The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq

6 Conclusions: Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Future

One lesson from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars outshines all the others: any US victory in “asymmetric conflict” is likely incomplete and may always depend on conditions that the United States cannot manipulate. With its finite capabilities and resolve, the United States is seriously challenged when its goals include winning in combat and maintaining and extending support for US policies at home and abroad. The challenges increase enormously when US goals also include building open and effective host-government institutions, establishing local security, and promoting reconstruction and development in a war-torn country. Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq Whereas US institution-building goals were more ambitious in Iraq than in Vietnam and the military challenges were greater in Vietnam than in Iraq, fundamental similarities outweigh dissimilarities in lessons drawn from the two con- flicts. The common lessons are as follows. chapter six Conclusions Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Future 206 The Limits of U.S. Military Capability Lesson 1a: The United States enjoys an overwhelming military advantage in conventional but not irregular warfare. Lesson 1b: Conventional strategies are ineffective and counterproductive for combating an insurgency. Lesson 1c: Despite a massive counterinsurgency investment in a conflict, the United States might not have the military, economic, and political resources available to succeed and is severely disadvantaged when engaged in counterinsurgency without full host-government support. Both conflicts provide compelling evidence that, with their enormous advantage in mobility and firepower, US forces will emerge as the net winner in a conventional military confrontation. The United States can draw on assets that follow from being a global power—as well as, today, the intelligence-gathering, data-processing, communications, and command and control capabilities that go along with being the world’s preeminent power—to secure a victory in confrontations that play to traditional US strengths. Given its advantages, the United States imposed high relative troop losses on the adversary throughout the Vietnam War— and certainly in the major communist offensives in 1968 and 1972—and orchestrated an invasion of Iraq in 2003 that dealt a quick death blow to the Saddam Hussein regime. Unfortunately for the United States, its conventional advantage was decisive only in certain phases of these conflicts and left US forces vulnerable in critical respects. The United States was stymied when its Vietnamese adversary feigned a conventional strategy to protect a guerrilla effort, and when its Iraqi adversaries capitalized on a deficient US national presence to recruit, arm, and conduct a deadly bombing campaign against US military forces, Iraqi governmental personnel , and Shiite civilians. In both conflicts, the US response was ineffective and self-defeating. By targeting the (Vietnamese) villages and (Iraqi) cities where the adversary was lurking and acquiring resources, the United States increased local grievances against the United States and host governments. The United States made significant headway against Vietnamese insurgents and Iraqi militias only when they went on the offensive. The evidence from both conflicts is that conventional strategies and tactics do not work in irregular wars—that the stronger party, in conventional terms, can fail when employing the wrong doctrine. In Vietnam and Iraq, the United States engaged in asymmetric wars against opponents that played to their own strengths, avoided US Conclusions 207 military strengths, and exploited US military (and especially political) vulnerabilities. Yet the evidence does not indicate that the United States would have won either war with a counterinsurgency strategy. Early victory through counterinsurgency in Vietnam would have required a huge US investment in manpower and resources and could have been realized only against an enemy that did not nimbly shift its strategy (to a big-unit offensive, for example) to compensate. At no time did the United States have the human and material resources available to win both a conventional and unconventional war in Vietnam. Indeed, the evidence is unconvincing that the United States would have succeeded in either effort . US forces fought North Vietnamese regulars to a stalemate and could not bring the South Vietnamese military to perform even to that standard. In turn, reputed US success at counterinsurgency in Vietnam—as measured by territory and people under Saigon’s control—was attributable not to gains in popular support , a key to success in counterinsurgency doctrine, but rather to insurgent losses in a conventional offensive. The United States could not overcome its signi ficant disadvantage—its dependence on a Saigon government that...