RIPPLE SALVO… #559… THE ON-THE-GROUND ANTI-INFILTRATION STRATEGY: McNamara was famous at Ford Motors for his EDSEL. As Secretary of Defense he had an equally infamous example of failure with his alternative for the interdiction bombing campaign in North Vietnam: “An Anti-Infiltration Wall.” Just as Edsel provided a lesson for Detroit, the McNamara Vietnam anti-infiltration wall of fifty-years ago provides a useful lesson for the consideration of American advocates of such a “wall” or “barrier” on our national borders… but first…
Good Morning: Day FIVE HUNDRED-FIFTY-NINE of a review of an a bombing campaign that was not called ROLLING THUNDER in the open press until the 1990s for no clear reason what-so-ever…
16 September 1967… HEAD LINES from The New York Times on a dark and cloudy Saturday in New York…
FALL 1967 in AMERICA: Page 1: The Lead Story: “U.S. Will Deploy Missile Defense Around the Nation–Long Debate Ends–Planned Nike X Guard Designed to Thwart Small Scale Attack”... “The United States has decided to deploy a limited missile defense system around the country…designed to counter the few number of intercontinental ballistic missiles that Communist China is expected to possess in the early 1970s… IRONIC COINCIDENCE WITH 2017… Page 1: “Hurricane Doria Nears Virginia Coast–New Jersey Warned of Flooding”...”Hurricane Doria, seething with 90-mile an hour winds and pushed by a sister storm on an unusual path toward the Virginia-Maryland coast… flooding expected from New York City through the Virginia Capes… Page 1: “Lindsay Summons Both Sides to Try for School Truce–He Calls a Parley in Move to End Five-Day Teacher Tie-Up–More Talks Due Today–Fewer Pupils Show Up For Class”… Page 1: “U.S. Panel Prods Ghetto Insurers–Denials of Coverage Scored–States Urged to Develop Plans on Boston Pattern”… A Presidential Panel declared today that insurance companies should no longer be permitted to deny coverage arbitrarily to commercial and residential properties in slum areas…all states make urban plans to make fire and extended insurance available to all insurable city property. (HUMBLE HOST recommends a read of “The 1967 Kerner Report on the causes of riots in America in 1967.” The report of then is an appropriate check list for our current times.)…
VIETNAM: Page 1: “Rusk Urges Hanoi To Give Peace Sign”… “Secretary of State Dean Rusk said today that he had no evidence to confirm press reports that North Vietnam was showing renewed interest in peace talks or new flexibility in its bargaining position…an an answer to questions at a news conference the Secretary indirectly invited Hanoi to give some official signal that the reports may be true.”… Page 1: “A Court Convicts Saigon Runner-Up–Dzu, Foe of Thieu to Seek Rehearing on Bad Check and Currency Charges”... “Truong Dinh Dzu was convicted today on bad check charges and illegally transferring $11,500 to a bank in the United States.”... Page 15: “U.S. Force Under Fire, Lands On Shore of A River”... “U.S. infantrymen rushed ashore from armored assault boats and came under heavy fire from a battalion of Vietcong troops in the Mekong Delta 45 miles southwest of Saigon in the area of several sharp clashed recently… 56 Vietcong were killed and 5 Americans were killed and 101 wounded.”…
16 September 1967…The President’s TS Daily CIA Brief… SOUTH VIETNAM: …press accounts state that senior military officers today announced the dismissal of four generals and one province chief. This looks like the beginning of a long-awaited purge aimed at weeding out officers considered corrupt or inefficient… NORTH VIETNAM: U.S. Bombings Reported Affecting Rice Production... The North Vietnamese were complaining that US bombings were affecting their capability to harvest two annual rice crops. the North Vietnamese also claimed that they were required to increase their rice imports to offset a growing deficit. Vegetables were in short supply but the shortage of clothing material was apparently hurting morale more than the tight food situation…. Hospitals Reorganized... With the exception of hospitals in Hanoi and Haiphong hospitals in North Vietnam have been reorganized into small clinics and mobile units servicing rural areas. The reorganization was reported to have lowered the standard of medical treatment but had brought medical aid to areas never before visited by medical teams….
