RIPPLE SALVO… #306… “…SENSELESS STRATEGY”… but first…
Good Morning: Day THREE HUNDRED SIX of a history lesson for the ages– win every battle and lose the war… VIETNAM 1965-1975…
5 JANUARY 1967… HOME TOWN HEAD LINES from the New York Times on a cloudy cold Thursday in the Empire State…
Page 1: “Donald Campbell is Killed in 300 MPH Crash of his powerboat. The 45-year old daredevil was killed as he gunned his powerboat, Bluebird, to about 300 mph during an attempt to set a world record. His last words were: ‘I’m on my back–she’s going.” (Series of pictures accompanies the article)... Page 1: “U.S. Invites Hanoi to Tell if Stand on Talks is Eased”…”The United States today requested the North Vietnamese clarify through diplomatic or other channels whether it has softened it’s position on Vietnam peace talks.”… Page 1: “Aide (of Ho Chi Minh) Says National Liberation Front is Independent of the North and asserts in interview with Harrison Salisbury that the NLF must be heard on all Southern issues including settlement of the war. ‘The aims, aspirations and operations of the NFL are viewed by its leadership in terms sharply different from the picture held by many Americans.”… Page 1: “British Warn U.S. on Car Standards” …”The British Government has warned that strict enforcement of the proposed United States automobile safety standards could cause ‘considerable damage’ to British-American trade relations. At the same time British and other overseas carmakers have told the National Traffic Safety Agency that they will not be able to meet all the agency proposed standards should they be adopted without modifications and put into effect this fall.” … Page 1: “Stolen Art Found by Scotland Yard”… “The eight paintings valued at $5 million stolen five days ago have been recovered and an unemployed Englishman held as the suspected thief.”…
Page 2: “U.S. Pilots Authorized to Hit Any MIG in Air”… “United States fighter pilots have received authority to attack North Vietnamese aircraft ‘the instant the wheels of the Communist planes leave the runway.’ The policy represents an attempt to reduce the threat of the enemy jets. Previously, American pilots struck back only when they were attacked. The MIG bases themselves however, remain ‘off limits’ to American pilots despite pleas from the United States Seventh Air Force. The proposal to hit the bases was rejected by the White House. The broadening of the ‘rules of engagement’ led to Monday’s engagement in which seven MIG-21’s were shot down.”… Page 4: “Hanoi Reports 3 Planes Down” … “A broadcast from Hanoi said three United States planes were shot down over North Vietnam today (4th). There was no confirmation from American authorities.”… Page 4: “Barrier Urged by Mansfield”… “The Senate democratic leader Mike Mansfield of Montana called today for a ‘defensive barrier’ across Vietnam. He said this would be more effective in reducing Communist infiltration than bombing North Vietnam. The best hope of preventing the expansion of the war is the construction of a wall along the 17th parallel and south along Vietnam’s border with Laos and Cambodia. Despite the bombing, the number of North Vietnamese moving south had increased from 1,500 a month at the end of 1965 to 7,500 one year later. Cost of the barrier is estimated at $4 billion. Mansfield said this is the current cost of 2 months of current war waging costs.”… Page 26: “U.S. Urged to Set Welfare Minimum” …”The United States Commission on civil Rights, adding its vote to what appears to be a growing demand for welfare reform, recommended today that the Federal government establish a national minimum standard for welfare payments. a 55-page report says that cash benefits funding the Aid for Dependent Children is ‘grossly inadequate.’ “
5 January 1967…The President’s Daily Brief…CIA (TS sanitized) COMMUNIST CHINA: Mid-December photography of the Chinese missile test range shows that launch complex “B” is now complete. Construction on this site, which we have monitored for over a year, has been extremely rapid even by US or Soviet Standards…(rest redacted)…NORTH VIETNAM: We have seen no indication that Hanoi has changed its price for peace negotiations, despite the recent flurry of statements designed to put a better face on the North Vietnamese position. The latest of these was made at a press luncheon today in Paris by the senior North Vietnamese representative, who said Hanoi would “study” the matter– if the US “finally and unconditionally” stopped bombing. He gave the standard exposition of Hanoi’s four points and the National Liberation Front’s five. There was no suggestion of any concession by the North Vietnamese…. COMMUNIST