This observation is worth keeping in mind as you consider how we got so deep into Vietnam:

Neither of them had the kind of feeling that it was politically okay for him to simply tell the generals what they ought to do, that for different reasons, both General Eisenhower, because he had more stars than they did, and Mr. Truman, because he just didn't give a damn, really did have. I've exaggerated in both cases, but still on balance, Truman and Eisenhower, and indeed FDR, had more self-confidence in dealing with their senior military advisors than either Kennedy or Johnson did." (From pp. II, 4-5, McGeorge Bundy Oral History, Interview II, 17 February 1969, LBJ Library.)   

Hey, speaking of bygone aides of rotten White Houses: How did Bill Moyers manage to go from being LBJ's spokesman to being the moral arbiter of American journalism? Pretty good maneuvering there, considering he was the mouthpiece for the man who was the most damaging president we had in recent decades, at least until George W. Bush. The jury is still out whether the younger Texan's choice of a poorly run war and fiscal mayhem ultimately will outweigh the older Texan's choice of same. I wonder if Karl Rove will have a PBS series in 20 years. ...

Idea for file: What say we put a constitutional moratorium on Lone Star presidents, kind of like a penalty box in hockey? (And no, I don't consider Eisenhower a Texan, even though he was born there. Plus, he kept us out of a war in Vietnam.) I'm usually against constitutional amendments, but I might sign up for this one. 

Fred Kaplan is one of the more interesting defense writers around, taking a broad approach. Here, by the way, is his review of Robert Dallek's new book on Kennedy.

And here are two of his e-mails to me in response to my Friday post about how I had come to think Kennedy was a terrible president. I disagree with what he says here, but I think it is worth considering.

By Fred Kaplan
Best Defense department of defending JFK

[E-mail 1:]

Just to state a few points on the question of whether JFK was a terrible president:

(1) Yes, he listened to Taylor and other hawks early on, but the Cuban missile crisis, which you glide over, was a turning point. The real significance (which I've gleaned from a close examination of the tapes) is that, quite early on (the 4th day), JFK was looking for how to give Khrushchev a face-saving way out; that when Khrushchev offered the secret trade (his Cuban missiles for our Turkish ones), JFK wanted to take it right away, while everyone -- and I mean everyone around the table (except, significantly, George Ball) -- was adamantly opposed. I think that the crisis taught him that all those smart experts sitting around the table weren't any smarter than he was. (He was beginning to see this point during the Laos crisis, when his generals behaved like bureaucrats -- the Army wanted to invade, the Air Force wanted to send B52s, the Navy wanted to send carrier groups.) Another key thing: JFK told six people that he was taking the deal and swore them to secrecy. Among the people he did not tell was LBJ. This was a critical mistake, as it left intact a false lesson of the crisis, which JFK's successors (including LBJ) applied to Vietnam. (McGeorge Bundy concedes this point in his memoir.)

Read on

Somewhere in Supreme Command, supreme strategist Eliot Cohen discusses the importance when formulating strategy of surfacing differences rather than papering them over, which is the general impulse in Washington.

I thought of that when I read this comment in an oral history given by Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the awful general and, during the 1950s, one of Cohen's predecessors as counselor to the State Department:

... the president [Eisenhower] and I went over to Mr. Dulles and the president said he wanted me to coordinate the policy plans and policy for the meeting. He said, 'Doug, there's one thing I won't have.' He said, 'I know your bureaucratic language where there are differences, you smother those differences with general language, and then every department goes its own separate way.' He said, 'That's the sure road to disaster.' He said, 'I want, when there are disagreements, I want first to find out if the two secretaries or three secretaries, if Treasury is involved or somebody else, can iron out their difficulties. If they can't I want those issues brought with clear, separate and distinct positions that differ to me. And then I will decide what our position is going to be.' He said, 'The last thing in the world that we can afford is that wonderful bureaucratic language that you guys are so great at inventing where it's nice and general and it means everything to all people and each one goes his separate way.' He said, 'That's no way to go.'

(P. 42, Douglas MacArthur II oral history, Eisenhower Library)

The more I learn about Eisenhower as president, the more impressed I am.

By coincidence, in my research for my current book, I've also been reading, because it gets into George C. Marshall's handling of generals, Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive. Drucker hits a similar theme and develops it further. Not only is it important to surface dissent, a decision should not be made if there is no dissent, because real decisions by their very nature are difficult and contentious. Moreover, he says, imagination is needed to make good decisions. And the way to tap the imagination, he says, "is argued, disciplined disagreement." (P. 153 of my edition)  

What if they gave a war and nobody came? We are learning the answer to that old question, and it ain't what the flower children thought.

