A new biography puts an end to the idea that we could not win
By Max Boot in the Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2011
Note: Max Boot (b. 1969) is a Russian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, author, editor, lecturer, and military historian. He has worked as a writer/editor for The Christian Science Monitor, and Wall Street Journal. He has been a senior fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. What follows is his review of a book by Lewis Sorely titled Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011). It is part of an interesting analysis of the man who led the Vietnam War (1964 – 1968), relevant because Westmoreland was also the man who some define as the least competent general in the U.S. Army.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that The Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded ” … that the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn’t change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander-in-chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Within a few months, of course, Mr. Bush did change defense secretaries, generals and strategies. We can only speculate how events might have unfolded if he had subscribed to a different interpretation of Vietnam — one that did not blame political interference for our defeat. Could violence levels have been reduced earlier, saving untold numbers of American and Iraqi lives?
It is hard to think of a more compelling argument for the importance of studying history and, in particular, the history of the Vietnam War, which, 36 years after the fall of Saigon, continues to cast a long shadow over the American military and American politics. Whether Mr. Bush realized it or not, he was taking sides in a contentious debate — the war over the Vietnam War — that continues to divide scholars and commentators. The debates may be less rancorous than they were a few decades ago, but there is still little agreement over why the United States became involved in Vietnam, why we lost, whether defeat was inevitable, what the consequences were — and what it all means for current policy.
Among historians, the biggest division has pitted those who think that the Vietnam War was immoral and unwinnable against those who think it was a worthy effort that could have been won with different tactics and strategies. The antiwar view has been the dominant one, expressed in such celebrated books as Frances FitzGerald’s “Fire in the Lake” (1972), David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” (1977), Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History (1983) and Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam” (1988). All share the questionable assumptions that Ho Chi Minh was not a dedicated Communist but a nationalist leading a popular liberation struggle, that his enemies in Saigon were hopelessly corrupt and illegitimate, and that American policymakers were blinded to these facts by an excess of Cold War zeal. A recent exposition of this view can be found in Gordon Goldstein’s “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam” (2008), which became a hot item in the fall of 2009 among White House aides opposed to sending more troops to Afghanistan.
The antiwar orthodoxy was challenged from the start by many military officers (and some civilian officials), but while agreeing that the war could and should have been won, the “revisionists” divided over how. Some authors claimed the United States should have been less conventional in approach, concentrating more on counterinsurgency and less on “search and destroy.” Others argued that we should have been more conventional: invading Cambodia and Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bombing North Vietnam more heavily, perhaps even marching on Hanoi. As Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff in the 1960s, memorably put it: “We should stop swatting flies and go after the manure pile.” The “manure pile” argument — which ignored the fact that the French had occupied the entire country and still lost to a Communist insurgency with secure bases in China — found its most eloquent expression in “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War” (1982), a surprise bestseller from Col. Harry G. Summers Jr.
The rejoinder was published in 1986 by an Army major named Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. (today long-retired and president of his own think tank in Washington). In “The Army and Vietnam,” he argued that the Army had no one else to blame for defeat — it had squandered public support by devoting far too many resources to fruitless big-unit operations in the sparsely populated Highlands while failing to secure the coastal areas where the bulk of Vietnam’s population lived. Mr. Krepinevich argued that less firepower should have been used and more resources devoted to “population-centric” programs such as the Combined Action Platoons, which sent small groups of Marines to live in villages and secure them in cooperation with South Vietnamese militia.
Some conventionally minded Army officers still cite Summers (who died in 1999), but the Krepinevich view has become more influential in the military. His critique influenced the development of the counterinsurgency doctrine that was implemented in Iraq in 2007-08. Gen. David Petraeus (who wrote his Princeton dissertation on “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam”) was determined to implement the principles of counterinsurgency that had been ignored by his predecessors in both Iraq and Vietnam. He told his troopers to “live among the people,” “patrol on foot and engage the population,” and “hold areas that have been secured.”
While Mr. Krepinevich was the trailblazer, in recent years, his argument has been taken up and extended by Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and former CIA official. In his 1999 book, “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam,” he forcefully argued that Gen. Creighton Abrams, who took over as head of Military Assistance Command Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive, changed the course of the conflict for the better by moving away from big-unit sweeps. Mr. Sorley believes that the United States had essentially won the war by 1972. The “final tragedy” of his subtitle refers to the fact that Washington [Democrats] then abandoned South Vietnam, allowing it to fall to an armored invasion by the North in 1975.
