, the nation building effort in South Vietnam, and our air and naval offensive against North Vietnam.… To this end,” Admiral Sharp reported, “United States, South Vietnamese, and other Free World forces went into battle to defeat the Communists and the organizations in South Vietnam.… We took the war to the enemy [in North Vietnam] by a vigorous and unremitting—but highly selective—application of our air and naval power.”16 As we will see, our so-called strategic offensive in the South was never more than a tactical offensive, since we were unable to carry the war to the enemy’s main force—the North Vietnamese Army—and instead expended our energies against a secondary force—North Vietnam’s guerrilla screen. Admiral Sharp’s second strategic element—the nation building effort in South Vietnam was a task that could only be accomplished by the South Vietnamese themselves. While U.S. forces could provide a shield against external aggression from North Vietnam behind which this activity could take place, “nation building” itself was clearly an inappropriate military task. As we will see in a subsequent chapter on Coalition Warfare, it was not until we “Vietnamized” this task after 1967 that nation building became a reality. His third strategic element-our air and naval offensive against North Vietnam—was faulted by Admiral Sharp himself. As he said:
From a military standpoint, both air and naval programs were inhibited by restrictions growing out of the limited nature of our conduct of the war …
The bombing of North Vietnam was unilaterally stopped by the United States a number of times, for varying periods of time, in the hope that the enemy would respond by stopping his aggressive activities and reducing the scope and level of conflict. In every case the Communists used the bombing pause to rush troops and supplies to reinforce their army in South Vietnam. Such unilateral truce efforts, while judged politically desirable, accrued some temporary military disadvantages to successful prosecution of the war.17
But these bombing halts were more than “temporary military disadvantages.” They were fatal flaws. As Clausewitz had warned:
If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of the situation must not of course be merely transient—at least not in appearance. Otherwise the enemy would not give in but would wait for things to improve.…18
Ironically, the air offensive did have a strategic impact, but its impact was not on North Vietnam. The debate over the nature of our bombing campaign produced a strategic theory that was to have a devastating effect on American offensive operations—the theory of graduated response. In his analysis of the Vietnam war, Brigadier General Dave Palmer tells how this came about:
Within the larger framework of the debate over whether to bomb had raged an argument over how to go about it.… Civilian planners wanted to start out softly and gradually increase the pressure by precise increments which could be unmistakenly recognized in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh would see the tightening pattern, the theory went, and would sensibly stop the war against South Vietnam in time to avoid devastation of his homeland. Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton dubbed the strategy “slow squeeze” and explained it in musical terms—an orchestration of activities which would proceed in crescendo fashion toward a finale. “The scenario,” he wrote, “would be designed to give the United States the option at any point to proceed or not, to escalate or not, and to quicken the pace or not.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not like McNaughton’s tune. The generals argued that if force were to be used at all it should be applied hard and fast to obtain maximum impact with minimum loss. To start lightly and escalate slowly, they held, would be like pulling a tooth bit by bit rather than all at once and getting it over with. If the purpose were to affect Hanoi’s will, the Joint Chiefs said, the United States would have to hit hard at vital points and demonstrate a willingness to apply unlimited force.…
The intelligence community—a panel comprising members of the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, and State’s Bureau of Intelligence—entered the debate strongly on the side of the military.…
President Johnson overrode the objections of his intelligence and military advisors. Indeed, it is not at all clear whether Secretary McNamara ever even bothered to convey their arguments to him. Ambassador Taylor, still addressed as “General,” had given his blessings to their theory, approval which apparently cancelled the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus was born the strategy of “graduated response.”19
This Defense Department strategic concept carried over into General Westmoreland’s campaign plan for the conduct of the ground war in South Vietnam—a concept of operations to be executed in three general phases:
Phase One: Commit those American and Allied forces necessary “to halt the losing trend” by the end of 1965.
Phase Two: “During the first half of 1966,” take the offensive with American and Allied forces in “high priority areas” to destroy enemy forces and reinstitute pacification programs.
Phase Three: If the enemy persisted, he might be defeated and his forces and base areas destroyed during a period of a year to a year and a half following Phase II.20
Evidently without realizing it, this campaign plan committed the U.S. Army in Vietnam to the strategic defensive in pursuit of the negative aim of wearing the enemy down. In retrospect it would appear that Phase One was strategically sound, since it was the essential foundation for all future tasks. The strategic error was in calling for the reinstitution of pacification programs in Phase Two. This task should have been the responsibility of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces, while U.S. forces should have been committed to isolate the battlefield by sealing off South Vietnam from North Vietnam.
