The concept of territorial protection and area defense became a strategic goal in the South’s determination to withstand the North’s aggressive military designs, to eliminate subversive activities within the South, and to build the republic. In other words, the objectives were survival and independence. In every political situation these remained the two most important objectives of the South.
Colonel Hoang Ngoc Lung1
Former J-2, JGS, RVNAF
The above mission statement makes clear that the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was pursuing two complementary tasks—resisting North Vietnamese aggression and building their republic in South Vietnam—that were parallel to the goals the United States had set for itself in Vietnam. Where then did the difficulty arise? The problem becomes apparent when we compare our actions in Vietnam to our experiences in Korea. Colonel Lung’s mission statement could be transferred almost word for word to the mission of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in June 1950. It too was concerned with territorial protection, elimination of subversive activities, and building the republic. The difference was in the nature of the U.S. response. In Korea our military response was aimed at resisting and repelling outside aggression. The task of eliminating subversion and building the Korean republic was left to the Government of the Republic of Korea.
Although in Korea there was a facade of United Nations’ participation (15 nations furnished some 39,000 troops), the war was actually fought by a U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) coalition. The United States had been in the ROK since the end of World War II, first as an occupation force to disarm the Japanese and later as advisors to the ROK military. When the war began a U.S. Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) organization was located in the country. Instead of building on the existing KMAG structure when U.S. combat forces entered the war we instead immediately established our own headquarters. When the U.S. 24th Infantry Division—the initial combat elements—landed in Korea, the commander established a U.S. Army Forces in Korea (USAFIK) headquarters and assumed operational control of KMAG. Ten days later the Eighth Army Headquarters closed in Korea and took operational control of KMAG, which shared headquarters with the Korean Army. A proposal to make KMAG part of the Eighth Army general staff was defeated and KMAG was left a separate entity throughout the war.2 The attention of Eighth Army was thus kept focused on the external enemy and did not become involved in the internal affairs of the Republic of Korea Government. This concentration of attention was assisted by Korean President Syngman Rhee’s decision on 14 July 1950 to place his armed forces under the United Nations’ command. Under authority of this command the Eighth Army commander directed the Korean Army through its own Chief of Staff. Later when ROK units were attached to U.S. units and when Korean soldiers were integrated into U.S. units (the so-called KATUSA—Korean Augmentation To The U.S. Army—program) command was exercised directly by the United States. As the official history states, “From a military point of view there was no conflict on this score.”3 Throughout the war the ROK retained its political autonomy. Although there was some divergence, especially in the latter stages, between the U.S. and ROK war aims, the U.S. position prevailed.4
We rejected the Korean model in Vietnam, even though there were obvious similarities. As in Korea, the commitment of American ground combat troops was preceded by a military advisory mission designed to equip South Vietnam to counter North Vietnamese aggression. Also, as in Korea, the commitment of American troops was preceded by an invasion from the north, albeit on a much smaller scale. Seeing the war from a different perspective, Australian diplomat Coral Bell commented on what she saw as “President Johnson’s decision on ‘Koreanization’ of the war in February 1965.”5 Unfortunately the analogy was not apt. As General Maxwell Taylor stated:
Many leading American officials, including some senior military officers, had thought from the beginning of the US troop build-up that General Westmoreland should receive operational control over the South Vietnamese forces, as the American Eighth Army commander had controlled the Korean forces from 1950 to 1953. However, in Korea the American commander was a representative of the United Nations, and he exercised operational control of all U.N. forces in that capacity. In South Vietnam, no such U.N. authority existed and a demand for operational control by the Americans would be likely to raise serious resistance among the Vietnamese whose nationalist pride was as intense as their repugnance to the charge of being American puppets. Westmoreland was firmly against such an action and strongly recommended that command relationships be regulated by the principle of cooperation and mutual support, a view which eventually prevailed.6
While General Taylor’s analysis of South Vietnam’s sensitivities was probably true before late 1964, changing circumstances—the intervention by North Vietnamese regular units and the virtual collapse of the Republic of Vietnam—caused Vietnam to more closely resemble Korea. It must be recalled that when we intervened in Korea in July 1950 the Korean Army had collapsed and President Syngman Rhee knew that his only chance for survival—and for rejuvenation of his armed forces—was to ally the ROK as closely as possible with the United States. As U.S.–ROK relations in the subsequent 30 years have demonstrated, it was the alliance with the United States that counted; the UN label was a convenient facade. Not only was the Republic of Vietnam also on the verge of collapse in the spring of 1965, the parallel with Korea was strengthened by the commitment of U.S. ground combat forces and by the 60,000 “Free World Military Forces” sent to Vietnam by other nations (a number far surpassing the 39,000 UN soldiers sent by nations other than the United States to fight in Korea). As former RVN Minister of Defense Tran Van Don wrote in 1978: [The U.S. and RVN] were fighting two separate wars against a common enemy, one of the reasons for our common military defeat. We should have had a single allied command charged with detailed coordination of all forces, as in the Korean war.7
