Category: US Military

Lessons of the Vietnam War

The My Lai Massacre
The My Lai Massacre

W.J. Astore

Nick Turse has a fine op-ed in the New York Times, “For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam.”  In it he argues that for Americans involved in the Vietnam War, life was very cheap indeed – Vietnamese lives, that is.  Turse has written a powerful book, “Kill Anything that Moves,” that documents the total war the United States waged on the Vietnamese people and countryside.  As Turse notes in his op-ed, American leaders like General William Westmoreland demonstrated “a profligate disregard for human life,” mainly because their strategy “was to kill as many ‘enemies’ as possible, with success measured by body count.  Often, those bodies were not enemy soldiers,” Turse concludes.

As the U.S. embraced a bloody war of attrition, Turse observes that “the United States declared wide swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside to be free-fire zones where even innocent civilians could be treated as enemy forces. Artillery shelling, intended to keep the enemy in a state of constant unease, and near unrestrained bombing slaughtered noncombatants and drove hundreds of thousands of civilians into slums and refugee camps.”

I recently came across two accounts that lend further support to Turse’s conclusion.  The first is an article written by Bernard Fall, “This Isn’t Munich, It’s Spain,” published in Ramparts in December 1965.  (My thanks to Dan White for bringing this article to my attention.)  Bernard Fall was an expert on Vietnam; among other classic books, he wrote “Hell In A Very Small Place” (about the siege of Dien Bien Phu) and “Street Without Joy.”  He was killed by a mine in Vietnam in 1967.

Writing in 1965, in the early stages of large-scale American deployment of troops, Fall noted that the war had already become “depersonalized and, to a large extent, dehumanized.”  “It is a brutal war,” Fall continued, “and already, in what may loosely be termed the ‘American period’ [of Indochinese conflict], the dead are near a quarter million, with perhaps another half million people seriously maimed.”

“A truly staggering amount of civilians are getting killed or maimed in this war,” Fall concluded, illustrating his point by recounting an air raid he had accompanied that destroyed a Vietnamese fishing village.

By later standards (massive bombing by B-52s in Arc Light attacks), the air raid Fall witnessed, consisting of A-1 Skyraiders carrying napalm and fragmentation bombs, was small.  But don’t tell that to the Vietnamese fishing village that was utterly destroyed in this “small” raid.  As Fall recounts, the village may or may not have been harboring a Viet Cong unit.  If it had been harboring a VC unit, it may have done so unwillingly, and that VC unit may have already moved along by the time the Skyraiders appeared overhead.  No matter.  The village and villagers were burnt, blown apart, and strafed.  A U.S. official report recorded that a VC rest center “had been successfully destroyed.”

Such indiscriminate attacks convinced Fall that the U.S. was not “able to see the Vietnamese as people against whom crimes can be committed.  This is the ultimate impersonalization of war.”

But even more worryingly for Fall was that “The incredible thing about Vietnam is that the worst is yet to come,” a tragically prescient statement.

And the worst might be represented by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Julian Ewell.  As the commanding general of the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam, Ewell became known as the “Butcher of the Delta.”  Douglas Kinnard, an American general serving in Vietnam under Ewell, recounted his impressions of him (in “Adventures in Two Worlds: Vietnam General and Vermont Professor”):

Ewell, recalled Kinnard, “constantly pressed his units to increase their ‘body count’ of enemy soldiers.  This had become a way of measuring the success of a unit since Vietnam was a war of attrition, not a linear war with an advancing front line.  In the 9th [infantry division] he had required all his commanders to carry 3” x 5” cards with body count tallies for their units by date, by week, and by month.  Woe unto any commander who did not have a consistently high count.”

In a war in which commanding generals rewarded American troops for generating high enemy body count and punished those “slackers” who didn’t kill enough of the enemy, small wonder that Vietnam became an American killing field and a breeding ground for atrocity.

Bernard Fall ended his powerful article on an ambiguous note.  After having talked to a lot of Americans in Vietnam, he noted he hadn’t “found anyone who seems to have a clear idea of the end – of the ‘war aims’ – and if the end is not clearly defined, are we justified to use any means to attain it?”

In Vietnam, the U.S. used immoderate means, often with wanton disregard for the lives or livelihood of the Vietnamese people, in pursuit of ill-defined ends.  Echoing Fall’s words, we pursued open-ended devastation for no clear purpose with little regard to moral responsibility.

