How Wars End by Gideon Rose

Author:Gideon Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

NO MORE VIETNAMS

Bush administration policymakers had a number of contemporaneous reasons for not wanting to go to Baghdad. Reinforcing those, however—particularly for the uniformed military—was a specter from the past. As the Third Army’s official history of the conflict puts it, “From the president downward through the chain of command, the ghost of the Vietnam War hovered over every proceeding. . . . Commanders were intent on avoiding what they regarded as the mistakes of the past. . . . This war would be everything the Vietnam War had not been.”35

For the senior officers in the Gulf crisis, Vietnam had been the defining experience of their professional lives. They had watched their friends and charges die and their beloved institutions break down into a dysfunctional mess, all for the nation’s first military defeat—and had then devoted their careers to overcoming the past and reestablishing American military competence and honor. Every action they took during the crisis was driven by those goals and seen in that light.

Powell, who served two tours in the earlier war, notes that throughout the early principals meetings, “Vietnam [was] running through my mind very much.”36 Fred Franks, the Third Army commander, had lost a leg there and says that Vietnam was “constantly in my mind. . . . [W]e all felt that we’re going to do it right this time.”37 Warden, the creator of the concept for the air campaign, had flown in 266 combat missions in Indochina and named his plan Instant Thunder to emphasize that it was the opposite of Vietnam’s Rolling Thunder. Walt Boomer, the Marine commander, said that “Vietnam was always lurking in the background for all of us that had served there. In my case, I served two tours. All of my commanders had been in Vietnam, at least two times. And I think what we were committed to more than anything else, was that we weren’t going to make the same stupid mistakes that we made in Vietnam. And we weren’t going to do some of the dumb things that we had been forced to do, as younger officers, we weren’t going to tolerate it, and we didn’t.”38

For the military, the mistakes and lessons of Vietnam were obvious. That conflict was seen as having been entered into casually and then fought slowly and halfheartedly for broad, vague political objectives. Avoiding a repeat meant doing the opposite at each decision point: keeping out of trouble unless absolutely necessary and then, if ordered to do so, fighting quickly with massive force for narrow and militarily achievable goals. In the context of the Gulf, this translated into skepticism about making the invasion of Kuwait a casus belli, reluctance to move from sanctions to war, insistence on overwhelming force to execute the mission given, and determination to limit the war’s objectives and return home quickly.

In many if not most respects, the military’s Vietnam obsession had beneficial consequences during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, resulting in an extremely high level of tactical and operational proficiency and professionalism.

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