While the analogy with Korea is apparent in retrospect, it was not obvious in 1965 when General Westmoreland categorically rejected the idea of a combined command:
I consistently resisted suggestions that a single, combined command could more efficiently prosecute the war. I believed that subordinating the Vietnamese forces to U.S. control would stifle the growth of leadership and acceptance of responsibility essential to the development of Vietnamese Armed Forces capable eventually of defending their country. Moreover, such a step would be counter to our basic objective of assisting Vietnam in a time of emergency and of leaving a strong, independent country at the time of our withdrawal.8
General Westmoreland was technically correct and there was no single U.S.-RVN combined command. But the war was dominated by the United States and not only did we not promote “the growth of leadership and acceptance of responsibility” we also failed to “leave a strong independent country at the time of our withdrawal.” In 1969, General Cao Van Vien, then Chairman of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS), told a delegation of South Vietnamese congressmen: “We Vietnamese have no military doctrine because the command of all operations in Vietnam is in the hands, is the responsibility, of the American side. We followed the American military doctrine.”9 After the war, in a series of interviews with some 27 former high ranking South Vietnamese military and civilian leaders, the question of strategic planning was addressed. The respondents made it clear that:
There was little strategic planning; that, in fact, Saigon, which had no strategy of its own when the Americans were in the country, also failed to develop a real strategy after they had left … These respondents pointed to their weak and ineffective General Staff, their poor and unimaginative leadership, or the unfortunate conditioning of their leaders by the Americans.10
Colonel Hoang Ngoc Lung, former JGS J-2, in a separate analysis of Vietnam strategy and tactics, emphasized that “the Americans … dictated the grand strategy of the conflict. With their monopoly over weaponry and equipment, they also shaped how that strategy would be executed, what tactics and techniques would be employed.”11 We had deliberately opted for cooperation to coordinate our actions in Vietnam. In so doing we violated our own principle of Unity of Command. As it states, “While coordination may be attained by cooperation, it is best achieved by vesting a single commander with the requisite authority.”12
Not only did we not follow the Korean model on Unity of Command, we also did not follow it on the principle of The Offensive. In Korea we saw clearly that the primary military task was repelling external aggression and (after the Chinese intervention) had deliberately adopted the Strategic defensive to accomplish that end. The South Vietnamese had also seen the importance of this task. According to Colonel Lung:
In 1965, when US forces started pouring into the South, the Minister of Defense, General Cao Van Vien, wrote a paper entitled “The Strategy of Isolation” in which he likened the task of stopping infiltration to that of turning off the faucet of a water tank. General Vien advocated turning off the faucet through the isolation of North Vietnam. He would fortify a zone along the 17th parallel from Dong Ha to Savannakhet and follow this with a landing operation at Vinh or Ha Tinh, just north of the 18th parallel, cutting off the North’s front from its rear. In 1972 General Vien published the original paper with the following added conclusions: “In her alliance with the United States, Vietnam was hamstrung in her action, causing her strategy to be confined to the defensive.”13
Ironically, although we did not realize we were on the strategic defensive in Vietnam, this fact was apparent to our enemies. Colonel Lung writes that “Vo Nguyen Giap observed that the reason the U.S. imposed restrictions on targets in the North was to prevent the Vietnam war from adversely affecting political, economic, social, and diplomatic objectives of the United States.… In other words,” Lung continues, “the American strategy, according to Giap, was designed to accomplish American objectives.” Given that U.S. support and intervention was at that time critical to the survival of South Vietnam, “the leaders of the South had no rational alternative but to accept American leadership in strategy.”14
As we have seen, that strategy did not focus on the primary threat. In a 1976 interview, former South Vietnamese Secretary of Defense Tran Van Don stated his belief that no strategy could have been successful unless it effectively stopped the infiltration from the North, a task General Don thought could have been done. Elaborating on this, former I Corps commander Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong said that in hindsight halting infiltration was the most critical requirement. He believed that South Vietnam could have solved its internal problems if the infiltration could have been brought under control. Once that had been stopped, everything else would have been “easy.”15 General Truong’s comment is telling. As he said, “South Vietnam could have solved its internal problem if the infiltration could have been brought under control.” Conversely, the opposite was also true—if the infiltration could not be brought under control South Vietnam could never solve its internal problems. And his comment is telling in another sense. The United States could (as it had done in Korea) bring the infiltration from the North under control. What the United States could never do was “solve the internal problems” of South Vietnam. Only the Vietnamese themselves could accomplish that task.
