Meditations on the Vietnam War: Graduated Pressure 1965 - 1967

Perhaps no one had more influence over the way the U.S. war in Vietnam was fought than Robert McNamara.  Although his contributions on the road to the Vietnam War came late in the journey, McNamara left a large footprint on how that war was fought from 1961 up to his resignation as Secretary of Defense at the end of 1967. 

This meditation looks at McNamara's perspective and policies through the eyes of two books in my collection: Dereliction of Duty, one of the best political analyses on the lead-up to the war, and McNamara's own fascinating memoir, In Retrospect.  McNamara orchestrated his will upon the US course in Vietnam while winning a political chess game with his opponents and in competition with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).  As we will see, it was McNamara who crafted a strategy of half-measures in an attempt to steer a "middle" course in Vietnam between the extreme views of no intervention at all and all-out military intervention.  

Like most Americans, when he became Secretary of Defense, McNamara brought the mindset toward Communism as outlined in my first meditation.  "Having spent three years helping turn back German and Japanese aggression only to witness the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe the following years, I accepted the idea advanced by George F. Kennan, in his famous July 1947 'X' article in Foreign Affairs, that the West, led by the United States, must guard against Communist expansion through a policy of containment.  I considered this a sensible basis for decisions about national security and the application of Western military force.  Like most Americans, I saw Communism as monolithic.  I believed the Soviets and Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony." (McNamara, page 30) 

"It seemed obvious that the Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines during the 1950's.  We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements - as they largely appear in hindsight - but as signs of a unified Communist drive for hegemony in Asia.  This way of thinking had led Dean Acheson, President Truman's secretary of state, to call Ho Chi Minh 'the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.'" (page 31)

"Instability in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, and the continued Soviet threat in Europe all took up time and attention.  We had no senior group working exclusively on Vietnam, so the crisis there became just one of many items on each person's plate.  When combined with the inflexibility of our objectives, and the fact that we had not truly investigated what was essentially at stake and important to us, we were left harried, overburdened, and holding a map with only one road on it.  Eager to get moving, we never stopped to explore fully whether there were other routes to our destination." (page 108) 

Like so much about Vietnam, the birth of McNamara's ideas had nothing to do with Vietnam at all.  Much of his policy was shaped by his experiences during the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, specifically with innovative thinking outside the box compared with the JCS.  "On October 16 McNamara offered an alternative to the Chiefs' recommendations for a full-scale air strike, blockade, and invasion.  He argued that the EXCOM had focused on a false choice between the all-out military solution and an exclusive reliance on diplomatic pressures.  McNamara suggested that the United States blockade Cuba to search approaching ships and remove offensive weapons.  The defense secretary based his 'third category of action' on 'overt military action of varying degrees of intensity' including a naval 'quarantine,' aerial overflights of the Caribbean Island, and mobilization of a large military force.  McNamara was confident and articulate." (McMaster, page 26)

"In combination with Robert F. Kennedy's secret negotiations with the Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, during which he discussed a quid pro quo arrangement involving the withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey, McNamara's plan for gradually intensifying military pressure, or 'turning the screw,' on the Soviets seemed to produce the desired result.  The Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba and a secret pledge to remove America intermediate-range missiles from Turkey.  After the crisis President Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a historian and White House aide, that it was 'lucky for us' that Robert McNamara was at the helm in the Pentagon." (page 28)

The political "success" McNamara enjoyed ultimately led him to outmaneuver and marginalize the Joint Chiefs input where future Vietnam policy was concerned.  "The missile crisis emboldened Secretary of Defense McNamara in the realm of strategic planning and enhanced his reputation as a level-headed adviser.  As one of Taylor's White House staffers noted in February, the defense secretary was already 'getting away from what was perhaps an early preoccupation with counting noses and beans' and had become more assertive in the area of military advice in developing strategic options." (pp. 29-30)

"November 1963 marked a turning point in the Vietnam War.  The U.S. role in fomenting a change in the South Vietnamese government saddled the Unites States with responsibility for its successor.  Instability in the South presented the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese sponsors with an opportunity to exploit, and the deteriorating situation forced the United States to consider deepening its involvement in what had become a new war.  

