The war in Vietnam may be over, but it is still being fought over. As those who struggled with the policy decisions during Rolling Thunder came to learn, any dispassionate and objective appraisal on the subject of Vietnam is almost impossible.1 History continues to show that the arguments made for and against the Vietnam War during that chaotic time continue to resonate in postwar histories. Literary work on the subject is immense. No other conflict in U.S. history has resulted in so many published works assessing and assigning blame or justifying the effort. This is especially true with regard to the air war. All too often, these histories are emotional, anecdotal, and argumentative. They convey the author’s polarized passions but do little to explain them. Instead, they follow preconceived personal views or experiences, either dove or hawk, radical leftist or conservative. What does it all mean? What lessons, if any, can be learned?
Forty years after the fall of Saigon, Americans have failed to come to terms with Vietnam because they can agree neither on what happened nor why. The wound still festers. As noted columnist George Will observed, “So powerful were—are—the energies let loose in the sixties that there cannot now be, and may never be, anything like a final summing-up. After all, what is the ‘final result’ of the Civil War? It is too soon to say.”2
Conversely, President Johnson’s biographer, Robert Caro, noted, “Time equals truth. There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts and the more facts you manage to obtain, the closer you will come to whatever truth there is.”3 With Caro’s comments in mind, it is possible to examine Rolling Thunder and the American failure in Vietnam. It is beyond the scope of this book to examine and render judgment on all the lessons stemming from this troubled era. However, a cursory examination reveals several objective observations.
The United States failed to stop the Communist takeover of South Vietnam, as well as of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Some will argue that the United States did not lose the war. While this is true, it is also deceptive. Upon signing the Paris Peace Accords, the United States withdrew all forces but agreed to leave nearly 160,000 North Vietnamese troops in the South. These same critics will point to the success of Operation Linebacker as an example of the success and proper use of airpower, never mind the fact that the war and the stated goals of the Nixon administration were different from Johnson’s during Rolling Thunder. While the United States never suffered a defeat in Vietnam, it was certainly not willing to pay the price for victory. This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Rolling Thunder. The bombings’ unintended consequences had a greater impact on the war’s outcome than did their declared rationales in 1965. The campaign proved to be a colossal misjudgment, worsened by civilian decision makers.4 A full-blown air campaign as argued for by Admiral Sharp and the Joint Chiefs likely would not have produced a satisfying conclusion, as the political cost would have been too high both at home and abroad.5 As it was, Rolling Thunder polarized world opinion against the United States while providing Hanoi with a rallying point for its populace. It also gave the Communists a tremendous bargaining chip with a growing POW population. These effects on American foreign policy with regard to the Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and later Gen. Colin Powell doctrines that guided America through the end of the Cold War have been well documented.
Less understood or readily acknowledged is the war’s effect on the modern American military. After signing the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, President Nixon did away with the draft and adopted a professional standing military. Prior to assuming command in Vietnam, General Westmoreland had originally favored a volunteer military. By the time he became the Army Chief of Staff, he opposed it. Westmoreland fought with Nixon until he was told, “We are going to have an all-volunteer army, or we’re not going to have an army at all.”6 Nixon’s impetus for an all-volunteer military was based on the willingness of the aviators flying and fighting in Vietnam.7 The air war over North Vietnam was fought by professionals like the men flying from Oriskany, who had a vested interest in seeing a successful conclusion to the war. While the United States became further divided over its involvement in Vietnam, the pilots taking part in Rolling Thunder saw the late summer of 1967 as the decisive point of the air campaign. Aviators intensified their efforts, despite the limitations placed on them. Squadrons suffered even more casualties, which caused greater frustration with the war, yet they persisted in their attempts to stop North Vietnam’s support of the war in South Vietnam. The controversial conscription during the war, coupled with the efforts of the aviators both in the air and as POWs, gave President Nixon a solid reason to implement the professional military that exists today.
Adopting a volunteer military transformed the U.S. military into a highly trained professional organization. It solved many of the issues that plagued the Vietnam era. Training became a priority. Lessons learned from Rolling Thunder led to the fabled Ault Report and the creation of Top Gun, the Naval Fighter Weapons School. The air force followed with its own weapons school. This led to massive training by both services at secretive, remote training ranges in the western deserts of Nevada and California. The training provided to today’s aviators is simply unfathomable to the men who flew in Vietnam.
Only time will tell if the change to a volunteer force is successful. The perceived benefit of an all-volunteer military was the virtual guarantee that future military intervention could never again upset American society and domestic programs. It has inadvertently led to a warrior caste and divorced Americans from their country’s foreign policy. In the case of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it led to the very real issue of having a military, but not the populace, at war. The volunteer force succeeded during a time when Johnson and McNamara were trying and failing to protect domestic programs during a time of war.
Domestically, the impacts of Rolling Thunder and the war in Vietnam were equally far reaching. The immense cost of Rolling Thunder as a part of the estimated $167 billion spent on the war dealt an immense blow to the economy. Johnson’s decisions to simultaneously finance the war and his Great Society without raising taxes resulted in double-digit inflation and a federal debt that wreaked havoc on the American economy and lowered living standards well into the 1990s.
Politically, Rolling Thunder and Vietnam forever destroyed bipartisanship. They also destroyed Americans’ faith in their government, calling into question the integrity, honesty, and competence of its leaders. The Watergate scandal was the final blow.
Despite it all, there is still a positive lesson that can be drawn. Although the experience will forever color the national psyche, the United States can’t have another Vietnam, because it has already had it.