As we will see in a subsequent chapter on Coalition Warfare, such a strategy was proposed in 1965 by South Vietnamese General Cao Van Vien. His plan entailed fortifying a zone along the 17th parallel from the Dong Ha in Vietnam to Savannakhet on the Lao–Thai border. He further proposed to follow this up with a landing operation at Vinh or Ha Tinh in North Vietnam to “cut off the North’s front from its rear.”21 The DMZ portion of General Vien’s plan paralleled a concept proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in August 1965. Their plan would deny North Vietnam “the physical capability to move men and supplies through the Lao corridor, down the coastline, across the DMZ, and through Cambodia … by land, naval and air actions.” The plan was neither approved nor rejected by the Secretary of Defense or the President.22 General Westmoreland also favored such an operation. In April 1967 he recommended a limited reserve call-up to President Johnson which he felt was justifiable particularly if he “could get authority for a drive into Laos and possibly Cambodia and for an amphibious hook north of the DMZ.” According to General Westmoreland the plan ultimately foundered on President Johnson’s unwillingness to mobilize the reserves, as did a subsequent plan in the spring of 1968.23 Reserve mobilization therefore was a key strategic factor. According to Colonel Schandler’s analysis, “When the President began to search for the elusive point at which the costs of Vietnam would become unacceptable to the American people, he always settled upon [Reserve] mobilization … This constraint, with all its political and social repercussions, not any argument about strategic concepts or the ‘philosophy’ of the war, dictated American war policy.”24
Although our military instincts were correct, our military leaders evidently did not feel so strongly about their strategic concepts that they were willing to “fall on their swords” if they were not adopted. In his conclusions to the study of the causes of war, Australian Professor Geoffrey Blainey made the obvious point that in war, “defeat … is unintended.”25 Neither our civilian nor our military leaders dreamed that a tenth-rate undeveloped country like North Vietnam could possibly defeat the United States, the world’s dominant military and industrial power. Our military leaders evidently assumed that although their strategies were preferable, the United States would prevail regardless of what strategy was adopted. General Westmoreland says as much in his autobiography, even going so far as quoting Napoleon’s advice that:
A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army’s downfall.
Westmoreland goes on to say that “I suffered my problems in Vietnam because I believed that success eventually would be ours despite them, that they were not to be, as Napoleon put it, instruments of my army’s downfall.26 In his analysis of decision-making at the national level, Colonel Schandler found that “it does not appear that the military leaders threatened or even contemplated resigning to dramatize their differences with the opposition to the limitations on the conduct of the war insisted upon by the president and his civilian advisors.”27
Because they made the cardinal military error of underestimating the enemy, our military leaders failed in their role as “the principal military advisors to the President.” There are some who have yielded to the temptation to blame everything on the Commander in Chief, President Johnson. But even his severest critics would have to admit that he certainly did not set out to put the nation in turmoil, ruin his political career, and lose the Vietnam war. It was the duty and responsibility of his military advisors to warn him of the likely consequences of his actions, to recommend alternatives, and, as Napoleon put it, to tender their resignations rather than be the instrument of their army’s downfall. In failing to press their military advice they allowed the United States to pursue a strategic policy that was faulty from the start. Instead of deliberately adopting the strategic defensive, and tailoring our strategies and tactics to that posture, we slipped into it almost unaware and confused it with the strategic offensive. In so doing we lost sight of our strategic purpose and found the truth in the Clausewitzian observation: “Defense without an active purpose is self-contradictory both in strategy and in tactics.”28 By their own failure to understand what we were about, our military leaders were not able to warn our civilian decision—makers that the strategy we were pursuing could never lead to conclusive results.
Although from 1965 until 1975 (with the exception of Tet-68 and the ill-fated Eastertide Offensive of 1972) the North Vietnamese were also in a defensive posture, there was a critical difference. The North Vietnamese were on the tactical defensive as part of a strategic offensive to conquer South Vietnam. Our adoption of the strategic defensive was an end in itself and we had substituted the negative aim of counterinsurgency for the positive aim of isolation of the battlefield. This was a fatal flaw. As Clausewitz said, “A major victory can only be obtained by positive measures aimed at a decision, never by simply waiting on events. In short, even in the defense, a major stake alone can bring a major gain.”29 The North Vietnamese had a major stake—the conquest of Indochina. It was the United States that was “simply waiting on events.”
