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The Army and Vietnam

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This is an excellant book that should be read by every military professional and anybody interested in civil-miltary relationships and what happened in Vietnem. The authors premise is that the Army was unprepared for a war in Vietnam. Krepinevich states that Army training, doctrine and organization was geared toward a conventional conflict like what had happened in WWII and Korea. The Army was not prepared to fight a counterinsurgency against a foe that was only going to fight when they had to and when the circumstances and odds were in their favor. The senior leadership of the Army thought the war would be won be killing VC and NVA. According to Krepinevich this is all wrong. To defeat an insurgency you must protect and convince the people of the country you are trying to save that their fortunes lay in siding with you. If the people aren't going to back you then you will lose. It doesn't matter how many VC you kill. The Army's senior leadership did not want to deal with the pacification programs that would have won the war. Many in the military like to lay the blame for the loss in the war at the feet of the politicians in Washington. And there is justification for that. But Krepinevich makes a strong arguement that the war would have still been lost due to the poor/lack of strategy by our military leaders. Reading this book really angered me. Prior to this I had just finished reading "Street Without Joy" by Bernard Fall and I could not help but note the similarities between the failed French efforts and our own. It was like reading the same book over again except the units and the names of the leaders were different. There were almost no lessons learned by our senior leadership from the French debacle.

This book deserves to be far more widely read than it is--and I have no idea why it isn't. Krepinivich's thesis is a brilliant one--the US army was "conceptually" unprepared to fight the Vietnam war: it brought a cold war mentality to the jungles of Vietnam and spent the first seven or eight years of the war trying to "find" this war. The US army imagined that the Viet Cong was a variant of the Soviet army--they "must" have been controlled by a central organization and "must" have had "hidden armies" lurking in the jungle. Decively defeating them would, the Army believed, end the war.

In fact, Krepinivich convincingly argues, the VC was not in the jungle at all--but in the cities along the coast. "We should have done less 'flit'in' and more 'sit'in'", he says.

The war was actually fought more effectively after US troop reduction prevented the "jungle search" strategy from being implemented. This was something akin to what the Marines performed in I Corps: rather than participate in large scale jungle sweeps, troops were divided up and put in small villages with radios. The strategy was more hazardous as troops, because of their small numbers might be overrun. However, it was more effective because it allowed allied forces to prevent the VC from retaking a village after they had withdrawn from their major operation.

This book should eventually allow for US military operations in the first part of the war to be put in the context of greater US cold war culture. The "willing blindness" of the US military during much of the sixties came from what amounts to a cultural fixation on a way power was imagined to function. Even in '71, Nixon believed that the Vietnamese communists was controled by a "COSVN", which functioned like a sort of "tumor": nip the tumor and the body will fall. This, Krepinivich proves, was all part of the American imaginary. Our blindness went far beyond the generals: it was part of our culture.

Krepinevich has a cult following among professors and students at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. After reading his work I understand why. It is rare that ones comes across a book that radically changes the way one looks at military history. Thousands of books have been written on Vietnam and the movies "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now" brought the war to millions of Americans. Until I read this book, I thought I understood the causes and conduct of the war. Krepinevich brilliantly analyzes how the U.S. Army planned for and conducted the war. How it tried to fight the war it wanted to fight, vice the war as it actually existed. Army leadership brought their conventional mindset to the jungles of Vietnam. The inability to adapt to change proved a greater threat to the U.S. Army than the North Vietnamese Army. The book rises above the personal narrative style that dominates most Vietnam books. Instead, the book is based on solid military analysis. Even more telling was how the U.S. Army failed to grasp the lessons of counter-insurgency following Vietnam and quickly returned to the conventional mindset it preferred. The writing is crisp and powerful. The lessons of this book remain vital today as the U.S. continues to struggle on how to best defeat America's latest enemies.

Although coming to this work as a result of a contemporary (2006) news story about the author I was shocked at the relevance of the book to the issues facing the US Army (and others) in Iraq.

The Army and Vietnam is a fascinating study of how not to organise and fight a counter-insurgency campaign amongst a resentful populace using the most aggressive and technologically advanced "shock and awe" methods.