We lost more than a war in Vietnam.  We lost our humanity.

Military Academies and American Values — Updated

Football, Yes. English, No.
Football, Yes. English, No.

W.J. Astore

Bruce Fleming, an English professor at Annapolis, has a great letter at the New York Times about the government shutdown.  Unlike West Point and the Air Force Academy, most instructors at Annapolis are civilians rather than serving military officers.  They have been furloughed because of the government shutdown, so Navy midshipmen are no longer being educated.  They’re being herded into large lecture halls by young LTs.  Lord knows what they’re learning.

The library staff is furloughed as well.  But who needs books nowadays?

But wait!  I have good news.  Even as education in subjects like English is suspended at Annapolis, the football games continue.  There was an alarming report earlier this week that this weekend’s football game might be cancelled due to the shutdown.  But lo and behold, football games were restored for all the service academies.

Here are American values clearly on display.  Football and tailgates and hoopla: essential.  Education in English: optional.

And we wonder why America is in trouble today?

Update (10/7/13): Civilian faculty returned to work today at Annapolis, so “only” one week of classes were missed. I’m just glad no football games were missed. Priorities, people!

Martial Virtue: Promise and Peril

It's unwise to worship without question the god of war (Worcester Art Museum, image of Ares)
It’s unwise to worship without question the god of war (Worcester Art Museum, image of Ares)

W.J. Astore

Ever since the attacks of 9/11/2001, the United States has actively celebrated martial virtue.  We’ve portrayed our troops as heroes.  Presidents have celebrated them as the best led and best trained and most effective military in all of human history.  To question the wisdom of such hagiographic portrayals is to be dismissed as ungenerous and un-American.  Just ask the journalist Chris Hayes.

But the hard truth is that martial virtue is consistent both with republican freedoms and with imperial or despotic agendas, to include the suppression of freedom.

History teaches us that martial virtues (such as they are) are readily enlisted or perverted to serve imperial or even fascist regimes.  Sparta celebrated military virtues even as they lived off of slavery and exposed the “weak” to death.  The Romans, in ruthlessly pursuing an empire, created deserts and called them “peace,” to quote Tacitus, one of the great historians of Rome.  Both under the Kaiser and under Hitler, Germany elevated martial virtues and waged two utterly devastating wars.

This is not to say that martial service can’t be ennobling.  Organizing and fighting for what’s right is commendable.  To cite just one example, think of the Jews who organized to resist the Nazis during World War II.  Jewish partisans fought for a cause, for freedom from murderous oppression, a fight in which they found their “treasure,” the treasure of pure acts of will.  In Hannah Arendt’s words (which she applied to the French resistance), “they had become ‘challengers,’ had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without knowing or even noticing it, had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear.”

During World War II, Jewish (and other) resisters tapped the nobility of martial service, carving out public spaces where decisions were made freely for the purpose of defeating a regime dedicated to their destruction.  Under these conditions, martial virtue upheld freedom.

Martial virtue, in other words, is not an oxymoron.

Did martial virtue help to make “the greatest generation” in America?  No.  It was the events that came before World War II, not the war itself, that “made” this generation.  My dad, born in 1917, had to endure the Great Depression, had to serve in the Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s, had to work long hours in the factory prior to the war, to support the family.  From this he learned the value of hard work and the reality that life often isn’t fair.  His service in the Army during the war was a duty he performed to the best of his ability, but it was largely what he and his generation endured before the war, and the nation they built after the war, that made them “great.”

American troops during World War II were citizen-soldiers.  Unseduced by Mars, the god of war, most of them endured the degradations of war without becoming degraded themselves.  You can’t say the same of the German Wehrmacht or the Soviet Army. 

And there’s the rub.  Martial service is also consistent with totalitarian states.  Indeed, such states take pains to celebrate the military in order to co-opt its honorable qualities for disreputable ends.  Military service loses its nobility as it is monopolized by the state in the name of furthering anti-democratic agendas.

All of this is to say that the celebration of martial virtue is powerful — and powerfully dangerous.  It may be consistent with protecting freedom, but so too may it be consistent with denying freedom.

Our nation’s founders knew this when they created a small “standing” military, placing it firmly under the control of Congress and a civilian commander-in-chief, augmented by state militias under the control of governors.  Founders like James Madison warned us of the dangers of perpetual war and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.  They were wise to do so.

