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Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Thursday, February 9, 2012 - 6:05 AM
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By Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, US Army, Retired
Best Defense department of Vietnam War studies
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller
This is a sequel to my Reflections on Vietnam 1963-64: Trying to talk to Gen. Westmoreland about COIN, posted January 6, 2011. It is taken from an oral history now in progress.
Returning home from Vietnam in April 1964 I believed that I understood that situation. I had brought back copies of the flip charts that my deputy senior advisor Bob Montague had built to brief visitors to the 21st ARVN Infantry Division headquarters at Bac Lieu and to our Advisory Team 51. They described in detail the oil spot pacification scheme that the division with our help had developed and employed.
While waiting to attend the National War College, I used those charts to brief people at OSD and the CIA. I went up to West Point and briefed the cadets. I briefed at Forts Benning and Bragg.
I briefed LTG Harold K. Johnson, the Army DCSOPS. For about an hour I told him our story. At the end he said, "You know what we have to do to solve this problem in Vietnam? We have to build a command post down in the basement of the Pentagon where we can plot every platoon and every company and plot out the Vietnam situation in detail." I said, "General, even at the 21st Division we didn't keep that kind of detail. I don't see how you can keep that kind of detail in the Pentagon." He said, "That's what McNamara requires."
This was May 1964. If General Johnson had been perceptive he would have said to me. "You have just described the strategy for success in Vietnam's countryside." He would have bought the concept right then. He would have had me briefing everywhere. He did not. Eighteen months later he sponsored a massive study called PROVN which said essentially the same thing that I had been saying.[1]
He missed a huge opportunity. We had the essentials of PROVN in April 1964.
When I got to the National War College that August with ideas on Vietnam, the Vietnamese government was in upheaval. There had been a series of coups. Things were deteriorating in the countryside. Battalions of the ARVN were being ambushed and beat up by main force Viet Cong. It got so bad there was talk of committing U.S. combat forces. It was election season. Barry Goldwater was President Johnson's opponent. That fall LBJ would not mention the possibility of sending combat forces into Vietnam.
As a student my message was, "The countryside is no place for American troops. They will only tear it up. They won't be able to tell friend from foe." I believed that pacification was the answer and that with U.S. advice and assistance Vietnamese troops could deal with the Viet Cong.
In my view there were two problems in Vietnam; one, the instability in the countryside, and two, the reinforcements being received by the Viet Cong from outside South Vietnam. I believed that I had found the solution to pacifying the countryside. I began to study the problem of infiltration.
Some supplies were coming through Cambodia. A small amount came in over the beaches. But most reinforcements and materiel were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and entering through the South Vietnam's northern provinces. I thought that the best use of American resources would be to block the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Each student was required to write an individual research paper. I began to consider historical examples of counterinsurgency. An office at the Pentagon was keeping a library of them. I compiled a list of recent cases in which established governments had coped successfully with an insurgency (Burma, Greece, Hungary, Korea, Malaya, the Philippines and Tibet) and a list of those in which the insurgents were successful (China, Cuba, Indochina, Indonesia, Israel, and Laos, and a draw, Algeria). There were seven of each type.
For each case I wrote a one-page paper describing the government's internal measures compared to the effort being made by the opposition, grading it on a scale of one to 10. For each case, on the same one to 10 scale, I determined the degree to which the insurgents did not receive outside support.
When I plotted all fourteen insurgencies on graph paper the successful counter-insurgencies were grouped in the upper right, with a "7" or more in both dimensions. I plotted that as a "zone of success." I then gave my assessment of the situation in South Vietnam: it was down in the lower left at about a "3". I said, "You're not going to have a successful counter-insurgency until you solve both problems. The zone of success is up here and the situation in Vietnam is down here."
I derived this general principle that I put in my paper:
In order for a counterinsurgency to succeed, there must be both an internal effort substantially superior to that of the insurgents, and an effective restriction of (or an absence of} external support to the insurgents. Neither action alone is sufficient to success. Both are necessary.
That simple operations analysis with its profound truth was an appendix to my individual research paper, External Support of the Viet Cong: An Analysis and a Proposal. Originally classified TOP SECRET, it has been downgraded to unclassified and can be found in the special collections of the library of the National Defense University.
I had become convinced that a satisfactory conclusion in Vietnam was not possible if the Ho Chi Minh trail were allowed to exist. I thought that there had to be some way to use the great military capability of the United States to solve this problem. I thought air mobility could supply part of the answer. I had been following the evolution of air mobility in the Army for years and especially since the approval of the recommendations of the Howze Board in 1963 as I left for Vietnam.
While at the National War College I kept abreast of the formation of the 11th Air Assault Division at Fort Benning. Employment of that division was a key element of my paper. My plan was to use the 173 Airborne Brigade (Okinawa), the 25th Infantry Division (Hawaii) and the 11th Air Assault Division to seize blocking positions on the Ho Chi Minh trail.
I thought that the force to seize and establish the positions on the Ho Chi Minh trail must be a coalition force, including Vietnamese and other nations' troops. As a cover plan, a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization exercise in Thailand would provide a reason for moving forces into the area. The assembled force would then launch the trail cutting operation.