It appears, not least from the paucity of reviews, that this is a book that was seen to lack relevance or lessons for America's warriors. How wrong they were.

I would strongly commend this book both to students of the history of the Vietnam War and those looking for a fresh, professional, perspective on the problems the US faces in Iraq.

Why did the United States lose in Vietnam? Many in the military like to blame the politicians, arguing they meddled in tactical operations or put unreasonable restrictions on those on the front lines. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., a U.S. Army major at the time he published this book (now a retired lieutenant colonel) disagrees with these views. He argues that the Army entered this conflict with equipment and methods more appropriate for fighting a conventional conflict in Europe against the Nazis (or Soviets) than they were for an insurgency in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Even though this situation was a lot like Napoleon's troops arriving in Moscow with the light summer gear they expected to use when they reached British India, generals and staff officers figured heavy firepower and advanced technology would be enough to carry the day. "Simply stated, the United States Army was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency environment" (p. 4)

The strategy that the United States adopted in Vietnam was also inappropriate. Under General William Westmoreland the Army pursued a strategy of attrition. The problem with this approach is that it depend on resources not skills, and by trying to depend on sheer volume, Westmoreland put the enemy in the position of just needing to survive in order to emerge victorious, which gave them an enormous advantage. The general believed that the real threat to the South Vietnamese came from the conventional units of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). If the Americans destroyed these units, they would take the pressure off of the South Vietnamese government, and allow them to destroy the Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas. The problem with this plan was that Westmoreland had no plan on how to follow up on these battles. More importantly, he and his staff were ignoring the realities of Vietnam: the NVA were supporting the main effort, which was the VC insurgency.

According to Krepinevich, the U.S. Army--despite pressure from the White House--showed little interest in counterinsurgency. The Army took years before it started making any serious effort to train its soldiers in low intensity conflicts, and even then much of it was nothing more than a series of cosmetic gestures. Existing training courses got new names, and training exercises in mock Vietnamese villages took place in climates that did not exist in the actually country. The Army placed little emphasis on having intelligence officers learn the language, culture or history of Vietnam. As a result, they focused on the things they knew and understood--finding and destroying the enemy's big units. The problem is in fighting insurgency, the real prize is the support of the people and this requires winning small battles, patrolling on a regular basis, and destroying the support infrastructure of the guerillas. To that task, the counter-insurgent must know the environment in which they are fighting and this the American solider never mastered.

Krepinevich knows the military and this is a real strength of the book. He shows that officers knew what got themselves promoted--the skill sets that the service valued--and they naturally gravitated towards these functions. These areas were those that the Army needed to win have to win World War III. The U.S. Marine Corps, on the other hand, was better at fighting insurgencies and got results in Vietnam. Westmoreland, though, saw these efforts as an unnecessary and dangerous diversion of resources away from what he that was the real fight.

The single-minded focus of this book is a bit of a liability. There were reasons--good, sound reasons--for many of Westmoreland's decisions. He worried about the time factor. The Marine approach was effective, but it was slow and he worried about how long the American public would support the conflict. The U.S. also had to worry about the possibility of fighting the Soviets directly. What good would it do to retool if the Army retooled itself to fight and win an insurgency in Vietnam, if it came at the cost of being unable to stand up to a conventional fire fight that cost that lost all of Western Europe. Krepinevich ignores these considerations. Still, he makes it extremely clear that the U.S. Army owns a lot of the failure in Vietnam and in that sense he makes a major, arresting contribution to the historical literature.

This is an excellent work on why the US Army failed to over come the insurgency in the early days of the Viet Nam war. It explains how President John F Kennedy ordered the Army to change direction and prepare for the new wars of 'national liberation' in the developing world.

The Army considered President Kennedy's orders to be troublesome and did everything the Army could to not carry out his direction. The Army brass considered Kennedy's plan to be a "fad" and continued to plan on the big war in Europe against the Soviet Union. The Army believed that if it could fight the Russian Army, then crushing an insurgency would be no problem. When they did include insurgent warfare training, it was always with the big war in mind. Once Kennedy was dead the Army felt free to dump most of the program.

Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., the author wrote the book after completing his PhD. He was a Lt Col in the Army and this book - since it did not follow Army doctrine - ended his Army career.

Today's Army leaders in the Middle East have studied this book and some of their anti-Taliban efforts can be seen in the lessons learned by earlier generations of command.

An excellent read for those interested in the Viet Nam war, and in how to battle insurgent forces.

Review of The Army and Vietnam, by Andrew Krepinevich

Date: 09 June 2009
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Introduction

Andrew Krepinevich (USA LTC Ret.) heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA). As a US Army Major working at OSD he authored a book called The Army in Vietnam, which critically assessed the approach used by DA to the ongoing insurgency in South Vietnam. The book is well researched and provides an exhaustive set of references.

Book Summary

Organized chronologically, Krepinevich takes the reader from the advisory years of 1954-65 through withdrawal in the mid-70s. Although easily dismissible as yet another failure narrative on an unpopular war, it provides a clear-eyed assessment of the systemic disconnects between DA, DoD and NCA and the mid-level officers, NCOs and civilians on the ground in Vietnam. Krepinevich does not gripe but cites examples of grounded solutions which, had they been adopted into practice, could have influenced both the tactical and strategic outcomes of the war. He ends the book with a ringing indictment of the strategy of attrition and explores the two competing strategies offered by DA/DoD at the time, the El Paso plan and the Enclave or oil-spot approach.

El Paso

Discussed in detail in COL Harry Summers book On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context, the plan called for

...a joint U.S.-ARVN-ROK push across the Laotian panhandle form the DMZ to Savannakhet on the Thai-Laotian border. Once in place, the plan held, such a force could have blocked North Vietnamese access to South Vietnam...allowing the RVNAF to destroy insurgents in the South, a job in which, Summers contends, the Army should not have become involved. Indeed, Summers states that the Army's fatal mistake was becoming overly involved in combating the insurgents, thereby missing the real threat-the North Vietnamese (Krepinevich 262).


Enclave

Proposed by Ambassador Taylor in 1965, Enclave accepted the idea of the stalemate where U.S. forces could neither win the war for the RVNAF nor be driven out of Vietnam through military action (Krepinevich 264-265). Further,

...the strategy called for the military to recognize the war had been won by the South Vietnamese and that the most effective role for American troops would be to aid the RVNAF by controlling the densely populated coasts areas (Ibid).


CORDS

Headed by Robert Komer (President Johnson's special assistant for pacification), Civil Operations and Revolutionary Support (CORDS) capitalized on and enjoyed the early and continued support of the CIA, a key player in Vietnam from the beginning. The CIA's assessment that the majority of supplies for the enemy originated inside Vietnam was controversial , and was the study which gave life to CORDS. At its height, over 6,000 officers and men of MACV worked with civilians on the project, with the intent of pacifying the Vietnamese countryside by

...pulling together...State Department, the AID, the USIA (information agency) and the CIA" with the military. CORDS teams occupied 250 districts in the 44 provinces of Vietnam. The duty description of a typical CORDS advising commander was "to advise the province chief in military operations, pacification efforts and civil affairs (Hemingway)


CAPS and GOLDEN FLEECE

A Marine Corps initiative, Combined Action Platoons (CAP's) looked internally to their Small Wars manual . With the aim of social, political and economic development, and `tolerance, sympathy and kindness' (Krepinevich 172) at the heart of their relationship with the populace, CAP's depended on `ruff puffs' (Ruffs=regional forces; Puff's=popular forces) that lived locally.

Marginalized by GEN Kinnard, Commander, 1st AIRCAV Division and GEN Westmoreland, MACV (Military Assistance Command-Vietnam) the CAP's living and working inside villages were part of the Marine Corps Golden Fleece operation. Kinnard and Westmoreland amplified the mischaracterization that CAP's were sitting in fortified positions, avoiding the fight. Kinnard was "absolutely disgusted" (Rector) with the Marines. Golden Fleece called for

`saturating the coastal farming areas with Marine guards and patrols during the harvest season so the farmers could harvest, store and eventually sell their crop... (Krepinevich)

In contrast, Sir Robert G.K Thompson noted that "the use of CAP's is quite the best idea I have seen in Vietnam, and it worked superbly".


