The Army and Vietnam

An important but flawed book that should be read by anyone serious about understanding the Vietnam war. The author is primarily concerned with what is called the "Army concept" which is the US Armies idea of why it exists and what future wars it existed to fight in the 1960's. That war was a conventional war against the Soviet Union in central Europe. Instead the war it fought was a counterinsurgency war in Vietnam. The author's case is that the US Army took it's conventional mindset and fought the Vietnam War using that instead of counterinsurgency methods. That a policy of attrition was used which left the population to be dominated by the Viet Cong. I think that case is mostly proven.

My criticism is three fold.

Firstly it doesn't show more cover the policy of Containment, the grand strategy of the US during the Cold War. Without discussing this policy it makes decisions made regarding Vietnam seem without context and irrational.

Secondly the book finishes in 1968, it is a common thing in books on the war but wrong. There is still 7 years of war to be fought and nothing within that time is important or can change anything?

Thirdly why are the Communists invisible? Nothing that America does has any effect on the Communist war effort. That is simply not true, the Communists were forced to change constantly because of the American forces and that includes at a strategic level.

I think the book is an important critic of the US Army and government in Vietnam, it is important to question assumptions, but it is far from the final answer on the war. Finally the story is that this book destroyed the authors career in the US Army, it's rare to read the sentence that destroyed a career but here it is on page 262:

"That this strategic war of annihilation against North Vietnam still evokes support in some Army quarters reinforces the notion that for some the learning process proceeds at a glacial pace, if at all."

No employer is going to be happy with that sentence! show less

Andrew Krepinevich, among other critics of the so-called “Army Concept,” has refuted Harry Summers’ plan (see Summers' On Strategy) for isolating South Vietnam from the North. Krepinevich asserts the following about Summers’ plan. Summers’ idea had already been proposed (as the EL PASO Plan) by the military, and discarded, because of the enormous support and logistical requirements. This barrier force, like that along the DMZ, would have been subjected to an enormous amount of harassing fire, requiring a great deal of support to maintain its position. Also, the North Vietnamese could have gone around this barrier by entering Thailand. This would have lengthened the North Vietnamese supply lines into the South, but South show more Vietnam would not have been completely isolated from the North. And, until the Tet Offensive in 1968, the primary opponents were the Viet Cong already operating in South Vietnam, who relied mainly on supplies and support provided from within South Vietnam, rather than relying primarily on external aid.

Krepinevich also argues that instead of focusing too much on the counterinsurgency component of the war effort, the U.S. military failed to concentrate on it enough. He contends that mere lip service was given to the civilian leadership’s demands for greater counterinsurgency effort, and that the early efforts (like the CAP – Combined Action Platoons program, for example) were highly successful, but were discarded shortly after implementation because they were a longer-term solution requiring more time and patience than the military establishment was willing to invest in this type of program. Rather than adapting its doctrine and operations to meet the changing threat of the insurgency, the U.S. military, Krepinevich says, was too inflexible, and wanted to use its conventional approaches and doctrine. Using the same military doctrine that had prevailed in Korea and World War Two, and was designed to match the Soviet conventional threat in Europe, instead of adopting a new low-intensity conflict doctrine is what caused the military failure in Vietnam. Failing to commit enough of our effort on counterinsurgency, rather than too much on it, as Summers asserts, was one of the major causes of U.S. failure in Vietnam, according to Krepinevich.

Review copyright 2009 J. Andrew Byers show less

Pages 131-275 were assigned reading for Vietnam Case Study in S&W at the NWC. I skimmed this section, but then came back and referenced this reading multiple times for the final exam when I answered the question about irregular warfare. Krepinevich is very critical of Army strategy in Vietnam and senior Army officers.

From the syllabus: Krepinevich shows how the U.S. Army began fighting the war by attempting to apply conventional doctrine in Vietnam.

This was the counter factual history that was a huge influence on the scholar soldiers of the Middle East wars.