In other UAV news, I see where an F-18 made a UAV-like landing on the USS Eisenhower. There was a pilot in the plane but he kept his hands off the controls. Look ma!

By Joseph Trevithick
Best Defense department of robotic military history

The arming of drones really hits at a number of disparate issues. The U.S. Navy had actually fielded a rotary wing anti-submarine warfare drone in the 1960s that could attack targets with torpedoes. Under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA; what is now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA) a small number of these drones were fitted with machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, rockets, and other weapons, and used experimentally during the conflict in Vietnam. The results of these tests were generally favorable, but went nowhere. The Navy ceased operating the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter (DASH), designated the QH-50, in 1970. Japan also used the QH-50 in the anti-submarine warfare role.

Read on

Here's a great anecdote I hadn't heard before, from a recent FPRI talk by Josiah Bunting III:

…Henry "Hap" Arnold, the chief of the Air Corps in World War II, was decorating workers at a B-29 factory in Wichita in 1943, and the foreman introduced a woman in her 70s, saying, "This is our best worker." The woman was Helen Longstreet, widow of the Civil War soldier James Longstreet. He had lived a long life and married a young woman.

Indeed, I believe his widow did not pass until 1962.

I've just finished reading an advance copy of Lewis Sorley's biography of General William Westmoreland, which will be published later this year. It is terrific, and surprisingly interesting. I found it a lively, brisk read, despite Westy having been in many ways a dull man.

The tension that drives the book comes from the author's continuing astonishment at his subject: How could this deeply flawed, limited man rise so high in the U.S. Army? Westmoreland was an ambitious, energetic but incurious man, one who looked more like a general than thought like one. In many ways he was a stupid man.

The stunning chapter titled "Atmospherics," about how Westy lived and operated in Vietnam, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

I expect this will be the definitive book on Westmoreland, and a must read for anyone who tries to understand the Vietnam War.

From the diary entry of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for Oct. 18, 1951:

"In 1941 our peacetime navy took a terrible blow on the first day of the war, but the navy built after the war started did a great job in both oceans, particularly against Japan, where it really, with air force help, won the war. And this does not ignore the work of the great divisions that won and held the bases from which air attacks were made."

(P. 202, The Eisenhower Diaries, edited by Robert Ferrell.)

You have got to wonder just how much Ike despised MacArthur, who is shoved into the backseat here. I think a whole lot, but I have never actually seen it stated by him, even in a diary or private note. I suspect that Mac's quiet campaign for president in 1951-52 is what finally drove Ike to run.

Here's the penultimate excerpt from the papers and sayings of General DePuy. Again, I have read thousands of pages about this stuff and observed military operations in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as training at Fort Benning, Fort Hood, Fort Polk, Fort Irwin, and Camp Lejeune, and I have never seen it put this succinctly.

When I commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, we received hundreds of lieutenants from Fort Benning and OCS, and I have to tell you that almost without exception -- this was in 1966 or 1967 -- these platoon leaders would, if not otherwise instructed, almost automatically proceed in a column and deploy into a line when the first shots were fired and assault into the enemy position as a sort of puberty rite, a test of manhood.

Instead, a platoon leader should always think of the leading element as being on a reconnaissance mission for the company commander and the battalion commander so he's out there to find out where the enemy is, try to figure out the enemy strength so that the company and battalion commanders can make decisions. That's the professional way to fight a war.

(P. 458, Selected Papers of General William E. DePuy)

One of the things that I like about reading the papers of Gen. William DePuy (link) is that he sheds new light on familiar subjects. Few debates are as long-running in the U.S. military as to whether to place more emphasis on firepower (the dominant view) or maneuver (the fashionable minority view).

DePuy argued in 1990 that it is a false dilemma. Rather, he says, maneuver is something you fight for:

People talk a lot about attrition versus maneuver. This is not an intellectual choice. The same generals who so brilliantly dashed across France were suddenly forced back into conducting attrition warfare. Nobody doubts that General George Patton preferred maneuver, but maneuver warfare is not a doctrinal choice; it is an earned benefit.

The efforts to break through and obtain operational maneuver in the Fall of 1944 at Arnhem, with the great air-ground operation called Market Garden, failed; the attacks through Huertgen and Aachen were bloody and indecisive, and the attack by the Third Army across the Saar bogged down.

In a last operational effort in the middle of December -- three months later -- the German Army once more sought freedom of maneuver through the Ardennes.

(My italics. P. 452, Selected Papers of General William E. DePuy)

It is not all it is cracked up to be, Gen. Donn Starry (U.S. Army, ret.) warns in his oral history. "As a matter of fact, brigadier generals get treated with much less respect and so on than second lieutenants do in many places. I got much better treatment as a second lieutenant, in many instances, than I did as a brigadier general."(P. 1103, Press On! Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry, Vol. 2, Lewis Sorley, ed.) 