Coalition partners would justify their action by citing North Vietnam's operations in Laos since 1961 to seize the trail's territory as flagrant violations of the 1954 Geneva Accords[2]. I offered a U.S. political-military concept aimed at convincing China that it should not intervene in this defensive blocking action.
I thought that with engineer effort positions could be built and fields of fire cleared to establish positions that could be held and from which operations could be conducted to deny enemy use of routes. I made the best terrain analysis that I could based on the available maps. I determined that my planned multinational, multidivision joint force could do the job.
I also described how U.S. forces available at end-1964 were substantially greater than those available at end-1960 during the Laos crisis. In 1965 we had, for example: 1,119 UH-1 and 71 CH-47 helicopters on hand compared to only a handful in 1961. We had 139 Army CV-2B Caribou aircraft and 682 Air Force C-130 cargo aircraft, compared to zero Caribou and 264 C-130s in 1961's inventory. Secretary McNamara had in four years more than doubled the Air Force and Navy's capabilities in tactical air. So I thought that adequate force was available.
After the 1964 election someone at OSD called me wanting to know more about my idea of cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail and using the 11th Air Assault Division. He said, "Tell me more about this division." I sensed that they were thinking of deploying the division and using it in the countryside. I said, "Don't use this outfit that way. It's not the proper mission. This unit should be assigned to seize and secure terrain interdicting the infiltration routes."
My notion was overtaken by events. In April 1965 a battalion of U.S. marines landed at Da Nang. In June LBJ gave General William Westmoreland the authority to commit American troops to ground combat operations in Vietnam. That summer the 11th Air Assault Division, renamed the 1st Air Cavalry Division, was committed into Vietnam's countryside, as was the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. Search and destroy began. Half a million U.S. troops followed.
Years later, in the 1980s and 1990s, I presented this trail-blocking idea at various symposia as having had merit as a possible solution. I said that it should have been undertaken as a feasibility study. Many commented that it would never have worked, for various reasons. I'm not sure, but someone should have made a proper feasibility study. If done right, there would have been no Ho Chi Minh highway and we could have had a success in South Vietnam.
In 1984 General Bruce Palmer, who was the Vice Chief of Staff under General Westmoreland, came out with a book The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam in which he said we should have done something like this early in the war. I took some comfort from the fact that he had the same notion.
General Cushman commanded the 101st Airborne Division, the Army Combined Arms Center, and the ROK/U.S. field army defending Korea's Western Sector. He served three tours in Vietnam.
[1]Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam (PROVN) March, 1966:
"PROVN examines the situation in South Vietnam within the context of history and in broad perspective. Specific problems of pacification and long-term development are identified, and specific actions are proposed to alleviate them...
"PROVN submits that the United States and the Republic of Vietnam must accept the principle that success will be the sum of innumerable, small and integrated localized efforts and not the outcome of any short-duration, single master stroke."
[2] Text: "Final declaration, dated July 21, 1954, of the Geneva Conference on the problem of restoring peace in Indochina, in which the representatives of Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, France, Laos, the People's Republic of China, the State of Viet-Nam, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom and the United States of America took part...
"In their relations with Cambodia, Laos, and Viet-Nam, each member of the Geneva Conference undertakes to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity, and the territorial integrity of the above-mentioned states, and to refrain from any interference in their internal affairs."
Or is it? One wonders, in around 37 years will there be a blog in which will regularly appear post-mortems on what went right and wrong in Afghanistan? How Osama could have been killed earlier, how the Taliban could have been pacified and what have you. There is one noteworthy thing, though, in Afghanistan and Iraq the word-smiths discover that parts od the populations of those countries aren't really citizens or don't have the country's best interests at heart, that 'foreign fighters' make up a good part of the insurgents. Whereas in these latter times these refrains have become cliches.
Hard to make big course adjustments to the super tanker once it's up to full speed. Harder still when it's necessary to find the multiple wheel houses and engine rooms, and to then persuade all of the responsible and high-ranking sailors that it's necessary to make some changes. And then someone in the radio shack figures out that a course was set for the wrong port. Best to just haul the oil to the destination on the manifest and let the buyers figure it out.
This makes me think less about COIN and tactical solutions and more about institutional inertia. Try and get an external idea into the system and the system will basically ignore you. Doesn't matter what rank you are.
Leaving aside whether LTG(R) Cushman's ideas were right or wrong, was he arguing tactics or policy? Tactics are completely within the military's purview, policy is outside of same. Adoption of the tactics recommended here would have affected US policy not only in the amount of force applied but our interactions with the gov't of South Vietnam and other regional actors then.
If we assume that his tactics, as laid out in this article, would have worked better than what was done - and this is assumption for the sake of argument - was he right, as a military officer, to advocate for something that affects policy? Even if, or particularly when, the action being advocated will better accomplish the stated goals of the US?
Or should he have just shut up and moved out?
I think we see something similar going on today. LTC Davis and his article in AFJ broaches areas that are political, stuff in the policy realm. But can he make any argument regarding AFG that does not affect US policy there? Since ultimately it is our policy that is faulty (continued dealing with PAK, etc)? Perhaps in these smaller wars the dividing line between tactics and policy is less clear than we would like to think.