And we would be wise to heed their counsel.  We would be wise not to celebrate a military setting as being uniquely suited to creating “heroes.”  And we would also be wise not to embrace martial qualities as being uniquely virtuous.

America is not exceptional when we commit to martial virtues; America is exceptional when we commit ourselves to liberty.

Three Lessons for the U.S. Military from the Falklands War

map_of_falkland-islands

W.J. Astore

In 1992 I had the pleasure of meeting Major General Julian Thompson at a colloquium at Oxford.  It was ten years after the Falklands War in 1982, and Thompson shared some of the lessons he had gleaned from fighting that war.  The inherent unpredictability of war was one such lesson.  Four months before Argentina seized the Falklands, Britain’s First Sea Lord remarked to then Brigadier General Julian Thompson that the capability to launch amphibious assaults against hostile shores was no longer needed.  Half a year later, Thompson, Commander of the 3 Commando Brigade, Royal Marines, found himself leading just such an amphibious assault halfway around the world from Great Britain.

Thompson’s job was to get the landing right the first time.  There would be no second chance; no Normandy triumph to follow the Dieppe disaster.  There were two reasons for this.  The first was halfhearted support in Britain for the war.  Most Britons thought little and cared even less about a few hundred sheep herders on the far side of the world.  The second was Britain’s lack of military resources.  As an exercise in power projection, the Falklands were at the extreme edge of British military capabilities.  It had to go right the first time because Britain had nothing left in the locker with which to recover from a major setback.

Getting it right put an enormous strain on everyone.  Despite tension and worries, Thompson knew he had to project calmness and confidence, a hearty sangfroid captured in a remark made to him by a Welsh staff officer that “You are meant to enjoy this [war], brigadier.”

“Enjoying” this splendid little war called for a particular approach to leadership, in this case agonistic.  The lack of an overriding cause put a premium on the Royal Marines’ culture of competence.  Queen and Country were not in immediate danger at the Falklands.  This was not another Battle of Britain but a war of choice, a fact that elevated the critical importance of bonding within the unit, of unit camaraderie and morale.  And morale drew sustenance from the unit’s faith in its leaders, training, and equipment.

Agonistic leaders and spirited troops gave Britain the edge in the decidedly low-tech, gutter fighting on the islands.  Leaders sought to tap Britain’s imperial heritage, summoning memories of thin red lines that had prevailed against long odds a century ago along the periphery of the empire.

The Argentines, in contrast, lacked the élan and spirit of the British.  Argentine privates were mostly poorly trained conscripts.  Strict class barriers between officers and enlisted served to degrade morale.  Experienced non-commissioned officers (NCOs), the backbone of any military unit, were rare birds in the Argentine forces compared to their hardened counterparts in Britain’s Royal Marines.

But the fatal weakness of the Argentine military was the lack of synergy among the Argentine combat branches.  It was as if the Argentine army, navy, and air force each fought its own war against the British.  Cohesive and coherent leadership was missing-in-action at the highest levels of the Argentine government.  Contrast this with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s unwavering determination to win the Falklands back for Britain, backed up by an integrated vision shared among Britain’s armed services.

Good leaders know their enemy and the terrain, but both were at first largely unknown to the British.  Thompson improvised.  He sent his G-3 (operations officer) to the local library in Plymouth to gather information on Argentine forces (Jane’s defense publications proved useful in a crunch).  Knowledge of island topography was sketchy; the last complete survey of the Falkland Islands dated from 1836.

In this uncertain environment, what proved decisive was small-group cohesion forged within the British Regimental System, a system that produced troops who were both keen to fight and adaptable to uncertain conditions.  Even so, modern troops within democratic settings need to know – at some essential level – both what is going on as well as their part in the plan.  Agonistic warriors are self-actualizing individuals, not unthinking cogs in a machine.  They fight best when they know what their bit is.

The British leaders succeeded in motivating their troops – in explaining what the war was all about.  That said, it is rarely easy contemplating going to war.  Written into a soldier’s contract is a calculated willingness to die.  Commanders, Thompson noted, have a limited license to expend human life to get a tough job done.  Aim for too low a price and failure and wasted men could be the result.  Too high a price may lead to failure and disaster.  The power over life-and-death is an enormous burden on commanders, one made heavier by the intense stresses and hazards of combat.

