People have been comparing Iraq to Vietnam since before the United States went into Iraq. At first, the comparisons were mainly made by those who wanted to get out or who did not want to go in the first place.
More recently, those who support what we are doing in Iraq, or who worry about what might happen if we leave too early, have talked what happened in Vietnam and Cambodia after we left and what might happen in Iraq if we left in a similar way. President Bush has even made this point himself.
But let me make another comparison between Vietnam and Iraq. This is going to be a very broad comparison. It has to be broad because, while there are some similarities between Vietnam and Iraq, there are as many, if not more, differences. Also, Vietnam is over. The story in Iraq has not finished yet. We still have a chance to learn things from our experience in Vietnam that might help us in Iraq.
First, a few comments about Vietnam. When the United States first started sending large numbers of combat troops to South Vietnam in late 1964/early 1965, those troops mostly followed what was then our standard military strategy and tactics. We approached Vietnam as if it were a big-unit war. General William Westmoreland said that we would win with firepower. Our policy was search and destroy: We would search out the Communists and destroy them. This is, roughly, the story of We Were Soldiers Once … and Young. We would find the Communists, attack them and kill them. If necessary, we would go where we thought they would be and get them to attack us, so we could kill them. The measuring stick was the number of enemy killed, the body count. If we could kill enough of them, we would win. But it did not work that way. That was not, and is not, how you beat an insurgency.
In June of 1968, General Westmoreland was replaced by General Creighton Abrams. General Abrams brought a new strategy to the war. Instead of body count, the goal was protecting the people. General Abrams said that everything was part of "one war," and the key marker of success was population security.
Two events, however, overshadowed Abrams’ efforts and his new strategy. First, after the Communist attacks during Tet in 1968, Walter Cronkite told us the war was lost. He was wrong, but a lot of people believed him and shut their minds to what was really happening in Vietnam. Second, in 1969, President Nixon announced that the United States would start to withdraw its troops from Vietnam. The combination of these two things meant that people in the United States did not see how things were starting to change on the ground in South Vietnam as a result of Abrams’ new policy. Significant progress was being made in our counterinsurgency efforts against the Communists, but people in the United States did not realize it.
In other words, it was not until more than three years after we started introducing large numbers of combat troops into Vietnam that the Army implemented a proper counterinsurgency strategy. Even though the new strategy was not much noticed, it did work. In fact, our counterinsurgency efforts were going so well that, by 1972, it was the North Vietnamese who switched their focus away from insurgency tactics.** The North Vietnamese Easter Offensive in 1972 was regular, traditional warfare, with tanks and all, because we had done so well in our counterinsurgency efforts. The South Vietnamese, with our help, beat back the attacks.***
Three years later, the Communists tried again. This time the situation was different. Our airpower and advisers were gone. We had not kept our promise to keep the South Vietnamese supplied. We had cut South Vietnam off, both materially and psychologically. When the North attacked, the South crumbled.
However, what happened in 1975 does not mean Abrams’ "one war"/counterinsurgency doctrine failed. As I mentioned, the real success of Abrams’ ideas can be seen in the fact that the North Vietnamese abandoned insurgency tactics because they were no longer working. The fact the South Vietnamese could not win a conventional war against the North in 1975 only tells us that the North had a better army and allies who would give it more supplies than the South had in 1975.
Even though Abrams’ strategy was working, after 1975 our military reacted to Vietnam just like the rest of America did: They said no more Vietnams, and they promptly forgot everything they learned in Vietnam about counterinsurgency warfare. Abrams had figured it out, but the Army forgot it. The military turned its attention to Europe and beating the Russians.
Which brings us back to Iraq. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Army fought the kind of big-unit war it knew how to fight. And it did a great job of beating Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army (just like it did in Kuwait in 1991).
The problem was that we were not prepared for what happened after we won. Apparently, we had not thought through what might happen after the initial fighting was over. In some ways, though, even if we had thought things through, even if we had known what was going to happen, it is unclear whether the military would have had the proper doctrine to deal with it.
The insurgency did not start right away, but even when it did, and even once we admitted there was an insurgency, the Army, or at least large parts of it, did not seem to know what to do about it or how to respond to it.
There were some generals in Iraq, like General Petraeus when he was there the first time, who knew what to do, but others who did not. It was not until late 2006 that the Army had a proper, up-to-date manual to tell our soldiers how to fight an insurgency.**** It almost seems we had to re-learn what we had forgotten after Vietnam about how to fight an insurgency.
What Abrams did in Vietnam would not have been a perfect fit for Iraq. The two wars are different, as are the two countries. But much of what we learned in Vietnam could have been helpful in Iraq. The counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam would have been a great place to start in responding to the insurgency in Iraq. Using that information from the beginning would have gotten us to where we are today a lot quicker.