Gen. Cushman has pretty much convinced himself that he discovered the ‘golden key’ to the war in Vietnam. Whether he did or didn’t we can have fun with debating ad infinitum. It is about as useful as discussing why Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg didn’t move his Army of Northern Virginia between Meade and Washington and force the Army of the Potomac to attack him rather than the other way around.
Or in ‘Operation Barbarossa’ if only Hitler hadn’t demanded that Army Group Center follow-up the destruction of the Soviet forces defending Smolensk and turn south and capture the Ukraine (the massive Kiev envelopment) rather than forge ahead and capture the more strategically important (in time if not space) Moscow.
‘What if’s’ are nice diversions for arm chair strategists but really don’t shed much light on what actually happened? The factor of contingency is such that in the game of ‘if only’ they had listened to me everything would be better is vacuous conversation as active traders in the stock market(in many respects similar to war) with battle scars well know.
If it was true, my friend, there'd be NO point to recording or studying ANY history, except as a game to keep old guys like us busy on the sidelines.
ERIC HAMMEL, sitting here with my amateur historian hat on I merely doubt the value of spending much time (or any time) on ‘counterfactual history’. Extracting the actual facts of history is difficult enough for historians rather than be bothered with old generals who postulate ‘if only they had done it my way’. That was the favored response of the German generals as interviewed by B. H. Liddell Hart after the 2nd World War and it is a street that leads nowhere.
When the plan goes wrong or the army doesn't measure up (etc., etc., ad infinitum), is it wrong to get at the source of the problem--then try to fix it? How can one do that without posing counterfactuals and gaming them--for the sake of the outcome of another battle or war?
A few weeks ago, Hunter and I indulged in a counterfactual battle for Betio. Hunter's premise was that a landing on Betio's eastern tip would have spared hundreds of Marines lives. My part became knocking his concept down with geographical facts. But real people planning a real battle--Kwajalein, in January 1944--thought to land an entire artillery regiment and lighter supporting arms on undefended islands just off Roi and Namur. The objectives were not defended with nearly the strength nor confidence as Betio, but the idea was sound. The ofttimes enfilade fire from the artillery and other supporting arms was helpful if not decisive.
Now how could Marine planners come up with =that= plan without looking at Betio and starting a sentence with these two words: What if . . .
These stories when matched up with similar stories about AFG and Iraq let us know there are systemic problems with how the U.S. fights limited wars.
Likely the Powell Doctrine was a response to Vietnam quagmire, and it held sway for a few years, but elected officials and appointees from both parties cannot resist using the US military to achieve their limited and/or partisan objectives.
And when things go sideways in these limited wars, accountability is not to the largely indifferent American people but rather to the interest groups and election politics. Americans don't care about AFG, but the opposing party and its minions is ready to tar any Preissident with appeasement charges or not keeping faith with the military and American people.
AFG should have been about revenge and appropriate prevention of another 9/11 but it's somehow mutated into this abomionation of nation-building and regional power politics. Iraq should not have happened, but once it did happen, the US should have boogied most riki-tik.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats would risk their jobs to fix an obvious mistake that's killing people and emptying the coffers.
What makes all of this even more insane is that there's not much daylight between Republicana and Democrats when it comes to ideology and policy. It's not like Americans are choosing between fascists and communists, or extremists and reactionaries.
No question about it, N. Viet-Nam couldn't have succeeded w/o theTruong Son Road or Ho Chi Minh Trail. . .but keep in mind, it weren't no one long track, but a whole piss-pot full of'em, and hard to find.
A good map inspection back then would have shown that by infiltrating (and latter attacking) from west to east into S. Viet-Nam, the NVA prevented the ARVN, and later the U.S. in I and II Corps from concentrating forces effectively, as might have been the case if the NVA had only access across the narrower DMZ on a north-to-south axis.
However, I am puzzled as to how the U.S. could have introduced ground pounders to block the Trail as advocated by then LtCol Cushman, because Laos and Cambodia were officially neutral. . .but the man was thinking, few other were!
I would also like to bring-up the point that although a division's worth of troops sounds impressive, but if you haven't physically operated under the triple canopy in the type of cross-compartmented terrain involved, to include the jungle rot that infests your body, you can't appreciated the neutralizing effect it had on manpower (as well as communications) back then.
Additional, in the beginning, until the Trail was improved for trucks, bicycles were used for transporting supplies, and many doing the peddling, mostly done at night, would also take up fighting when they got south - a two for one deal . . .Think about bicycles for a minute: they're were inexpensive and didn't need much maintenance, and their profile made them almost silent when moving, thereby preventing detection.
Lastly, much of the support infrastructure for the trail was underground along the way, and if the Viet-Cong could operate under our nose at Marble Mountain near Da Nanang’s major air base and III MAF headquarters throughout the war, how well could we have been expected to root-out the NVA in even better camouflaged and concealed conditions in the bush?
Well rat spit, I admit I think on the smaller tactical level as opposed to the bigger picture, but at the least one would have thought a feasibility study of Cushman's plan couldn't have hurt?