Many of Thompson’s observations about combat in the Falklands will be familiar to commanders in all wars.  Friction was one: Everything took longer than expected.  Rain, cold, and fatigue were aggravated by incomplete or faulty intelligence.

Luck played its part as well.  Prior to the war, Britain’s 3 Commando Brigade had just completed arctic training in Norway, hence they were well prepared for the atrocious weather and cold temperatures of the Falklands.  Bad weather kept a dangerous Argentine Air Force from attacking the amphibious landing.  And bad luck could turn to good: A security leak in Whitehall alerted the Argentines to the timing of the British landing, but the leak was so gratuitous that the Argentines judged it to be a ruse and dismissed it.

Overall, the Falklands operation might be described as an Iraq-lite.  It was a power projection operation, limited in scope, and limited as well in public and political support.  And the British got it right the first time.  They pulled off a win at long odds.

Are there lessons to be learned here for the U.S. military?  At least three.  The first is that humility is more becoming than hubris, especially in war.  The British military didn’t boast much after the Falklands.  Yet after two long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both stalemates, America’s leaders continue to boast that the U.S. has, in the words of President Obama in August 2013, “the best-led, best-trained, best-equipped military in human history.”

A second lesson is the importance of inculcating a culture of competence and agonistic leadership at senior levels.  U.S. military and civilian leaders need to do a better job of explaining why we fight to American troops.  And if that is too tall of an order, these same leaders ought to recognize that a war that cannot be explained is one that should not be fought.

Finally, the entire Falklands campaign illustrates the inherent unpredictability of war.  But clarity was provided by a clear and achievable goal: evicting Argentine forces from the islands.  Clear national objectives are everything in war; that, and sound leadership of skilled troops.  America’s recent extended wars, by way of contrast, have largely lacked clear or achievable objectives.

Clearly “no picnic,” as Thompson’s book on the campaign is titled, the Falklands still have much to teach us about military accountability and war.

America’s Ascetic Warrior-Generals

Irony of ironies: The "ascetic" Petraeus bonded with Broadwell as they ran six-minute miles
Irony of ironies: The “ascetic” Petraeus bonded with Broadwell as they ran six-minute miles

W.J. Astore

A recent article in the New York Times about how General (Ret.) David Petraeus is being honored by the New York Historical Society featured a word often used to describe Petraeus as well as another retired U.S. general fallen on hard times, Stanley McChrystal.  The word is “ascetic.”  The American media loved to hype the ascetic nature of both these men: their leanness, the number of miles they ran or push-ups they did, how hard they worked, how few hours of sleep they required, and so on.  Somehow “ascetic” became associated with superlative leadership and sweeping strategic vision, as if eating sparse meals or running ten miles in an hour is the stuff of a winning general.

Of prospective generals Napoleon used to ask, “Is he lucky?”  In other words, does he find ways to win in spite of the odds?  It seems our media identifies a winning general by how many chin-ups and sit-ups he can perform, or how few calories he needs in a day.

The whole ascetic ideal is not a citizen-soldier concept.  It’s a Spartan or Prussian conceit.  And it’s fascinating to me how generals like Petraeus and McChrystal were essentially anointed as ascetic warrior-priests by the U.S. media.  So much so that in 2007 the Bush Administration took to hiding behind the beribboned and apparently besmirchless chest of Petraeus.

Of course, both Petraeus and McChrystal bought their own media hype, each imploding in his own way, but both manifesting a lack of discipline that gave the lie to the highly disciplined “ascetic” image of the warrior-priest.

And of course both are now being rehabilitated by the powers-that-be, a process that says much about our imperial moment.

Something tells me we’d be better off with a few plain-speaking, un-hyped, citizen-soldier types like Ulysses S. Grant rather than the over-hyped “ascetic warriors” of today.  Or as a friend of mine put it, “I’d prefer a little fat at the gut to lots of fat above the ears.”

“American Fascism”: Accurate or Misleading?

Has an Iron Heel already come to the USA?
Is it already here in the USA?

A recent article by John Pilger in the British Guardian speaks of a silent military coup that has effectively gained control of American policymaking. It features the following alarmist passage:

In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration … The historian Norman Pollack calls this “liberal fascism”: “For goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.” Every Tuesday the “humanitarian” Obama personally oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that “bugsplat” people, their rescuers and mourners. In the west’s comfort zones, the first black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood. This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war movement — Obama’s singular achievement.