"McNamara, emboldened in the realm of strategic planning, was poised to become the president's dominant military adviser on military affairs. Convinced that the military advice based on the objective of achieving victory was outmoded, even dangerous, he would use his talent for analysis and the experience of the Cuban missile crisis to develop a new concept for the use of American military power.  John Kennedy bequeathed to Lyndon Johnson an advisory system that limited the real influence to his inner circle and treated others, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, more like a source of potential opposition than of useful advice." (page 41) 

McNamara advocated innovative ideas where orthodox military planning was concerned.  He came up with a new concept that he and many others in the Kennedy administration thought was a better course for Vietnam, one where military force was viewed as a means of foreign policy communication.  "Traditional military experience mattered little to McNamara - even less in an era of nuclear deterrence and superpower competition....If the global reputation of the United States and the U.S. desire to fight the spread of Communism made withdrawal from Vietnam unacceptable, weapons of mass destruction rendered policies that risked escalation to nuclear confrontation unthinkable.  McNamara thought that graduated pressure offered a sensible compromise between those two options.  He concluded that the principal lesson of the Cuban missile crisis was that graduated pressure provided a 'firebreak between conventional conflict and that situation of low probability but highly adverse consequences' that could lead to a nuclear war." (pp. 72 - 73)

But McNamara's maverick strategy did not bode well, according to the JCS. "Because they were dissatisfied with McNamara's March report advocating graduated pressure, the JCS decided to organize a war game to test the assumptions that underlay the strategy.  Between April 6 and 9, the war games division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff conducted SIGMA I-64 to examine 'what might be produced' if the Republic of Vietnam and the United States undertook a program of gradually increasing pressures against North Vietnam....The outcome of the game was eerily prophetic.  In response to the U.S. military action, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong raised the tempo of attacks in the South and conducted terrorist attacks on U.S. installations and personnel.  The game's final report concluded that 'a small expenditure of iron bombs' led the United States to commit sizable forces and funds to defeat the North, while the war in the South continued with less attention and fewer resources.  The paper warned that the U.S. public and Congress would not support a strategy on graduated pressure.  In fact,, the officers who played the role of the North Vietnamese leaders in the game 'banked on [a lack of] American resolve' to see their effort to fruition." (pp. 89-90)

However, the JCS failed to act proactively with regard to the results of SIGMA I-64.  They never offered an alternative to McNamara's strategy beyond the conventional war recommendations they had made (and were shot down) in the beginning.  "Although reluctant to accept the implicit objective behind Bundy's 'limited pressures' against the North, the JCS offered no alternative plan.  Bundy's program aimed to send a 'signal' of resolve to the 'Communists' and boost the morale of the South Vietnamese while minimizing the possibility of escalation before the November election.  The Chiefs restated the position they had espoused consistently since January 22, 1964: Military action against North Vietnam should instead aim to destroy the Hanoi government's 'will and capacity' to continue support for the insurgency in South Vietnam.  Caught without their own program for military action against North Vietnam, however, the Chiefs chose neither to challenge Bundy's concept of 'limited actions' nor to question the wisdom of pursuing the short-term objective of 'holding on' in South Vietnam until the New Year." (page 142)

Part of the problem with the JCS was that they were constantly bickering among themselves and failed to reach a consensus for a recommendation to the president.  "...although there was general agreement among the Chiefs that the situation in Vietnam required some action, the services possessed a 'wide variety of views' on what those actions should entail.  Differences of opinion among the Chiefs stemmed, in part, from their institutional perspectives as heads of their services.  It seemed that each of the services, rather than attempt to determine the true nature of the war and source of the insurgency in South Vietnam, assumed that it alone had the capacity to win the war.  The Air Force believed bombing North Vietnam and interdicting infiltration routes could solve the problem of insurgency in the South....The Army, whose mission would entail the introduction of ground troops, thought that the problem in South Vietnam was only partially connected with North Vietnam's support for the insurgency; it planned to pacify the countryside by means of political action and military security." (page 143)

