The decisive application of full combat power requires unity of command. Unity of command obtains unity of effort by the coordinated action of all forces toward a common goal. While coordination may be attained by cooperation, it is best achieved by vesting a single commander with the requisite authority.
FM 100–5, 19 February 1962,1
To understand its full meaning, it is informative to trace the evolution of Unity of Command. In our earliest codified version this principle was entitled “cooperation.”2 By 1939 this principle had changed to “Unity of Effort.”3 While the words changed, one common thread runs through all of these definitions: the reason for this principle is to facilitate attainment of the objective. While at the tactical level this is best achieved by vesting authority in a single commander, at the strategic level it involves political and military coordination.
Clausewitz emphasizes that war cannot be divorced from political life. “Whenever this occurs in our thinking about war,” he says, “… we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense.”4 “If war is to be fully consonant with political objectives, and policy suited to the means available for war,” said Clausewitz, then either the political and the battlefield leader should be combined in one person (a rarity in modern warfare) or the military commander in chief should be made a member of the cabinet “so that the cabinet can share in the major aspects of his activities.”5
It is instructive to note that North Vietnam followed Clausewitz’s instructions almost to the letter. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military commander in chief throughout most of the war, was a member of the ruling Politburo, a Deputy Premier of the North Vietnamese Government, the Minister of Defense and Commander in Chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam.6 The degree to which political and military leadership were combined is illustrated in General Van Tien Dung’s account of the final North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. From the very first page he details how the Political Bureau and the Central Military Party Committee worked together to formulate the strategic combat plan and to direct the actual combat operations.7 For example, in April 1975, Politburo member Le Duc Tho arrived at General Dung’s headquarters in South Vietnam with Hanoi’s detailed plan for the final assault on Saigon. Le Duc Tho told General Dung that prior to his departure “the Politburo and Uncle Ton [North Vietnamese President Ton Duc Thang] told him that he [Le Duc Tho] would not be allowed to return if he was not successful in his mission.” This Politburo decision went so far as to establish the specific combat commands for the campaign and name the field commanders.8 North Vietnamese Unity of Command gave them an enormous advantage. As former Under Secretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes wrote in 1969, “For the enemy the war remained fundamentally … a seamless web of political-military-psychological factors to be manipulated by a highly centralized command authority that never took its eye off the political goal of ultimate control in the South.”9
Turning to the United States, it would appear at first glance that our Unity of Command at the national level was well established both in law and in fact. The Constitution establishes the President as Commander in Chief of our armed forces and, in principle, the responsibility for strategic coordination rests with him. Then Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur stressed this point in 1932:
The national strategy of any war, that is, the selection of national objectives and the determination of the general means and methods to be applied in obtaining them, as well as development of the broad policies applicable to the prosecution of the war, are decisions that must be made by the head of state, acting in conformity with the expressed will of the Government.…10*
In stressing that fixing the objective and determining the means are the responsibility of “the head of state, acting in conformity with the expressed will of the Government,” General MacArthur was echoing Clausewitz. “Despite the great variety and development of modern war,” Clausewitz said, “its major lines are still laid down by governments … by a purely political and not a military body.”11 This point is especially important, since much of the criticism of the Vietnam war has to do with “political interference” in military operations. Such criticism is off the mark. Our problem was not so much political interference as it was the lack of a coherent military strategy—a lack for which our military leaders share a large burden of responsibility. As Clausewitz explains:
When people talk, as they often do, about harmful political influence on the management of war, they are not really saying what they mean. Their quarrel should be with the policy itself, not with its influence.…12
Although our President is nominally the Commander in Chief of our armed forces he does not actually command troops in the field. This has been true since 1814 when President James Madison fought—and lost—the Battle of Bladensburg. But, as Clausewitz observed, “A certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy.”13 Unlike the system recommended by Clausewitz—and followed by the North Vietnamese—serving American military officers were traditionally excluded from the President’s cabinet and military counsel was provided through the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy. In earlier years the primary task of the President was to coordinate Army and Navy efforts. In the 1932 statement quoted earlier General MacArthur went on to say: “The issues involved are so far-reaching in their effect and so vital in the life of the Nation that … coordinating Army and Navy efforts should not be delegated by the Commander in Chief to any subordinate authority. Any such attempt would not constitute delegation but rather abdication.”14
But this simple approach to Unity of Command was not up to the complex demands of World War II. Beginning in 1942 with the Combined Chiefs of Staff—the British and American Service Chiefs—who were organized to formulate coalition strategy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff evolved as strategic advisors to the President. This informal arrangement was institutionalized in 1947 with the creation of what was to become the Department of Defense. The Secretary of Defense was named principal assistant to the President on military matters and a member of the National Security Council. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were to be the principal military advisors to the President, the National Security Council and the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a statutory advisor to the National Security Council.15 Measured by the problem posed by General MacArthur—coordinating Army and Navy efforts—this new command structure was a success. Even MacArthur, in his 1951 testimony, praised the cooperation he received during the Korean war from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.16 Likewise, in his autobiography, General Westmoreland stated that during the Vietnam war “no commander could ever hope for greater support than I received from … General Wheeler [then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and the other members of the Joint Chiefs.”17
While the establishment of the Department of Defense had removed many of the problems of inter-Service coordination, the much larger problem of coordinating military efforts so that they would serve the political objectives of the United States remained. As Clausewitz put it, and as MacArthur was to learn:
The only question … is whether … the political point of view should give way to the purely military (if a purely military point of view is conceivable at all).… Subordinating the political point of view to the military would be absurd, for it is policy that creates war. Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa. No other possibility exists, then, than to subordinate the military point of view to the political.18
The Korean war reinforced the primacy of the political point of view. As Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall told the Senate:
From the very beginning of the Korean conflict, down to the present moment, there has been no disagreement between the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that I am aware of.