I didn't truly realize the extent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail until I visited the HCM Trail Museum in Hanoi last year. Considering the poverty of much of the country's infrastructure, the HCM Trail Museum is amazingly moderh, well built and professionally curated, with fascinating exhibits and hardware that document the Trail exhaustively. It's misleading to call it a "trail." It was many trails, paths, roads, and highways, with a spiderweb of detours, cut-outs, by-passes, etc., and the network ran down the entire length of VN and extended well into the neighboring countries. It would have taken way more than 1 division to cut off all the traffic, and it would have meant extending the ground war (we were already bombing the hell out of the Trail) into at least two other countries.
Good additional commentary Devil Dog, and one that I concur with . . . Thanks for sharing!
Although, one could state that during Cushman’s first tour into the emerald green countryside, the trail complex would have been a bit less sophisticated and intricate than it became at the close of the war in 1975, if ever there was a time to address the issue, prior to 1965 was it. . .Bravo Zulu for him to understand its importance.
However, it also helps if one actually makes a physical recce to truly appreciate the task at hand, and as an American, and a Caucasian, I would bet a younger Cushman did not make a physical cross border recce with some Nung scouts, to really appreciate the endeavor. . .besides, Nungs like to be bried with whiskey and women and get crabby when denied. : )
The optimum word is "bribed."
I had ~95 Nung irregulars in my detachment and they worked for tobacco and silver.
I had a monthly air-drop of both commodities for detachment pay-day.
Women would have been impractical in our set-up and whiskey is less suited to air-drops than silver and tobacco.
They seemed generally satisfied with the arrangement.
Lucky for you KRIEGSAKADEMIE. . . .
you had good rice bowl early-on up in the highlands, too bad the MAC-V Saigooners screwed it up later on.
"...it's somehow mutated into this abomination of nation-building and regional power politics."
It's called "mission creep," the curse that has befallen almost all of our military adventures in Africa (Somalia) and the Mid-east.
Uh huh. And each new iteration has politicians and generals insisting that this time will be different.
We weren't smar enough to outwith the NVA 559th Transport Group
“Some supplies were coming through Cambodia. A small amount came in over the beaches. But most reinforcements and materiel were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and entering through the South Vietnam's northern provinces”
Although the author (Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, Retired) went on to greater things in the Army, this posting suggests that his perspective as (I assume) about an 0-5 was not very comprehensive when it came to Laos and the NVA’s systems of resupply in South Vietnam.
Similarly, his grasp of the intentions of senior U.S. command elements is surprisingly incomplete. General Westmoreland was considerably more engaged with the problem of the NVA supply lines that the author seems to understand.
As someone who spent four years in the mountains of Laos collecting intelligene on who and what was moving on the Ho Chi Minh trail, I am particularly struck at how little the author seems to understand about the sophistication of the North Vietnamese logistics system.
What the Americans called the Ho Chi Minh Trail was an enormously complex system of paths, trails, rudimentary roads, developed roads and sections of highway, all covered with forest canopy (enhanced with artificial materials when necessary) that ran through the mountains of the Laos panhandle into both Cambodia and South Vietnam.
There were depots, truck maintenance stations, dispatching centers, fuel and supply centers, and command and control systems throughout. This complex, clandestine transport network was divided into regional logistic commands, (we called them “Base Areas”) – initially three and ultimately five.
The intellectual/operational center of this system was the North Vietnamese Army’s 559th Transport Group which dated back to the Vietnamese war against the French when the HCM trail system was first conceived. The senior leadership of the 559th were world-class military logisticians – as good as Napoleon’s best.
The author imagines that some sort of American ground operation in Laos could have meaningfully interdicted the trail and effectively shut off the resupply of the NVA and VietCong in South Vietnam. The author also seems oblivious the complications of international law which compelled us to do everything on the ground in Laos in a clandestine mode. His suggestion, as a student at NWC, to deploy the 11th Air Assault Division in Laos to seize and secure terrain interdicting the infiltration routes” verges on naïve.
Long before Cushman wrote his NWC term paper (and while he was serving in Vietnam) we had an enormous CIA led ground effort operating against the trail (using regular and irregular Lao forces and vast numbers of American paramilitary) and the world’s most extensive air campaign (Rolling Thunder –which dropped more ordnance on the trail that all the allied bombing of Germany).
By 1965 the CIA led efforts were augmented by Westmoreland’s decision to deploy substantial numbers of US Army ground elements --- the “Studies and Observation Group, (SOG) which was neither about studies nor observation (that’s what I was doing). The SOG operated on the ground in Laos (and in Cambodia) directly against critical elements of the trail.
The fact is that the “trail” was so flexible, movable and adaptable that neither the world’s greatest air bombardment nor combined abilities of US Special operators and CIA paramilitary could do more than inflict short-term damage to small parts of the system.
Cushman seems to feel that if, only Westy had listened to him, we could have interdicted the trail, dried up the resupply of men and materiel and won the war.
Dream on!
Westy took the logistic challenge very much to heart and devoted much blood and treasure to dealing with it – we simply weren’t smart enough to come up with a set of interventions that could outwit the logisticians of the 559th.
As usual the comments on these posts are far more informative than the posts. Can you suggest some good books on the Ho Chi Minh trail?