Mr. Sorley, who also wrote an admiring biography of Abrams (“Thunderbolt,” 1992), has now focused on the war’s early years by producing a biography of Abrams’s predecessor — William Childs Westmoreland. The subtitle says it all: “The General Who Lost Vietnam.” This judgment flies in the face of the common view — enunciated by no less than George W. Bush and a dominant strain in the 2005 obituaries for Westmoreland — that it was the politicians (with a big assist from the news media) who lost the war. Mr. Sorley makes mincemeat of this myth. While he concedes that Lyndon Johnson was deeply involved in “actions taken outside South Vietnam” (such as the bombing of the North), he argues: “Within South Vietnam, the U.S. commander had very wide latitude in deciding how to fight the war. That was true for Westmoreland and equally true for his eventual successor.”
It was Westmoreland — not Lyndon Johnson or even Robert McNamara — who decided to fight a “war of attrition,” sending large and cumbersome American formations to thrash through the jungle and rice paddies in search of elusive enemy units. It was Westmoreland who kept demanding more American troops and who encouraged them to fire as many artillery rounds as possible — even if they lacked specific targets. It was Westmoreland who made “body counts” the key metric of the entire war effort in the futile hope that the United States could inflict enough casualties on the Communists to make them cry “Uncle!” He did not seem to realize or care that in the process, he was inflicting lesser but still considerable casualties on American forces — and that a democracy like the United States was much more casualty-averse than a one-party dictatorship like North Vietnam.
Why did Westmoreland bungle so badly? It was not, as the most extreme antiwar protesters would have it, because he was a war criminal or psychopath. Mr. Sorley shows that Westmoreland was well-intentioned and conscientious but also dense, arrogant, vain, humorless, and not too honest. Is that too harsh a judgment? You won’t think so if you read all the damning assessments compiled by Mr. Sorley from the late general’s associates. Air Force Gen. Robert Beckel thought that “he seemed rather stupid. He didn’t seem to grasp things or follow the proceedings very well.” Or Army Gen. Charles Simmons: “General Westmoreland was intellectually very shallow and made no effort to study, read, or learn. He would just not read anything. His performance was appalling.”
Those comments were made by officers who worked closely with Westmoreland during his years as Army chief of staff —1968 to 1972— a time when “briefers were dismayed to find that Westmoreland would occupy himself during one-on-one deskside briefings by signing photographs of himself, one after another, while they made their presentations.” But the warning signs had been apparent long before. In 1964, when Westmoreland was first being considered for an assignment in Vietnam, one general privately warned that “it would be a grave mistake to appoint him”: “He is spit and polish . . . This is a counterinsurgency war, and he would have no idea how to deal with it.”
Westmoreland’s appointment was further validation of the Peter Principle — that eventually, every employee is promoted beyond his level of competence. “Westy” was a good division commander who had compiled an impressive record in World War II and Korea. Mr. Sorley summarizes his sterling, pre-Vietnam CV: “Eagle Scout at 15, journeyer to Europe and the World Scout Jamboree, president of the high school senior class, Citadel cadet, First Captain at West Point, battalion commander at age 28, with the Presidential Unit Citation, earned in combat in North Africa, a full colonel at 30, then a brigadier at 38 while leading the airborne regimental combat team in Korea, major general — youngest in the Army — at 42, serving at the right hand of the famous Maxwell Taylor, then sent by him to command the 101st Airborne Division, on to West Point as the dashing Superintendent with the young and beautiful Kitsy and the three attractive children she had borne him, familiar then with so many greats of an earlier day — MacArthur, Eisenhower, Omar Bradley — then corps command, again with his beloved airborne, and the third star.”
Alas, none of that experience prepared Westmoreland to deal with a foe that refused to stand and fight like the Wehrmacht. The North Vietnamese preferred to wear down U.S. forces with ambushes and hit-and-run raids, and Westmoreland blundered straight into their trap. By the time he was finally sent home in 1968 — kicked upstairs to become chief of staff — he had been thoroughly discredited.
He spent the rest of his life fighting unsuccessfully to reclaim his reputation — often by twisting the truth. In a 1972 Washington Post article, he was quoted saying that “we had full warning that the [Tet] offensive was coming” even though Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker testified that “we had no inkling of the scope, the timing, or the targets of the offensive” and South Vietnam’s top intelligence officer said that “the enemy had really achieved the element of surprise.” In 1982, Westmoreland even sued CBS News for a “60 Minutes” report that claimed he had deliberately minimized estimates of enemy strength prior to Tet. (He settled out of court without getting any money from CBS.)
