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Strategy and History
The Myth Of Inevitable U.S. Defeat In Vietnam
This volume offers a dispassionate strategic examination of the Vietnam conflict that challenges the conventional wisdom that South Vietnam could not survive as an independent non-communist entity over the long term.
- GenresAmerican History
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
16 people want to read
About the author
C. Dale Walton
4 books2 followersDr. C. Dale Walton is Program Chair and Professor of International Relations at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, as well as a Senior Research Fellow with the John W. Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise.
He has also taught at the University of Reading in England and Missouri State University.
His research interests include strategic relationships and security problems in Asia, geopolitics and the changing geostrategic environment, and U.S. military strategic history. In addition to his three books, he has published more than 70 book chapters, articles and reviews.
Walton received his Ph.D. from the University of Hull, in England, where he was an H.B. Earhart Fellow; his M.S. from Missouri State University; and his B.A. (magna cum laude) from the University of New Mexico.
He has also taught at the University of Reading in England and Missouri State University.
His research interests include strategic relationships and security problems in Asia, geopolitics and the changing geostrategic environment, and U.S. military strategic history. In addition to his three books, he has published more than 70 book chapters, articles and reviews.
Walton received his Ph.D. from the University of Hull, in England, where he was an H.B. Earhart Fellow; his M.S. from Missouri State University; and his B.A. (magna cum laude) from the University of New Mexico.
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August 5, 2008
First, let's get the bad part out of the way. There are three things that prevent this from being a five star book.
First, Walton is a bit dry. While academic works tend to be dry, there is no particular reason why they have to be. The fundamental material of the work is the decisions which were made over the course of the War in Vietnam and the reasons why that those decisions were made. This need not be dry reading. It could be depressing. It could be exciting. It could be a lot of things. It doesn't need to be boring.
Secondly, I'm inclined to think that the title of the work is ill-chosen merely to be provocative. Walton doesn't tightly tie the structure of his work to the myth he is trying to overturn. To do so, he would need to present more of the argument of the opposition and explain why some are inclined to believe that US defeat was inevitable in Vietnam. He doesn't really do this, and addresses the notion of the mythic US powerlessness and corresponding myth of the invulnerability of the NLF only in passing at the beginning and end of the work. The long list of myths about Vietnam he gives in Table 1, does not receive the attention it should in later chapters. As a result, I don't think he is as convincing as he might be in dispelling any of the specific myths directly. The title seems to be chosen to provoke interest compared to a perhaps more accurate academic title like, ‘An Examination of Several Possible Paths to Victory in the Vietnam War’
Thirdly, there is one area of his thesis that seriously breaks down and where his reasoning doesn't seem to hang together even on its own terms, and that's the risk of China entering the war in the event that the war escalated. While Walton seems to be arguing that the risk of China intervening directly in the war wasn't great, he then concludes the section by basically unraveling that argument and settling for a much weaker suggestion. Ultimately he's left with something else; that China might have intervened directly, but ultimately even if they did given the direct support that they were already providing both in material and personnel that direct Chinese intervention might not have mattered much. That's a much weaker claim, and it leaves him open to the charge that by his terms the war was winnable only by greatly widening the war.
That last flaw was big enough that I nearly dropped this down to two stars, except that Walton in the last third of the book manages to undo most of the damage he's down to his own thesis with much more conventional and better reasoned claims about the trajectory of the Vietnam War.
Walton's central thesis is that not only was the Vietnam War winnable, but that given its military and political goals it wasn't even a particularly challenging thing for a great power to set out to accomplish. Ultimately, Walton claims that the war was lost not because of excessively difficult terrain, or by the length of the US logistic lines, or by the mythic impossibility of fighting a land war in Asia, or by losing the hearts and minds of the south Vietnamese, or because of the indomitable fighting spirit and ability of a ghostlike native insurgency, but rather the war was lost by a very long series of flawed decisions almost any of which, had the correct choice been made, would have in and of itself quite possibly been enough to alter the outcome of the war. Further, Walton argues that in each case, the decision was made to go against well known principles of war fighting in favor of what those in charge of the war believed was a more sophisticated and nuanced political strategy. Thus, Walton not even claiming that it was necessary to conduct the war perfectly - which at a practical level would be an admission that the war could not have been war - but rather that the war need only to have been conducted with something less like perfect strategic ineptitude in order to have achieved an acceptable end solution to the problem in Vietnam from an American perspective.
