Landpower in the Long War by Jason W. Warren

Author:Jason W. Warren [Warren, Jason W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, International, International Security, History, Military, Other
ISBN: 9780813177601
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2019-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

The Cold War

The last point referenced by the 9/11 Commission above, the “sharing of information,” remains vital, especially between the CIA and the Army. The uneasy relationship between the two began with the former’s inception from the 1947 National Security Act. The CIA received its own personnel, budget, and mandate to gather and produce independent intelligence, which curtailed the role of the Army’s director of intelligence in influencing national intelligence decisions. In addition, the CIA now oversaw a great deal of economic and political intelligence that was within the Army’s former sphere.21

CIA-Army tension and politicization reached its Cold War apex during the Vietnam War. While there were several issues between the CIA and the Army, the most infamous incident occurred from the fallout of the 1968 Tet Offensive over the Order of Battle (OB) of enemy troop strength. CIA analyst Sam Adams was at the center of the OB controversy. Late in 1965, Adams began studying the troop strength of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. He worked alone and received little support or encouragement on his OB assignment. He concluded that total enemy strength was close to 600,000 and should include irregulars (guerrillas), rather than the 280,000 figure cited by General William Westmoreland’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV).22 When reflecting on his tenure as MACV commander, Westmoreland discounted Adams’s claims that MACV ignored his estimates and underrated enemy strength. Westmoreland stated, “The problem might have been handled by other than a unified command had each of the intelligence agencies been assigned as a ‘lead agency’ on some particular aspect of intelligence.” For Westmoreland, too many agencies contested with each other and “when something is everybody’s business, it is nobody’s business.”23

The OB was significant to Westmoreland if it illustrated that progress was being made in his quest to reach his “cross-over” point, which indicated the enemy could not replace its troops lost to attrition. The estimates of OB were the responsibility of MACV J-2 (joint staff intelligence), and they kept these estimates low in order to demonstrate American success, per the order of Westmoreland.24 Veteran senior CIA officer Harold P. Ford explains, “In 1967–1968 … available evidence convinced virtually all CIA officers that the enemy had additional tens of thousands of irregular troops that were militarily significant, but which MACV would not count.”25 MACV would not change its troop strength estimates despite new recommendations, and the CIA ultimately gave in to Westmoreland and MACV’s demands. DCI Richard Helms accepted this and acknowledged in his memoir a “significant political problem … in view of the continuing increase in U.S. personnel and armaments in South Vietnam, any admission that the Viet Cong were actually gaining strength would obviously have stirred public reaction on the home front.”26

Westmoreland and his staff felt obliged to show progress. They would not admit enemy strength was greater than their own estimates. Returning from his visit to the troops at Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson, at a meeting with General Earle Wheeler, noted, “I like Westmoreland … Westmoreland has played on the team to help me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.