Mr. Sorley has stripped away Westmoreland’s after-the-fact mythologizing, leaving us with a deeply unflattering portrait of an army careerist who unintentionally did much damage to an institution —and a country— that he loved dearly. “Westmoreland” is a valuable addition to the growing “revisionist” literature that shows the Vietnam War was winnable if we had fought differently — and, contra President Bush, that did not mean simply letting the generals do whatever they wanted.
Mr. Boot, the author of “The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power,” is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Fix Bayonets! 
For those of us who served there late in the war the continuing frustration is convincing outside observers that they know less than nothing about the conduct and the real history of the latter days. One cannot even have an intelligent discussion about it without evoking ideologically driven, venomous responses.
It is one thing to be against a war. It is an entirely separate issue to be against the CONDUCT of a war. Although we slip-slides our way in to the war in very typical fashion we tried everything else first until we hit upon that which worked. William Colby needs to be part of the discussion. Land reform. The green miracle circa 1969 to 1972. These complex yet critical issues need to be a part of the discussion.
It is this issue among many that convince me the concept of academic freedom is long since dead in our culture. So sad. After all the lives lost the Vietnamese Communists tried everything else until they realized we tried everything else and then found that which works. Semper Fidelis
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America’s enemy knows us better than we know ourselves. Our main problem is that we simply refuse to admit that our State Department (along with 99.9% of our presidents since 1912) is a gaggle of incompetent buffoons in matters of foreign policy. They are gleefully joined by ass-kissing flag officers who conclude that their career is far more important to them than their country. Now enter the woke-middle-grade officers who add the goat rope to mission-centered combat readiness. It all adds up to this: we’d better not pick a fight with any more goat herders, or we’ll likely get our asses kicked.
What did the North Vietnamese know that our leaders didn’t know? Easy to answer: that they could wait us out until we lost our focus and went home.
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Fight and talk, talk and fight.
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What an interesting piece!! Thanks, Mustang. This caught my attention “Could violence levels have been reduced earlier, saving untold numbers of American and Iraqi lives?” Would that have meant OUR reducing violence levels only? How do you convince your enemy to do that? I so often think we Americans believe everyone thinks just like we do. I really appreciate this article, thank you for calling my attention to it.
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Here’s the problem, as I see it: The United States commits military forces to an area or region that becomes a concern to policymakers but does so incompetently. The goals and objectives of such deployments are rarely communicated to the American people, with government officials declaring a level of secrecy attendant to military operations. This is only partially true. The government’s cloak of secrecy limits the amount of informed conversation about the deployment, should things go wrong — so it takes on the appearance of a C.Y.A. operation. The grunts are certainly never “informed.” They don’t need to know such things. But neither are the objectives adequately communicated to the field generals, staffs, or maneuver element commanders. Why? Because the goals and objectives change with the same frequency of a baby’s diaper — and for the same reasons.
It’s crucial to understand that the objectives of warfare and diplomacy are not always aligned. The primary aim of a military engagement is to decisively defeat the enemy, often through violent means. In contrast, diplomacy should focus on the long-term consequences of such engagements, considering the potential impact even decades into the future. Unfortunately, it seems that our State Department lacks individuals who can effectively balance these contrasting objectives.
Here, too, is a problem associated with having armed combatants wearing civilian clothing and hiding behind women and children to avoid confrontation until it suits them. Furthermore, when dealing with the Arab mind, one must recall that you’re dealing with the intellect of a five-year-old. Culturally, whatever happened 3,000 years ago may have been the day before yesterday. It all boils down to this: killing people whose appearance might suggest “collateral damage,” the optics being terrible, when in reality, those people are carrying guns and explosives and need to be pounded into mincemeat, and the optics are still awful.
Knowing this, “we” should give war careful thought before delving into that place of horrors. Once we are committed to war, let the military fulfill its terrible resolve and do not tie its hands with “politically correct” rules of engagement that only advantage the enemy and harm our own forces. Note: I have never intended to suggest that George W. Bush was capable of this kind of thinking.
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Yes, your article makes Bush look like the total moron he probably is…. L
Good point about warfare v diplomacy…
I just wish more American diplomats and ‘experts’ understood (FINALLY) that not all countries think like we do. For example, we are SO nice it’s stupid, and they ARE NOT and they don’t even admire or respect it, as our idiot diplomats, like Blinkin, think
Thanks xxx
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I once stood as as a temporary body guard for General Westmoreland (it was at a press conference in Germany.) Strangely enough, he was dressed in tailored jungle fatigues and carrying a pearl griped 45 on a pistol belt and a pair of mirror bright shined jump boots.
Strangely enough, I was chosen for this “honor” for my “military bearing” and ability to always have on hand on a clean field jacket a tailored clean (not baggy) pair of fatigues. Keep in mind, this was Germany in the late fall in 1971 and said my uniform was the uniform of the day.