We weren't smart enough to outwit the NVA 559th Transport Group
“Some supplies were coming through Cambodia. A small amount came in over the beaches. But most reinforcements and materiel were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and entering through the South Vietnam's northern provinces”
Although the author (Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, Retired) went on to greater things in the Army, this posting suggests that his perspective as (I assume) about an 0-5 was not very comprehensive when it came to Laos and the NVA’s systems of resupply in South Vietnam. Similarly, his grasp of the intentions of senior U.S. command elements is surprisingly incomplete. General Westmoreland was considerable more engaged with the problem of the NVA supply lines that the author seems to understand.
As someone who spent four years in the mountains of Laos collecting intelligene on who and what was moving on the Ho Chi Minh trail I am particularly struck at how little the author seems to understand about the sophistication of the North Vietnamese logistics system.
What the Americans called the Ho Chi Minh Trail was an enormously complex system of paths, trails, rudimentary roads, developed roads and sections of highway, all covered with forest canopy (enhanced with artificial materials when necessary) that ran through the mountains of the Laos panhandle into both Cambodia and South Vietnam.
There were depots, truck maintenance stations, dispatching centers, fuel and supply centers, and command and control systems throughout. This complex, clandestine transport network was divided into regional logistic commands, (we called them “Base Areas”) – initially three and ultimately five.
The intellectual/operational center of this system was the North Vietnamese Army’s 559th Transport Group which dated back to the Vietnamese war against the French when the HCM trail system was first conceived. The senior leadership of the 559th were world-class military logisticians – as good as Napoleon’s best.
The author imagines that some sort of American ground operation in Laos could have meaningfully interdicted the trail and effectively shut off the resupply of the NVA and VietCong in South Vietnam. The author also seems oblivious the complications of international law which compelled us to do everything on the ground in Laos in a clandestine mode. His suggestion, as a student at NWC, to deploy the 11th Air Assault Division in Laos to seize and secure terrain interdicting the infiltration routes” verges on naïve.
Long before Cushman wrote his NWC term paper (and while he was serving in Vietnam) we had an enormous CIA led ground effort operating against the trail (using regular and irregular Lao forces and vast numbers of American paramilitary) and the world’s most extensive air campaign (Rolling Thunder –which dropped more ordnance on the trail that all the allied bombing of Germany).
By 1965 the CIA led efforts were augmented by Westmoreland’s decision to deploy substantial numbers of US Army ground elements --- the “Studies and Observation Group, (SOG) which was neither about studies nor observation (that’s what I was doing). The SOG operated on the ground in Laos (and in Cambodia) directly against critical elements of the trail.
The fact is that the “trail” was so flexible, movable and adaptable that neither the world’s greatest air bombardment nor combined abilities of US Special operators and CIA paramilitary could do more than inflict short-term damage to small parts of the system.
Cushman seems to feel that if, only Westy had listened to him, we could have interdicted the trail, dried up the resupply of men and materiel and won the war.
Dream on!
Westy took the logistic challenge very much to heart and devoted much blood and treasure to dealing with it – we simply weren’t smart enough to come up with a set of interventions that could outwit the logisticians of the 559th.
Is there an extant popular-type history of the HCM Trail or the 559th or even just efforts to take them down? If not, it's a major oversight that could be corrected while it's still within the horizon of living memory.
There's a ton of information in North Vietnam. The Trail is a legendary feat of arms in their history of the war. So there are books, songs, movies, a fine museum, etc., etc. The Trail vets (including thousands who were teen agers at the time) are still relatively young (60's), and the story is not going to be forgotten for a long, long time. Of course, from the US side, there are many books by pilots who bombed the Trail, as well as some memoirs by SF teams who operated in the area of the Trail.
North Vietnamese history of the HCM Trail
FG42 is quite right that the best sources are North Vietnamese. The victors usually produce more historical writing than the losers.
Asymmetric logistics were as central to the North Vietnamese war strategy as asymmetric battle tactics. They have documented the 559th and the entire history of the HCM trail extensively.
Sadly, American historical writing on the clandestine war in Laos is very thin. There is a modest batch of anecdotal material (much of it by American pilots who had almost no knowledge of what was going on at ground level). There is substantial official Air Force documentation of Rolling Thunder – but it, too, lacks ground truth.
Because most of the ground operations were under the direction of the CIA station in Vientiane, there is a paucity of public documentation – even to this date.
One in teresting tidbit that I have never seen in print has to do with the fact that King Savang Vatthana of Laos sold Laotian citizenship to a number of Nazi war criminals – several of whom wound up as long-term TCN staff at the American embassy in Vientiane.
Another I was right all the time guy
This while telling us in this piece that there was only one Vietnamese government in 1964. There were, of course, two.
General Cushman is another in a long line of apologists for the mistaken US intervention in the Vietnamese Civil War. Like the others he is comforted by the possibility the US "might have won the war" if only we had done things differently - in this case according to his personal after-the-fact scheme. The fact is we got our butts kicked by a bunch of underfed peasants in black pajamas and flip-flops armed with AK 47s and little else. The war cost a staggering number of US deaths (58,722) wounded (303,644) and MIA (1,678) and billions in treasure.
