Vietnam: Was it 'winable'?

[Bengalzona]

I suppose that to figure out if Vietnam was 'winnable', you sort of have to figure out what a 'win' would have looked like. We were told that our troops were being sent there to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression and, thereby, to prevent the spread of communism. In that perspective, we did accomplish that... while we were there. And at a high cost. It was a cost that our public was not willing to continue paying. Ideally, from our perspective, South Vietnam would have become a self-sufficient country able to take care of its own defense. In that case, our troops could leave and we would have a new proxy client nation similar to South Korea. I think we really did wish to build another South Korea.

Could that have happened? In a word, no. South Korea is located on a peninsula with only one overland neighbor. It was a somewhat easy thing there to seal off that border and create the DMZ. If you look at maps of Vietnam, you can see why that scenario would be more problematic there. Sure, the North and South could be separated at the 17th Parallel. But the border of South Vietnam with Laos and Cambodia to the west was a different matter. It is a very long border with mountains, jungles and punctuated in the south with tributaries of the Mekong River and the Mekong Delta. Sealing off that type of a border in the same manner was (is) not possible. The governments in Laos and Cambodia were communist governments. This did not automatically make them friendly or even sympathetic with North Vietnam, particularly when it came to moving troops or supplies across their sovereign borders. But these governments were nacent and impoverished and could do little to stop incursions, especially through the jungle and hilly areas in the eats prts of their countries.

In light of the west border problems, we decided to take a page out of the British playbook in Malaysia in the 1950's: counter-insurgency. Our strategy during the Kennedy years was to send Army Special Forces advisor teams into the west part of South Vietnam to recruit and train tribesmen like the Montagnard people in the central highlands into militia units. This strategy was actually quite effective during the early years of our involvement.

Would it have continued to be successful if Kennedy had not been killed? Over the long term, no. The North Vietnamese had adopted the Chinese Maoist doctrine Dau Trahn. This doctrine had three phases. The first phase was a period of guerrilla warfare while simultaneously recruiting, training and building a conventional force. The second phase was a period of relative equilibrium of forces with the enemy, where there would be a combination of guerilla warfare and conventional warfare. The final phase was a period of conventional warfare, conducted only at a point where the conventional forces were superior to the enemies forces. If you look at the history of the Vietnam War, that is sort of how things went. During the Kennedy years, they were in the first phase of Dau Trahn. During the Johnson and Nixon admins, the were in the second phase. After we withdrew, they moved to the third phase.

Our leaders were not ignorant of this. We knew they were building forces. Hence, the moment of decision came after Kennedy was assassinated. A withdraw of our troops at that time would have been a wise choice in the long term. But it would have been political suicide for the Johnson admin which was now facing an election against such "hawk" opponents as Barry Goldwater, who had staked their political bets on combating communism throughout the world. They opted to remain, knowing that a surge in U.S. forces might be necessary. The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred in August of 1964, just a few months before the U.S. election and seemed, at that time, to reinforce U.S. opinions about North Vietnamese aggression. Regardless of that incident, two major defeats by South Vietnamese forces against North Vietnamese forces in December 1964 and in June 1965 demonstrated that the North was now in Phase Two of Dau Trahn and were now more willing to use their conventional forces. Since the decision had been made to "shit" rather than "get off the pot", our course was now set and the build-up of U.S. forces began.

General Westmoreland was placed in charge of our forces. Westmoreland was a long time artillery officer and his subsequent defensive strategy was of using firebases with concentrated artillery situated throughout the country from which small groups would be sent to patrol the surrounding hills and jungles ("search and destroy"). If troops made contact with enemy forces, they would be supported by fire from the artillery in addition to airstrikes. In many ways, it was the same strategy the crusaders used in the Levant during the Crusades. In combination with this strategy, larger units would be sent (often airmobile) to surround large enemy units and obliterate them (known as "clear and hold"). Westmoreland did submit plans for a major operation into southern North Vietnam and Laos known as Operation Frisco/Durango City. This plan was turned down as the admin felt an incursion of conventional forces into North Vietnam and/or Laos would directly draw Chinese military into the conflict wholesale (a la the Korean War). With this option off of the table, Westmoreland chose the overall strategy of attrition. The simple math he used was that if North Vietnam's population of 18 million could produce 200,000 military service aged men each year, we could deplete their forces if we killed more than 200,000 every year (roughly 17,000 per month). And, thus, the era of the "body counts" began. Even with the exaggerated body counts submitted, we never really got near that level of casualties to enemy combatants. By the Department of Defense estimates, there were a total of 950,000 communist combatants killed between 1964 and 1975, which would come to roughly 9,000 per month. Attrition didn't work. But we stayed with that strategy until the Tet Offensive in 1968.

In North Vietnam, they had a different view of the war and different goals. They did not see themselves as "North Vietnamese". They did not see the people in the south as "South Vietnamese". Rather, they saw both groups as just Vietnamese. In their view, it was not a war between two countries, but a civil war between combatants in the same country. They viewed the U.S. as outside interference in the same manner that the North in our own Civil War would have viewed a country like England sending troops to the South to fight. We referred to their forces in the North as NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and their forces in the South as the Viet Cong. But they saw all of these units as being part of their army. These units would often be a mix of soldiers from the north and the south, but they were all trained and supplied.

When the U.S. came in force, they initially tested their conventional troops against ours (Ia Drang Valley, 1965). They quickly assessed that they were over-matched and reverted to a lower level of Phase Two of their doctrine. As a result, we would rarely see large NVA units during the war assembled to fight major pitched battles. Instead, they generally sent units regimental size or smaller to infiltrate, test defenses, or set ambushes (a primary reason why we would never achieve the body counts necessary to make the attrition strategy viable).

The one major exception to their strategy was the Tet Offensive in 1968. The primary objectives of the offensive were to secure targets in South Vietnam and invoke popular uprisings in key cities. They failed in both accounts... miserably. And the massive casualties they took would set them back militarily for a couple of years. But they did incite terror in the local populations. And the Tet Offensive had an even more profound impact on American public opinion. Westmoreland had been proclaiming that we were 'winning' the war for well over a year and that the lack of large enemy offensive operations was proof. The fact that the communists were able to launch such a massive effort contracted what was claimed in the eyes of the public, regardless of how badly we defeated the offensive. Worse, word was leaked that the Johnson Administration was planning on calling up reserve forces (something that was actually considered after Tet). We had already committed nearly 40% of our military to Southeast Asia. The public opinion changed over the war, leading Johnson to announce that he would not seek re-election.

Could we have won? Yes, IMO. But we would have had to either continue with the same strategy of defense or widen the war and occupy Cambodia to secure the western border using conventional weapons. Either of those options would have been distasteful for our public. There is no doubt that incursion into the North would have led to direct Chinese intervention. Use of nuclear weapons would have 1) made us a pariah among the world community, 2) alienated us from our allies, 3) demonstrated to enemy nations that we could not win a war without them, and 4) been superfluous as there were no real targets in North Vietnam worthy of a nuke.