After the press conference was over, I returned to my unit out in the field (I was on NATO exercises with no permanent duty station). I asked my 1st sergeant (Top Soldier) why the General wasn’t wearing the uniform of the day and he said, “When you become a 5 star @#$%ing General, “YOU” can whatever the hell “YOU” want!
I guess what I’m trying to say is, I never achieved any higher rank than buck Sergeant and I never figured out what was going on the @#$%ing Generals’ mind. I can tell you, as Mustang said, the war was a goat rope all the way down the line!
Longrange1 / Warren
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I encountered General Westmoreland once at the Pentagon. I was a staff sergeant at the time. He was arrogant and did not appear to have the qualities of a combat leader, but perfectly suited for a high position within the Johnson Administration, where kissing ass was always valued over professional expertise.
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So, a high ranking Martinet.
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That’s how I see him.
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Excellent post. Glad you invited me in. My thoughts:
A first question to ask is “what would winning look like?” It’s a problem of battling an ideology with technology. Technology might hold ground … but what about the energizing ideology?
I have long held the view that we “nearly” won the war by 1972, but I’ve re-evaluated that. Again, what actually is “winning”? Well, not having your capital named after a chameleon Communist – for sure. But it pitted one side – partially decapitated by the loss of historical pride, loss of Diem and corruption – against another that had a strengthening story of pride and victory (over the French) and was using the same tactics.
We would NEVER have been cutting off the HCM trail outside the country. Thank you Averell Harriman for axing that opportunity and the surrender of a battalion of North regulars to Diem. (Our Lend-Lease “negotiator” with the Soviets too.)
Was Diem perfect? No, but had worthy attributes for a leader (not so for those around him) and was a damn sight better than his predecessor, the last emperor in the Nguyen dynasty who lived in comfortable exile in France (even while his mother still lived in the old imperial capital of Hue).
Momentum. No amount of military strategy took into account that the north could look back with pride on their valor fighting the French. After the Dien Bien Phu defeat, the ARVN in the south were made to turn their back on 80 years of military association with France. In their proud association with the French past they had air aces, their own valiants at Verdun, and heroism and victory on 3 continents. A great price was paid in loss of fighting spirit that stands and staunchly defends. (Bernard Fall) Much less becomes a bulwark in the security of the new state. This was a critical crack in the foundation of state, followed by this:
From Mike Hennelly (in The Fortress of Broken Dreams) “By the time that the French began the Dien Bien Phu campaign in 1953, they had established a decade-long pattern of making strategic decisions without owning the resources needed for those decisions. …. People will be more reckless with other peoples’ resources than with their own (the U.S. financed 78% of the French effort). Conducting a war while being bankrolled by another country led to a lack of discipline in French strategic thinking.” Likely in South Vietnamese thinking, too. LESSON FOR TODAY, again. Yoohoo, Ukraine?
Ho was no sudden nationalist uprising, but a dedicated Communist from his days working as a cook in France. Plus he wanted his country out from under the control of westerners – the nationalist part. When “self-determination” was buzzed at the post-WW1 peace conference, he showed up with his plan for Vietnam. Of course he was not admitted, but the point is he was focused and on task for levering westerners out of Vietnam and more and more under the secure shield of Communism that he solidified in his days in France. He was hanging out with – but not joining – the Americans post-WW2. Looking for an opening for opportunity. Where were the bright boys evaluating him? More hubris?
Yes, war of attrition against THAT? What a stupid idea. He knows you don’t fight Goliath in face-to-face confrontation or Goliath will steamroll over you. When the Americans arrived with helicopters the North Viet commander in the Ia Drang battle later told a retired Hal Moore “you were like grasshoppers with your helicopters, all over the place, and we had to figure out new tactics to deal with those.” I don’t think the de-energized south was imbued with the same spirit.
Having read much on the French in Indochina – including the fascinating story of how they latched onto the place to begin with – I think the winning and the losing, and the oft blinding hubris that accompanied them, started generations before our pieces were on the chess board. You know how the French got there in the first place? They went in to punish the emperor who had some French missionaries killed. At least that was the pretext to gain commercial advantages. Thought it would be a couple of weeks and they’d bag the place and take over tea plantations and rich ports. They invited Spain to join them, and Spain wisely demurred preferring the reliable safety and wealth of their nearby Philippines. Read THAT story first. We can start with the “few weeks” part, and it goes downhill from there (10 years later). In 1953, in a desperate bid to consider helping the French who were strangling themselves for choosing a bastion of LOW ground surrounded by high ground subject to enemy control (Dien Bien Phu – vastly underestimating the determination and solidarity of the commies to attain those high grounds), the U.S. considered building a highway deep through impassable enemy suffused countryside from Hanoi to Dien Bien Phu, Black River and Red River country – to make a 200-mile rescue dash! Merciful heavens! This was not the race across Europe in 1944 with the enemy in retreat. Re-living the last war.