16 SEPTEMBER 1967… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times (17 Sept reporting of 16 Sept ops)… Page 5: “In the air war over North Vietnam partly clearing skies allowed Air Force pilots to strike a storage area 44 miles north of Hanoi as well as a nearby railroad yard and bridge at Hagia that was heavily damaged… Page 5: “Planes Downed Says Hanoi” North Vietnam said today that it’s fighters shot down two United States jet planes yesterday over Sunia Province 140-miles west of Hanoi…the pilots bailed out and were seized…names were not disclosed… no comment from the Unite States.”… “Photo Jet Is Downed”... “An unarmed United States photo reconnaissance plane was shot down by a MIG jet over North Vietnam yesterday and the pilot is missing. The RF-101 jet was downed while on a photo mission. It was the 25th American jet downed by North Vietnamese MIGs and was the 678th American plane lost over the North.”…
“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There were three fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 16 September 1967…
(1) MAJOR BOBBY RAY BAGLEY was flying an RF-101 of the 20th TRS and 432nd TRW out of Udorn on a photo recce bomb damage and intelligence mission on the northwest railway and after completing the photo mission and exiting west at 24,000-feet, was shot down by a North Vietnamese MIG-21. MAJOR BAGLEY ejected and came down in a village 60 miles west of Yen Bai where he was captured and beaten by the villagers then North Vietnamese troops. He survived POW duty, returned to active duty in 1973, and after another tour in Vietnam, retired from the Air Force as a Colonel… oohrah…
(2) CAPTAIN R.E. PETERSON was flying an RF-101 of the 20th TRS and 432nd TRW out of Udorn on the same mission as MAJOR BAGLEY to cover the northwest rail line but sustained damage from enemy ground fire after a successful photo run. CAPTAIN PETERSON was able to fly his faltering Voodoo into Northern Laos before he was required to eject. He was rescued by an Air Force helicopter. This was his second successful ejection and rescue from a battle damaged RF-101… This was also the last mission in RP-6 for the RF-101 Voodoo…
(3) MAJOR WILLIAM LEE NELLANS and 1LT PETER ARTHUR GRUBB of the 16th TRS and 466th TRW out of Tan Son Nhut were on a night photo mission over the southern route packs of North Vietnam and failed to return from the mission. There is some reason to believe these two intrepid aviators perished a few miles north of the demilitarized zone, but MAJOR NELLANS and 1LT GRUBB are carried as “Presumptive Finding of Death.” Hardly the ending of their service for America, I hope. They are remember, with sorrow, on this 50th anniversary of their final flight for our country as “Left behind”……
Ripple Salvo… #559… Peter Brush: “On September 7, 1967, at a press conference in Washington, DC, United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced plans for the construction of an electronic anti-infiltration barrier below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the line of demarcation between North and South Vietnam. The principled purpose of this ‘McNamara’s Line’ would be to sound the alarm when the enemy crossed the barrier. Allied firepower in the form of air and artillery strikes would then be brought to bear upon the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, the North Vietnamese Army) in order to curb infiltration from the north. The McNamara Line represented an attempt by the US military to merge modern technology with one of the oldest defensive techniques in warfare. The US would learn that more than sophisticated technology was necessary to make an effective barrier.”…
In June 1967 the “air war” was judged less effective than what was required to reduce the flow of troops and materials required by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong to prosecute a sustained war in the South. Secretary McNamara had another idea– “pursue an on-the-ground interdiction strategy (barrier).”
By mid-September 1967 the New York Times had a few words to say about the “Anti-Infiltration Wall.”…
“Perhaps the chief benefit to be hoped for from the anti-infiltration wall the United States plans to build across the top of South Vietnam is that it will cause President Johnson to abandon the futile bombing of the North and thus improve the chances for a negotiated peace.
“Whether barbed wire and sophisticated electronic devices will actually prove an impenetrable barrier to Hanoi’s elusive legions is a matter of some doubt among high-ranking military officers in Saigon and Washington. The Times’s military editor, Hanson W. Baldwin, reported last July that the project was viewed as ‘a static defense tactic–a kind of ‘jungle Maginot Line’–that poses immense engineering difficulties and, more important, would require the assignment of vast numbers of troops to monitor and guard.’…
“In Algeria the French did have some success in cutting off supply movement from external sources by using a comparable defense technique against Algerian rebels, but in the end the technique availed the French nothing. Americans will hope the result in Vietnam will be a cut in the casualty rate and a quicker advent to the conference table.”
The following is snitched from “How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America“… by Matt Novak…
“From 1968 until 1973, the United States military spent about $3-billion a year on a new computer-powered initiative intended to end the war in Vietnam. It went by many names over the years–including Practice Nine, Muscle Shoals, Illinois City, and Dye Marker. But today it’s most commonly known as Operation Igloo White.
“Despite being a high-priced technological failure for the U.S. military, Igloo White was the first real-time, computer driven surveillance operation program, set up during the Vietnam War……
“What happened to Igloo White is not unlike the tech transfer from battlefield to border that we see today, as the machines used by American military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq find their way to American streets….
“Defense Secretary Robert McNamara thought that a physical fence would be the best way to stopping the flow of weapons, people and supplies from North to South.”… “…there were a lot of hiccups…”
“If Igloo White demonstrated anything, it was the limits of remote warfare. Despite being automated, there was a lot of guesswork involved in the system.”… Nobody in the US military wanted to admit that $1 billion per year system wasn’t getting results. The Air Force claimed that 75,000 trucks had been destroyed as a result of the sensor network. The problem? By the CIA’s estimates, there were only about 6,000 trucks in all of North Vietnam.”…
“American planners promised that the new techniques being used with Igloo White meant we weren’t going to get our hands dirty in war anymore. ‘Boots on the ground’ were no longer necessary to win. Except that they were. Because no amount of computer technology can make war clean. In fact, as Igloo White shows us, tech has the potential to make war nastier than ever.”
Read “The Story Behind the McNamara Line” by Peter Brush
RTR QUOTE for 16 September: SENECA: “Sacred is the speech of the people.”…
Lest we forget…. Bear