U.S. Army Strategy in the Vietnam War

the Vietnam War 1 Book Review I Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. The Army and Vietnam. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. w a s the Vietnam War a conventional war or a war of insurgency, an “unconventional war”? The fact that this question is still debated more than two decades after the United States entered the war in force in 1965 testifies to the poverty of our real knowledge about that conflict despite the flood of books and articles and the widespread breast-beating and soul-searching prompted by the recent tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Neither scholars nor military professionals, whose self-imposed amnesia about Vietnam began to abate around the end of the 1970s, are anywhere near unanimity on this question. Yet it is one that points toward the heart of the central dilemma of the military in Vietnam: why, with its massive firepower, superior mobility, absolute command of the air, and immense technological edge, was the United States unable to defeat the numerically smaller, far less well armed and equipped Communist forces? One early answer to the question was offered by Colonel Harry Summers, Jr., in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam Way.’ The Army was unsuccessful in Vietnam, Summers says, because it fought the wrong kind of war. Pressured and encouraged by the Kennedy Administration to concentrate on counterinsurgency warfare and preoccupied with dealing with the threat of ”people’s war,” the U.S. military failed to comprehend the real nature of the war in Vietnam. That war, whatever it might have been in earlier years, had become by 1965 a strategic offensive against the south by the regular forces of North Vietnam. A correct response to this threat would have been to orient ”on North Vietnam-the source of war” and “isolate the battlefield by sealing off South Vietnam from North Vietnam.”2 In other Ronald H. Spector, Professor of History, University of Alabama, is currently serving as Director of Naz~al History, Department of the Navy. He is the author of Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941-1960 and Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan. 1. Harry Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982). 2. Ibid., p. 88. International Security, Spring 1987 (Vol. 11, No. 4) 01987by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute o f Technology. 130 U.S. Army Strategy I 131 words, the Army should have fought a conventional campaign by establishing and holding a front from the Demilitarized Zone across the Laotian panhandle to the Thai border, thus sealing off South Vietnam. Summers’s book has gone through several editions and has been widely read within the military, particularly in war colleges and other service schools. It also matches the mood of many senior officers. Andrew F. Krepinevich’s new book, The Army and Vietnam,is in some ways the flip side of Summers’s book. Krepinevich, like Summers a career Army officer, also argues that the United States fought the wrong type of war in Vietnam, but this was due to the fact that the Army largely ignored counterinsurgency . Instead it fought a conventional-type conflict with heavy reliance on firepower, employing forces organized and equipped for the mid-intensity European battlefield. Whereas Summers’s account of the Vietnam War is based on standard secondary works such as Dave Richard Palmer‘s The Summons of the Trumpet3 and William Westmoreland’s A Soldier report^,^ Krepinevich has thoroughly combed the Army’s official records, utilizing oral histories by Army historians as well as conducting some interviews of his own. Whether or not one accepts Krepinevich’s entire argument, the results of his research are striking, for he demonstrates that the Army’s apparent conversion to the gospel of counterinsurgency during the early 1960s was largely cosmetic. Summers believes that in the early 1960s ”counter-insurgency became not so much the Army’s doctrine as the Army’s dogma and . . . stultified military strategic thinking for the next decade.”5 Krepinevich shows that the counterinsurgency vogue in the 1960s had...