A clue to why coalition warfare failed in Vietnam was given by a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) major in Hanoi a week before Saigon’s fall. “You should not feel badly,” he said. “You have done more than enough … more than enough.”16 Even worse than the mortification of being in the enemy’s capital while he is celebrating your defeat is the humiliation of his trying to lessen your discomfort with reassuring words. Yet the NVA major was more correct than he knew. We failed in Vietnam because we attempted to do too much. Instead of concentrating our efforts on repelling external aggression as we had done in Korea we also took upon ourselves the task of nation building. This was an error we never made in Korea. Although the situation in South Korea was far worse in June 1950, with their government in disorderly retreat, their economy destroyed and their social fabric torn to shreds, we did not intervene but left the resolution of their internal problems to the ROK government.
Why didn’t we do the same thing in South Vietnam? There are several reasons for our overinvolvement. One has to do with the climate of the times. Observers have faulted our intervention in Vietnam as evidence of American arrogance of power—attempts by the United States to be the World’s Policeman. But there is another dimension to American arrogance, the international version of our domestic Great Society programs where we presumed that we knew what was best for the world in terms of social, political, and economic development and saw it as our duty to force the world into the American mold—to act not so much the World’s Policeman as the World’s Nanny. It is difficult today to recall the depth of our arrogance. In March 1962, discussing the degree to which American military advisors become political—“directing, influencing, or even managing the local government’s policies and operations”—the editors of Army wrote: “Although the official U.S. policy is to refrain from injecting Americans into foreign governments under our tutelage and support, the pragmatic approach is to guide the inexperienced and shaky governments of the emerging nations by persuasion and coaxing if possible, and by hard-selling and pressure if the soft methods don’t work.”17 In his examination of the roots of our Vietnam involvement Norman Podhoretz noted the fact that the Kennedy administration “was, if anything, more zealous in its commitment to containment than the Eisenhower administration had been.” In fact, “the new strategic doctrine of the Kennedy administration had been conceived precisely for the purpose of [not only containment in the conventional sense but] meeting … indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, and internal revolution.” The only dissent within the Kennedy administration to intervention in Vietnam “came from those who argued that military measures would fail unless we also forced the South Vietnamese government to undertake programs of liberal reform.” But as Podhoretz points out, “this argument implicitly called for a greater degree of American intervention than the dispatch of troops alone (and led eventually to the assassination of Diem and the assumption of complete American responsibility for the war).”18
Earlier this overinvolvement had been minimal, since the concentration was on conventional containment of potential North Vietnamese aggression rather than counterinsurgency. According to Ambassador Komer, from 1954 to 1959 “MAAG concentrated … on preparing ARVN for a conventional, delaying action against what it regarded as the most serious threat: a conventional, Korea-style NVA attack across the DMZ.”19 “In sum,” continued Komer, “little was done during 1954-1960 to develop an effective counterinsurgency capability …”20 As Clausewitz had warned, “In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts”21 and the North Vietnamese reacted to ARVN’s growing conventional capability by stepping up the guerrilla war. From one extreme we swung to the other. Where earlier we had emphasized conventional forces, after 1960 the emphasis was on counterinsurgency. From only 335 U.S. military advisors in 1954, advisor strength grew to about 3,150 by April 1962. This was half again as large as the 2,000 U.S. advisors with KMAG at the height of the Korean war.