CHINA: Mao has now, for the first time in the long struggle within the leadership, personally entered the ring and may be trying for a knockout against Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping. According to posters and Red Guard newspapers seen yesterday and today by foreign newsmen in Peking, Mao personally attacked both of these persons. Mao is said to have complained bitterly that they forced him out as chief of state in 1958 and have treated him like a “deceased parent” ever since. Although Mao did indeed turn the ceremonial office over to Liu after the “people’s communes” lunacy collapsed in 1958, this charge is a patent fabrication. With Mao’s prestige now formally on the line, those attacking Liu and Teng are under pressure to finish a job they have so far been unable to carry out…
5 JANUARY 1967… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times (6 Jan reporting 5 Jan ops)… Page 2: “Foe Shoots Down Two U.S. Navy Jets”… “North Vietnamese gunners shot down two United States Navy jets yesterday (4th) as American pilots carried out 116 missions in the North. The two downed planes brought to 453 the number downed since August 1964. During the missions today (5th) an A-4 Skyhawk crashed 50 miles south of Haiphong. The F-4 went down 40 miles south of Haiphong. The A-4 pilot and the F-4 crew of two were rescued from the South China Sea by a helicopter from the USS Bennington. In the second day of inflicting heavy losses on North Vietnamese shipping Navy pilots reported having destroyed or damaging 77 cargo junks or barges. Air Force pilots continued to hammer highways and railways in the southern panhandle region along the coast and also reported having blasted a storage area in the demilitarized zone.”…
“Vietnam: Air Losses”(Hobson): One United States fixed wing aircraft was lost in Southeast Asia on 5 January 1967…
(1) LCDR RICHARD ALLEN STRATTON was flying an A-4E of the VA-192 “World Famous Golden Dragons” embarked in USS Ticonderoga on a strike mission to find and destroy a reported ferry at My Trach, 10 miles south of Thanh Hoa…Hobson: “Unable to spot the ferry the Skyhawks attacked four barges, which were moored nearby. LCDR STRATTON fired one Lau-3 pod of rockets and then came around for another attack. As he fired his next pod debris from one of the rockets was sucked through the aircraft’s intakes and into the engine. The pieces of rocket destroyed the engine, which exploded, blowing the aircraft tail off. Although he tried to reach the sea, the sequence of events happened too quickly and Dick Stratton ejected over land and parachuted into a tree near a village and was captured. LCDR Stratton was VA-192’s maintenance officer and was flying his 27th mission over North Vietnam when he was brought down… He was released on 4 March 1973 and after retirement from the Navy became a social worker specializing in drug abuse counselling. In 1978 Scott Blakely wrote “Prisoner of War: The Survival of Commander Richard A. Stratton,” which is probably the most perceptive of all the books on POW experience.”… (Sorry, Chris, “Honor Bound,” by Rochester and Kiley can’t be beaten…)
RIPPLE SALVO… #306… In two weeks the transition from the Obama presidency to a new Administration and Commander-in-Chief will be complete. Our nation gets new life. Another chance to recover from a twenty-year year spin. Full opposite rudder, stick forward, power on, then wings level and a recovery using the angle of attack to preclude another stall and spin… New faces are legion in the incoming line-up and with the exception of a few retired generals I doubt that many have a copy of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” (500 B.C.) or John M. Collins “Grand Strategy, Principles and Practices” (USNI, 1972) in their libraries. The incoming President would do well to make both these great masterpieces required reading for his entire administration. Both how to avoid a spin and how to recover from one are covered therein. To make my point this Salvo borrows freely from an essay Collins wrote in 1978 for the U.S. Army War College’s “Parameters.” Title: “Vietnam Postmortem: A Senseless Strategy”…
“American strategists struck out in Vietnam. Our forces won every battle, but we lost the war. That scandal, contrary to conventional wisdom had little to do with our ally’s lack of spirit or President’s Thieu’s poor leadership. It had little to do with disciplinary problems that bedeviled American troops during later stages. It had little to do with constraints on American air power or privileged sanctuaries. It had little to do with outside logistic support for our opposition until the fracas was almost finished.