There have been, however, and continue to be basic differences of judgment between General MacArthur, on the one hand, and the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the other hand.…
It became apparent that General MacArthur had grown so far out of sympathy with the established policies of the United States that there was grave doubt as to whether he could any longer be permitted to exercise the authority in making decisions that normal command functions would assign to a theater commander. In this situation, there was no other recourse but to relieve him.19
In discussing why the system worked, former Under Secretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes highlighted several factors. One was the personalities involved—i.e., Secretary of State Dean Acheson, General of the Army George C. Marshall as Secretary of Defense, General of the Army Omar Bradley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another was the National Security Council (NSC) structure. The purpose of the NSC, according to Hoopes, was:
To bring the separate organizations and traditions of the Military Services under sufficiently central authority to ensure an end to multiple and conflicting strategies for defending the nation and its interests; and to bring the Military Establishment as a whole into close and continuous relations with the State Department, the intelligence agencies, and the economic counselors—for the purpose of planning foreign policy, weighing its military risks, judging the demands on national resources, and coordinating day-to-day operations.… The NSC was designed to ensure detailed coordination of all major factors that bear upon US foreign policy decisions.20
As we saw earlier, in the Vietnam war the problem was not so much coordination of effort toward a common objective as it was determining that objective in the first place. Contributing to this deficiency was the erosion of the NSC structure. According to Hoopes, “President Kennedy … scrapped the entire structure of the NSC.” Instead he chose to rely on “irregular meetings at the White House attended by the President, [Secretary of State] Rusk, [Secretary of Defense] McNamara, and [National Security Advisor] Bundy, augmented from time to time by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of Central Intelligence, and others …” President Johnson inherited “this somewhat amorphous set of arrangements for foreign policy formulation, coordination, and control.” Hoopes writes that:
I believe the decisions and actions that marked our large-scale military entry into the Vietnam War in early 1965 reflected the piecemeal consideration of interrelated issues, and that this was the natural consequence of a fragmented NSC and a general inattention to long-range policy planning.21
Another contributing factor was the military command structure itself. The Department of Defense/Joint Chiefs of Staff were modeled for the conduct of total war where all our energies were focused on a single objective. It was neither organized nor designed for the conduct of limited war where our focus was diffused. As Hoopes pointed out, this defect was hidden during the Korean war by the personalities involved and by the NSC structure which forced the system to work in spite of itself. We were able to reinforce NATO Europe to contain the Soviet threat and fight the war in Korea simultaneously. In Vietnam we were not so successful. Again the Department of Defense was pulled in two directions. One focus was on the containment of the Soviet Union and the need for peacetime preparedness as a credible deterrent. The other focus was on the war in Vietnam itself. The contradiction between these two missions—what Clausewitz had called “preparation for war” and “war proper”—severely inhibited our conduct of the Vietnam war. Commenting on this from his perspective as the former chief of the Pacification Program, Ambassador Robert W. Komer criticized what he called the lack of unified conflict management in the Vietnam war. Noting that no Vietnam “high command” emerged to coordinate all aspects of Washington war management, he asked “Who was responsible for conflict management of the Vietnam war?” Answering his own question, he said, “The bureaucratic fact is that below Presidential level everybody and nobody was responsible …” With several minute exceptions “not a single senior level official above the rank of officer director or colonel in any U.S. agency dealt full-time with Vietnam before 1969.” He went on to fault the use of “peacetime planning, programming, financial, resource allocation and distribution procedures” in the conduct of the war. Komer quotes approvingly Herman Kahn’s observation that Vietnam reflected a “business as usual” approach with the bureaucracy locked into a peacetime management structure.22
Not only was Unity of Command lacking in Washington, it was also lacking in the theater of operations. During World War II the strategic headquarters for the conduct of the war in Europe was originally in London but displaced forward as the war progressed. The same was true in the Pacific where MacArthur’s headquarters moved from Australia to New Guinea to the Philippines in order to direct the war. During the Korean war the strategic headquarters was close by in Japan. By comparison, during the Vietnam war the so-called strategic headquarters, Pacific Command, was located in Honolulu over 5,000 miles away. Commenting on command relationships, General Westmoreland noted that:
MACV functioned not directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington but through CINCPAC.… The White House seldom dealt directly with me but through the Joint Chiefs.… What many failed to realize was that not I but [Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, Commander in Chief Pacific Command] was the theater commander in the sense that General Eisenhower, for example, was the theater commander in World War II. My responsibilities and perogatives were basically confined within the borders of South Vietnam …23
In his criticism of the Vietnam war, Hoopes notes that the United States was actually fighting “three separate or only loosely related struggles. There was the large-scale, conventional war … there was the confused ‘pacification’ effort, based on political-sociological presumptions of astronomical proportions … and there was the curiously remote air war against North Vietnam.”24 In comparison with the Korean war (especially in the early period) where all of the strategic direction came from General MacArthur’s GHQ Far East Command, there was no equivalent headquarters for the Vietnam war. General Westmoreland was only the tactical commander—the equivalent of the Eighth Army Commander in the Korean war. Part of the strategic direction (especially in air and naval matters) came from Honolulu, part came from Washington and there was no coordinated unity of effort.