So What?

Krepinevich's work was prescient. On its own a textbook analysis of the strategic failures of DA and DoD in Vietnam, The Army and Vietnam offers timely counsel for our efforts in current counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Understanding how CORDS and the Marine Corps CAP program contributed to stabilization can illuminate the future of the PRT program's potential impacts. Some lessons:
* Senior army leadership denigrated the success of the Marine Corps CAP and Golden Fleece operations.
o Lesson: support success stories even when they don't fit doctrine.
* The CORDS program never exceeded 10% of `foxhole' U.S. strength and represented only 1% of total uniformed military personnel at the height of the effort. In a theatre where the effort to effect ratio was 1000 artillery rounds to 1 dead enemy, CORDS was cheap at twice the price.
o Lesson: Civil Military Operations are cost-effective.

* Efforts in South Vietnam were concentrated against two main entities: the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (insurgents). Between the two, they were basically everywhere. Lethal operations (see above: 1,000 artillery rounds to 1 dead enemy) created more problems than they solved.
o Lesson: The friend you have today is the enemy you empower tomorrow through your insensitivity. Denying the enemy the opportunity to exploit your missteps is cheap; retracting statements is difficult and bringing a child back to life after lethal ops kills them `by mistake' is impossible.
Works Cited
CSBA. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. 2009. [...]

Hemingway, Al. Historynet.com. 2008. 9 June 2009 [...]
Krepinevich, Andrew F. The Army in Vietnam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Rector, William. "THE EVOLUTION OF COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINE." April 1993. DTIC. 11 August 2009 <handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA283162 >.

Summers, Harry G. On Strategy. Novato: Presidio, 1995.

United States Marine Corps. Small Wars Manual. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1987.

There are several ways to read Andrew Krepinevich's "The Army and Vietnam," which was published in 1986 when many wounds from the Vietnam War were still raw. First, it can be read as a summary and general assessment of the decade long Army experience with counterinsurgency (COIN) in Southeast Asia. Second, it can be viewed as a critique of the Army's organizational inflexibility (or fundamental inability) in embracing new ways of war. Finally, it is a superb case study in institutional resistance to change, which is applicable to any large bureaucracy (civil, military or corporate).

When this book first came out it was the second aspect that mainly captivated defense policymakers, especially during the 1990s Revolution in Military Affairs debate when it was feared that the Air Force's fighter pilot culture would undermine the move toward unmanned aerial vehicles and the Navy's surface warfare leadership would stymy the move to semi-submersible, long range arsenal ships. Meanwhile, many officials were asking seriously, "Do we really need an Army?"

Today, after a near decade of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first aspect of the book has come into sharper relief, although it has been largely drowned out by the flood of COIN-focused books hitting the market even though most of them are of far lesser quality than "The Army and Vietnam."

The core of Krepinevich's argument is that US Army leadership never wavered from their support of the "Army Concept" of war, which he describes as "the Army's perception of how wars ought to be waged and is reflected in the way the Army organizes and trains its troops for battle. The characteristics of the Army Concept are...a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties." It can be summed up in the Army phrase: "It is better to send a bullet than a man."

Counterinsurgency would play a large role in Vietnam, but the political pressure for the Army to more seriously adopt that form of warfare pre-dated US escalation in 1965. It was Khrushchev's 1961 announcement of support for wars of national liberation that prompted newly elected President John F. Kennedy to order the US Army to more fully embrace COIN operations as part of his administration's new defense policy of "flexible response." From the very start, and straight through to the humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam a decade later, Krepinevich claims that the top Army brass paid mere lip service to COIN and more often than not actively undermined any substantive changes away from the Army Concept of conventional, firepower-first mindset.