“Westy” would not read anything. Shameful. What a contrast to Hal Moore who was devouring Bernard Fall’s excellent Street Without Joy in transit to Vietnam and later Hell in a Very Small Place. (It was published shortly after the Battle of Ia Drang Valley.)
“A guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French army, convincing the Viet Minh that similar tactics might prevail in battle with the U.S.”
Westmoreland shoudda read it too. Fall, having documented the French demise in Vietnam, was also highly critical of Westmoreland. De Gaulle sent France’s secret after action report on Vietnam to Lyndon Johnson. He never even had it translated. This bespeaks a hubris and disinterest in “learning” that seems to have been on full display in Westmoreland, but it is a common theme in this narrative, offering so many obstacles to ‘winning.’
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Thank you for this “most excellent” reply.
Considering the total number of flag officers in the United States from its beginning, few have ever reached the pinnacle of “strategic or tactical” brilliance. Roosevelt didn’t “side” with MacArthur because he believed MacArthur’s strategy was superior to that of Nimitz; he sided with him because there was no one to take his place in the Southwest Pacific. Roosevelt also knew that Nimitz was the better “gentleman.” I’m not suggesting Nimitz didn’t have an ego … only that he was much less centered on self than MacArthur.
Vo Nguyễn Giap was a superior strategist and logistician, and one whose schemes suited his country’s objectives and his country’s capabilities. Early in the conflict, Westmoreland far too readily accepted Vo’s terms: warfare by attrition. Battles have been won through a stout defense, but one would have to go back in time many years before discovering a war that was won by employing defensive strategies and tactics.
I agree with the argument that Westmoreland was not up to the task of combat leadership and that his opponent intellectually diminished him in that war. I cannot fathom why Johnson left him in that position other than Johnson preferred having people around him who were adept at licking his boots. Promoting a man like Westmoreland to service as Army Chief had to have an unsettling impact on the Army’s true warrior class.
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Thank you for the link.
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A man who knew MacArthur’s father General Arthur MacArthur said “I never met a man who was so egotistical as Arthur MacArthur until I met his son.” It does not mean they can’t do great things. Look at Trump.
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We may be talking apples vs. oranges here. If a general wins all the battles but loses the war, he’s not a great general. Why? Because tactically, it illustrates that his field commanders and the troops engaged in the fight were true warriors. At the same time, the senior general’s strategies for winning the war were a dismal failure.
If a president’s failures equal his successes, he’s not a great president. Almost everyone I speak with about the Biden administration opines that his failures far outweigh any success as chief executive. I have not seen a “fair and balanced” assessment of the Trump administration. That, in and of itself, may tell us how polarizing Trump was as America’s President. It led us into two distinct political camps.
I have seen no evidence of either Biden’s or Mr. Trump’s willingness to unify the American people. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was a unifier … with disastrous results for millions. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Entering the 2024 general election, Mr. Trump’s modus operandi will continue to divide the American people into two camps — possibly three: those for Trump, those against Trump, and those who have given up on the American political system. I fail to understand how such a situation will benefit the long-term interests of the American people.
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Trump is not the divider. He’s not a reconciler, but that’s near impossible anyways, given the fifth column media working against that.
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Good analysis.
“The primary aim of a military engagement is to decisively defeat the enemy,”
I’m beginning to think it’s to feed the military industrial complex. Use up as many weapons to be replaced as possible.
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I doubt it is possible to have a strong military without an accompanying military-industrial complex. High-performance aircraft are not made by or purchased at Toys-R-Us. The average cost of a battle tank today is around $10 million. Note that Joe Biden has promised Ukraine a $400 million tank package.
What was the saying in the film, The Right Stuff? No bucks – no Buck Rogers. As long as you have such demands, you’ll find arms and munitions manufacturers pushing for as much money as they can get from Uncle Sugar, and you will find politicians like Liz Cheney clamoring for her share of the pie.
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Excellent review and thanks. The fine comments made leave me little to add to the topic. Pertinent now that we are slowly slipping into war via Ukraine. Sending long range Missiles to Ukraine that will reach the heart of Russia to tweak the bear…. one wonders if anyone in the WH considers the possible results. Although Zelensky was told not to hit their refineries .. of course which he disregarded…
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