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January 3 - May 18, 2019
“The West is still battling an ideology with technology,”
Like Fall, Gates notes that the United States has learned nothing from its failure in Vietnam because it has refused to recognize the true nature of the war that was fought there.
Georges Clemenceau is reputed to have said (and perhaps he did) that war was too important to be left to soldiers. Nobody seems to have come forward with the obvious corollary, which is that peace is too precious to be left to politicians.
As will be seen later, almost nowhere did the French succeed in creating viable anti-guerrilla guerrilla forces, and French tactical intelligence was often faulty because of this Communist-created isolation of the French forces from the population in which it operated.
No counter guerilla or tactical intelligence lead to stumbling blindly into traps.
The Indochina war became deadlocked politically in 1948, when French political hesitations failed to make the Vietnamese nationalists an effective counter-force in the psychological struggle.
Guerilla Warfare is based primarily in human psychology .
the enemy slipped through the conventional battle lines and armored stabs; yielded weapons and depots if he had to, but lived to fight another day.
Guerilla units and ideology are almost impossible to erase
When we shall have reached the third stage, the following tactical principles will be applied: mobile warfare will become the principal activity, positional warfare and guerrilla warfare will become secondary.
Transition From guerilla war to positional warfare as taught by Mao. Did not transition until ready, maintained the initiative even in defense.
but it was certain that the enemy would soon simply by-pass the hedgehog, blocking it by a few battalions of its own and would resume its march forward without bothering about the post,
Maneuver Warfare ala Boyd
one last time, the “Maginot Line” spirit had prevailed and it led straight to the biggest pillbox of them all: the fortified camp of Dien Bien Phu.
All in all, the French Air Force in Indochina fulfilled its mission as well as could be expected. What it lacked in matériel it more than made up by the knowledge which most of its pilots possessed of the terrain and meteorology of the country they were flying in, and by the relative absence of friction between the ground and air forces staffs. The latter knew that this was first and foremost a ground war and adjusted its own sights accordingly.
An air force that found a niched and adjusted instead of trying to force another role. Flying CAS not forcing strategic bombing and call it AI.
They, in turn, may well be replaced later by a “counter-insurgency airplane” specifically designed for such a mission.
Nope
The U.S. Air Force understandably seeks to maintain a stake in “little wars” of the future, particularly in view of the growing importance of Army aviation, and new knowledge about the role of air operations in counter-insurgency is constantly being processed at the Air Force’s Special Air Warfare Center at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.
Not Really true.
South Viet-Nam, where the enemy hardly offers conventional aerial targets—contrary to North Viet-Nam, where such targets as bridges, dams, plants and sizable cities exist—the use of massive bomb attacks and napalm drops on villages is not only militarily stupid, but it is inhuman and is likely to backfire very badly on the psychological level.
The most likely conclusion is that the G.C.M.A.’s were designed for a mission of guerrilla warfare which they fulfilled well, but not for one of raiding against well organized forces, which would have required a level of tactical training and coordination that could not reasonably be expected from primitive tribesmen.
the three reserve battalions were immediately assigned defensive sectors along the perimeter and thus were largely unavailable for the counterattack missions to which they initially had been committed.
Reserves should have no other mission beyond commitment to decisive points
All this was pure, orthodox, 18-century siege technique, and
“programmed”—the worst errors made were simply those of an outrageous overestimation of one’s own worth
military. It has not forgotten the basic reason for fighting a war, which is to bring the enemy to a point where one can impose one’s will upon him—whether by brute force or psychological persuasion.
This problem of having to live with and face up to unpleasant facts is probably one of the most difficult which threatens the peace of mind of the contemporary politician, military planner, or historical analyst.
Military action is a measure by which politics are executed …
The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up. The Americans who are now fighting in South Viet-Nam have come to appreciate this fact out of first-hand experience.
And those anti-insurrectional systems which eventually prevailed over the revolutionaries simply did so by accepting large parts of the program advocated by the latter: in Malaya, Britain granted the independence which the CT’s said they stood for, and the succeeding Malay regime granted the socio-economic reform measures the Communists had made part of their program.
rationale. A dead Special Forces sergeant is not spontaneously replaced by his own social environment. A dead revolutionary usually is.
guerrilla war mounted from outside a … nation is a crude act of international vandalism,” and that it is somewhat difficult to accept “the outcome of a guerrilla war, mounted from outside a nation, as tantamount to a free election.
it has always been the West who has been craven enough to accept the outcome of guerrilla wars as “tantamount to a free election” because of its refusal to deal forthrightly with the problem of the active sanctuary,
“International vandalism” in the form of Revolutionary War is going to be with us for a long time to come. We might as well reconcile ourselves to its existence, quit inventing new names and slogans for it, and settle down to study its rules, so that we might be in a better position the next time when we have to face its grim realities.
The Indochina war has shown that serious studies are almost totally lacking in such fields as modern river warfare and the use of rivers as vital supply lines in countries where the road and rail net is destroyed or inadequate;
Revolutionary Warfare cannot be left to happy improvisation any more than can nuclear warfare