Despite several high level attempts to push the Army in the direction of more counterinsurgency focused operations, including the Special Group, Counterinsurgency (SGCI), the Stilwell Report, and the Howze Board (all in 1962), which highlighted the inadequacy of Army COIN training, doctrine and organization; the Program for the Pacification and Long Term Development of Vietnam (PROVN) in 1966, which argued that pacification ought to be given top priority; to the 1968 efforts of the new assistant secretary of defense of defense Paul Warnke to shift US strategy from attrition to pacification and population security, Army leadership (Wheeler, Westmoreland, etc.) clung tenaciously to a strategy of kinetic intensive search-and-destroy missions that sought to bleed the enemy white.

The only genuine structural change ushered in by the Army during the Vietnam era was "airmobility," which Krepinevich claims was only embraced by the orthodox Army leadership because it was packaged in such a way that it supported the Concept of conventional mid-intensity warfare in Europe and had the added benefit of stealing back ownership of close air support from the Air Force. Rather than help the Army address COIN, the author claims that airmobility merely provided the service a quick fix to avoid it all together. As far as the Army was concerned, COIN was compartmentalized to the Green Berets (special forces). It was confidently held that superior firepower, mobility and communications, all augmented by airmobility, would trump any advantages the VC had on the ground with the local population.

As the population-focused operations in Afghanistan grind on with mixed results, belief in the validity of COIN has certain suffered of late. But the author, writing in the mid-1980s, is clearly a believer in the efficacy of population-centric COIN efforts in Vietman. Krepinevich lauds the tactics and results of various COIN programs employed during the course of the Vietnam War, especially the Strategic Hamlets program (January 1962 to November 1963); the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) (before control of the operations were transferred from the CIA to MACV in Operation SWITCHBACK in July 1963 and the role of Green Berets was reoriented toward search-and-destroy missions rather than pacification and training); Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons (CAPs, which stressed night patrols, minimum firepower, and intimate, long term contact with villagers, a program that Krepinevich says General Westmoreland and the rest of MACV detested as a waste of manpower); and the "Ruff-Puffs" (Regional/Provincial Forces, locally recruited paramilitary forces that, according to one study, accounted for up to 30% of VC casualties at the cost of 2-4% of US resources).

The author's main conclusion is that these promising COIN initiatives were never adequately supported. Whenever the Army was forced to make trade offs, it always chose the side that most closely mirrored the Army Concept, whether that meant better supplies for regular forces over Ruff-Puffs or concentrating intelligence gathering on regular units over VC infrastructure or favoring massive firepower that created refugees over sustained, local pacification efforts. Over time, COIN did receive a greater share of the resource pie, but it never came close to emerging as the priority.

In sum, the Army placed a disproportionate share of emphasis and resources on combating the external threat (i.e. invasion from the North) because it more naturally fit with the Army Concept of mid-intensity conventional operations. The true threat -- the insurgency internal to South Vietnam -- was neglected because it was different and didn't neatly fit with the Army's standard procedure, pathways to promotion or fundamental image of itself as a force the engages and destroys the enemy in open combat.

"The Army and Vietnam" is a compelling piece of scholarship and should be on the reading list for any serious student of counterinsurgency, the Vietnam War, or organizational change.

I served on two A Teams from Okinawa to Vietnam, was a Company Commander and S3, and at the cease fire a District Senior Adviser. I am in disagreement with this author over many points. A strategy of attrition was about the only approach the politicians would allow. This was not just an insurgency. The Army had that war won. The North Vietnamese attacked in strength with regular units in 65, TET of 68, again in May of 68, in 1972, and finally took Saigon in 1975 after our withdrawal and cut off of funds. I believe the US Army was a learning organization. The author seems to treat Vietnam as some academic exercise in organizational behavior and change. I see this book as well researched and documented. I happen to disagree with it. I am more of the Summers school, seeing the North Vietnamese as the real threat to be destroyed. I will say that as long as US troops were in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese and VC were beaten at every turn. By 1972, 93% of villagers were in a secure environment. It is wrong to try to separate the conventional war from the irregular. Forces and advisers in Vietnam had to do both and at the same time. This author has no appreciation of the realities. It is a campus effort. The North Vietnamese overran Saigon with 130,000 regulars with tanks and artillery. They didn't even mention the Viet Cong.