I like how Walton refuses to treat the war as if there was one single critical factor in its outcome. As he himself points out, too much military or historical scholarship on the Vietnam War focuses on some singular aspect or decision in Vietnam as being the fundamental aspect or decision of the war. The result is books that seem to think they can treat the whole 15 plus years of significant US involvement in Vietnam as a single indistinguishable whole, and neglect the very different character that the war had as it evolved. Instead, Walton looks at the war along multiple threads, and notes that each thread was potentially decisive given the vast disparity in power between the USA and North Vietnam.
Walton illuminates a lot of bone headed decision making regarding the Vietnam War, which left me cringing continually even if I already knew it all in general outline, but where Walton is most powerful though is in arguing what many others have argued, which is that with the changes in US strategy instituted belatedly by Nixon from 196 on from the US perspective the war was very nearly won by 1972 and comparatively little additional support would have been required to secure a US victory. After the Tet offensive, a native insurgency in South Vietnam virtually ceased to exist, and thereafter until the fall of Saigon virtually the sole threat to the security of the South Vietnamese government was by a conventional invasion by Chinese and Russian backed NVA troops. Further, South Vietnam convincingly succeeded in repulsing at least one of these invasions before the US Congress by an act of law shut down all military support for the South Vietnamese government leaving them with guns with no ammunition, trucks with no fuel or spare parts, and airplanes that couldn't fly and had no bombs to drop if they could do so. The result was a rout of the NVRA by the heavily backed NVA troops in 1973, and the enduring images of the US hastily evacuating the US embassy. This is well established history, particularly now that the North Vietnamese side of the story is well known, and Walton never needs to play maverick or revisionist historian to make his point.
On the question of whether or not the US should have been involved in Vietnam in the first place, Walton is mostly deliberately silent. There are several good reasons for this. First, it's a much more difficult question which raises more difficult 'What if?' scenarios. The answers to those questions usually tell one more about the biases of the persons than they do about the situation in Indochina. Also, the question has a much larger moral and ethical component than simply the question of what the US could have done to win once it had committed to the war. When Walton does bring it up the question, he tends to hedge his bets and is I think a little self-contradictory. On the one hand, he seems to lean toward thinking that if confronting and containing communist imperial expansion was paramount, that Vietnam is seemingly the least likely place to have chosen to do so. On the other hand, he notes that there was a significant rational component to the ‘domino theory’, and had Saigon fell ten or fifteen years earlier it’s possible that Russia and or China would have looked toward Singapore or Indonesia as the next step in their ambitions and that this would have required US intervention.
Given the current political climate, it’s pretty much inevitable that if anyone pays any attention to this review at all, that someone will draw some sort of comparison with the current war in Iraq or the larger ‘War on Terror’. To preempt some of those comments, I’ll make a few of my own. It is always extremely suspect to draw direct comparisons between any two conflicts. Each war has unique and non-repeatable aspects which distinguish it from every other war. The ‘Vietnam War’ has a powerful effect on the American imagination, and critics of the Iraq War – seeking to score easy points – have to often undermined their own arguments by making facile comparisons with the Vietnam War. The list of differences between the two wars is enormous, and not limited to: all volunteer army as Vietnam era conscripts, lower intensity conflict, differences in climate and terrain, differences in natural resources, AIF lacks a superpower patron, differences in technological capabilities, Iraq is a less conventional and less symmetrical conflict, AIF was never a popular insurgency, Iraq War had a fixed beginning and greater Congressional approval, and so forth. In my opinion, people on either side of the Iraq War are not going to find easy ammunition in Walton’s book. On the one hand, it is possible to see that some of the same mistakes were repeated in prosecuting the Iraq War, but on the other hand it is also possible to see that many lessons of the Vietnam War were learned and better thinking made to govern the Iraq effort. Emphasizing one or the other makes it far too easy to point out the straw man in the argument. Compared to the sorry accounting of Vietnam War, it is easy to see that the current leadership – for all its flaws – had greater acumen, strategic imagination, and willingness to learn from its mistakes than any administration handling the Vietnam War (and the Johnson administration in particular). Old lessons were learned and relearned; new mistakes were made. So far there is no sign of anything the scale of the debacle of the Vietnam War, or (to pick on one of my favorite military theorists AND ALSO a certain hyperventilating contributor to the Boston Globe) Quinctilius Varus’s campaign in Germany. Overly simple comparisons between two historical events rather than examining each according to its unique circumstances and course of events generally is a sign of a lack of knowledge and imagination on the part of the one making the comparisons.
