Lessons in Disaster by Gordon M. Goldstein

Author:Gordon M. Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

LESSON FIVE

NEVER DEPLOY MILITARY MEANS IN PURSUIT OF INDETERMINATE ENDS

“What can we say is the most surprising?” McGeorge Bundy asked himself in a fragment he composed on February 3, 1996, as he and Mary returned from a holiday in the Caribbean. His answer: “The endurance of the enemy.” It was a dynamic of the war that fascinated him. Bundy marveled at the leadership of the insurgency, its political strength inside South Vietnam, the stamina of the armed forces of the Vietnamese communists, and the social cohesion that bound these variables together into an equation that allowed a small power, among the poorest countries in the world, to triumph over the United States.1

In strictly military terms, over the long course of the war between 1965 and 1973, the United States imposed massively asymmetrical damage on the forces of the North Vietnamese army and the cadres of the National Liberation Front in the South. Yet the Vietnamese communists drove American forces from the battlefield, toppled the Saigon regime, and ultimately prevailed over a global superpower. Bundy searched for some kind of metric to illustrate the rough order of magnitude separating American and North Vietnamese casualties. Acknowledging a degree of imprecision to his formulation, he projected that the communists’ battle losses were about ten times the size of American losses, yet they were imposed on a population roughly one-tenth as large. By his calculation, for every million North Vietnamese, there were roughly fifty thousand combat deaths. “Yet we were more than willing to leave the field when we did in the time of Nixon,” he observed.2

More than three decades after the United States embarked on the full-scale Americanization of the war, Bundy was still struggling to understand how the Johnson administration had committed itself to a strategy that would devolve into a contest of endurance Americans were destined to lose. “Most histories of the war,” wrote Bundy, establish that the U.S. ground combat operations were predicated “on a strategy of attrition.” The capture and control of territory, although part of American military strategy, did not define its central purpose. The core function of U.S. combat troops was different. “Their mission,” according to Bundy, “was to bring the enemy ground forces to battle and wear them down.”3

Attrition was not clearly understood in the summer of 1965 to be the military strategy that would come to dominate Americanization of the war. As Bundy noted, attrition also “is not extensively explained by those who adopted it, but the best account we have is from General Westmoreland in his memoirs.”4 There, Westmoreland stated that “the military strategy employed in Vietnam, dictated by political decisions, was essentially that of a war of attrition.” While acknowledging that since World War I attrition had fallen into “disrepute,” Westmoreland argued that it was an appropriate strategy in Vietnam, “against an enemy with relatively limited manpower.”5 Thus, beginning in 1965 the United States deployed considerable and escalating numbers of ground combat forces in a protracted effort to grind down the enemy—depleting its

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