In his autobiography General Westmoreland discussed the need for a strategic headquarters for the conduct of the Vietnam war. He visualized a “Southeast Asia Command” under his command with headquarters in Saigon.25 In retrospect it would appear that such a headquarters would have greatly improved Unity of Command. But, rather than establish a strategic headquarters in-country as General Westmoreland envisioned, it should have been established outside of the immediate war zone. This would have avoided involvement in South Vietnamese internal affairs and would have facilitated perspective on the theater as a whole, which included operations not only in Vietnam but in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand as well. Such a location may well have been available in the Philippines. Agreement from the Philippine Government was likely since they allowed U.S. use of bases at Subic Bay and Clark Air Force Base to prosecute the war and later provided a civic action team for operations in Vietnam. This strategic headquarters would have reported directly to the Secretary of Defense through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Within Vietnam itself a tactical field army headquarters should have been established and located well forward—perhaps initially at Da Nang. The responsibility for the military advisory effort should have been delegated to a subordinate commander as was the case during the Korean war. The problem of Unity of Command with the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (RVNAF) will be addressed in a subsequent chapter on Coalition Warfare. Suffice it to say here that it exacerbated the major problems that already existed.
Although we did not obtain Unity of Command in the Vietnam war, this failing was not the cause of our defeat but rather the symptom of a larger deficiency—failure to fix a militarily attainable political objective. Without such an objective we did not have unity of effort at the national level, which made it impossible at the theater level to obtain coordinated action among the ground war in the south, the pacification effort and the air war in the north. “Unity of command,” our definition states, “obtains unity of effort by the coordinated action of all forces toward a common goal.” But the reverse is also true. Without a common goal it is impossible to have coordinated action or to obtain either unity of effort or unity of command. Our own definition predicted the outcome. Without Unity of Command we could never have “decisive application of full combat power.”
NOTES
1. FM 100–5, 19 February 1962, p. 47.
2. Willoughby, Maneuver In War, p. 27.
3. FM 100–5, 1 October 1939, p. 28.
4. Clausewitz, On War, VIII: 6B, p. 605.
5. Ibid, p. 608. The translators note that “by writing that the commander-in-chief must become a member of the cabinet so that the cabinet can share in the major aspects of his activities, Clausewitz emphasizes the cabinet’s participation in military decisions, not the soldier’s participation in political decisions.”
6. Robert J. O’Neill, General Giap: Politician and Strategist (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 179.
7. Dung, Great Spring Victory, Vol. I, pp. 1–8, and Vol. II, pp. 56–57.
8. Ibid. Vol. II, p. 73.
9. Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1969), p. 61.
10. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, p. 105.
11. Clausewitz, On War, VIII:6, p. 608.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, p. 105.
15. United States Government Manual 1979–1980, pp. 95, 174, 179, 180.
16. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Vol. 1, p. 13.
17. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, p. 261.
18. Clausewitz, On War, VIII:6, p. 607.
19. 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Part I, pp. 323, 325.
20. Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, p. 3.
21. Ibid, pp. 3,4,7.
22. R. W. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on US-GVN Performance in Vietnam (Santa Monica, California: Rand Corporation, August 1972), pp. ix, 75–84.
23. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 75–76.
24. Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, pp. 61–62.
25. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 76–77.
* In an evident attempt to hoist General MacArthur on his own petard, this statement was read into the record during the 1951 Senate Hearings on the MacArthur-Truman controversy. The bomb was defused by MacArthur’s observation, “As I look back, Senator, upon my rather youthful days then, I am surprised and amazed how wise I was.”