Simplicity contributes to successful operations. Direct, simple plans and clear, concise orders minimize misunderstanding and confusion. If other factors are equal, the simplest plan is preferred.
FM 100–5, 19 February 19621
To a large degree this last principle of war is the sum of all the others. This can be seen in its evolution in our Field Service Regulations. The 1921 version stressed that Unity of Command was an important element. The 1939 version warned against complicated Maneuver. The 1949 version emphasized “simplicity of plans [because] even the most simple plan is difficult to execute,” and the post-Korea 1954 version added a new twist when it stated: “Simplicity must be applied to organization, methods, and means in order to produce orderliness on the battlefield.”
The need for Simplicity in war is deceptive. We saw in an earlier chapter that defense analysts Enthoven and Smith dismissed the principles of war as “a set of platitudes that can be twisted to suit almost any situation.” They went on to say that “graduates of the military academies and war colleges cannot state with any precision what strategy and force posture may be needed to support certain foreign policy objectives, because there are no great immutable military laws to determine these requirements, and few military men would claim that there are.”2 Enthoven and Smith were echoing the modern prejudice where, as John Kenneth Galbraith once observed, “obscurity is next to divinity” and each profession—especially including defense systems analysis—has developed its own obscure and obtuse jargon. Unwittingly they were also echoing Clausewitz. In war, he said, “everything looks simple; the knowledge required does not look remarkable, the strategic options are so obvious that by comparison the simplest problem of higher mathematics has an impressive scientific dignity.”3 Clausewitz goes on to say that “the military machine—the army and everything related to it—is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage … In theory it sounds reasonable enough … In fact, it is different, and every fault and exaggeration of the theory is instantly exposed in war.”4
The importance of the principle of Simplicity can be seen in the conduct of the Vietnam war. Using this principle alone the outcome is predictable. Applying it to the principle of The Objective, we saw earlier that North Vietnam concentrated on one objective—the conquest of South Vietnam. By comparison the United States was caught up in the conflicting and sometimes contradictory objectives of resisting aggression and counter insurgency. In our chapter on The Offensive we saw how North Vietnam pursued the strategic offensive to conquer South Vietnam by switching from the tactical offensive to the tactical defensive and back again. The United States unwittingly confused the tactical offensive for the strategic offensive and conducted the war on the strategic defensive in pursuit of a negative aim—counterinsurgency with results that should have been foreseen. Despite our enormous technological advantage the North Vietnamese were able to apply Mass, Economy of Force and Maneuver to greater strategic effect than we were, particularly in their use of the guerrilla screen as an economy of force effort that caused us to dissipate our efforts. The simplicity of North Vietnamese Unity of Command compared to the complex and convoluted system through which the United States prosecuted the war almost speaks for itself. At the national level their Politburo and Central Military Party Committee worked in close coordination to plan and direct the war. In Washington there was no such unity of effort. As we have seen, the inherent conflict between the peacetime task of war preparation necessary for the continued containment of the Soviet Union and the wartime task of prosecuting the war in Vietnam were never reconciled. Strategic direction was fragmented among Washington, Honolulu and Saigon. Within Vietnam itself the command structure was convoluted and confused with overlapping authority and responsibility diffused among Military Assistance Command Vietnam, the Army Republic of Vietnam Joint General Staff, United States Army Vietnam and the “Free World Military Forces.” Although the application of the principle of Surprise may have been a draw, North Vietnamese Security was so pervasive that it even concealed the true nature of the war to the very end.
Not only did our failure to apply the principle of Simplicity confuse and complicate our conduct of the war, it also had a debilitating effect on the American people. Our inability to explain in clear and understandable language what we were about in Vietnam undercut American support for the war.