Meanwhile, McNamara's graduated pressure seemed to offer an effective response that could be ratcheted up or down as needed, depending upon the response of the North Vietnamese to our "messages" of force.  "The ability to control events precisely - rather than what effect those operations might have on the enemy - became a principal criterion for approving operations.  As an alternative to the DESOTO patrols, Forrestal recommended to McNaughton that the United States initiate cross-border air operations into Laos.  The principle virtue of these undertakings was that they were 'controllable.'  Sharp limitations on the severity of the air strikes would allow the United States to 'give a strong impression to Hanoi that we are slowly walking up the ladder' without destroying 'a large number of the targets in massive attacks.'" (page 161)

When Lyndon Johnson took over in late 1963, a number of constraints on America's Vietnam policy emerged.  Part of these were due to Johnson's ambitious domestic policies.  The system of graduated pressure was the least military threat to Johnson's domestic agenda. Another Vietnam absurdity emerged, the belief among McNamara's team that fighting and losing in Vietnam was preferable to withdrawing from the situation.  The fundamental importance of this belief cannot be overstated.

"Because the Great Society constrained the exploration of policy options in Vietnam, the probable consequences of the favored course - the gradual application of military pressure against North Vietnam - received relatively little attention.  Indeed, those who developed plans for that strategy recognized that their proposals were unlikely to achieve the administration's stated foreign policy objective of guaranteeing the freedom and independence of South Vietnam.  Rather than explore alternative course of action, however, planners such as McNaughton and William Bundy rationalized that committing the U.S. military to a war in Vietnam and losing would be preferable to withdrawing from what they believed was an impossible situation.  They believed that if the United States demonstrated that it would use military force to support its foreign policy, its international stature would be enhanced, regardless of the outcome.  Because the civilian advisers conceived of the gradual application of force as a political, rather than a military, operation, they did not seriously evaluate its practical military consequences.  The men charged with a comprehensive examination of U.S. policy toward Vietnam were planning for failure." (emphasis added, page 180)

"...McNaughton believed that protecting American credibility was the principle objective of U.S. policy.  He argued that, in the eyes of the world, the United States was responsible for the outcome in Vietnam.  American 'international prestige' and influence were 'directly at risk.'  He told the president that 'without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable - probably not in a matter of weeks or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so.'

"Although Bundy put the odds of a favorable outcome of the war as low as twenty-five percent, he was one hundred percent certain that 'even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.'  To preserve American credibility, Bundy told the president, 'the policy of graduated and continuing reprisal' was 'the most promising course available.'

"He admitted that 'U.S. casualties would be higher - and more visible to American feelings, ' but he dismissed that expense as 'cheap' relative to the costs of withdrawal.  He and his group concluded ambiguously that 'the value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.'" (page 219)

This is where one of the greatest lies about the Vietnam War began to take root.  With the best of intentions given the various foreign and domestic constraints, McNamara's team saw war in Vietnam as a necessary evil where we were unlikely to win before the first American Marine set foot in Southeast Asia.  The American public would be told from the beginning about the war's importance. What remained unsaid was that the consensus already in the early 1960's was that the war was probably not winnable.  A "bright shining lie" was born.

By default, then, a hybrid strategy for conducting the war emerged that was not based on any truly "strategic" objectives.  "In absence of clearly defined strategic objectives, 'killing more Viet Cong,' a tactical mission, became the basis for the JCS plan and recommendations.  After their meetings with the president, the JCS set the Joint and Service Staffs to work to 'determine how we can increase the Viet Cong (VC) kill rate within the framework of our present posture in Southeast Asia.'  The JCS concluded that, with the current force levels, they might 'kill more Viet Cong' through the massive application of air power in the South.  It remained unclear, however, how the tactic of massive air strikes against an enemy who was intertwined with the noncombatant population would help to establish strategic conditions conducive to ending the war." (page 272)

"Johnson and McNamara succeeded in creating the illusion that the decision to attack North Vietnam were alternatives to war rather than war itself.  Graduated pressure defined military action as a form of communication, the object of which was to affect the enemy's calculation of interests and dissuade him from a particular activity. 

