THE U.S. ARMY AND VIETNAM: THE BEGINNING

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Some would argue that "the U.S. Army lost the Vietnam war before the first field formations set foot in that country."  One argument is that in 1965 'the U.S. Army was unprepared and unable to meet the challenges imposed by the Vietnam War.'

 Andrew Krepinevich’s The Army and Vietnam is a critique of the U.S. Army and strategic/operational leadership during the conflict in Vietnam (1959-1973). Krepinivich lays claim that the senior leaders and commanders of the U.S. Army approached the conflict in Vietnam in an inflexible, European Theater style ‘force-on-force’ strategy that conscientiously ignored ‘counter-insurgency’ techniques and would tactically, rely on maximum combined arms firepower to destroy the Viet Cong insurgency and the North Vietnamese Army.

The Army and Vietnam draws from the experiences of the U.S. Army during World War II and Korea. Krepinevich presents details of the thinking of senior leaders between WWII and Korea as well as after the Korean War. There is discussion of ‘The Army Concept’, as Krepinevich illustrates, which was “basically, the Army’s perception of how wars ought (authors italics) to be waged and is reflected in the way the Army organizes and trains its troops for battle.”[1] The illustrated point Krepinivich makes is that the U.S. Army, reflecting on its own experiences of both World War II and Korea, applied its ‘desires’ to the way Vietnam should have been fought instead of performing analysis, incorporating flexibility both strategically and operationally, and ultimately approaching the issues and challenges of Vietnam by tailoring her forces for the uniqueness of the campaign.

Instead, the Army simply deployed both formations and an organizational mindset much more suited for a combined arms conflict across Europe to the jungles of Vietnam. The Army’s objectives in principle are “to find, to fix, and to destroy the enemy.” This, to senior Army leaders was the key task for both conventional and unconventional conflicts.


The Army and Vietnam makes the effective argument that the key planners for the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland and the staff of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) all simply massaged a strategy based off of ‘how the U.S. Army’ was organized prior to the conflict as opposed to conducting a thorough analysis of the enemy first, and then organizing the U.S. involvement based off of the analysis. “MACV simply developed a strategy to suit the Army’s modus operandi, force structure, and doctrine.”[1]

Krepinevich’s thesis appears to be validated on some counts as he lays out the discussion of strategy from sourced reports and conversations between the Johnson administration, General Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Westmoreland in Vietnam. Any good examination of counterinsurgencies focuses in on defining the insurgency, understanding the insurgency ‘center of gravity’ or focus, and the counterinsurgents force make up and force ratio of counter insurgents to insurgents. And Krepenivich provides that key planners from the very beginning of the Vietnam involvement understood accurately, the challenges that they would face. And ultimately, how they often ignored the reality favoring their firepower and maneuver centric approach to combined arms warfare.


The Army and Vietnam’s most damning and powerful arguments are made in chapter 7; ‘Counterinsurgency American Style.’ The U.S. involvement essentially followed a theme that Krepinevich outlines; a large Western military, overly reliant on technology and firepower arrives, forces the ARVN to reorganize in a slighter image of its visiting U.S. Army.  This coupled with the formulation of a strategy based on how the U.S. Army was organized for war in Europe, while ignoring the realities of South Vietnam and its insurgency. This was dubiously followed up by counterinsurgency tactics that relied on firepower, searching for large ‘enemy formations’ to annihilate and missed the most obvious and critical aspect of any insurgency; protecting the populace.

MACV and Westmoreland decided early on to run two separate commands in South Vietnam. MACV and the U.S. would focus on ‘finding, fixing, and destroying’ the Viet Cong in the field. The ARVN would be charged with protecting the populace. And neither two commands would be mutually supporting. The avoidance of the most fundamental principles in counterinsurgency; unity of command and protecting the populace would be avoided in the main and relegated to the least effective force for the whole of the war.


The inner workings of the U.S. Army in Vietnam brought to bear a recipe for disaster. Draftees were rotated in and out of Vietnam every 12 months, thus denying the most basic formations such as the Platoon and Rifle Company, any modicum of cohesion and esprit. Officers were rotated every six months from Platoon Command to Battalion Staff positions. “In a 1976 survey of officers conducted at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, only 8% of Vietnam veterans stated burnout was a factor at the end of their six months’ command; the majority felt that frequent changes in command were detrimental to morale and discipline.”[1]

To further add to the malaise that was the U.S. Army in Vietnam, U.S. advisors were almost held in contempt once large U.S. main force Divisions arrived in-country. The perception, very quickly, was that the advisors were of a lower quality than those operating as U.S. Company and Battalion Commanders.  Also operating along the margins of the ‘big’ U.S. Army in Vietnam were Special Forces, State Department ‘CORDS’ (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) pacification program and a host of other agencies, projects, and personnel. The irony was that those outside the main U.S. Army force structure in Vietnam (U.S. Divisions) were almost exclusively focused on ‘counterinsurgency’ principles such as protecting the populace, village economic development, education training, and pacification. Meantime, MACV was focused on large scale operations with the ‘body count’ metric providing proof of progress in ‘destroying the enemies will or ability to fight.’


Krepinevich and The Army and Vietnam makes a compelling argument for the failures of many key leaders and planners of the Vietnam involvement. The sacrifices made by hundreds of thousands of American youth, to include the over 58,000 U.S. Americans killed in action, had to be attributed to someone, and culpability rests with President Johnson and his coterie of attendants from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to General Westmoreland dispatched to MACV and South Vietnam. “True to its Concept, the Army focused on the technological dimensions of strategy while ignoring the political and social dimensions that formed the foundation of counterinsurgency warfare.”[1] And thus, the 10-year war that resonates and influences the U.S. Army even today. It most likely will for some time to come given the challenges of the contemporary Army today.

However, refreshed arguments from contemporary scholars including Mark Moyar (Triumph Forsaken:  The Vietnam War 1954-1965) and the trilogy from Gregory Daddis (No Sure Victory, Westmoreland's War, and Withdrawal) force us to acknolwedge that one, the Vietnam war is an incredibly complex mosaic, and that two, no matter often scholars try, no simple argument or thesis is enough to fully explain or offer an understanding of the Vietnam war.

 

 

 

CITATION

KREPINIVICH, ANDREW F., THE ARMY AND VIETNAM, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1986.


[1] Krepinivich, Andrew F., The Army and Vietnam, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1986, 5.

[2] Ibid, 166.

[3] Ibid, 206.

[4] Ibid, 233.



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