Small Wars: Low-Intensity Threats and the American Response since Vietnam

Conclusions

Conclusions The very nature of war makes certainty impossible. —USMC Doctrinal Publication, Warfighting Vietnam Analogies The Vietnam War is alive and well in America’s many contemporary conflicts. As a country, we have chosen to listen to the famous dictum and learn from the past in order to avoid its mistakes. Critics of our current wars reflexively apply Vietnam’s failures to explain our own. Whether applied to public opinion, the battle for indigenous “hearts and minds,” or matters of law and presidential authority, the Vietnam template can be made overly simplistic. More important to the story is understanding the depth and degree to which the past war actually shapes our military affairs. In terms of grand strategy, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan share the same tunnel vision that warps U.S. policy and creates dangerous diplomatic blind spots. The two eras suffer from what is the strategic opportunity cost of too much time, effort, and talent too narrowly applied to a specific set of objectives. Richard Nixon warned of the risks of this approach in 1970 when he argued for a foreign policy more carefully calibrated to pragmatic interests than unreachable principles: “We are not involved in the world because we have com mitments, we have commitments because we are involved. Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”1 In his June 2009 Cairo speech, Barack Obama adopted this same 286 Conclusions pragmatism in an appeal to the Arab world based on its common interests with the United States.2 Politically, Vietnam and our current wars are essentially presidential litmus tests. In the early stages of both conflicts, decisive action— illustrated after Tonkin Gulf and Operation Enduring Freedom— proved to be a boon for the White House. However, as the wars unspooled , public discontent regarding cost and candor soon mired the respective administrations in a war of public perception. The failure to effectively answer domestic concerns, a trait shared by Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, ultimately affected not only support for the war effort, but also handicapped the domestic policy agendas of each era. Latter-day public support for war has proven to be consistently fickle yet critical to the effective use of force abroad.3 It is shaped by a variety of factors: the length of the conflict, its imminence in daily life, and popular tolerance for its brutality. Modern developments in communications technology, from satellite transmissions in the sixties to the World Wide Web today, invite war into homes and offices in real time and unquestionably complicate contemporary diplomacy and military affairs.4 In How Democracies Lose Small Wars, Gil Merom argues that modern societies allow their revulsion of war to dictate the collective will to fight. Modern polities, particularly their educated and affluent elements , cannot endure the horror produced by combat. In fact, as technology improves war’s lethality, it becomes increasingly easy to reach this threshold of pain. Merom further explains that it is not necessary for a majority of society to reach this point; an articulate, dedicated minority is sufficient to disrupt domestic support for war. In the sixties , the loosely organized student antiwar movement was adequate for this purpose. After the September 11 attacks, many of these same baby boomers, now mature members of the American establishment, were even more formidable opponents to military action.5 Drawing military analogies between Vietnam and the present is a more problematic exercise. In Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win, Jeffrey Record illustrates the clear distinctions separating military operations in South Vietnam and Iraq. One of the more obvious departures regards the size of opposing forces. Record estimates that in 1968 the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were able to field between Conclusions 287 250,000 and 300,000 personnel. In contrast, U.S. military and coalition forces overwhelmingly outnumbered Iraqi insurgents from 2003 onward. Moreover, the Iraq and Afghan insurgencies are divided by religious, ethnic, and local rivalries that bear little comparison to communist operations in South Vietnam.6 Some military analogies do apply, however. Both periods began with conventional force structures and doctrines that took years to recognize and incorporate the complexities of asymmetrical conflict. The initial show of force made by regular American units between 1965 and 1968 eventually gave way to a coordinated effort to win both the “big war” and popular support for the Saigon government. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the rapidly diminishing relevance of...