Of course, when Starry was a lieutenant, he served in a tank battalion commanded by a lieutenant colonel and war hero named Creighton Abrams and his company commander was one George S. Patton III.   

Anyway, Starry's observation reminded me of an exchange I had with a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff back during the Bosnia crises. I asked a question, and the general said, "Oh, I don't think anyone in a responsible position thinks that."

"Actually," I said, "it was just said to me by an Army brigadier general I ran into walking over here to your office."

"Well," he shrugged, "if you're going to listen to every brigadier in the hallway..."   

A plea to book cover designers: Could we not put a helicopter on the cover of every single book? It is getting boring. I mean, I don't recall transport helicopters playing much of a role in Fields of Fire, or in Marine operations generally -- but here you are.

This is no knock on the books themselves. One of my favorites, The American Culture of War, by Adrian Lewis, features no fewer than 15 helicopters on its cover. Maybe that's why that book is so damn expensive.  

While I'm on the subject of Vietnam books: Why are there so many oral histories of the Vietnam War, in which veterans and others tell the story of what they saw and did? I counted at least 15 at a Marine library the other day. I suspect it is because we are still trying to understand that damn war.

And while I'm bellyaching about the Vietnam War: It is amazing to me how naïve academic historians often seem to be about government memos. I've been reading a bunch of books that I have come to think of as "memo histories." Basically, these claim to offer new insight into the Vietnam War by some poor guy who has waded through thousands of pages of memoranda, reports, and other government documents. Generally these hard-working but perhaps innocent historians accept these documents at face value, as accurate and true records. But in my experience of covering the national security establishment for two decades, memos sometimes are written not to clarify the record but to obscure it. A lot of them are written for the files to show future historians that, "I lost in the meeting but will record here why I still think I was right." Sometimes I think they are produced also to revise what actually was said in meetings-sort of to "correct the record."

Government memos frequently are most significant, I suspect, for what is said between the lines, as part of bureaucratic infighting. For example, a Pentagon memo that emphatically states, "We pledge to give our total, unqualified support to State Department points 1 and 3" might mean, But we will fight you to the death on point 2. But that seems to be lost on the revisionist academic historian who triumphantly concludes, "Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the secretaries of State and Defense were in bitter opposition on this important issue, the documentary record shows that the Pentagon gave its 'total, unqualified support' to most of the Secretary of State's proposals." Likewise, when Westmoreland states that he really supports "pacification," he may not be defining pacification as you or I might. As in, Them B-52 Arc Light strikes sure pacified the hell out of that corner of the southwestern corner of the province. 

And to finish off my current pet peeves: I am amazed at how often "Ridgway" and "DePuy" are misspelled in books, even in indexes. It is not "Ridgeway," "William Depuy," or "William Dupuy." My book researcher, Mr. Gregory McGowan, the Big Poppy of documents, even found an instance where the Government Printing Office apparently confused Gen. William DePuy with Col. Trevor Dupuy, who confusingly testified in the same set of December 1990 hearings of the House Armed Services Committee.

While I'm at it, I also think baseball writers need to lay off the word "iconic."

Now I feel better.

This note was posted over the weekend by Hal Barker of the Korean War Project in the discussion of Friday's post about Army War College papers.

I was particularly interested in it because until last year, I knew almost nothing about the Korean War. I now wonder if it eventually will be seen as more historically significant than the Vietnam War. It was the first hot conflict of the Cold War. It was the emergence of Communist China as a major power. It introduced us to limited war in the nuclear era.

CMH has a substantial series of After Action Reports and monographs, but no mandate to digitize these records. Same with Carlisle Barracks. Korean War records are scattered at many government locations. Researching the Korean War has formidable obstacles.

At the Korean War Project, we recently obtained a set of Marine Corps digital records in a proprietary format created in 1999 but almost unusable for research. We now have over 30,000 pages of those Marine records converted to PDF and will have them online next week. As part of this work, we discovered after the Marine Corps digitized the records, they sent the files to NARA. Through a bureaucratic error, the Marine records were reclassified and cannot be accessed by the public to this day, many years later.

Recently, DOD started a multi-million dollar research project to digitize Korean War Command Reports and Unit Histories. Over 100,000 pages of these records are digitized but have been declared off limits under FOIA under an arcane and unsupportable interpretation of the "Agency Records" case law. Many government agencies consider public records as private property, and use a FOIA denial to create a brick wall requiring a federal court battle to obtain simple public records available at NARA for a quarter a page.