As we saw in the previous chapter, Clausewitz defined critical analysis as “not just an evaluation of the means actually employed, but of all possible means.… One can, after all, not condemn a method without being able to suggest a better alternative.”30 From a “purely military” standpoint it might appear that the better alternative would have been a strategic offensive against North Vietnamese armed forces and their will to fight. But, as Clausewitz warned, there is no such thing as a “purely military” strategy. Military strategy exists to serve political ends, and, as we have seen, for a variety of very practical political reasons an invasion of North Vietnam was politically unacceptable.
We were faced with essentially the same dilemma we had faced in the Korean war. Our political policy was to contain the expansion of communist power, but we did not wish to risk a world war by using military means to destroy the source of that power. We solved that dilemma in Korea by limiting our political objectives to containing North Korean expansion and successfully applied our military means to achieve that end. In Vietnam we began with just such limited objectives. Our mistake was in failing to concentrate our military means on that task. It would appear that we sensed this deficiency, since the Korean war model was essentially the alternative that General Vien, General Westmoreland and the JCS recommended. It was not identified as such because it did not fit the frame of reference we had established for ourselves. For one thing, establishment of a Korean war-type objective in the mid-1960s would have branded Army leadership as hopelessly anachronistic. As we have seen, from the perspective of our total victory in World War II, Korea still looked like a defeat and it is only from the perspective of our actual defeat in Vietnam that we can see that Korea was actually a victory. Further, there was the tyranny of fashion. Counterinsurgency, not conventional tactics, appeared to be the wave of the future. Finally, their plans hinged on the mobilization of the Reserves, a political price President Johnson was not prepared to pay.
Time and bitter experience has removed these distortions from our frame of reference. In 1977, General Bruce Palmer, Jr. (USA, Retired), former commander of U.S. Army Vietnam and former Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, saw clearly what should have been done. In a seminar at the U.S. Army War College, he said that, together with an expanded Naval blockade, the Army should have taken the tactical offensive along the DMZ across Laos to the Thai border in order to isolate the battlefield and then deliberately assume the strategic and tactical defensive. While this strategy might have entailed some of the same long-term costs of our Korean strategy, it would (like that strategy) have furthered our political objective of containing communist expansion. He said that in his opinion this could have been accomplished without reserve mobilization, without invading North Vietnam and running the risk of Chinese intervention, and with substantially fewer combat forces than were actually deployed to Vietnam.
In brief, General Palmer’s strategic concept called for a five-division force (two U.S., two ROK and one ARVN) along the DMZ with three more. U.S. divisions deployed to extend the defensive line to the Lao–Thai border. An additional U.S. division would have been used to stabilize the situation in the central highlands and in the Saigon area. The Marine divisions would have been held in strategic reserve, to be available to reinforce the DMZ and to pose an amphibious threat, thereby tying down North Vietnamese forces in coastal defense.