Strong words. Is America the land of “liberal fascism”?

Certainly, since the attacks of 9/11 the U.S. has become more authoritarian, more militarized, and less free (witness the Patriot Act, NSA spying, and the assassination of American citizens overseas by drones). The U.S. Supreme Court has empowered corporations and the government at the expense of individual citizens. Powerful banks and corporations reap the benefits of American productivity and of special tax breaks and incentives available only to them, even as average American citizens struggle desperately to keep their heads above water.

But to describe this as “fascism” is misleading. It’s also debilitating and demoralizing.

It’s misleading because fascism has a specific historical meaning. The best definition I’ve seen is from the historian Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism

For Paxton, fascism is:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In formulating this definition, Paxton had Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in mind, but his definition is an excellent starting point in thinking about fascism.

What about it? Is the U.S. fascistic? Plainly, no. We don’t have a messiah-like dictator. Our justice system still works, however imperfectly. Our votes still count, even if our political speech often gets drowned out by moneyed interests.

It’s true that, in the name of “support our troops,” we grant the Pentagon brass and defense contractors too much leeway, and allow our Department of Defense to seek “global power” without reflecting that such ambitions are the stuff of totalitarian states. But let’s also recall that our troops (as well as our representatives) still swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a dictator or party.

It’s also true that, as a society, we are too violent, too attracted to violence (think of our TV/Cable shows, our video games, and our sports), and too willing to relinquish individual liberties in the name of protecting us from that violence and the fear generated by it. Yet Americans are also increasingly weary and skeptical of the use of military force, as recent events involving Syria have shown.

The point is not to despair, not to surrender to the demoralizing idea that American politics is an exercise in liberal fascism. No — the point is to exercise our rights, because that is the best way to retain them.

Authority always wants more authority. But as political actors, we deny by our actions the very idea of fascism. For in fascist societies, people are merely subjects, merely tools, in the service of the state.

Don’t be a tool. Be an actor. Speak up. Get involved. Work to make your imperfect republic a little more representative of the better angels of our nature. Because it’ll be your deeds that keep our country from falling prey to fear and violence and the authoritarian mindset they breed.

Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.  This article is also at Huffington Post.

Wars Are Not Won by the Suppression of Truth

Shock and awe, and awesomely deadly
Shock and awe, and awesomely deadly

W.J. Astore

The American way of war has often relied on massive firepower as a way to reduce American troop casualties.  This was true of World War II and Korea, which were conventional “big battalion” wars, and it was also true of Vietnam, which was an unconventional war involving much smaller units.  The problem in Vietnam was the wanton use of firepower, to include napalm and Agent Orange as well as traditional bombs and artillery shells, which devastated the countryside and destroyed the lives of so many innocent Vietnamese.  The horror of this approach to war was recently captured in Nick Turse’s bestseller, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, the American government was at pains to deny that massive firepower was being misused, even when that criticism came from within the ranks.  This lesson was brought home to me while reading Douglas Kinnard’s Adventures in Two Worlds: Vietnam General and Vermont Professor, in which he looks back on his earlier book about Vietnam, The War Managers.  Upon publishing The War Managers in the mid-1970s, Kinnard says in Adventures (127-28) that he received the following note from an informed reader:

“Another [note received] from a colonel who had had two tours of duty in Vietnam and had tried in 1969 to publish an article criticizing the tactical conduct of the war, especially the overuse of fire power.  Indeed, any of us who were connected with the use of fire power knew it was overused, and certainly this was true in 1969.  The publication of his article in The Military Review was turned down not by the journal itself but by the office of the Secretary of Defense.  Let me point out that the turndown was not a rejection based on international policy or strategic implications.  ‘Colonel X’s article has been reviewed by this office and is returned without clearance on the basis of policy objections.  The main thrust of the article is in conflict with the announced policies of reducing US casualties and of Vietnamization of the War.  Publication of an article of this nature is also considered detrimental to the national interest in that it erroneously lends validity to charges of catastrophic death and destruction in the Republic of Vietnam.’ Signed, Roger Delaney, Deputy Director of Security Review.  The article, by the way, was a very interesting and informative one.  The turndown is incredible, but it is part of the history of the War.” [emphasis added]

It’s fascinating how the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) acted to suppress internal criticism within the U.S. Army itself that was aimed at curbing excessive firepower and its devastating impact on South Vietnam, which was after all our ally in that war.