“The cause was a senseless strategy that foiled us for 14 straight years. It turned this so-called superpower into a sorry giant like George foreman, who lost his heavyweight championship in Zaire because he couldn’t cope with Ali’s strange style. The pity of it is that, unlike Foreman, we fashioned winning concepts in the final stages of the fiasco, but failed to stay the course.
“That subject has been summarily dismissed in US decision-making circles, where conventional concepts still hold sway. Military men especially are convinced that unfettered firepower could cure an established insurgency. This critique says it can’t.” …
“…Top level US leadership has never been very subtle when it comes to war. Strategy takes a back seat to physical strength and tactics in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. When the ‘chips are down,’ we’ve always poured on the power until opponents are crushed.”… “Technology, not strategic theory, was this country’s trump card. Masses of material from the military complex turned most every trick…Our whole approach to conflict coupled the theories of Clausewitz with the bombing concepts of Douhet. One stressed killing combatants, the other blasting civilians.”… Military victory was our major conscious aim. We achieved it in World War II (at the cost of later agony), but inconclusive Korea left a sour taste, convincing men like MacArthur that there is no suitable substitute. He featured that theme–‘There is no substitute for victory’– in a fervid farewell address to Congress in 1951, and he echoed it at West Point 12 years later. ‘Your mission,’ he told the cadets, ‘is to win’ in armed combat.’…”… “US leaders learned those lessons too well. They forgot that winning combinations cannot be switched from one time period to another without very precise appreciation for changes that transpire in the interim. Concepts are just as tough to transplant from place to place, unless the problems peculiar to one locale are pertinent in the others.”… “…There was clear evidence as early as Eisenhower’s era that insurgency of the sort in southeast Asia bore little resemblance to conflicts this country experienced in Korea and Europe. The threat faced was ambiguous, as opposed to the clear-cut threat of a conventional conflict. Further, the decisive strategy was indirect rather than direct; the decisive force was political rather than military; the decisive participant was not an outside force, but the local people; the impact of technological advantage was trivial rather than telling; and, the desired culmination was political, rather than military, victory.”
…”Eradicating rebel causes should have been our key goal in Vietnam. Instead we wrestled with symptoms. From the very beginning, US objectives were mainly military, with economic overtones. Consequently, supporting operations were tactically offensive, but strategically defensive and negative in nature, because the true aim was social change, not military victory…There was always a sense of US urgency–the typical American proclivity to solve present problems quickly, then get on with others. Communist campaigns, in contrast, took time, but Ho Chi Minh could afford to wait because South Vietnam, steered by this country’s advisors, was put in a ‘can’t win’ position… Since the real name of the game was controlling people, not killing them, subversive insurgents in South Vietnam centered their efforts on policy machines and the grass-roots populace. Regular armed forces and paramilitary people were the least effective Free World instruments for stemming such activities. Popular forces, police, and civil officials are better suited; but our State Department, lacking inclination and cadres, was in no shape to take charge… US leaders therefore passed primary responsibility for a political war to the Central Intelligence Agency’s hard chargers and our action starved army, which confused tactics for strategy. Every Service college conducted required courses in counterinsurgency throughout the 1960s, all rooted in the least relevant aspects of revolutionary war. School solutions stressed the proper employment of air power, armor, and artillery against insurgents in swamps, while civic programs got short shrift–small wonder, therefore, that deterrent measures failed to forestall the spread of Vietcong influence.”…
“Deterrence depends on three ingredients: a threat, the capability to carry it out, and the intention to do so if compelled. However, threats, capabilities, and intentions that are credible in conventional environments are inappropriate for counterrevolutionaries. In a conventional setting, the emphasis is on armed force, military means, and a will to serve people. Force controls resistance only in closed societies, where a security octopus operated at a block level, but even there it is not always a successful method of control. Police states can come under siege by their own people.”… “Body counts on the battlefield never meant as much as the battle for men’s minds. Feckless firepower does not win many friends, and friends win revolutions…”