General Palmer believed that the advantages of such a strategy would have been enormous. It would have required four fewer divisions than the ten and two-thirds divisions we actually deployed. “Moreover,” he said, “the bulk of these forces would have fought on ground of their choosing which the enemy would be forced to attack if he wanted to invade South Vietnam. [This would have provided U.S. forces with a clear and understandable objective—a peace-keeping operation to separate the belligerents.] In defending well-prepared positions, U.S. casualties would have been much fewer … The magnitude and likelihood and intensity of the so-called ‘Big War,’ involving heavy fire power, would have been lessened [one of the main causes of U.S. public disenchantment with the war].” He went on to say that a much smaller U.S. logistics effort would have been required and we would have avoided much of the base development that was of no real value to the South Vietnamese. “Cut off from substantial out-of-country support, the Viet Cong was bound to wither on the vine and gradually become easier for the South Vietnamese to defeat,” he concluded.31 This conclusion was recently reinforced by statements of former South Vietnamese leaders who believed that by providing a military shield behind which South Vietnam could work out its own political, economic, and social problems, the United States could have provided a reasonable chance for South Vietnamese freedom and independence.32
Writing after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, Brigadier Shelford Bidwell, editor of RUSI, the distinguished British military journal of the Royal United Services Institute, commented on the view that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. “This is rubbish,” he said, blaming our failure on our election of a strategy which “not only conferred on the North Vietnamese the privilege of operating on safe exterior lines from secure bases but threw away the advantages of a tactical and strategic initiative.” He went on to note that by “using firepower of crushing intensity” we succeeded in defeating both the insurgency and the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive but at the strategic price of “American society in turmoil.… All this … would have been avoided,” he said, “by adopting the classical principles of war by cutting off the trouble at the root.… If this was not politically realistic, then the war should not have been fought at all.”33
Just as the North Koreans and their Chinese allies were the “root of the trouble” in the Korean war, so the root in the Vietnam war was North Vietnam (not the Viet Cong). In Vietnam as in Korea our political objectives dictated a strategic defensive posture. While this prevented us from destroying the “root” at the source through the strategic offensive, Korea proved that it was possible to achieve a favorable decision with the strategic defensive. It restored the status quo ante, prevented the enemy from achieving his goals with military means, and provided the foundation for a negotiated settlement. All of this was within our means in Vietnam.
NOTES
1. FM 100–5, 19 February 1962, p. 46.
2. Clausewitz, On War, II:2, p. 143.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, I:2, pp. 92–93.
5. Colmar, Baron von der Goltz, The Conduct of War: A Brief Study of its Most Important Principles and Forms, translated by First Lieutenant Joseph T. Dickman, 3d Cavalry, Assistant Instructor in the Art of War, U.S. Infantry and Cavalry School (Kansas City, Missouri: The Franklin Hudson Publishing Co., 1896), p. 32.
6. Norman Podhoretz, “The Present Danger,” Commentary, March 1980, pp. 3, 4.
7. Clausewitz, On War, I:2, p. 93.
8. Ibid, VIII:5, pp. 601–2.
9. Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet, p. 254.
10. Senior General Van Tien Dung, “Great Spring Victory,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service (Vol. I, FBIS-APA-76-110, 7 June 1976; Vol. II, FBIS-APA-76-131, 7 July 1976). (Afterwards “Dung, Great Spring Victory”)
11. Ibid, Vol. I, pp. 5–6. For a discussion why the United States failed to respond to the North Vietnamese violation of the Paris Accords and the open invasion of South Vietnam, see McGeorge Bundy, “Vietnam, Watergate and Presidential Powers,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1979/80, pp. 397–407.
12. Ibid, p. 15.
13. Ibid, p. 3.
14. Ibid, p. 6.
15. Colonel Hoang Ngoc Lung, Strategy and Tactics (Washington, D.C.; U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), p. 71.
16. Admiral U. S. G. Sharp, USN, “Report on Air and Naval Campaigns Against North Vietnam and Pacific Command-wide Support of the War, June 1964–July 1968,” Report on the War in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1968), p. 6.
17. Ibid, p. 7.
18. Clausewitz, On War, I:1, p. 77. For a British diplomat’s view of the initial effects of bombing on Hanoi in 1967, see John Colvin, “Hanoi in My Time,” The Washington Quarterly, Spring 1981. He believes that by halting the bombing in the fall of 1967, “victory … was not so much thrown away as shunned with prim, averted eyes.”
19. Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet, pp. 75–76. (Emphasis added.)
20. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, p. 142.
21. General Cao Van Vien, “The Strategy of Isolation,” Military Review, April 1972, p. 26.
22. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President, pp. 34–35.
23. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 227, 239, 355.
24. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President, p. 56.
25. Blainey, The Causes of War, p. 249.
26. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 261–62.
27. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President, p. 59.
28. Clausewitz, On War, VIII:4, p. 600.
29. Ibid, VIII:8, p. 616.
30. Ibid, II:5,p. 161.
31. General Bruce Palmer, Jr. (USA Retired), “Remarks to USAWC Elective Course, The Vietnam War,” 31 May 1977 (quoted by permission).
32. General Cao Van Vien and Lieutenant General Dong Van Khuyen, Reflections on the Vietnam War (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), p. 81.
33. Shelford Bidwell,Modern Warfare: A Study of Men, Weapons, and Theories (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 234.