THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM AND THE POWELL DOCTRINE: FOUR CASE STUDIES LUKE FOSTER MIDDUP, BA (Hons), MA (Hons). Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. OCTOBER 2011 i ii Abstract The Vietnam War was one of the most traumatic events ever to afflict the US Military. From the ashes of this defeat, the US Military sought to renew itself. As part of this process of renewal, the US Army in particular engaged in serious soul searching as to how, and under what circumstances, the United States ought to commit itself to war. The answers that were derived from this soul searching are known collectively as the Powell Doctrine,1 named after General Colin L. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-1993). The elements of the Doctrine are as follows: the need for “overwhelming” force; the need for public and Congressional support; the need for clear objectives; the need for a clear “exit strategy”; and force should only be used in the “vital national interest.” This thesis will advance four principal arguments: first, that the evolution of the Powell Doctrine cannot be understood without reference to the US experience in Vietnam; second, that the various elements of the Powell Doctrine have a logical relationship to one another which means that the Doctrine as a whole should be considered as a single, integrated body of thought; and, third, that Colin Powell, in his Foreign Affairs article, is simply giving public articulation to an intellectual climate that had already become influential before his ascent to the Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.2 And that, whilst the Powell Doctrine does deserve to be called a doctrine in the 1 Also sometimes referred to as the Powell-Weinberger Doctrine. 2 Colin Powell, “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 71 (1992), pp.32-45. iii military sense of the word, this is not a full explanation of the conditions Powell has laid down as they encroach upon profoundly political issues. And thus, whilst the Powell Doctrine does deserve the title “doctrine,” it is also an attempt to formulate a coherent set of principles to inform US “National Security” policy in areas that go beyond those traditionally seen as being of military concern. The case studies that will be used in this thesis are: the first Persian Gulf War (1990-1991); US policy towards Nicaragua (1979-1984); the US intervention in the Lebanese Civil War (1982-1984); and the US reaction to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1991-1995). In the conclusion of the thesis, I also deal briefly with the question of how the Powell Doctrine may relate to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. iv Acknowledgements I’d first like to acknowledge the enormous contribution that my family has made towards the writing of this thesis. My parents and my brother have provided emotional and at times financial support to enable me to undertake this project. I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Matthew Jones and Professor Alex Danchev, their guidance, support, and at times criticism have been invaluable to the project. I would also like to thanks Dr. David Milne and Dr. Donna Jackson, who read through large parts of the drafts of this thesis. Donna’s advice in particular was crucial to how this thesis has been organised. I’m enormously grateful to the three scribes who have typed the entire manuscript: Lucy Veale, Hannah Durkin and Steve Doran. These three have put up with my constant changes, they were available whenever I needed them, and often as not they were my editors of first resort. I would also like to put on record my thanks to Owen Butler of Nottingham University Student Support for organising the scribing support without which this thesis could not exist. There are also people through whose correspondence and hard work this thesis has benefitted enormously. In particular I would like to single out Lieutenant General Frederick Franks (US Army, Retired), who provided invaluable advice on how US Army Doctrine is written and also pointed me towards several books and papers which proved variously useful. I would also like to thank John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California, Santa v Barbara. Their American Presidency Project is an invaluable resource to any researcher of the US Presidency, and has made the writing of this thesis far easier than it would otherwise have been. I would also like to place on record my profound gratitude to the staff at the Hallward Library, University of Nottingham, and the British Library for running down seemingly endless obscure books and articles. I would also like to thank the staff at the School of Politics for helping me in ways too numerous to mention. Finally I would like to thank my Grandfather Sam Middup to whose memory this work is dedicated. Without a childhood spent listening to my Granddad’s war stories I’m all but certain that I would not have had the interest that led me to this PhD. In every meaning of the phrase, I would not be here without