Besides simplicity of operations, there was another aspect that had an adverse effect on the conduct of the war. Although not normally considered as part of the principle of Simplicity, living conditions, and particularly the contrast in living conditions between the headquarters (particularly in Saigon but also at the elaborate base camps throughout the country) and soldiers in the field, were at least a partial cause of American public antipathy toward the war. This blatant disparity was the source of much of the critical reporting on Vietnam. Michael Herr, one of the more critical (but also one of the more observant) reporters on the Vietnam war, summed up the feelings of many when he wrote that “sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.”5 To some degree this was a function of geographic proximity. The sybaritic lifestyle of the headquarters always differed from the Spartan existence in the field. Troops on the beaches at Gallipoli in World War I cynically joked that their command ship offshore could never move because it had run aground on a reef of gin bottles. Certainly in World War II life in London or Melbourne was more luxurious than life in the Ardennes or the New Guinea jungles, and the contrast between Tokyo and the trenches in Korea was equally as stark. The difference in Vietnam was that these differences were only miles apart.
But the Army was also a victim of changing times. Some years ago the British social commentator C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a lengthy review of a book on Russell of The Times, the first British war correspondent. Parkinson noted that during the Crimean War British generals such as Lord Raglan and Lord Cardigan who lived in luxury while their troops died in the mud for lack of food, clothing, and shelter were no more uncaring or incompetent than their predecessors had been. The crucial difference was that for the first time their actions were being reported to the British people and headlined in the daily press. The ensuing uproar caused their disgrace and the reorganization of the British Army. The advent of the television camera had just such an effect in Vietnam. Part of the problem was the nature of the beast. As Washington Post columnist Henry Fairlie commented in July 1980, “It is in the nature of most important events to be dull, and by nature television cannot handle the dull.… It is monstrously untrue that the camera cannot lie. It is the most eager and pliant of liars. [The reason the motion camera lies is that] its nature is what its name says. Motion. It needs action, and of a particular kind.… It is adept at catching the moment of police brutality … But the long hours of provocation that yielded that brutality? The camera hasn’t the eye for that.”6 As every combat veteran knows, war is primarily sheer boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. The camera can record the terror, but the boredom is just not news. Adding to this fact of life were the reporters themselves. Quartered mostly in Saigon, they saw firsthand the contrast in lifestyles, and this experience made many of them cynical. Michael Herr commented on the contradiction between the “Dial Soapers in Saigon” and the “grungy men in the jungle.”7 This contradiction most certainly influenced their reporting. In American living rooms the television nightly news could and did portray the fleshpots of Saigon in juxtaposition with the tattered infantry man in the jungle. The contrast was deadly.
A final impact of this violation of the principle of Simplicity may have even more serious long-term effects. The “business as usual” approach to the Vietnam war at the Washington level spilled over into our combat operations in Vietnam. Base camps were constructed that were even more elaborate than the training camps constructed in the United States during World War II and attempts were made to provide all the amenities of home. The effect was an inordinate number of soldiers tied down in base camp operations and a reduction in our ability to rapidly redeploy our forces. We now have a generation of combat veterans raised with a “base camp mentality.” Lieutenant General Joseph M. Heiser, former commander of the 1st Logistical Command, Vietnam, commented, “There is a need to establish standards of living for troops early in a campaign … In the absence of such criteria, every unit will establish its own standards, usually high; and constantly strive to upgrade them. This places excessive demands on an already busy logistic system.”8
If we attempt to duplicate this effort in future wars not only will it overload our supply systems it will also hamper our operational flexibility. We need to use the simple litmus test for Simplicity in combat standards of living given by Clausewitz 150 years ago. Everything that fits this test is essential; everything that does not should be discarded:
The whole of military activity must … relate directly or indirectly to [combat operations]. The end for which a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed, and trained, the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking, and marching is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.9
NOTES
1. FM 100–5, 19 February 1962, p. 48.
2. Enthoven and Smith, How Much Is Enough, P. 90.
3. Clausewitz, On War, I:7, p. 119.
4. Ibid.
5. Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 43.
6. Henry Fairlie, “TV’s Conventions Will Be a Lie,” Washington Post 13July 1980, pp. E-1, E-4.
7. Herr, Dispatches, p. 42. See also, Elegant, op. cit.
8. Lieutenant General Joseph M. Heiser, Vietnam Studies: Logistic Support (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1974), pp. 259–60.
9. Clausewitz, On War, I:2, p. 95.