Time Essay: THE ARMY AND VIET NAM: THE STAB-IN-THE-BACK COMPLEX

TIME ESSAY

THE ARMY AND VIET NAM: THE STAB-IN-THE-BACK COMPLEX

WHENEVER a war ends in defeat or a dubious stalemate, the unsuccessful military leaders are apt to grope for some kind of stab-in-the-back explanation. The U.S. is certainly not headed in Viet Nam for any defeat remotely akin to Germany’s humiliation in World War I, which the German generals blamed on treacherous politicians and civilian softness. Nor is Viet Nam likely to prove quite as bitter a military experience as the French abandonment of the Algerian war, in which some French officers even threatened to attack Paris in their rage against De Gaulle’s pull-out orders. In fact, the U.S. military harbors a new, scarcely admitted optimism about the present battlefield situation in Viet Nam (see THE NATION). This, however, only makes more galling the thought of any outcome short of victory. General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam during the critical years 1964-68, seemed to reflect this, though in a much muted fashion, when he said in congressional testimony released last week: “If we had continued to bomb [North Viet Nam], the war would be over at this time —or nearly over.”

Classic Mistake

The words were wistful and defensive, and they raised an issue that has long stirred controversy in the U.S.: civilian limitations on the use of military power. Most top military officers refrain from public alibis, criticism and rebukes. But many privately agree with Westmoreland’s complaint, and there are signs that a stab-in-the-back, or Versailles, complex is developing. Some officers contend that they were not permitted to move quickly, massively and without restrictions—either on bombing targets or in hitting enemy sanctuaries along Viet Nam’s borders—once the decision was made in 1965 to commit U.S. combat troops. This complaint is aimed mainly at President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who, some officers argue, wanted to win the war “on the cheap and without disturbing the country.”

The Pentagon was appalled that no full mobilization of U.S. manpower was ordered, and that their suggestions for committing up to 750,000 troops as soon as they could be assembled were ignored. “Gradualism was the classic mistake of the McNamara crowd,” sums up one Pentagon officer. Says another: “The American people won’t support a long war—but they would have supported a short one if we had got in and got out quickly.”

How would unleashing the Air Force have achieved that? While there is heated argument even within the military about the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing that was permitted, many officers contend that U.S. airpower, properly applied, could have ended the war in about six months. By the spring of 1966, this argument goes, the Air Force had ample bases in South Viet Nam and the Navy had enough carriers in position to carry out a systematic destruction of the enemy’s power plants, transportation network and military facilities in the North. But, officers complain, instead of being able to hit all those related targets at once, they had to get Washington approval for each major new target, and this “piecemeal” approach was inefficient.

Ignorant Critics

Any real military victory was also rendered impossible, General Creighton Abrams is known to believe, as long as enemy troops could flee across the border to Laos and Cambodia and not be hunted down. These sanctuaries give a badly battered enemy time to recover. Although some exceptions have been made, official U.S. policy forbids pursuit across these borders.

Commanders in the field have other complaints. They say that the U.S. should have moved much sooner to strengthen the South Vietnamese forces, which are now belatedly expected to take over the fighting. Field officers would have liked greater freedom to clean the Viet Cong out of populated villages without having to obtain cooperation from province and district chiefs —although the massacre at My Lai raises questions about whether the restrictions are, in fact, tight enough. Officers contend that too many of the most prominent critics of the war simply do not understand Viet Nam or the nature of the fighting there. If the military gets around to publicly pinpointing scapegoats, it will undoubtedly cite the U.S. press. There is a widespread conviction in the armed forces that reporters have fed antiwar sentiment at home by sensationalizing the war’s bloodier aspects, downgrading the South Vietnamese army, exaggerating U.S. defeats, emphasizing the negative.

Questioning the Bombing

Perhaps no other war in history has imposed similar restraints and frustrations on an armed force, making the bitterness of the military men understandable. Still, most of their assertions about missed chances of victory are highly questionable. The notion that a quick strike by an unfettered U.S. military force would have promptly subdued the enemy ignores the whole history of the incredible tenacity, patience and xenophobic passion of Vietnamese nationalists. It also underrates their guerrilla fighting skills. A U.S. invasion of North Viet Nam to topple the Hanoi government must at times have had an obvious appeal to the military. But it is almost certain that this move would have provoked full-scale intervention by China, perhaps with Russian support. Such intervention might not have happened, many military men argue, if the U.S. had confined itself to a far more weighty air offensive. But no one could be sure of this, and the Administration at the time judged the risk too great. Besides, Russians and Chinese could have found many means of aiding Hanoi short of rushing armies into the fight. Given South Viet Nam’s porous border and long coastline, the mere resort to more systematic bombing would not have sealed off the movement of supplies from the North.

The concept that bombing the North could end the war has been effectively questioned by Townsend Hoopes, Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1967 until last February. In his book The Limits of Intervention, he contends that U.S. bombing, which is geared to nuclear war, is surprisingly inadequate for interdiction strikes, “a fact shrouded in professional embarrassment.” He claims that the Communist war effort in the South requires a volume of supplies so small compared with the North’s capacity to deliver that it cannot be effectively shut off. Sealing off Haiphong, he also contends, would not have been a decisive move, since only a small portion of vital war supplies arrives through that port.

An even more basic argument against any stab-in-the-back theory is that the military only belatedly made the case for an all-out effort. Especially in the conflict’s early years, the professionals of war were thinking in the old way of victory on the battlefield, and troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet Nam. The excitement of technology became an almost spiritual feeling among the military. Generals thought that bigger, faster weapons systems, particularly against peasants, would do it.

Failure of Persuasion

But even earlier, asserts TIME Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken, top military officers should have exercised “their responsibility of advising the civilian leadership in military matters.” Instead of automatically embracing President Johnson’s proposition in 1965 that U.S. combat forces might go into Viet Nam, the Joint Chiefs should have warned with greater insight—and greater force—of the difficulty of waging guerrilla warfare against an enemy that could match U.S. manpower.

But neither the military nor the civilian leaders were willing to admit that a military victory in the classic World War II sense was impossible under the conditions imposed by the Red Chinese and the Soviets and the nature of the war. The Pentagon should have tried harder to persuade its civilian commanders that both ought to narrow their goals. They could hope to prevent a conquest of South Viet Nam and bolster the South Vietnamese forces for a limited time—and that, perhaps, is all that the President and the nation should have expected to accomplish in Viet Nam. Military men have often said that they were asked to fight the Viet Nam War with one hand tied behind their back. If the goal had been clearly defined as less than a knockout, leaving the ring now would assuredly be easier.

Fortunately, American officers do not have a tradition of taking their grievances to the political barricades. Yet the belief that the U.S. military was betrayed or let down by civilian leaders, in or out of Government, is comparable to the idea, on the other side, that the U.S. was led into a hopeless war by the “militaryindustrial complex.” Both notions fail to fit the facts. Both are dangerous to future American unity.