The Failure of Psychological Warfare Doctrine and Understanding in the Vietnam War
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“ONE TO THE HEAD, TWO TO THE HEART”: THE FAILURE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE DOCTRINE AND UNDERSTANDING IN THE VIETNAM WAR Kyle K Rable A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2021 Committee: Benjamin Greene, Advisor Dwayne Beggs Walter Grunden © 2021 Kyle Rable All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Benjamin Greene, Advisor As the American presence in Vietnam grew in the early 1960s with the introduction of full combat troops in 1965, it became evident that this American War in Vietnam was not like that of World War Two or even Korea. The enemy that American service members fought in South Vietnam was a mix of a tough guerrilla force and regular North Vietnamese soldiers. They controlled the countryside and the local populations of the villages scattered in the jungles and hills. The Vietnamese guerilla tactics required that the American military attempt to pacify the rural countryside and influence guerrilla and regular soldiers to lay down their weapons. The tool to influence the enemy was the psychological operations (PSYOP) units attached to maneuver units. However, the intricacies of the requirements from MAC-V on combat commanders to produce measurable data led to an overall failure to properly use this vital asset. This thesis examines the doctrine, training, and equipment shortages of the PSYOP units in Vietnam. By examining these aspects of PSYOP while using case studies of Operation Junction City and Operation Apache Snow, this thesis suggests that the PSYOP assets on hand for combat commanders were misunderstood and misused. Arguing that the failure of the U.S. Army to provide adequate doctrine and training for its combat commanders led these commanders to equate the effort of PSYOP missions to the effectiveness of it. This narrow understanding of PSYOP damaged its chances to affect the outcome of the war adequately. This work uses Field Manuals, Standard Operating Procedures, After Action Reports, and other primary sources to examine the doctrine and use of PSYOP during the course of the war. iv While examining the scholarship of other authors, this work expands the current studies to add examples and analysis of PSYOP use in a setting ruled by conventional forces.. v For Gary vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people to thank that helped or supported me throughout this project. First, I would like to thank my thesis advisor Professor Benjamin Greene. Professor Greene provided unlimited support in every way possible, and this thesis would not have happened without his belief in me or my topic. While he did have a knack for emailing at the exact wrong time, his feedback on my chapters always pushed me to think more in-depth about my subject. I would also like to thank the other committee members, Professor Walter Grunden and Professor Dwayne Beggs, who took time out of their schedules to participate in this project. A huge thank you to the Bowling Green History Department, who took in a Toledo Rocket and made me feel at home. A huge thanks is owed to Julian Gillilan, who helped proofread anything I have ever written, including much of this thesis, and had to deal with many late-night text messages about it. Another thanks go to Jacob Mach, who always offered kind words and an ear to hear to listen to me talk about my thesis or any other work. Without these two, I am not sure that this project would exist or that I would graduate. A thank you also goes to Gabby Mickel, whose desire to learn matches my own and always listens to my many ideas on what to study. I also want to thank the archivists at Texas Tech’s Virtual Vietnam Archives. Many of the primary sources for this project came from this extensive digital archive, and without the ability to find them, this thesis does not exist. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner Kristen Murray. Without her, I would have had no one to turn to complain about not finding a source or no one to hear me talk about doctrine not making sense. She has dealt with late nights, taking our dog on walks without me, drill weekends, and my constant anxiety throughout this process. Kristen, thanks for being the best. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1. BY THE NUMBERS: THE INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE OF PSYOP ........ 12 Organization and Chain of Command: Who’s In Charge? ........................................... 13 Doctrine and the Army’s Professional Education System: Read this Doctrine take this Class, it Might Help ...................................................................................................... 18 Effort over Effectiveness: Misapplied Metrics of Success for PSYOP ....................... 25 Personnel and Equipment Shortages: Make it Work, It’s All We Have ....................... 30 Racial Prejudice: Being Racist Doesn’t Help ............................................................... 32 Conclusion….. .............................................................................................................. 34 CHAPTER 2. A TOOTHLESS COMB: PSYOP IN OPERATION JUNCTION CITY ........ 37 The Horseshoe, a Jungle, and Walking ......................................................................... 39 Paper in the Sky ............................................................................................................ 45 Analysis……................................................................................................................. 49 Conclusion….. .............................................................................................................. 54 CHAPTER 3. DIFFERENT COMMANDER, IDENTICAL OPERATIONS, SAME OUTCOMES: A CASE STUDY OF OPERATION APACHE SNOW .................................. 57 The Valley…… ............................................................................................................. 60 Loudspeaker in the Air .................................................................................................. 64 Going to need more numbers and more than numbers ................................................. 66 Conclusion………………………………………… .................................................... 73 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………..…….. 76 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 84 1 INTRODUCTION With the introduction of U.S. combat troops in 1965, what had been a colonial war, then a civil war, became the American war in Vietnam. It was different from the great wars fought in the first half of the 20th century. In Vietnam, the U.S. fought a limited war against an enemy that blended in with the civilian population with no “front lines” to be distinguished. The Vietnam War was the climax of Cold War ideology and rhetoric that ignored strategic logic, and instead relied on ill-informed political dogma. Containing the communist threat and fighting it abroad was the United States’ goal in South Vietnam, drawing upon the underlying assumptions of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s domino theory.1 It posited that if Vietnam fell to the communist North Vietnamese and guerrilla Viet Cong, all of Southeast Asia would soon succumb to communist control as well. The United States slowly started to engage itself into the already complicated civil war that had begun as an anti-colonial struggle from France. It failed to recognize how to fight the war it encountered in South Vietnam. In Vietnam the U.S. Army did not find great plains for tank battles and a recognizable front to entrench soldiers.2 Instead, it found villages of impoverished farmers and an enemy that easily blended in with the civilian population fighting more for freedom from another outside power than for communist ideals. The enemy attacked and vanished into the jungle, which left American soldiers in confusion and U.S. Army combat arms commanders frustrated with fighting against elusive enemies who limited their ability to employ superior firepower, mobility, and technology. 1 The war in Vietnam is a part of a wider array of Soviet and Western battles in the anti-colonial struggles that came out of the end of World War II. The Cold War doctrine of the East and the West were to persuade these emerging countries to partake in their systems of government and support the cause. Vietnam itself was remote to the actual national security of the U.S. For a thorough analysis of the U.S. role in the French Indochina War, See Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2014). 2 This thesis necessarily limits the focus of its analysis to the U.S. Army in Vietnam. 2 When the American advisory effort, the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), stepped in to fill the void left by the departing French colonial military forces, they began training and equipping the South Vietnamese army called the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). While these American army officers and senior non-commissioned officers had great experience in the tactics of medium and large-scale warfare, they were woefully unprepared for the challenges of Vietnam. The enemy was very rarely enticed into large scale battles, they preferred to conduct small unit ambushes and surprise the American advisors and their ARVN counterparts who often possessed greater mobility and firepower. Not only were these