What happened afterwards proved that the whole perception of the Vietnam conflict from the US perspective wrong: there was no "domino effect". The unification of Vietnam was achieved without our involvement, and Vietnam has become a trading partner. The global communist conspiracy proved to be a fiction, existing principally in the minds of US politicians and the jingoistic press. Without it we had to wait for the "global terrorism" to find another reason to fire up those war machines again and make the military-industrial complex flush. (Grenada and Panama were really too small to sate their appetitie for blood and money)
Until we accept the fact that such interventions in the affairs of second-rate countries is both costly and - ultimately - fruitless, we will continue to blunder into more wars where the extent of our national interest is unclear. And we will continue to waste the lives of our young and the treasure of our nation.
We hardly got our butts kicked, at the tactical and operational level things went fine but going out and killing a ton of guys does not always win a war. Estimates are low at 1.5 million killed on the North's side, compared to roughly 50k on ours it not what I would call a butt kicking. Strategically is where we lost this, plain and simple and to be frank, we screwed the South by getting them to the Paris Peace Accords, getting them to sign off on it by promising air support and finance and then taking both of those things away. The first time the North tried to mass and invade the South they were decimated by air strikes, next time we did not provide that and eventually the South lost. In short, we screwed the south and screwed them hard.
Then, as now, we were not willing to do what was needed to win a conflict like this and arm chairing and looking at what went right and wrong is how we learn from history as Eric Hammel points out.
What it really all comes down to is that there really isn't a way short of genocide to defeat a society that is willing to sacrifice one military generation after another to attain victory or simply, as in Vietnam, oblige the other side to wear itself out and walk away.
Tet 1968 was a strategic and operational victory for the U.S. that destroyed the VC as a coherent military and political force and wiped out that generation of young North Vietnamese as an offensive military force. The VC never recovered, and it took until 1972 for the North Vietnamese to cobble its next generation of cannon fodder into an offensive army. The 1972 offensive was defeated in large part by U.S. supporting arms, so it took another few years to raise yet another generation of cannon fodder. By then, the NVA had become sufficiently mechanized to pose a real threat, the South had not had a settled government in a decade, and no U.S. supporting arms were the least bit in the offing.
The situation in Aghanistan is not analogous, except that Afghani Pashtuns in the countryside seem willing to fight a generational war if we're game, which we ain't.
I think your right, we could have attacked their dam and dike system en masse and caused large scale flooding and starved them on a massive scale, they had even thought about dropping a nuke at one point. There are a lot of things we could have done and nearly did do but I am glad we did not at times, not sure how I would be with wiping out a whole people that were not a direct threat to our country.
If we had supported the South with money and Close Air Support though I truly believe they could have held as it proved critical in the initial Northern attempts at invasion. I believe to this day that we screwed the South hard with that after pushing them to the Paris Peace Accords and it is a reason I am not a fan of Kissinger and think the Nobel Peace Prize is a bit of a joke. Our Congress, Nixon and Kissinger betrayed them as far as I am concerned and it is a shameful mark on our history.
"The Blood Road" by John Prados published 1999.
I have been surprised at how little attention this book has got. The Vietnamese would have been more than happy for the US to dump hundreds of thousands of troops in the middle of nowhere (Laos and Cambodia border areas) but the more important issue is why why the trail as a whole only worked to bring supplies south. Motivation and Morale was only a dream for the ARVIN but a reality for the NVA. "Born in the North to die in the South." and very few defected.
Read "Iron Will, Bare Feet" by Admiral Zumwalt's son, just published last year. It will make clear what we always understimated during the VN War: the moral and motivation of the other side. As RVNSFVET says in a comment below, whatever we thought of doing, the other side would have countered.
The enemy was supermen, who would have countered anything we did and done it better than we ever could have! (I'm being sarcastic)
Let's say it was possible to establish an impervious line across the Ho Chi Minh Trail (how far would it have to go? All the way to the Thai border? Into Thailand?) what then? Are we assuming the government of the North would just throw in the towel? I see nothing in the actual history to argue that the North would give up. More likely, they'd simply wear us down until we packed up and went home. How long would the American people have put up with an endless defensive battle in the jungle? Then it would back to business as usual. The bottom line of Vietnam was that the existence of two competing governments was unsustainable. The division of the country by the Geneva Accords was never intended to be permanent, and the refusal of the South to abide by the accords gave the North a considerable sense of grievance and motivation. One or the other was going to go down. Our presence, and anything we tried to do, only postponed the inevitable.
The Geneva Accords calling for re-unification through elections were something of a joke. The north, by 1954-56 run with a pretty iron fist by the Viet Minh, had a population equal to, or slightly larger than, the south. So obviously the Viet Minh would have gotten all the votes in the north (I don't think there was any serious plan for outside, objective monitoring of the vote) and a few in the south and they would have won. Would that have been a fair election? Maybe, maybe not. I don't deny Ho Chi Minh's wide popularity. But the elections called for by the accords would not have been fair in either the north or south.
The division of Korea was never intended to be permanent either. So did our fighting to defend Syngmann Rhee's government only "delay the inevitable" Communist take-over? Apparently not.
At a briefing by CINCPAC HQ in Hawaii (January 1965) it was referred to as a "trail package" and the graphic depicted numerous discreet trails that had been identified by photo recon and SOG. There were signal intercepts as well. General Cushman's estimate of 2 to 3 divisions agrees with what I had heard.
