The new makers of modern.., p.110
The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 110
The North Vietnamese interpreted Johnson’s limited measure in exactly the opposite of the way predicted by the limited war theorists. Rather than viewing the American limitation as an indicator of resolve that demanded reciprocal limitation, the North Vietnamese saw it as an indicator of weakness that they could exploit through aggressive action. In September 1964, North Vietnamese leaders concluded that the absence of further American military action after the Tonkin Gulf incidents proved that the United States lacked the will to respond forcefully to North Vietnamese escalation. For the past decade, the North Vietnamese had avoided committing large North Vietnamese combat units into South Vietnam for fear that it would provoke a massive American military response. With that fear now dissipated, Hanoi began preparing entire North Vietnamese divisions for an invasion of South Vietnam, aimed at winning a decisive military victory.13
In the late summer and fall, Johnson’s campaign rhetoric gave Hanoi additional reason to believe he would not intervene to save South Vietnam. While denouncing Republican nominee Barry Goldwater as a reckless war-monger, Johnson portrayed himself as the candidate of peace. At campaign events, Johnson vowed that he had no intention of sending American boys to fight in Asia.14
On November 1, two days before the US presidential election, a Viet Cong mortar company fired 100 rounds at the Bien Hoa Air Base, where large numbers of US aircraft were based. The bombardment killed four Americans and wounded thirty more, in addition to destroying twenty-seven aircraft. General Westmoreland and Admiral Sharp called for immediate retaliation against the North Vietnamese. The Joint Chiefs warned Johnson, via McNamara, that if the United States did not retaliate in the face of such a provocation, then it ought to leave Vietnam.
Before making up his mind, Johnson consulted political pollster Louis Harris. The president feared that retaliation would upset some voters, but was also concerned that a lack of retaliation would turn other voters against him. Harris responded that few voters would shift their vote away from him if Johnson did not retaliate right away.15 Reassured, Johnson avoided any military response. The North Vietnamese took it as yet another sign that the Americans would not intervene to save South Vietnam.
News of Johnson’s victory in the presidential election on November 3 confirmed for the North Vietnamese that Johnson, and not the bellicose Goldwater, would occupy the White House for the next four years. With the potential obstacle of a Goldwater presidency now out of the way, the North Vietnamese were ready to move forward with escalation. Within a few days, they ordered the first elements of the invasion forces to head immediately for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These troops would wear the garb of Southern guerrillas and minimize communications to conceal their Northern origins; Hanoi knew that Johnson would face greater domestic and international pressure to intervene if the world noticed a foreign invasion rather than what looked like a homegrown insurgency.16
III
After the election, Johnson became more open to escalation, though he still believed that limited escalation would be sufficient to discourage the North Vietnamese from escalating too far. He charged McNamara with developing a plan to bomb North Vietnam. The secretary formulated a plan based on the concept of “gradual escalation,” a principle derived from the abstract reasoning of limited war theory. The bombing would start with modest numbers of strikes on targets of modest significance and slowly, over time, would increase in intensity and target importance. For McNamara and other civilian proponents, this strategy was better than beginning with high intensity attacks on the most lucrative targets because it would be less likely to provoke the Chinese. Additionally, a strategy of gradual escalation would leave open the option of threatening the enemy with heavier strikes in the future. According to McNamara, the military damage caused by an intensive air campaign against North Vietnam would be inconsequential, for he and the other civilian advisors did not believe that the insurgents in South Vietnam depended heavily on assistance from the North.
The Joint Chiefs protested strenuously against gradual escalation. Taking a more pessimistic and historically-based view of human nature, they argued that the slow start of gradual escalation would convince the enemy that the United States lacked resolve, and hence, instead of leading the enemy to show restraint, it would cause them to escalate. If the United States commenced high-intensity bombing of critical targets at once, the generals argued, it would discourage the North Vietnamese from escalating.17 The chiefs pointed to growing signs that the Chinese would not intervene in response to heavy attacks on North Vietnam, including Chinese public statements to that effect. The bluntest pronouncement came on January 9, 1965, when Mao told the American journalist Edgar Snow:
China’s armies will not go beyond her borders to fight. That is clear enough. Only if the United States attacked China would we fight.18
These arguments failed to sway Johnson. He began bombing North Vietnam in February 1965 in conformance with McNamara’s strategy of gradual escalation. The bombing program—codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder—was to continue on and off for the next three and half years.