"Once the United States crossed the threshold of war against North Vietnam with covert raids and the Gulf of Tonkin 'reprisals,' the future course of events depended not only on decisions made in Washington but also on enemy responses and actions that were unpredictable.  McNamara, however, viewed the war as another business management problem that, he assumed, would ultimately succumb to his reasoned judgment and others' rational calculations.  He and his assistants thought that they could control that force with great precision from half-way around the world." (pp. 326 - 327)

"The way in which the United States went to war in the period between November 1963 and July 1965 had, not surprisingly, a profound influence on the conduct of the war and it outcome.  Because Vietnam policy decision were made based on domestic political expediency, and because the president was intent on forging a consensus position behind what he believed was a middle policy, the administration deliberately avoided clarifying its policy objectives and postponed discussing the level of force that the president was willing to commit to the effort.  Indeed, because the president was seeking domestic political consensus, members of the administration believed ambiguity in the objectives for fighting in Vietnam was a strength rather than a weakness." (page 332)

"Westmoreland's 'strategy' of attrition on South Vietnam, was, in essence, the absence of a strategy.  The result was military activity (bombing North Vietnam and killing the enemy in South Vietnam) that did not aim to achieve a clearly defined objective.  It was unclear how quantitative measures by which McNamara interpreted the success and failure of the use of military force were contributing to the end of the war." (page 333)

McNamara takes exception to this critique in his memoirs, though he admits that his strategy was misguided.  "Some critics have asserted that the United States lacked a military strategy in Vietnam.  In fact, we had one - but its assumptions were deeply flawed.  Beneath Westy's strategy lay the implicit assumption that pacification and bombing would prevent the Communists from offsetting losses inflicted by U.S. and South Vietnamese Army forces through recruitment in the South and reinforcement from the North.  That key assumption grossly underestimated the Communists' capacity to recruit in the South amid war and to reinforce from the North in the face of our air attacks.  Moreover, American military and civilian leaders assumed the U.S. and South Vietnamese military could force the Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars to slug it out on the battlefield in more or less a conventional war.  The U.S. mobility and firepower, together with bombing to choke off supplies and reinforcements from the North, would force them into a settlement.  If the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army refused to fight on our terms and reverted to hit-and-run tactics, as some believed they would, we had assumed that the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, backed by a strong pacification program, could wage effective antiguerrilla war.  And, finally, we believed that the pacification program in the South would serve as our insurance policy, keeping the insurgents from being able to find supplies and recruit fighters there.

"All of these assumptions proved incorrect.  We did not force the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army to fight on our terms.  We did not wage effective antiguerilla war against them.  And bombing did not reduce the infiltration of men and supplies into the South below required levels or weaken the North's will to continue the conflict.  

As we will see in a future post, the military would be highly critical of the "restraints" placed upon it.  For larger domestic matters and foreign policy fears, the enemy could not be attacked by US regular forces at its source of reinforcement and supply in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. "With Washington's tacit agreement, Westy fought a war of attrition, whose major objective was to locate and eliminate the Vietcong and North Vietnamese regular units.  No alternative to this 'search and destroy' strategy seemed viable, given the decision not to invade North Vietnam, with its attendant risk of triggering war with China and/or the Soviet Union (a risk we were determined to minimize) and our unwillingness to expand massively our ground operations into Laos and Cambodia." (McNamara, pp. 210-211)

Reflecting on the emergence of a "strategy" in those critical early years, McNamara admits that his perspective on Vietnam was in some ways naive, particularly after the decision was reached to base US aircraft in support of the South Vietnamese Army in 1962.  "All of us should have anticipated the need for U.S. ground forces when the first aircraft went into South Vietnam - but we did not.  The problem lay not in any attempt to deceive but rather in a signal and costly failure to foresee the implications of our actions." (McNamara, page 175)

But, when the decision to send in the Marines was actually made, the American public was on board - even though most key officials thought the war was unwinnable.  The lie worked its magic and led to ultimate tragedy.  "In the days following President Johnson's July 28, 1965, announcement, most Americans - intellectuals, members of Congress, the press, the people on the street - expressed support for his decision.  When, in late August, a Gallup Poll asked: 'Do you approve or disapprove of the way the Johnson Administration is handling the situation in Vietnam?' 57 percent approved versus 25 percent who disapproved.  This compared with 48 percent versus 28 percent two months earlier.  A Harris survey in September reported that 'the American people are nearly 70-30 behind the proposition that Vietnam should be ground on which the United States should take a stand against communism in Asia,' and it pointed out that 'a majority of the public believe that the Vietnam fighting will go on for several years." (McNamara, page 208)

For many policy makers, the flaw in McNamara's graduated pressure and the subsequent deployment of US combat troops, only became apparent with the experience of fighting the war.  McNamara admits this.  "Gen. William E. DePuy, Westmoreland's operations officer and principle planner in 1965-1968, made a...telling point in a 1988 interview, when he said: '[We] eventually learned that we could not bring [the Vietcong and North Vietnamese] to battle frequently enough to win a war of attrition....We were arrogant because we were Americans and we were soldiers or Marines and we could do it, but it turned out that it was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never closed.  It was a losing concept of operation.'