First, Walton is a bit dry. While academic works tend to be dry, there is no particular reason why they have to be. The fundamental material of the work is the decisions which were made over the course of the War in Vietnam and the reasons why that those decisions were made. This need not be dry reading. It could be depressing. It could be exciting. It could be a lot of things. It doesn't need to be boring.
Secondly, I'm inclined to think that the title of the work is ill-chosen merely to be provocative. Walton doesn't tightly tie the structure of his work to the myth he is trying to overturn. To do so, he would need to present more of the argument of the opposition and explain why some are inclined to believe that US defeat was inevitable in Vietnam. He doesn't really do this, and addresses the notion of the mythic US powerlessness and corresponding myth of the invulnerability of the NLF only in passing at the beginning and end of the work. The long list of myths about Vietnam he gives in Table 1, does not receive the attention it should in later chapters. As a result, I don't think he is as convincing as he might be in dispelling any of the specific myths directly. The title seems to be chosen to provoke interest compared to a perhaps more accurate academic title like, ‘An Examination of Several Possible Paths to Victory in the Vietnam War’
Thirdly, there is one area of his thesis that seriously breaks down and where his reasoning doesn't seem to hang together even on its own terms, and that's the risk of China entering the war in the event that the war escalated. While Walton seems to be arguing that the risk of China intervening directly in the war wasn't great, he then concludes the section by basically unraveling that argument and settling for a much weaker suggestion. Ultimately he's left with something else; that China might have intervened directly, but ultimately even if they did given the direct support that they were already providing both in material and personnel that direct Chinese intervention might not have mattered much. That's a much weaker claim, and it leaves him open to the charge that by his terms the war was winnable only by greatly widening the war.
That last flaw was big enough that I nearly dropped this down to two stars, except that Walton in the last third of the book manages to undo most of the damage he's down to his own thesis with much more conventional and better reasoned claims about the trajectory of the Vietnam War.
Walton's central thesis is that not only was the Vietnam War winnable, but that given its military and political goals it wasn't even a particularly challenging thing for a great power to set out to accomplish. Ultimately, Walton claims that the war was lost not because of excessively difficult terrain, or by the length of the US logistic lines, or by the mythic impossibility of fighting a land war in Asia, or by losing the hearts and minds of the south Vietnamese, or because of the indomitable fighting spirit and ability of a ghostlike native insurgency, but rather the war was lost by a very long series of flawed decisions almost any of which, had the correct choice been made, would have in and of itself quite possibly been enough to alter the outcome of the war. Further, Walton argues that in each case, the decision was made to go against well known principles of war fighting in favor of what those in charge of the war believed was a more sophisticated and nuanced political strategy. Thus, Walton not even claiming that it was necessary to conduct the war perfectly - which at a practical level would be an admission that the war could not have been war - but rather that the war need only to have been conducted with something less like perfect strategic ineptitude in order to have achieved an acceptable end solution to the problem in Vietnam from an American perspective.
I like how Walton refuses to treat the war as if there was one single critical factor in its outcome. As he himself points out, too much military or historical scholarship on the Vietnam War focuses on some singular aspect or decision in Vietnam as being the fundamental aspect or decision of the war. The result is books that seem to think they can treat the whole 15 plus years of significant US involvement in Vietnam as a single indistinguishable whole, and neglect the very different character that the war had as it evolved. Instead, Walton looks at the war along multiple threads, and notes that each thread was potentially decisive given the vast disparity in power between the USA and North Vietnam.