The limited nature of the initial strikes did nothing to curb the ambitions of Hanoi. As the Joint Chiefs had predicted, the North Vietnamese pressed ahead with the invasion, believing that Johnson would not step in to stop them. When the American president tendered an offer to negotiate, the North Vietnamese interpreted it as yet another sign that he lacked the will to fight. With a hint of impudence, Hanoi replied that it would negotiate only after the United States had agreed to leave South Vietnam and let the Communists take over.19
As it became apparent that the low-intensity bombing was not causing Hanoi to yield, Johnson showed symptoms of despair. His unfamiliarity with military affairs left him ill-prepared to question the merits of gradual escalation and to weigh the current strategy against alternatives. While pushing McNamara for a strategic silver bullet, Johnson laid bare how little he understood the military environment that dictated the viability of the strategic options. “I don’t guess there’s any way,” Johnson said, “that through your small planes or helicopters … you could spot these people and then radio back and let the planes come in and bomb the hell out of them.” The Americans and South Vietnamese had been doing just that for years, but McNamara was diplomatic enough to avoid mentioning that fact. Instead, he merely replied, “This is what we are trying to do, but it’s very difficult when they’re under the trees.”20
With McNamara unable to produce a surefire solution, President Johnson turned to the Joint Chiefs for ideas. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson recommended the deployment of four US divisions across the seventeenth parallel into Laos in order to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The chiefs also called for closing North Vietnamese and Cambodian harbors by mining or blockades, a matter given new urgency in February 1965 by the discovery of a North Vietnamese transport ship on the South Vietnamese coast. McNamara persuaded Johnson to turn these recommendations down, repeating his claim that the Communist armed forces in South Vietnam did not need extensive external support, and arguing that obstructing Haiphong could provoke a crisis with the Soviets.21
Following additional North Vietnamese attacks, McNamara did convince Johnson to authorize the deployment of US Marines to defend American installations in the northern section of South Vietnam. The first of these Marines arrived at Da Nang on March 8. Neither McNamara nor Johnson anticipated that the deployment would be the first step toward direct American participation in the ground war; neither was aware that the North Vietnamese invasion forces were already on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Johnson was so convinced that the American forces would avoid combat that he considered portraying them to the American people as “security battalions,” rather than Marine combat battalions. McNamara was hardly opposed to such misrepresentation in principle, but he believed that in this instance the press would easily see through the deception and the administration would look the worse for attempting to mislead. As a less risky alternative, McNamara persuaded Johnson to minimize the attention given to the Marines by announcing the deployment on a Saturday night, which kept the news out of the morning papers on Sunday, the only day when no papers published afternoon editions.22 This obfuscation would work for a time, and it might have succeeded in the end had it not been for the fact that the enemy’s invasion would eventually draw the American forces into mortal combat. Over time, the administration’s efforts to conceal the truth would invite scathing criticism from Americans across the political spectrum.
The confinement of US forces to base security in the South, the inoffensive nature of Rolling Thunder, and the public statements by Johnson forswearing attacks on North Vietnam and China eased Chinese fears of a direct clash with the United States over North Vietnam. At the same time, the Soviets were boosting their military aid to North Vietnam, raising concerns in Beijing that North Vietnam would become too close to the Soviets. Because of these developments, the Chinese decided to send seven divisions of troops to North Vietnam, mainly to serve in construction and other support functions that would be far removed from current or probable future combat. Their presence did nothing to diminish Mao’s determination to avoid war with the United States, or his willingness to say as much to numerous audiences.23
Not until April 1965 did the Johnson administration realize that the North Vietnamese had shifted to a strategy of decisive conventional warfare. The American intelligence community came to that conclusion after obtaining compelling evidence that the first North Vietnamese army division had entered the South. The news convinced McNamara and Johnson to accede to requests from the military to send more combat troops to South Vietnam, increasing the US military personnel strength from 33,000 to 82,000. Had Johnson authorized such a deployment in the summer or fall of 1964, when the generals had started recommending it, he would have shown the North Vietnamese that they could not win a rapid military victory in the South. Now, however, it was too late to stop the North Vietnamese invasion.
Hanoi’s spring offensive began in May with a string of large-scale attacks on South Vietnamese cities and bases. Holding the tactical and strategic initiatives, the North Vietnamese attacked at the times and places of their choosing, in weather conditions and terrain that impaired American air support. The South Vietnamese armed forces, still reeling from coups and purges, sustained crippling losses. The attacks accelerated in the first week of June, inflicting 1,876 casualties on the South Vietnamese, the highest one-week tally of the war to this point.24
IV
On June 7, Westmoreland urged Washington to insert US ground forces into the war as the only way to stop the North Vietnamese army from obliterating its South Vietnamese opponents. American intervention would avert defeat, Westmoreland argued, but it would not bring about rapid victory. Rather, intervention would buy time to restore the strength of the South Vietnamese government and regain control of the South Vietnamese countryside.
President Johnson knew that a war would cost him dearly in material resources as well as in political capital, but he believed that abandoning South Vietnam would also come at enormous cost. Allowing South Vietnam to fall, he feared, would cause other Asian “dominoes” to fall to Communism, which would severely damage America’s interests in Asia as well as undermine its credibility around the globe. The domino theory was well supported by the evidence available at the time and since. In late July, Johnson decided that the strategic ends of preserving South Vietnam were worth employing a massive US military commitment. The United States would enter the ground war.