Three factors seem to have driven OSD’s decision:

1.  Firepower (the more, the better) was linked to reducing U.S. casualties, thus making an unpopular war more palatable to Americans.

2.  Firepower (the more, the better) was used as a prop to Vietnamization, i.e. a crutch for ARVN (the South Vietnamese Army) in the field.  When ARVN didn’t perform well, massive firepower came to the rescue, which served to mask the inadequacies of Vietnamization.

3.  Even with this massive firepower, you as an American soldier were not allowed to say that it was causing widespread death and destruction, leading to the loss of the very hearts and minds that we claimed we were trying to win.  In other words, you had to deny logic as well as the evidence of your own eyes.

There’s a famous paradoxical saying about the Vietnam War: Americans had to destroy the Vietnamese village to save it.  What General Kinnard’s anecdote makes clear is that by 1969 you weren’t even allowed to say that you were destroying the village even as you burned it, since such acts so obviously contradicted the announced policy of Vietnamization as well as the idea of pursuing “peace with honor.”

But how can there be honor when honest efforts by American troops to critique deeply flawed and immoral tactics are suppressed in the name of political expediency?

An Open Letter to Congress on Syria

Quicker, easier, more seductive -- and wrong
Quicker, easier, more seductive — and wrong

Here is the letter that I sent to my senators and congressman on Syria. Whether you agree or disagree, I urge you to email or call your representatives. Let them hear your voice!

I implore you to vote “no” on military intervention in Syria. No vital U.S. interest is at stake, and an attack will have unforeseen consequences that are nearly impossible to predict. The proper response to the Assad regime’s use of poison gas is not more killing. I don’t want American cruise missiles slamming into Syrian bodies in my name. Neither should you.

Respectfully yours,

William Astore, professor and retired lieutenant colonel (USAF)

Astore may be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.

Also featured at Huffington Post.

Syria (Maybe) Used Chemical Weapons — And the U.S. Sits in Judgment?

Nick Ut's famous photo of children fleeing napalm in Vietnam (NPR)
Nick Ut’s famous photo of children fleeing napalm in Vietnam (NPR)

W.J. Astore

The Obama administration’s outrage over the possible use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government smacks of hypocrisy.  We might recall that the U.S. refuses to become a signatory to a ban on cluster munitions, which are particularly dangerous to civilians and children in the days and weeks following their deployment.  Or that the U.S. remains by far the leading weapons dealer in the world today, accounting for more than half of the world’s trade in arms.  Or that the U.S. has been profligate in its use of firepower (including depleted uranium shells) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given these facts, and especially the profits we make from dominating the world’s arms trade, there is something quite morally obtuse about our nation’s posturing about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria as a cause for war.

The outrage against chemical weapons stems from World War I, when western nations were at pains to kill or wound one another by chlorine gas, mustard gas, phosgene gas, and similar chemical agents.  More than a million casualties of World War I were chemical casualties.  Western nations who had found plenty of excuses to gas each other during the war came together after the war to ban them.  And rightly so.

But then again, why not ban all chemical weapons?  Just think of the massive quantities of napalm (chemical incendiary), Agent Orange (chemical defoliant), and high explosive (yes, more deadly chemicals) we rained down on the Vietnamese in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Heck, bullets are propelled by a chemical reaction.  Let’s ban all these too.

And if we do that, then maybe, just maybe, our nation will have the moral authority to act outraged in cases like that of Syria today.

In Praise of Douglas Kinnard, A Truth-telling General of the Vietnam War

My Copy of "The War Managers"
My Copy of “The War Managers”

W.J. Astore

The death on July 29 of retired Army general and professor Douglas Kinnard at the age of 91 reminded me of the vital quality of integrity and truth-telling, especially in life-and-death military settings.  A fast-rising general who became critical of America’s path in Indochina in the late 1960s, Kinnard retired from the military and wrote The War Managers (1977), a probing and fascinating survey of what he and his fellow general officers thought about the Vietnam War and America’s efforts to win it.

The general officers who answered Kinnard’s survey in The War Managers give the lie to the so-called Rambo myth, the idea that the American military could and should have won the Vietnam War, but were prevented from doing so by meddling civilians, mendacious media, and malicious hippie war resisters.