In 1964, MACV adopted a series of terms to describe the basic missions performed by the Vietnamese military forces in support of the counterinsurgency effort. These ranged in intensity from “search and destroy” operations designed to find, fix, fight, and destroy enemy forces to “clearing operations” to drive large enemy forces out of populated areas to “securing operations” to protect pacification teams.22 But again the North Vietnamese reacted by committing conventional forces to the war in the south. ARVN collapsed under this increased pressure and the decision was made to commit U.S. ground combat forces to the war.
It was here that the basic error was made in the conduct of the war. Instead of leaving ARVN to pursue the counterinsurgency mission, assisted at least initially by U.S. combat forces, and concentrating U.S. efforts on repelling North Vietnamese aggression, the U.S. instead committed the United States forces in support of counterinsurgency. There were several reasons why this error was committed. First, as we saw earlier, was our misapprehension that North Vietnam was a Chinese proxy and our fear that any effort against the North Vietnamese would bring China into the war. Allied with this was the mythology surrounding Laotian and Cambodian neutrality which prevented us from sealing off the infiltration routes. Second was the gradual nature of the Vietnam war which promoted inertia. In Korea there was a clear break between the advisory phase of our involvement and the war-fighting phase. As we saw earlier, the KMAG commander did not become the field army commander, but instead was relegated to a subordinate position once American troops were committed. The KMAG headquarters did not become the field army headquarters, but was left colocated with the headquarters of the Korean Army. The Eighth Army headquarters established itself in the field in close proximity to its combat elements.
In Vietnam this clear break did not occur. General Westmoreland and his Military Assistance Command Vietnam were already located in Saigon in close proximity to the South Vietnamese government and to the headquarters of the South Vietnamese military. The tendency was therefore to build on the existing structure and to continue the emphasis on South Vietnamese internal security rather than reorienting the effort to confront North Vietnam. Finally there was the nature of our counterinsurgency doctrine itself. Our doctrine failed to clearly differentiate between what a beleaguered nation could and should do for itself and the limits of assistance an outside power could provide. Failure to understand and apply these differences led the United States to involve itself in nation building tasks that only the South Vietnamese could ultimately accomplish and diverted our attention from the tasks that were within our capability.
When American combat units arrived in country in 1965, General Westmoreland positioned them to support the counterinsurgency effort he had begun earlier as military advisor to the South Vietnamese. U.S. Army combat divisions were scattered throughout the country. Against the North Vietnamese along the DMZ he placed the units least organized and equipped for sustained defensive operations—the 1st and 3rd U.S. Marine Divisions.23 This initial deployment may have been justified to blunt the ongoing North Vietnamese offensive and allow ARVN to regain its balance. But even after the situation had been stabilized U.S. Army units continued to be committed to “search and destroy” operations in support of counterinsurgency, and the Marines with their Combined Action Platoons pursued counterinsurgency with a vengeance. As we have seen, they enjoyed great tactical success. But it was at a fatal strategic price. Almost all of the criticism of the U.S. actions in Vietnam have to do with “search and destroy” operations—Ben Sue and My Lai being but two examples. In a postwar reassessment General Westmoreland himself acknowledged the adverse effect of U.S. public opinion:
The term “search and destroy” fed a general American abhorrence for the destruction that warfare inevitably produces. A few graphic newspaper photographs and TV shots of American troops setting fire to thatched-roof huts were enough to convince many that “search and destroy” operations were laying waste to civilian property and the land. Yet, in reality, the operations were directed primarily against military installations—bunkers, tunnels, rice and ammunition caches, and training camps.…24
“There was no alternative to ‘search and destroy’ type operations, except, of course, a different name for them,” General Westmoreland said. “One can point to few cases, if any, in military history where victory was achieved by passive defense.”25 General Westmoreland was more correct than he knew. Our tactical offensives in “search and destroy” operations in South Vietnam masked the fact that in reality we had committed ourselves and our South Vietnamese allies to just such a passive strategic defense. As we have seen, the alternative was an active strategic defense to deny North Vietnamese infiltration and isolate the battlefield.