While Johnson and McNamara had constrained and managed the use of American force in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, they deferred to the judgment of General Westmoreland on military operations within South Vietnam. Westmoreland’s strategy for South Vietnam combined mobile military operations against North Vietnamese units with the securing of the South Vietnamese rural population and the rehabilitation of the South Vietnamese armed forces and government. Had McNamara and Johnson been more familiar with military affairs, they might have been more inclined to second-guess Westmoreland’s strategy, although it was a sound strategy given the conditions and constraints that the general faced. Seeking out and destroying North Vietnamese forces—the strategic component of Westmoreland’s plan that came under the most criticism—was essential in preventing the North Vietnamese from mounting massive attacks on South Vietnamese forces, bases, and cities.
During the late summer and fall of 1965, American combat troops found and engaged several large concentrations of North Vietnamese forces. Exploiting their superior mobility and firepower, the Americans inflicted heavy losses on the North Vietnamese each time, at relatively low cost to themselves. These defeats damaged many of the North Vietnamese units that Hanoi had earmarked for the decisive battles, and made clear the punishment awaiting other North Vietnamese units that had massed for the attack. The North Vietnamese leadership decided to abort its plans for a decisive military victory. They shifted to a strategy of protracted attrition, intended to wear down America’s will.25
Once the immediate danger to South Vietnam had passed, the Joint Chiefs and McNamara resumed their struggles over strategy beyond South Vietnam’s borders. The Joint Chiefs urged President Johnson to double the pace of Rolling Thunder, noting that the longer the bombing campaign took, the easier the enemy could relocate targets and strengthen air defenses. Additionally, the generals advocated mining North Vietnam’s harbors. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower weighed in with Johnson in favor of these measures. “We should not base our action on minimum needs,” said the mastermind behind the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Instead, the United States “should swamp the enemy with overwhelming force.”26
McNamara convinced Johnson to reject these recommendations by raising the same objections as before. McNamara clung to the hope that American restraint would be matched by North Vietnamese restraint. The United States did not yet know that Hanoi already had decided to set its 1965 invasion in motion back in November 1964, and therefore, Americans could still believe—as McNamara did—that the American bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965, rather than American weakness in late 1964, had triggered North Vietnam’s springtime offensive.
At the same time that McNamara was arguing for limited war, the US intelligence community was predicting North Vietnamese and Chinese reactions that were diametrically opposed to McNamara’s. In a unified estimate, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the US Intelligence Board augured that intensification of American bombing in North Vietnam or Laos would cause Hanoi to de-escalate, and would not cause the Chinese to intervene in the war.27 In one of the most striking examples of his strategic closemindedness, McNamara refused to reconsider his views, and instead orchestrated the creation of a new estimate that was certain to demonstrate the soundness of his strategy. McNamara entrusted the estimate not to other intelligence professionals, but rather to his own policy experts, breaching the segregation of intelligence from policy that normally impedes the slanting of intelligence for policy purposes. In their estimate, McNamara’s policy staff concluded that American escalation would not achieve favorable changes in North Vietnamese behavior and, in fact, would dangerously antagonize the Chinese and Soviets.28
Debate over North Vietnam’s openness to mutual self-limitation came to an end in November 1965 with the intelligence community’s discovery of surging North Vietnamese troop infiltration. New information showed that young North Vietnamese men were coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at rates much higher than previously believed, and that enemy strength was increasing twice as fast. The North Vietnamese were estimated to have 90,000 regulars in the South at the end of 1965, up from 50,000 six months earlier.29
V
American restraint, it was now clear, was being answered by North Vietnamese escalation. McNamara’s confidence in limited war theory was badly shaken, and it would never fully recover. Johnson, who had never been as fond of academic ideas as McNamara, lost whatever confidence he had possessed in the notion that one combatant’s restraint caused the other to exercise restraint. Both McNamara and Johnson decided that the time had come to escalate. They would match the influx of North Vietnamese troops by increasing the American troop strength in South Vietnam to 400,000.
The generals favored this troop increase, believing it would be militarily and psychologically advantageous, but they told President Johnson that he needed to call up the reserve units of the US armed forces if he wished to raise the troop ceiling to 400,000. With a deep reservoir of experienced manpower, the reserves were intended for use in the type of wartime military expansion being contemplated. Johnson, however, opposed summoning the reserves for fear that it would rile up the American population, to the detriment of his domestic agenda and his personal popularity. He asked McNamara to come up with an alternative plan for fielding the 400,000 troops without using the reserves. McNamara’s solution was to send large numbers of draftees and junior officers to Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs protested that combat leadership and technical competence would suffer, but their words failed to dissuade Johnson from approving McNamara’s plan.30
In November, the Joint Chiefs met with the president to advocate harder blows against North Vietnam, which they deemed necessary to compel North Vietnam to end—or at least curtail—its involvement in South Vietnam. Without a powerful hammering of the North, the chiefs told the president, the war would drag on without hope of decisive victory. In response, Johnson exploded with a ferocity greater than any he had ever evidenced toward the North Vietnamese. As retold by a junior officer who was present, the president “screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their ‘military advice.’ ” Johnson “called them filthy names—sh__heads, dumbsh__s, pompous assh__s—and used ‘the F-word’ as an adjective more freely than a Marine at boot camp.” The president castigated the chiefs for discounting the possibility of Chinese intervention and for “trying to pass the buck for World War III to him.”31