It is that time delay that brings me back to the Vietnam comparison. All of the problems in Vietnam before Abrams took over in 1968 convinced many Americans that Vietnam was a lost cause or at least that we had to get out.
Abrams changed our approach and our tactics, but, as I said, I am not sure how many people cared or even realized it. Some thought we had already lost. Others were just happy that our soldiers were starting to come home. In any case, our progress went unnoticed (or at least was not sufficiently noticed).
Like in Vietnam, it has taken us too long to figure out and implement the right strategy and tactics to beat the insurgency in Iraq. Some people, like Senator Harry Reid, have told us that we have already lost. Others are just tired of Iraq and want to get out, no matter what.
But there are differences between Vietnam and Iraq, too. First, I think there may be more recognition now than there was in Vietnam that we have changed our approach to fighting the insurgency. While much of the talk has been about the surge, there has also been discussion of General Petraeus’ new tactics.
Second, I think President Bush may be able to sustain support for Petraeus’s counterinsurgency efforts longer than President Nixon did for Abrams’. I am not sure how much President Nixon focused on the tactics and doctrine that Abrams was using. I think President Bush is paying more attention.
Third, the opposition in Iraq is not in the same league as the North Vietnamese.
But where the comparison starts to be a concern is in timing. You can make the claim that we ran out of time in Vietnam. If it was not time that we ran out of, perhaps it was patience. Abrams’ ideas were working in South Vietnam, but we could not stay there long enough to help the South Vietnamese beat the North Vietnamese.
Will we run out of time in Iraq? Certainly, the failures of 2005 and 2006 tested the patience of the American people. A lot of Democrats have already declared defeat. But how do the American people feel about it? Will they give our efforts enough time?
Tied in with this, do we have enough troops to do the job? We probably do not have as many as we should have. We certainly do not have as many as the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual calls for. The military is too small (one reason for Bill Clinton’s budget surpluses in the 1990s was a decrease in the size of the military), and we wasted too many tours of duty/too much time before we got to the right strategy.
I hope that enough of the American people will see that things are improving in Iraq in a military sense. We finally have a general who knows what to do, who knows how to fight the war we have to fight in Iraq. But it has taken a long time for our political leaders and our military leaders to figure it out. Just like Vietnam.
Ultimately, the progress in Vietnam was not enough. But the enemy in Iraq should be easier to beat than the Communists in Vietnam. The question, then, is whether we have enough patience and troops – and will – to build on the progress we have made in Iraq. Or whether the progress will once again be too little and too late.
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* I say "for the last time" because I have written on comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq a number of times and I hope this is the last time.
** I understand there are people who would not agree with this statement or would not believe it. A detailed response is beyond the purpose of this post and would require more time than I have available. In general, I refer you to A Better War by Lewis Sorley.
*** An aside on the Easter Offensive (so-called because it started on Good Friday): The Easter Offensive failed for at least three reasons. First, North Vietnam’s plan was flawed. Instead of concentrating their forces, they split them into three parts, launching uncoordinated attacks in three different sections of the country. If they had concentrated in one of the areas, they might have succeeded. By dividing their effort, they were stopped. Second, the North Vietnamese were using tanks for the first time. Not surprisingly, they did a poor job in coordinating their tanks and their troops. (It is not easy to get it right the first time.) Third, the United Sates was still there. We may not have had ground forces, but we had airpower and we had advisers. Our planes provided incredible amounts of air support. We not only filled in for the artillery the ARVN lost early in the attack. We also provided close air support and B-52s. Our advisers provided enough advice, backbone stiffening and moral support to just barely hold off the Communists. The Easter Offensive was, in some ways, the kind of big-unit, conventional war that the Army wanted to fight in the Westmoreland years.
**** The new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, co-authored by General David H. Petraeus and Lt. General James F. Amos of the Marine Corps, was published in December 2006.
I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.
Politicians make no difference.
We have bought into the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). If you would like to read how this happens please see:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/halliburton200711
Through a combination of public apathy and threats by the MIC we have let the SYSTEM get too large. It is now a SYSTEMIC problem and the SYSTEM is out of control. Government and industry are merging and that is very dangerous.
There is no conspiracy. The SYSTEM has gotten so big that those who make it up and run it day to day in industry and government simply are perpetuating their existance.
The politicians rely on them for details and recommendations because they cannot possibly grasp the nuances of the environment and the BIG SYSTEM.
So, the system has to go bust and then be re-scaled, fixed and re-designed to run efficiently and prudently, just like any other big machine that runs poorly or becomes obsolete or dangerous.
This situation will right itself through trauma. I see a government ENRON on the horizon, with an associated house cleaning.
The next president will come and go along with his appointees and politicos. The event to watch is the collapse of the MIC.
For more details see:
http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2007/02/warped-priorities.html
Posted by: Ken Larson | November 28, 2007 at 01:36 PM