“Seventh Air Force bombs never scratched the rebel’s cause. Indiscriminate firepower actually strengthened insurgency in South Vietnam by enraging innocent people whose homes were incinerated on the off chance that a few Vietcong might be killed. Bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age would in no way have assured our side a conclusive victory. Remember that Castro quickly conquered Cuba without outside support. Algeria’s rabbles were completely suppressed by French armed forces but finally won the war.”… “Insurgencies are total war from the perpetrator’s standpoint, without any ‘stupid scruples,’ as Mao once said.”…
(Collins details the belated application of ‘new concepts’ that turned the war around by 1972 in a section he calls “Winning the Lost War.”)…then…
“Losing The Won War…”…”Bled white, blocked on the battlefield, and battered at home, Ho’s successors sued for peace, and unskilled US statesmen gullibly snapped at the bait. Willingness to compromise is a pillar of American foreign policy, but our side was strictly amateur when compared with Communist spokesmen. The Marquis of Queensberry was our model; theirs was Machiavelli.”…
“The Cost of Short-Sighted Strategy… What were the long-term consequences to the United States? This country took up the torch from France in 1955, 20 years before the fatal collapse. Failure to formulate that then follow a sound strategy during the fateful period still cripples our President’s ability to shape foreign policy and sculpt a solid defense. The legacy includes isolationist sentiment, antimilitarism, foreign aid coming under fire, controversy over war powers, cracks in the US alliance system, decreased conventional deterrent powers, and the spread of subversive insurgencies. Every liability on that list reflects losing the Vietnam War…”
(All of the above is foundation for Collins’ final paragraphs and his timeless message for President Trump and our nation…)
“The Seeds Of Future Failure”
“It would be nice to announce that US leaders have learned hard lessons, but they haven’t. The Old Conventional Guard still set standards for contingency plans and conducts classes on counterinsurgency. A new generation is ingesting stale ideas.
“One senior service college course taught in 1976 provides a first-class example. Its syllabus zeroed in on military matters that missed the main target. The speakers list featured men who fought a losing war, not men who might have won it. Required reading was badly unbalanced. Mao, Giap, and David Galula were not even in the bibliography. Neither was Robert Thompson, whose No Exit from Vietnam beat any book the class read. Most surprisingly, Sun Tzu’s treatise on The Art of War was missing, although it served as the Communist model. It could have served us too, as some of his quotes indicate:
*For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill
*Generally in war the est policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this.
*Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.
*If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.
*In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.
“Violence in his (Sun Tzu) view was the court of last resort, not because he was squeamish, but because he believed it stupid to destroy property and disaffect people who could serve friendly causes. Alexander the Great, the grandfather of all strategists, concurred with that sentiment. There is a substitute for tactical victories, if they court strategic defeat.
“We oriented on opposing armed forces, not opposing strategies, a fatal faux pas in that war. We overrated ourselves and underrated opponents. Technological strengths and superior numbers consequently conferred no advantage on the United States. Finally, we forgot armies are not the only weapons in the counterinsurgency’s arsenal, not even the most important.
“In sum, this country suffered from a shortage of competent strategists. An army general, while Superintendent at West Point, once was asked why the United States, after 200 years of nationhood, had never produced a classic theorist. His answer allegedly was: ‘We’re not interested in thinkers. We’re interested in doers.’
Collins: “Doers, however, don’t do very well unless skilled thinkers think.”…
5 January QUOTES… “We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible.”… CHURCHILL … “No sacrifice is too great if by it you can attain your goals.”…PATTON
Lest we forget… Bear _12_