BUT, nobody takes it to the next step and asks what would the North have done in response? The answer is that they would have countered our divisions with theirs. The good news might have been that these divisions might have constituted excellent targets for the Air Force. And then what? You would still have a determined North trying new strategies for growing the insurgency/invasion. Clever ideas would have been met by other clever ideas. Resupply for us would have been a bitch. Someone would have had to have nuked the State Department, etc. Lastly, two Army Captains were walking around the Pentagon in Octoberr, 1964 advocating the creation of a radiation belt across the trail package. So, two O-3s had identified the problem and wanted to nuke it. After trying to sell this in OSD/ISA; they were hustled out of the Pentagon and back where they came from most rikki tik. General Cushman was not the only officer with eyes.
I can't believe how arrogant this is
Which should not suggest that he is necessarily wrong. But he does fail to persuade that, as he in effect claims, presented a "blueprint for victory" in Vietnam in 1964 that they just wouldn't listen to. After WWII there was a whole cottage industry of German ex-generals who suddenly knew exactly what Germany should have done to win on the eastern front and hence the war. Let me tell the author two things I know from the smallest scale of combat, martial arts, that I believe apply also at the biggest scale, war: nothing gets old faster than old fighters who "explain" why they "really won" the title fight that the referees said they lost. And, ego is dangerous to a fighter because it clouds judgment better than any however stiff drink and alienates those one needs to win over. The author no doubt served his country honorably. But he fails to persuade me that his plan would have produced victory and even if his plan was sound I can easily see why he failed to make himself heard (I too have derived the necessity of external support for an insurgency to succeed and the need for greater support than the insurgency is pretty much the first line in any book on election strategies and popularity contests.) So perhaps General Johnson lost out on an oppurtunity that was slightly smaller than the author suggests. As a final piece of advice, I would suggest avoiding phrases like "profound truth" outside religion and certainly not in any research results. But while I find the author arrogant and narrowminded, I do think officers need good self-confidence. But not big egos and certainly not "if only they had listened to me" stories. If the facts support you , you don't need to puff yourself up. Geniuses never have to tell others how smart they are.
A similar plan, named OPLAN El Paso, was developed later on - 1967ish - but never implemented of course. It would have involved a couple of US divisions, the ARVN Airborne divisions, and more going into southern Laos and blocking the trail for at least 18 months. The terrain, weather, and logistical/engineering aspects of the plan are well-analyzed in a book called "Military Geography" by John M. Collins.
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Although difficult, I think such an operation would have been feasible. Once blocked, the NVA would probably have tried to bypass such a blocking force. But going around it (the block would have covered at least the eastern half of the Laotian panhandle) would entail travelling through the open plains of the western half of the panhandle, near Savannakhet on the Mekong River/Thai border. Would they have detoured around through Thai territory? Doubtful -it would have required crossing the entire Laotian panhandle to the Mekong, a crossing of the river, a transit through Thai territory (Thailand was a US ally, and an active one), then a recrossing of the Mekong, and finally a trip south of the blocking force across the width of Cambodia. I find the idea that the North Vietnamese, who were not supermen despite the way some people are in awe of their determination, industriousness, and so on, would have been able to accomplish this.
Once in place, the forces would have to defend their positons for an extented period. But I doubt the NVA would succeed in attacking strongly fortified positions there, and would suffer heavy losses without breaking through or re-opening the supply route. Yes, they were willing to suffer heavy losses as they proved - but would they do it over an over in the countryside of Laos for no tactical purpose?
The trail provided, by 1967, around 70% of the NVA and VC's weapons and munitions in South Vietnam. Even if a trickle still managed to evade the blocking force, I think it's reasonable to believe this action would have led to a massive drop in the enemy's fighting ability in South Vietnam, with a consequent gradual marginalization of the insurgency and a long breathing space for the solidification of the RVN government.
The plan might have worked. It might have started an international war as well.
Besides that I have to note that, once again, writers do not take the South Vietnamese government into account when writing on the war. This does at least mention the other nations in the area but then completely ignores whether or not the other nations would have been likely to follow this plan as well as the potential domestic backlash in each of the member states. I'm starting to wonder if American writers are psychologically incapable of considering the South Vietnamese.
I don't see any reason to think an invasion of Southern Laos, followed by setting up a defensive position there, would have "started an international war." Why? Because it might have technically violated the Laos accords from 61-62? It's not as if the North Vietnamese were abiding by agreements to respect Laotian neutrality. They were also in gross violation of Cambodian neutrality. Being in a war in South Vietnam, the US and S. Vietnam had every legal right to move into Laotian and Cambodian territory when those countries failed to eject enemy (North Vietnamese and VC) forces from their own territory and allowed it to be used as a base by the NVA and VC. And forces in S. Laos were no threat, offensively, to either China or the Soviet Union, or their interests. They wouldn't have accepted an invasion of North Vietnam or areas of Laos on the Chinese border. But this would not have done so, or even threatened to do so.
And remember how well U.S intervention in Cambodia and Laos went. It helped bring the Khmer Rouge to victory and helped set up the Third Indochina War. A ground invasion, especially before the Sino-Soviet split became official, could have really sent everything to hell.