"That certainly explains part of our failure.  But the president, I, and others among his civilian advisers must share the burden of responsibility for consenting to fight a guerrilla war with conventional military tactics against a foe willing to absorb enormous casualties in a country without fundamental political stability necessary to conduct effective military and pacification operations.  It could not be done, and it was not done." (page 212) 

By default, the way the US fought the war involved a statistical analysis of how we well we were doing.  Ultimately, this statistical mindset took root to the extent that the unwinnable war seemed winnable "on paper" because we could kill so many of our adversaries.  "The body count was a measurement of the adversary's manpower losses; we undertook it because one of Westy's objectives was to reach a so-called crossover point, at which the Vietcong and North Vietnamese casualties would be greater than they could sustain.  To reach such a point, we needed to have some idea what they could sustain and what their losses were.

"In the spring of 1967, Westy concluded that the crossover point had at last been reached; the enemies numbers had stabilized and, perhaps, diminished.  The CIA, by contrast, never perceived a diminution in enemy strength.  In a May 23, 1967, report, its analysis concluded, 'Despite increasingly effective 'search and destroy' operations...Vietnamese Communists have continued to expand their Main Forces, both by infiltration and by local recruitment...It appears that the Communists can continue to sustain their overall strength during the coming year [emphasis added]." (page 238)

Interestingly, in the early years of the McNamara's war public support was so robust that left-wing opposition to the war was not as great as was the right-wing opposition to the way the war was being fought., "From early 1966 through mid-1967, public support for the administration's Vietnam policy remained surprisingly strong, despite rising U.S. causalities and increasing media scrutiny of the war.  After the Christmas Bombing Pause, polls showed about two-thirds of Americans took a middle-of-the-road position on the war.  For example, on February 28, 1966, Louis Harris reported, 'There is 'consensus' in the country today on one point about the Vietnam war: the American people long for an honorable end to hostilities, but by 2 to 1 they believe we have to stay and see it through.'  Harris also reported, however, that 'more and more the American people are becoming split between those who favor an all-out military effort to shorten the war and those who prefer negotiations to the risk of escalation. ' His conclusion: 'If there is a movement of opinion in the country it is toward seeking a military solution to what is generally regarded as a frustrating stalemate.'  Advocates of Sen. Richard Russell's 'get it over with or get out' approach appeared to be gaining popularity.

"Pressure from the left - those urging us to do less or to withdraw - would culminate in early 1968 in substantial opposition that contributed to President Johnson's decision not to seek reelection.  But that was not our major concern in 1966 and most of 1967.  The president, Dean and I worried far more about pressure from the right. Hawks charged we were forcing our military to fight with one hand tied behind its back and demanded we unleash the full weight of America's military might.  We believed, however, that a in a nuclear world an unlimited war over Vietnam posed totally unacceptable risks to the nation and, indeed, to the world.  In Dean's words, we therefore 'tried to do in cold blood what perhaps could only be done in hot blood.'" (pp. 252-253)

Robert McNamara committed several fundamental mistakes in designing how the US fought the war in Vietnam.  Some were due to misconceptions, some to unrealistic hopes, and others were mistakes of misguiding American politicians and the public.  He would regret much of the results due to his actions as Secretary of Defense and this would lead to his resignation (or his dismissal) at the end of 1967, before the pivotal moment of the war was reached. 

His later life was largely spent reflecting and coming to terms with the consequences of the policies he so forcefully advocated and implemented.  But he also contributed to a restructuring of the US military, peculiarly the army, that would serve as a icon for the military aspect of the Vietnam War, even outlasting the war and, indeed, revolutionizing the art of war itself.  That is the subject of my next meditation.