It was not until after the war had already been lost on the American homefront that we put counterinsurgency in proper perspective as a valuable adjunct to our military operations against North Vietnam. According to Ambassador Komer (who admittedly is not an unbiased source), it was only after the creation of CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) in May 1967 that genuine progress was made toward countering the insurgency. Although CORDS was ostensibly under the military this organization resulted in greater U.S. civilian influence than had ever existed before.26
General Creighton Abrams, then MACV Commander, told Ambassador Komer that “the in-depth U.S. advisory network became the ‘glue’ that held the situation together in many respects at the critical local level.” “If Pacification 1967-1971 can be adjudged at least a partial success,” said Komer, “it was largely due to the expanded CORDS advisory effort … At its peak strength, around the end of 1969, CORDS had about 6,500 military and 1,100 civilians assigned to it.… They were advising over 900,000 Vietnamese in every district and province of Vietnam—over 500,000 RF/PF, 50,000 RD cadre, 80,000 police, and on the order of 300,000 civil servants—on a wide variety of civil and military matters. Their cumulative impact has been incalculable.”27 But while the CORDS effort may have been a short-term success it had serious long-term disadvantages. After the fall of Saigon an unnamed high-ranking ARVN staff officer was asked, “What mistakes do you think the Americans made in preparing South Vietnamese to fight this war?” “Two things,” he replied. “First, when American troops came to Vietnam, they try to do everything. And make the Vietnamese lose the initiative … So the Vietnamese don’t rely on themselves. They rely on the Americans.”28
In his mission analysis of the RVN, Colonel Lung stated that “the South’s national goals and strategy were based on the assumption that full American support would be available until proven unnecessary. This assistance was perceived as being part of the U.S. strategy which followed the end of World War II with respect to the containment of Communism in Asia as well as in Europe.”29 This was to prove a faulty assumption. For one thing, the North Vietnamese had been successful in following Clausewitz’s advice that one way to win a war is “to disrupt the opposing alliance, or to paralyze it.”30 Our successes with CORDS were paralleled by a decline in American public support for the Vietnam war after Tet-68. U.S. domestic public pressure was pushing for an end to U.S. involvement and for a withdrawal of U.S. forces. Soon after President Nixon took office in 1969 the policy of “Vietnamization” was born. According to Colonel Lung the objectives of this program were to turn over military responsibility to the South by giving it sufficient strength to withstand invasion, to reduce American losses, and to maintain U.S. obligations and interests in Asia while heading toward peace. The trouble was, said Colonel Lung, that the Vietnamese had “missed the vital point: a new strategy had been announced by the Americans.” He went on to say that:
Vietnamization was more than modernization and expansion of the RVNAF; it was essentially a strategy that would require the Vietnamese to survive with greatly reduced American participation. Had President Thieu and the Joint General Staff fully realized this fact, perhaps they would have begun then to build a strategy to cope with it. Instead, the RVNAF made no adjustments in doctrine, organization or training to compensate for the departure of American troops and firepower.31
Another reason it was a faulty assumption was that there had been a fundamental change in U.S. strategy. The strategy of containment of communism in Asia lost its focus with the 1971 presidential visit to China. Not only that, as Norman Podhoretz argues, Vietnamization was actually “the model or paradigm of a new strategy of retreat.” Vietnam was to be “the paradigmatic testing-ground of [that] new strategy … of containment through surrogate power.” But, “in the case of Vietnam, not only was the surrogate power unable to hold the line on its own, but in the event, the United States refused even to provide it with the promised aid to defend itself against a military invasion encouraged and supplied with massive quantities of Soviet arms.”32 In the end the exercise of coalition warfare by the U.S. and RVN came to a close on a note sounded by Clausewitz a century and a half earlier:
One country may support another’s cause, but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own. A moderately-sized force will be sent to its help; but if things go wrong the operation is pretty well written off, and one tries to withdraw at the smallest possible cost.33
There are several ironic postscripts to this analysis of coalition warfare. On 25 July 1969, President Nixon had announced a new approach to U.S. security assistance based at least in part on our experiences in Vietnam. In what came to be known as the “Nixon doctrine” he said that while we would keep our treaty commitments, would provide a nuclear shield, and would continue to provide military and economic assistance as appropriate, “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.”34 The irony was that the “Nixon doctrine” described almost exactly what the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China had been doing since the start of the war. They had provided a nuclear shield that had been an effective deterrent against a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam. They had provided massive amounts of military equipment to North Vietnam. But they had not intervened with their own ground combat troops and had left the actual conduct of the war to the North Vietnamese. This gave the North Vietnamese an advantage. According to Bui Diem, former RVN Ambassador to Washington:
American support, even when it was militarily effective, was not an unmixed blessing … The enemy, of course, even though he was maneuvering between Moscow and Peking and therefore may have seemed to possess a modicum of independence, was solidly dependent on foreign support, too. However, he had the advantage of having no foreign troops in his ranks, and his allies … disguised their influence quite effectively, whereas the United States did not …35
Another irony is in the results of the war. One of the primary reasons we got involved in the first place was to check Chinese communist expansion. According to Hugh Arnold’s analysis of the official justifications for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, “The general threat of communism is the rationale most often given for U.S. actions in Indo-China … fifty-seven percent of all the material analyzed contained a reference with some variety of communism. The Chinese threat was cited [five times] more frequently than the Russian.”36 Australian diplomat Coral Bell cites as the root of this justification “Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s assumption, after the Geneva Conference in 1954, that any extension of the area of Ho Chi Minh’s control in Vietnam … would mean a dangerous enlargement of the area of China’s effective power.”37 This attitude undoubtedly grew out of our experience in Korea, where the United States and China engaged in a bitter war. But in Korea both nations emerged “winners.” Thirty years later China still has a buffer state on its northeastern frontier and South Korea is still an independent nation. In Vietnam, on the other hand, the Chinese succeeded in deterring a ground attack on North Vietnam and the United States succeeded in avoiding a war with China. But the strategic result of these successes was that we both lost. China now has a hostile state allied with its most dangerous enemy (the Soviet Union) on its southern border and the independent nation of the Republic of Vietnam in the south has ceased to exist.
But, as Clausewitz said, “In war the result is never final.” The outcome is “merely a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date.”38 The degree to which political conditions have changed since the Vietnam war was revealed in a 4 June 1980 address by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke. “On the Southeast Asian mainland, the focus of bitter mutual hostility less than a decade ago,” he said, “we now share many objectives in common with China …”39
NOTES
1. Lung, Strategy and Tactics, p. 6.
2. Major Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: KMAG In Peace and War (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1962), pp. 135, 155–56.
3. Roy H. Appleman, U.S. Army in the Korean War: South to Naktong, North to the Yalu (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1960), pp. 112, 385–89.
4. The divergence was on the question of the unification of Korea. See Harrison, The Widening Gulf, p. 242.
5. Coral Bell, The Asian Balance of Power, p. 7.
6. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, p. 350.
7. Tran Van Don, Our Endless War, Presidio Press, San Rafael, CA, 1978, p. 156.
8. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, p. 104.
9. Stephen T. Hosmer, et al, The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders (Santa Monica, California: Rand, December 1978), p. 46.
10. Ibid, p. 47.
11. Lung, Strategy and Tactics, p. 73.
12. FM 100–5, 19 February 1962, p. 47.
13. Lung, Strategy and Tactics, p. 72. General Vien’s article was published in Military Review in April 1972.
14. Ibid.
15. Hosmer, The Fall of South Vietnam, p. 45.
16. Conversation on 25 April 1975 in Hanoi between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and Major Huyen, North Vietnamese Army.
17. Norman and Spore, Big Push in Guerrilla War, p. 34. (Emphasis added.)
18. Podhoretz, “The Present Danger,” p. 4.
19. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, p. 41.
20. Ibid, p. 130.
21. Clausewitz, On War, III:3, p. 149.
22. Westmoreland, Report on the War in Vietnam, p. 91.
23. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 162–64, 168.
24. Thompson and Frizzell, The Lessons of Vietnam, p. 64.
25. Ibid.
26. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, pp. 114–18.
27. Ibid, p. 123.
28. Hosmer, The Fall of South Vietnam, p. 37.
29. Lung, Strategy and Tactics, pp. 6–7.
30. Clausewitz, On War, I:2, p. 92.
31. Lung, Strategy and Tactics, pp. 49, 56.
32. Podhoretz, “The Present Danger,” p. 6.
33. Clausewitz, On War, VIII:6, p. 603.
34. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 222–25.
35. Hosmer, The Fall of South Vietnam, p. 38.
36. Arnold, Official Justifications, pp. 35–36.
37. Coral Bell, The Asian Balance of Power, p. 8.
38. Clausewitz, On War, I:1, p. 80.
39. Richard Holbrooke, “China and the U.S.: Into the 1980s, Current Policy No. 187 (Washington, D.C.: Department of State, June 1980), p. 2.