Though he inherited the budding conflict in Vietnam, President Johnson and his administration are primarily responsible for the decisions that escalated the U.S. military’s commitment in Vietnam while at the same time imposing the limits with which that military power could be applied throughout Indochina. It was Johnson and his staff who continually sought the middle ground, trying to look tough on Communism while in reality fighting the war in such a manner that they actually strengthened North Vietnamese resistance.8 Because Johnson and his staff insisted on such close control, other programs, both foreign and domestic, suffered. Vietnam became all encompassing, overshadowing critical events the administration failed to act upon. The Six-Day War in the summer of 1967 was a case in point. As McNamara struggled with daily targets for Rolling Thunder, the crisis in the Middle East exploded—and we are still living with the consequences today. Rolling Thunder and Vietnam were the products of bad decisions by well-intentioned though arrogant—and ignorant—individuals.9
It is unrealistic, however, to blame the Johnson administration for all these failings, as the senior military leadership also deserves a significant portion of the blame. In the books The Wrong War by Jeffrey Record and Dereliction of Duty by H. R. McMaster, both authors conclude that while the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pacific Command, and Military Assistance Command Vietnam were not well served by their civilian superiors, they also failed to serve their country well. These men not only supported the administration’s decision to enter an open-ended land war in Asia but also submitted, without effective protest, to civilian-imposed restrictions on military operations that they believed would cripple any chance for a decisive end to the war in Vietnam. Rather than confront the White House and the secretary of defense and place their careers on the line, these men chose to go along with civilian decisions they regarded as ruinous to any prospect for victory and as likely to cause an unnecessary loss of American lives. Even worse, they did so knowing that no one in the chain of command was really competent to critique their performance. Neither Johnson nor McNamara had a complete understanding of military affairs, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Earle Wheeler, had spent his career as a staff officer with no combat acumen.10
Military leaders at all levels owe a duty to their troops to use them wisely and not squander their lives. They also have a duty to obey their superiors’ orders. Advising elected officials and obeying unwise decisions is a thankless, difficult duty that during the Vietnam War and Operation Rolling Thunder had tragic consequences.11 Service leadership continually told political leaders that the military could achieve results against a country that presented a poor target for a strategic bombing campaign. These men molded the war to suit their doctrine, viewing the war as a conventional conflict in which the enemy required essential logistical support, not as an insurgency. The United States contributed to its own defeat in Vietnam by fighting the war it wanted to fight, rather than the one at hand.12 Service leadership fought in Vietnam in the same manner as they learned to fight in World War II, by attempting to wreck the North Vietnamese economy in order to produce a prostrate enemy. They never paused to consider whether or not their perception of the war was correct or if it even conformed to that of the country’s civilian leadership.13 The military was prepared to fight the Soviet Union. Its war strategy, tactics, and weapons were developed and implemented for that purpose. Planning and conducting limited military operations against an insurgency in a Third World country in support of a corrupt, unstable South Vietnamese government with a monolithic mindset doomed American involvement in Vietnam.
This failure of American strategy in Vietnam found its roots in the development of thermonuclear weapons. Many military professionals in the late 1950s and early 1960s believed that previous notions of strategy and force were rendered obsolete by these superweapons. These same strategists believed that the fear of escalating conflicts that could possibly culminate in nuclear war would prevent total war on the scale of World War II. Thus nuclear weapons and the associated premise of limited war had an extremely corrosive effect on the U.S. military, which became focused on defense economics and the attempt to achieve the maximum deterrent at the least cost. Throughout this period, the Department of Defense became preoccupied with technical, managerial, and bureaucratic concerns. It was this preoccupation that led to the sortie counts in the air war and the body counts in South Vietnam—measures of effectiveness that in reality measured very little and reflected America’s arrogance during the early stages of its involvement in Vietnam. These numbers became strategic dogma and further served to mask the real American goals. The cost was high. When the country needed it the most, the senior leadership of the military was incapable of providing what the nation needed the most, a coherent national strategy for Southeast Asia.
Ultimately, the American involvement in the Vietnam War was predestined by a vast misjudgment of the character and culture of Southeast Asia, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese. More than any other single factor, it was this blindness that brought the American effort to its disastrous conclusion. Having never really looked at Vietnam for what it was, U.S. leaders never saw, until far too late, either the true nature of the enemy or the fatal weakness of the regime and society they tried, and failed, to save.14 The American failure in Vietnam was a result of arrogance, hubris, and general faith in America’s superior technology to carry the day. This disdain for the difficulties and complexities of the cultures that the United States faced in Vietnam led America to completely misjudge the character of the war. In short, cultural ignorance of Vietnam and Southeast Asia guaranteed American failure.
The failure of American strategy in Vietnam meant that any part of that strategy was doomed to fail, no matter how successful it may have been at the tactical level.15 This strategic failure was further compounded by the mismanagement and interservice squabbling that typified Rolling Thunder. These failures put American men in a no-win situation, forcing them to make increasingly tough decisions for which there was no good outcome, and the experiences of Oriskany and Carrier Air Wing 16 during Rolling Thunder are one of the more tragic examples. The cost of flawed strategic leadership was paid in blood by the men who served in Vietnam and ultimately by the South Vietnamese when America stopped supporting them after the passage of the Church-Case Amendment in June 1973. In reality, it proved to be the beginning of a greater tragedy, as the crisis continued throughout the 1970s. Communism and genocide swept through Laos and the killing fields of Cambodia. Anyone associated with former governments or the military were purged—killed or forced to serve time in reeducation camps. The resultant flood of refugees fleeing this persecution served as a stark reminder of the continued cost of this failure. Noted author and naval aviator Stephen Coonts summarized it best: “The length and scope of America’s involvement in Vietnam make it a national disaster. The cost both in human terms and dollars makes it a disgrace.”16