Thinking more about Vietnam: Wars are neither won nor lost by strategy alone

By Col. Gregory
Daddis, USA

Best Defense
guest respondent

For the past six months, the Vietnam War has been a popular
topic among The Best Defense readers.
In October 2011, Lewis Sorley identified ten
reasons why General William Westmoreland near single-handedly lost the war
during his tenure as the MACV commander between 1964 and 1968. In January 2012,
retired Lieutenant General John H. Cushman argued that he had solved the knotty
problem of pacification as early as 1964, yet the unfortunately timed American
escalation in 1965 prevailed over his revelations.
More recently, Charles A. Krohn has offered a fascinating traveler's
account of a veteran retracing his steps across the 1968 Hue battlefields.
Given the inescapable comparisons between our nation's current struggles in
Afghanistan, it seems unsurprising that Vietnam has garnered so much interest
as of late.

The unfortunate thread interwoven through nearly all of
these accounts is the near universal oversimplification of American strategy in
Vietnam. Guest columnists, along with many commentators, invariably have
applied well-worn clichés like "search-and-destroy," "big unit war," and most
notoriously "attrition" to explain Westmoreland's concept of operations for the
employment of military force in South Vietnam. At the risk of tilting at
windmills, I would like to suggest that such aphorisms are unsuited for a
deeper understanding of what irrefutably was a much more intricate war. If we
are going to benefit collectively from the American experience in Vietnam, it
is time to unhinge ourselves from all too convenient tropes which hinder critical
analysis of historical events. This appeal is hardly novel.

In August 1965, roughly three months before the Ia Drang
battles of which Mr. Krohn spoke, The New
York Times ran a page one story titled "The Undefinable War." Reporting
from Saigon, correspondent James Reston argued that the war in Vietnam was "so
alien to American experiences" that it defied "precise definition and [was]
almost beyond comprehension." Conventional language failed to capture the
political, cultural, religious, and regional complexities of a country and a
conflict which were unfamiliar to contemporary Americans. The article further
underscored the difficulties of accurately portraying the violence then
escalating within South Vietnam's borders. As Reston pronounced, "This war
needs a new vocabulary."

Nearly five decades later, Reston's largely unheeded
admonition reminds us how many historians and veterans have used-and
misused-language in their portrayals of the American experience during the
Vietnam War. Just as the word "surge" now embodies the entirety of American
operations and strategy in Iraq during the Petraeus era, catchphrases like
"attrition," "body counts," and "search-and-destroy" have become mainstays
within the Vietnam War's historiography. One historian even has described
Westmoreland's "strategic equation" as "mobility + firepower = attrition."
Strategy could not be made any simpler.

Yet in their employment, these shibboleths have helped
distort the historical record. As the MACV commander, Westmoreland never
implemented a strategy focused solely on attriting enemy forces, just as he
never focused solely on pacifying the countryside. As much as the general's
detractors wish him to be a narrow-minded traditionalist intent only on
achieving high body-counts, the real Westmoreland simply never viewed the war
in such limited terms. Throughout his correspondence with both senior officials
in Washington, D.C. and subordinate commanders in South Vietnam, MACV's chief
consistently highlighted the problems of a war that could not be won by
military force alone. Certainly, attrition was a part of American strategy
under Westmoreland, just as it was under his successor Creighton Abrams. How
else were American forces supposed to confront the threat of both North
Vietnamese regulars and the armed forces of the southern National Liberation
Front?

Lost in the selective use of words like "attrition" are the
attendant non-military aspects of American strategy in Vietnam. If Westmoreland
was so intent on killing the enemy, it is doubtful that one of his first
messages to the commander of the incoming 1st Infantry Division
would have spoke of something other than attrition. Less than three weeks after
Ia Drang, Westmoreland directed the 1st Infantry to place emphasis
on rural construction that would assist South Vietnamese units in their own
population security operations. As the general noted in early December 1965,
"an effective rural construction program is essential to the success of our
mission." In fact, even before Ia Drang Westmoreland wrote to Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs Earle Wheeler that "civic action in the form of food, medical care
and other assistance" was a "critical aspect" of the war. These were not hollow
words. Examining the operations of the 25th Infantry Division in Hau
Nghia province, for instance, one finds a unit balancing the myriad tasks of
both a military and political struggle rather than artlessly floundering about
on search-and-destroy missions. Other units, like the 4th Infantry
Division, followed suit.

The perils of simplifying American strategy in Vietnam lie
in the potential for misusing history by misreading it. If I may be so bold as
to disagree with my kind host, Mr. Ricks misconstrues Clausewitz when he
contends that war
is simple. In fact, Clausewitz maintained just the opposite and it is
worthwhile to read the entirety of Book One, Chapter Seven in On War to understand why the Prussian
proposed such an argument. More to the point of Vietnam, if we dismiss
Westmoreland's strategy as simply one of misplaced attrition, it becomes all
the easier to succumb to the belief that a well-conceived strategy can solve all
of our foreign policy problems. It is possible that what failed in Vietnam was
not an attrition strategy, but something much more complex.

The ramifications of this hypothesis are worth considering
beyond the tropes and clichés of a lost war in Southeast Asia. Talented
Americans generals can develop and implement a comprehensive political-military
strategy and still lose a war. What does it say about strategy if even good
ones aren't enough to win wars?

Gregory A. Daddis
is an academy professor at West Point and author of No Sure Victory:
Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War .