Vietnam and the American Theory of Limited War

American Theory o f Limited War IT h e idea of limited conventional war fought by American troops outside Europe is no longer unthinkable, but there has been no recent analysis of the whole idea of limited war. As a result, the concepts that we use when we think about this problem are, by and large, the concepts we inherited from a small group of scholars and policy analysts who did their most important writing in the middle 1950s. There is, of course, no automatic need for new strategic concepts every decade. Still, in the generation that has gone by since Robert Osgood and Thomas Schelling analyzed this subject, much has been learned while the American strategy of limited war has remained the same. As Osgood wrote in 1979, "the strategy transcended the Vietnam War and not only survived it but continued to expand in application and acceptance."* Much of what their strategy stated was and is true, but much is not, and much about the nature of war was simply ignored. A reconsideration of limited war strategy in light of what we can learn from historical experience leads to a new strategy to supplement the old. Limited wars are not only political wars, as the original theorists wrote, but strange wars. The general problem of limited war is not only the diplomatic one of how to signal our resolve to our enemy, but the military one of how to adapt, quickly and successfully, to the peculiar and unfamiliar battlefield conditions in which our armed forces are fighting. Diplomatic successwill depend on military success since resolve cannot survive repeated failure on the battlefield. Finally, the factors that determine whether this adaptation is successfulor not are largely moral factors: the presence or absence of political courage at the central levels of command that enables men to make clear decisions about the missions and resources allocated to the theater commander, and to delegate responsibility to the local commanders. Military courage is required of the officers, to earn and keep the confidence of their men as soldiers die without winning in the early stages of the war, and to adopt operational changes that necessarily stake the lives of the soldiers on untried and possibly incorrect tactics. Stephen Peter Rosen currently works at the Office for the Secretary of Defense. The opinions expressed herein are entirely his own. 1. Robert Osgood, Limited War Revisited (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), p. 10 International Securify, Fall 1982 (Vol. 7, No. 2) 0162-2889/82/010083-31$02.50/0 0 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 83 International Security I 84 Intellectual ability is obviously necessary but in some ways secondary; solutions to military problems have often been recognized but not implemented because men, with very good reason, are afraid of what would happen if they are wrong. In war the easiest thing is difficult, not because soldiers are stupid, but because they are human and do not regard human life as a resource to be expended as needed. Early Theorists of Limited War Between 1957and 1960, two books were published by professors that set the terms of discussion about limited war. Robert Osgood’s book Limited War argued that politics is primary. What is special about limited war is that resources and goals are constrained by policy, not capabilities. The object of the war is political, to be obtained by negotiation and compromise, and not military, involving the physical destruction of the enemy. Therefore, the special problem of limited war is ”more broadly, the problem of combining military power with diplomacy and with the economic and psychological instruments of power. . . . ‘ I 2 While it is true that limited wars deal with smaller problems than those found in total wars, in both kinds of wars the objects have been political. Both world wars had explicitlypolitical objectives and were the extension of politics just as much as in any smaller war. Nor was resource allocation determined by the physical capacity of the nation. The Allied commanders in Italy and Burma were painfully aware that they were fighting ”limited wars” in order to permit the operations in other...