The survey results bear this out.  For example, Kinnard notes that “almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives.” (25)  One general wrote that “Objectives lost meaning and were modified to justify events.”  Another wrote that “The U.S. was committed to a military solution, without a firm military objective–the policy was attrition–killing VC–this offered no solution–it was senseless.”

Along with unclear or swiftly changing objectives, the Army employed large units and massive firepower that tore up the land and produced millions of casualties.  This “search and destroy” approach of General William Westmoreland was termed “not sound” by one-third of the generals surveyed, with a further quarter saying it was “sound when first implemented–not later.”

Kinnard himself had direct experience with the Army’s reliance on costly and counterproductive firepower, specifically harassment and interdiction (H and I) by artillery.  In a note on page 47, he writes:

“In May 1969 I returned to Vietnam as Commanding General of II Field Force Artillery.  On my second day in the country I asked to have the intelligence targets plotted on my map.  Afterward, I asked to see the person who selected the targets, together with the data on which he based his selections.  A 1st Lieutenant appeared with a coordinate square; inspecting a map, he selected, at random, points in the areas where nighttime firing was authorized, and then measured off the coordinates for firing.  This had been the method of choosing intelligence targets in that zone for the preceding several months.”

In other words, U.S. forces were firing blindly into the jungle.

Most seriously of all, a ticket-punching culture in which officers rotated in and out of command every six months,* together with pressure from the top to inflate “body count” of the enemy, led to severe erosion of integrity in the U.S. Army.  Nearly two-thirds of the generals admitted that enemy body count was “often inflated,” with the following comments made by individual generals:

“The immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army.”

“I shudder to think how many of our soldiers were killed on a body-counting mission–what a waste.”

“I had one Division Commander whose reports I never believed or trusted.”

“Many commanders resorted to false reports to prevent their own relief.” (All quotes on page 75)

Along with inflated and dishonest body counts that compromised integrity was the failure to admit that Vietnamization was fatally flawed.  As Kinnard put it, “How could an army or a government so grossly corrupt [as those of South Vietnam], even in a country where corruption is expected, summon the enthusiastic support of its soldiers or its people?  There was no way to do so, as successive American advisers [to South Vietnam] discovered.” (84)

Several generals noted that the heavy-handed, can-do-right-now, approach of the American military to Vietnamization was fundamentally at odds with Vietnamese culture.  Two quotations illustrate this point:

“We erroneously tried to impose the American system on a people who didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it and may lose because they tried it.” (Written before the fall of Saigon in April 1975.)

“In this, as in all our foreign wars, we never really established rapport [with the Vietnamese].  This was largely due to our overinflated hypnosis with the myth that the American way–in economics, politics, sociology, manners, morals, military equipment, methodology, organization, tactics, etc.–is automatically and unchallengeably the best (really the only) way to do things.  This failure may well be the area of greatest weakness for the future of American arms.” (92)

As President Obama and his advisers meet today to discuss Syria, they should keep that lesson in mind, as well as Kinnard’s reminder that clear objectives are vital to the success of any military operation.  Even better, they should all be required to read (and re-read) Kinnard’s book, and to reflect on his wisdom.

Let’s leave the last word to Kinnard.  Before committing American forces to combat in the future, Kinnard wrote that “The situation itself must be one in which American interests are clearly at stake in a way that can be made understandable to the public … An important corollary is the need for truthfulness in dealing with the public.  From the president all the way to the field units, the practice of letting the facts speak for themselves is the best hope.  In the Vietnam War there was too much tricky optimism from LBJ [President Johnson] on down.  Furthermore, there was too much concealing of the implications of half-announced decisions.” (166-67)

Unclear objectives, compromised integrity, indiscriminate firepower, cultural blindness, “tricky” optimism, concealing the realities of the war from the American people: all of these reasons, and more, contributed to the disaster of Vietnam.  The sad truth is that we still haven’t fully learned the lessons of Kinnard’s honest, no-holds-barred, after action report that is “The War Managers.”

W.J. Astore

*With respect to ticket-punching and command rotation, Kinnard recalled that “Those of us who had our own command positions in Vietnam were required to attend changes of command ceremonies for others almost weekly.  In time, this became about as interesting as attending the baptism of an infant of distant friends.” (111)