him. vi Contents Page Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Contents Page vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Literature Review 26 Chapter 2: Force Should Only be Used in the “Vital National Interest” 58 Chapter 3: The Use of Force Must be Overwhelming 112 Chapter 4: US Forces Must Have Overwhelming Public and Congressional Support 162 Chapter 5: The Objective of US Military Forces Should be Clear 245 Chapter 6: The Need for a Clear “Exit Strategy” 282 Chapter 7: Conclusion 351 Bibliography 388 1 Introduction This introduction aims to do two things: first, to define the scope of the thesis; second, to determine whether the Powell Doctrine actually deserves the title of a “doctrine.” The main aims of this thesis are to give an account of where the ideas that form the Powell Doctrine came from, to understand how these ideas are logically related to one another to form the Powell Doctrine, and what the effect of the Powell Doctrine has been on US foreign policy since the end of the Vietnam War. However, what this thesis will not do is attempt to evaluate whether or not the Powell Doctrine is correct in what it says, or whether the lessons taken from Vietnam that form the Powell Doctrine were the correct lessons to have been taken. The Powell Doctrine is used as shorthand to describe a series of conditions for the use of US Military force laid down by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, shortly before his retirement. These conditions are: that the use of force ought to be overwhelming; that the use of force ought to command public and Congressional support; that force should only be used to achieve clear objectives; that force should only be used in the “vital national interest”; that US Forces should have a clear “exit strategy.”1 This doctrine is also sometimes referred to as the “Powell-Weinberger Doctrine” (Weinberger being the Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who laid down some of these conditions in a speech to the National Press Club in November 1984).2 In this 1Colin Powell, “US Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 71 (1992), pp.32-45. 2 The full text of Weinberger’s speech can be found at: http://www.airforce- magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Documents/2004/January%202004/0104keeperfull.pdf. 2 thesis, we will use the term Powell Doctrine for two reasons: first, because Weinberger and Powell’s conditions do not differ from each other in any significant way; second, because Powell served as Weinberger’s principal military assistant and was one of the key authors of the National Press Club speech. The Powell Doctrine does not spontaneously emerge in Powell’s Winter 1992 Foreign Affairs article. With this article, what Powell did was to lend the significant public stature that he enjoyed in 1992 as probably one of the most well-known US soldiers since Eisenhower to a set of ideas which had been written about as early as the late 1970s. Indeed, in the early 1990s, Powell’s standing was such that a Presidential bid along the lines of Eisenhower’s successful campaign for the Republican nomination was seen as a very real possibility. Steven Stark, writing in The Atlantic magazine, quotes a prominent but anonymous Democratic consultant as saying, "His [Powell’s] potential as a presidential candidate is mind-boggling. On paper, if he got the Republican nomination, I don't see how the Democrats could win."3 As we shall see throughout this thesis, Powell’s 1992 Foreign Affairs article drew together in one article a set of ideas that had emerged from an intellectual climate within the US Military. 3 Steven Stark, “President Powell?”, The Atlantic, October 1993. Full text available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/policamp/powell.htm 3 The ideas that come to be known as the Powell Doctrine are mentioned in a body of literature created between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s which attempted to learn the overall strategic lessons of the Vietnam War. It is important to understand that there was no systematic attempt during the 1970s to come up with anything resembling an official document that tried to pull together the strategic lessons the US Army had learned from Vietnam. As Conrad Crane puts it: The U.S. Army’s assessment of its Vietnam failure was quite different than that of the French. While a series of Vietnam studies by high- ranking officers focusing on branch performance and tactical innovations was completed in the early 1970s, the Army’s primary emphasis quickly returned to the future European battlefield.4 What this leaves us with then, if we are looking to establish an intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine, are the memoirs of those senior officers who commanded in Vietnam and those works of Powell’s contemporaries and near contemporaries published towards the late 1970s and early 1980s that attempted to spell out the lessons of Vietnam, but little in the way of an “official” response to the Vietnam War as a whole on behalf of the US Military.