Besides that, my point on the lack of any analysis of the southeast Asian governments and populations* still holds true. From what I commonly even on this site see you could reasonably write that the entire Second Indochina War a.k.a. Vietnam War (which was the second of three major conflicts in the region) was fought solely between the U.S military and ghosts.
*Particularly Vietnamese but also Thai, Chinese, Lao, Indonesian and other states.
Let's say some combination of forces blocks a significant portion of the trail package. I have forgotten and am not going to look up division frontage, etc. But, the forces described probably couldn't stretch across the entire package. Now, you are the North confronted with dug-in, static conventional forces. What do you do? First, you fix those forces in place. You do not try to go around them or penetrate their lines, you just keep them in place. Then, you hang a left and divert your supplies into South Vietnam earlier than you would like. You intensify your conventional efforts in I and II Corps. Since these additional forces pose no threat to China, they do not become involved any more than they already are. The North tries to distract us by increasing their activities on the Thai border and in Laos. Cambodia makes noise and doesn't do anything.
You direct the VC in the South to return to stealing and buying weapons and other supplies from the ARVN. You continue a relative trickle of supplies of critical supplies through Cambodian ports and move them over land and on coastal boats into IV Corps. You continue to capitalize on your complete penetration of both the ARVN and the South Vietnamese government and maintain your shadow governments in every province. The war will now take longer, but the American public continues to be your ally and continues to protest the war as the American forces continue to alienate the media by lying to them. More American soldiers are killed and wounded.
The supply routes through Cambodia (Sihanoukville - sp?) could have been closed or nearly closed with little or no military action. With either serious diplomatic pressure, or assurance that the US was not going to abandon them to the North Vietnamese, the Cambodians probably could have been convinced to shut down those supply lines which ran from their only major port and through their capital on the way to the NVA/VC border sanctuaries.
And yes, this would not have defeated the insurgency. I make no claim that it would have. But it would have gravely weakened it, and its offensive abilities - back more to its late '50s/early '60s strength. With this additional breathing space, the South Vietnamese government might have had a better chance to get their own internal house in order.
I'm not saying this would have guaranteed victory or anything of the sort. But I think it would have been a hell of a lot better than what we actually tried, which was a disaster.
Tell the VC to return to stealing or buying ARVN weapons? So, what you're claiming is that the VC stopped doing this by choice? Not because that wasn't providing them with adequate weapons and munitions anymore? I doubt that. I'm not saying ARVN got much better, corruption-wise, between the early and late 60s. But the VC clearly needed more that what they could get through those means to be a meaningful force by 67-68. So if you take away most of their imported weapons, they couldn't just go back to what they did in 62-63 and still be a powerful force. And the NVA units in the South, cut off by blocking forces in Laos, definitely couldn't maintain combat effectiveness without resupply, replacements, and equipment from the north.
A Fulda Gap Army vs a nimble, light opponent
RVN SF VET is right. Our slow, lumbering main-force maneuvers in unfamiliar territory in Laos would have been relatively easily countered by an enemy led and trained to think and act nimbly.
All of the "we could have bombed them into submission" and "If only we had thrown two more divisions into the fight" arguments falter in the face of the reality that our basic strategic posture was ill-suited to the challenge..
This isn't about bombing anyone more heavily. I actually think most of the bombing of North Vietnam and Laos was a waste of effort, lives, hardware, and so on which accomplished little, other than to make the North Vietnamese look heroic to much of the third world and the left worldwide.
I also am not advocating "just sending a couple more divisions." This is an argument about a tactical/operational maneuver aimed at one of the enemy's most important and vulnerable points.
interested in westminster dog show when all said and done. how did u acquior updates on westminster dog show 1964-65.blog me on facebook.
I think not General Cushman, on every count. I spent my entire time in country on the ground attempting to cut, interdict, block, and slow the movement of men and material down the HCM trail. To call that impossible maze a "highway" or a "trail" is to make up words that create pictures that never existed. This inaccurate use of nomenclature distorts the entire discussion, negating it.
If we somehow were able to block the massive system of trails, roads, hospitals, bunkers, ammo dumps, etc., through some sort of magic, the NVA and all their supporters including the ARVN's from the highest ranks to the lowest would have kept the NVA supplied as a potent and effective fighting force. I only speak from the period covering April 1968 to June 1969 when my a/o was the tri-border area of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The ARVN's were never trustworthy, although I am certain that there were a few divisions that distinguished themselves in other places, but not in the tri-border area.
During May of 1969, when the siege of BenHet was raging, elements of the 4th Inf Div, several other divisions, Montagnards, and armored convoys tried time after time to break the siege. According to Laird and Nixon, BenHet was the first test of 'Vietnamization' an odd term itself when you think about it. But, each time we tried to break through and called for ARVN support to help us out of our lonely and forgotten meat grinder, no ARVN unit came; there was always an excuse, of course. We came to hate the ARVN's as much as the NVA if not more, as they betrayed us at every turn. Vietnamization was simply a propagandistic word for US withdrawal.
Victory for the US was never in the cards. The whole notion of a HCM highway or series of trails that could somehow be blocked was a fiction, a cruel fiction.
The reality is that the only way for us to win that war, would have been never to fight it.
Sometimes political leaders pick the wrong side and through our biases and assumptions, side with an imaginary ally and face certain defeat.
So it was with Vietnam.
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