Walton illuminates a lot of bone headed decision making regarding the Vietnam War, which left me cringing continually even if I already knew it all in general outline, but where Walton is most powerful though is in arguing what many others have argued, which is that with the changes in US strategy instituted belatedly by Nixon from 196 on from the US perspective the war was very nearly won by 1972 and comparatively little additional support would have been required to secure a US victory. After the Tet offensive, a native insurgency in South Vietnam virtually ceased to exist, and thereafter until the fall of Saigon virtually the sole threat to the security of the South Vietnamese government was by a conventional invasion by Chinese and Russian backed NVA troops. Further, South Vietnam convincingly succeeded in repulsing at least one of these invasions before the US Congress by an act of law shut down all military support for the South Vietnamese government leaving them with guns with no ammunition, trucks with no fuel or spare parts, and airplanes that couldn't fly and had no bombs to drop if they could do so. The result was a rout of the NVRA by the heavily backed NVA troops in 1973, and the enduring images of the US hastily evacuating the US embassy. This is well established history, particularly now that the North Vietnamese side of the story is well known, and Walton never needs to play maverick or revisionist historian to make his point.
On the question of whether or not the US should have been involved in Vietnam in the first place, Walton is mostly deliberately silent. There are several good reasons for this. First, it's a much more difficult question which raises more difficult 'What if?' scenarios. The answers to those questions usually tell one more about the biases of the persons than they do about the situation in Indochina. Also, the question has a much larger moral and ethical component than simply the question of what the US could have done to win once it had committed to the war. When Walton does bring it up the question, he tends to hedge his bets and is I think a little self-contradictory. On the one hand, he seems to lean toward thinking that if confronting and containing communist imperial expansion was paramount, that Vietnam is seemingly the least likely place to have chosen to do so. On the other hand, he notes that there was a significant rational component to the ‘domino theory’, and had Saigon fell ten or fifteen years earlier it’s possible that Russia and or China would have looked toward Singapore or Indonesia as the next step in their ambitions and that this would have required US intervention.
Given the current political climate, it’s pretty much inevitable that if anyone pays any attention to this review at all, that someone will draw some sort of comparison with the current war in Iraq or the larger ‘War on Terror’. To preempt some of those comments, I’ll make a few of my own. It is always extremely suspect to draw direct comparisons between any two conflicts. Each war has unique and non-repeatable aspects which distinguish it from every other war. The ‘Vietnam War’ has a powerful effect on the American imagination, and critics of the Iraq War – seeking to score easy points – have to often undermined their own arguments by making facile comparisons with the Vietnam War. The list of differences between the two wars is enormous, and not limited to: all volunteer army as Vietnam era conscripts, lower intensity conflict, differences in climate and terrain, differences in natural resources, AIF lacks a superpower patron, differences in technological capabilities, Iraq is a less conventional and less symmetrical conflict, AIF was never a popular insurgency, Iraq War had a fixed beginning and greater Congressional approval, and so forth. In my opinion, people on either side of the Iraq War are not going to find easy ammunition in Walton’s book. On the one hand, it is possible to see that some of the same mistakes were repeated in prosecuting the Iraq War, but on the other hand it is also possible to see that many lessons of the Vietnam War were learned and better thinking made to govern the Iraq effort. Emphasizing one or the other makes it far too easy to point out the straw man in the argument. Compared to the sorry accounting of Vietnam War, it is easy to see that the current leadership – for all its flaws – had greater acumen, strategic imagination, and willingness to learn from its mistakes than any administration handling the Vietnam War (and the Johnson administration in particular). Old lessons were learned and relearned; new mistakes were made. So far there is no sign of anything the scale of the debacle of the Vietnam War, or (to pick on one of my favorite military theorists AND ALSO a certain hyperventilating contributor to the Boston Globe) Quinctilius Varus’s campaign in Germany. Overly simple comparisons between two historical events rather than examining each according to its unique circumstances and course of events generally is a sign of a lack of knowledge and imagination on the part of the one making the comparisons.
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