On the good side, we recently obtained access to 30 boxes of Korean War Second Infantry Division records independently obtained in paper form by a veterans group. When these records are digitized, it will be the first time the most blooded Division from Korea will have records online for intense research free of charge.

Who would have thought DOD would deny access to digital Korean War records? This is one of the many reasons why Korea has often been called the Forgotten War.

Gen. DePuy argued that the most sophisticated military organization was the rifle squad, because it existed only as an idea:

Why is that? It is because unlike a bomber crew, they don't have a bomber, unlike a tank crew, they don't have a tank; unlike a howitzer crew, they don't have a cannon; and unlike the radio section, they haven't got the VH radio vans.

What have they got? Well, they have got an idea and so a rifle squad consists of a kind of an agreement, a common understanding by a bunch of limited guys about how they are going to go about their business.

So what we have is an intellectual exercise being performed by non-intellectuals. So we have got to help them. We have got to make it a simple, clear system that doesn't require each member of the squad or the fire team leaders to be eloquent because they are not.

(From "Briefing by LTG DePuy, 7 June 1973, at Fort Polk, Louisiana," p. 61, Selected Papers of General William E. DePuy)

I was a year early on predicting that Ryan Crocker would become next U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, according to uber-reporter Karen DeYoung. I think he is terrific, so it's a good move, and quite a sacrifice on his part, given his 11 previous tours of duty: He has done time in Iran, Qatar, Tunisia, Iraq (twice), Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He also went to high school in Turkey, where his pop was serving in the Air Force. In 1983, when many of the little grasshoppers were not yet born, he was in the American embassy in Beirut when it was blown up.

Old Crocker's return to Kabul does make me think about something young Exum has pointed out, which is that we haven't figured out in American counterinsurgency what the U.S. government relationship with the host government is supposed to be. I think Crocker has a better handle on this than most.

I was thinking about this on a recent weekend when I re-read Robert Komer's fascinating autopsy of what went wrong during the Vietnam War, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing. If you are a steady reader of this blog, you've probably already read it. If not, you'll learn a lot from it -- plus it is free, just click on it and print it out. It is still one of the best studies of Vietnam going.

Komer was the veteran CIA officer who oversaw pacification and the controversial Phoenix program in Vietnam, seeking to either capture or kill Viet Cong leaders in the villages. After the war, Viet Cong officials disclosed that Phoenix had been extremely effective in attacking their control of rural areas. (Also, because main force Communist units laid low after taking a beating in the 1968 offensives, U.S. forces were freed to do more small unit patrolling, which added to the pressure on VC in the villages.) Stylistic bonus point: The straightforwardness of Komer's prose reminds me of the fine memoirs of U.S. Grant.  

Anyway, reading Komer's comments about his frustrations with the government of South Vietnam made me think there is a great but difficult dissertation to be done detailing and comparing U.S. relations with host governments during four wars: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I wonder if the more divided, both politically and organizationally, the U.S. government is, then the more difficult relations are with the local government. My hypothesis is that the more divided, both politically and organizationally, the U.S. government is, then the more difficult relations are with the local government. (This is different from the nation being divided. For example, when Vietnamese President Diem was whacked, the Vietnam War was not yet particularly unpopular, but Kennedy Administration officials differed sharply with U.S. military officers in Saigon about whether to back the coup against Diem.)

Or maybe this could be an Army War College seminar -- bring in Allan Millett on the government of South Korea during the war there; someone good on Vietnam; Emma Sky and Sadi Othman on relations between the U.S. and the Iraqi government; and someone else, maybe David Barno and Vikram Singh, on the U.S.-Karzai relationship. And after each panel, invite commentary from Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Afghans who worked with (or, in the earlier wars, opposed) the Americans.

There is lots to explore here. For example, I was struck in a recent conversation when someone referred to good relations with the host government as the sine qua non of COIN. Au contraire, I responded: "Actually, the U.S. started making progress strategically in Iraq when it summoned the nerve to cross the Maliki government and started cutting deals with Maliki's foes in the Sunni insurgency." You have to be tough-minded with the enemy, but perhaps even tougher with your allies.

Komer also is surprisingly complimentary of the analyses done by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, saying they often had a better handle on the war than did MACV in Saigon. "OSD/SA's Southeast Asia Analysis Report, produced monthly or bimonthly since 1967, provides in the author's judgment by far the best running analytical account (unfortunately still classified) of the course of the war." (p. 71) I believe the reports to which he refers are no longer classified, so it may be time to do a tasty dissertation on them. It might cheekily be called, "No, actually it was McNamara's aides who were right." The quality of those analyses is reflected in the book by one of the aides, Thomas Thayer, that I've mentioned on this blog. There also is probably a good article or dissertation in just looking at Thayer's papers.