Chapman University Chapman University Digital Commons History Faculty Books and Book Chapters History 2014 American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965– 1973 Gregory A. Daddis Chapman University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_books Part of the American Politics Commons, Asian History Commons, Cultural History Commons, Diplomatic History Commons, International Relations Commons, Military and Veterans Studies Commons, Military History Commons, Other History Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Political History Commons, Public History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation “American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedias: American History, ed. Jon Butler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Chapman University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Books and Book Chapters by an authorized administrator of Chapman University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973 Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965– 1973 Gregory A. Daddis Subject: 20th Century: Post-1945, Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy Online Publication Date: Mar 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.239 Summary and Keywords For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era. Keywords: Abrams, Creighton, attrition, Cold War, counterinsurgency, Johnson, Lyndon, limited war, Nixon, Richard, strategy, Vietnam War, Westmoreland, William Introduction Page 1 of 34 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, AMERICAN HISTORY (americanhistory.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973 By mid-June 1951, the Korean War had settled into an uneasy, yet conspicuous stalemate. Having blunted North Korean and Chinese offensives that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, the United Nations forces, now under command of General Matthew B. Ridgway, dug in as both sides agreed to open negotiations. Though the enemy had suffered heavily under the weight of allied ground and air power, Washington and its partners had little stomach to press northward. As the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff declared, the objective was to effect “an end to the fighting . and a return to the status quo.”1 Thus, President Harry Truman’s decision in April to relieve General Douglas MacArthur—who in Ridgway’s words “envisaged no less than the global defeat of communism”—suggested that political limitations were now an intrinsic part of developing and implementing strategy in a time of war. Yet what was the purpose of war and strategy if not the complete destruction of enemy forces? In a time when men had “control of machines capable of laying a world to waste,” Ridgway believed escalation without restraint would lead to disaster. Civilian and military authorities had to set attainable goals and work closely in selecting the means to achieve them.2 Ridgway’s admonitions forecast inherent problems in a Cold War period increasingly dubbed an era of “limited war.” In short, the very definition of wartime victory seemed in flux. An uncertain end to the fighting in Korea implied there were, in fact, substitutes to winning outright on the field of battle. Even if Korea demonstrated the successful application of communist containment, at least one student of strategy lamented that limited war connoted “a deliberate hobbling of tremendous power.”3 A Manichean view of the Cold War, however, presented knotty problems for those seeking to confront seemingly expansion-minded communists without unintentionally escalating beyond some nuclear threshold. How could one fight a national war for survival against communism yet agree to negotiate an end to a stalemated war? Political scientist Robert Osgood, writing in 1957, judged there were few alternatives to contesting communists who themselves were limiting military force to “minimize the risk of precipitating total war.” For Osgood, the challenge was to think about contemporary war as more than simply a physical contest between opposing armies. “The problem of limited war is not just a problem of military strategy but is, more broadly, the problem of combining military power with diplomacy and with the economic and psychological instruments of power within a coherent national strategy that is capable of supporting the United States’ political objectives abroad.”4 If Osgood was correct in suggesting that war required more than just an application of military power, then strategy—as a problem to be solved—entailed more than just battlefield expertise. Thus, the post–World War II generation of U.S. Army officers was forced to think about war more broadly. And they did. Far from being slaves to conventional operations, officers ascending the ranks in the 1950s to command in Vietnam understood the rising importance of local insurgency movements. As Andrew Birtle has persuasively argued, by 1965 the army had “succeeded in integrating counterinsurgency and counterguerrilla warfare in substantive ways into its doctrinal, educational, and training systems.”5 An examination of contemporary professional journals such as Military Review reveals a military establishment wrestling with the Page 2 of 34 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, AMERICAN HISTORY (americanhistory.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965–1973 problems of local economic and social development, the importance of community politics, and the role played by indigenous security forces. In truth, officers of the day, echoing the recommendations of Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, did not define limited wars in purely military terms. Rather, they perceived strategic problems as those involving changes in technologies, societies, and, perhaps most importantly, political ideas.6 These same officers labored to devise a coherent strategy for a limited contest in Southeast Asia within the larger construct of the Cold War. In an important sense, the development of strategy for all combatants necessitated attention to multiple layers, all interlaced. As Lyndon Johnson recalled of Vietnam in his 1971 memoir, “It was a political war, an economic war, and a fighting war—all at the same time.”7 Moreover, American political and military leaders found that Cold War calculations mattered just as much as the fighting inside South Vietnam. Fears of appearing weak against communism compelled the Johnson White House to escalate in 1965 when it looked like Hanoi was making its final bid for Indochinese domination. As Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara told a journalist in April, if the United States withdrew from Vietnam “there would be a complete shift of world power. Asia goes Red, our prestige and integrity damaged, allies everywhere shaken.” Thus, paraphrasing military theorist Basil Liddell Hart, policy imperatives at the level of grand strategy would set the foundations for—and later circumscribe—the application of military strategy on a lower plane.8 Liddell Hart’s council that strategy involved more than “fighting power” would lead American officers in Vietnam into a near insolvable dilemma. Clearly, the civil war inside Vietnam was more than just a military problem. Yet in the quest to broaden their conception of war, to consider political and social issues as much as military ones, senior leaders developed a strategy that was so wide-ranging as to be unmanageable. Rather than a narrow