Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam
Lewis Sorley. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 395 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bibliog. Index. $30.
Reviewed by John Nagl
No one can accuse Lewis Sorley of pulling his punches in Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. In fact, this book reads like the case for the prosecution before a grand jury, which in a sense it is. And like slowing down to rubberneck at a horrific traffic accident, it’s hard to feel good about reading it.
William Childs Westmoreland was marked for greatness early in his career, becoming an Eagle Scout and then first captain of his West Point class of 1936. Continuing a rapid rise, Westmoreland took command of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion at age 28, fighting in the North African campaign and in Sicily and earning the nickname of “Superman” from his troops. In Sicily he developed a close relationship with General Maxwell Taylor—later chief of staff of the Army and U.S. ambassador to Vietnam—that would serve him well for a generation. Westmoreland landed at Normandy just after D-Day, serving as chief of staff of the 9th Infantry Division and, during the occupation of Germany, as commander of the division’s 60th Infantry Regiment. Transferring to infantry from artillery, he commanded the 101st Airborne Division and was West Point superintendent and commander of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps before being assigned to take over responsibility for the war in Vietnam in 1964.
America had never lost an overseas war, and there were no indications that it would lose this one; Westmoreland was described as “the sinewy personification of the American fighting man in 1965” by Time magazine, which named him “Man of the Year.” He oversaw a rapid buildup of American troops conducting a conventional strategy of attrition, dubbed “Search and Destroy,” against an elusive enemy. Westmoreland measured progress by counting the bodies of his North Vietnamese and Viet Cong opponents and told President Lyndon Johnson in March of 1967 that his forces were killing the enemy faster than they could be replaced. Johnson used Westmoreland as the public face of the war in April of 1967, having him address a Joint Session of Congress to testify to his progress in Vietnam; later in the same year, Westmoreland would describe “light at the end of the tunnel.”
The light was an oncoming train. The Tet Offensive was a Viet Cong surprise attack that, although tactically unsuccessful, was a strategic victory for the enemy. It hit America all the harder for being so at variance with the official optimism that Westmoreland had trumpeted. Replaced in Vietnam by General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland became Army Chief of Staff, focusing his four years in that job as the self-described “military spokesman of the Army,” giving speeches on the war in every state of the union. After retiring from the Army he ran a singularly unsuccessful campaign for governor of his native South Carolina and continued to defend his command in Vietnam in his memoirs and in a long series of public speeches, one of which this author heard in 1996. He died in 2005, having lived long enough to see America repeat many of his mistakes in another counterinsurgency campaign gone awry.
It was a tragic end to a life that began with such promise, and this is a profoundly sad book. Sorley is a West Point graduate who knows whereof he prosecutes. The biographer of General Abrams, Sorley worked in Westmoreland’s office during his time as chief of staff of the Army and has interviewed dozens of those who knew the general. He takes no apparent pleasure in demolishing Westmoreland’s time in Vietnam, describing a man who was a very successful and excellent division commander who never understood the kind of war he was tasked to win in Vietnam. Westmoreland was a conventional soldier constitutionally unable to find a way to win an unconventional war.
The book is important not just for the insights it provides into the Vietnam War, but also because it helps explain America’s mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sorley charges that General Westmoreland failed to focus adequately on developing the South Vietnamese armed forces, a mission that only took priority after his departure from Vietnam. This charge re-echoes in Afghanistan, where the effort to build Afghan security forces was an afterthought for the first eight years of the war. America similarly failed to provide significant assistance to the cause of rebuilding Iraqi security forces for several critical years after making the unforced error of disbanding them during the first year of the war.
One wonders what it will take to convince the U.S. Army to take security forces assistance seriously. Future historians will likely be as scathing about the Army’s performance in standing up the Iraqi and Afghan armies as Sorley is about Westmoreland in this one. We only need to do it better if we want to win.
Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform
Paul R. Pillar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 413 pp. Pref. $29.50.
Reviewed by Hans Johnson
Efforts to improve U.S. foreign and security policy by reforming intelligence are misguided, according to Paul Pillar in his latest book. Pillar now teaches at Georgetown University having since retired from the CIA in 2005 after nearly three decades of service.
The textbook picture is that policy is set after considering the intelligence. Pillar states that the reverse is often true. President George W. Bush simply wanted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein out of power and to fashion a democratic Iraq. His administration then pushed for the intelligence to sell such a war to Americans.
A policy may fail, and intelligence is often blamed for providing inaccurate images to decision-makers. This may be true, but it fails to recognize that intelligence is only one source of the images forming the worldview of a decision-maker, according to Pillar. A leader’s personal worldview and experiences are far more influential in shaping policies than any intelligence report. When President Harry S. Truman looked at Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, he saw just another city political boss.
Intelligence is an easy scapegoat for foreign- and security-policy “failures.” Citizens and political leaders then demand “reform” to prevent future such “failures.” The wake of 9/11 brought such a call with its resulting investigative commission and set of recommendations. But the goal of the 9/11 Commission was catharsis, not real reform. Such “reforms” do not necessarily improve intelligence. They may worsen matters, writes Pillar, citing the establishment of a director of National Intelligence. Pillar argues that intelligence agencies often have made important reforms on their own initiative, such as the CIA’s formation of the Counterterrorism Center in 1986.
There is a misperception that as a powerful nation always striving toward perfection, U.S. intelligence agencies can provide decision-makers with a complete and accurate picture of the outside world. Leaders can then use such a picture to protect citizens from harm. This is a myth, writes Pillar. Adversaries will always have a degree of success in hiding their efforts. The future is simply too complex; no one can anticipate a decision an enemy has yet to make.
The most dangerous part of this myth is that the belief in an intelligence nirvana of complete and accurate information fails to recognize the limits of knowledge. Policies then fail, but the blame is laid on the intelligence. There is a failure to recognize that the policy was based on assumptions that turned out to be false and did not take into account what could happen if the assumption was wrong. Pillar cites the example of Iraqis greeting the United States as liberators and the disastrous consequences that occurred when that assumption proved false.
The author suggests a number of reforms to deal with these problems. Intelligence could be made less vulnerable to politicization with a model of semi-autonomy similar to the Federal Reserve. He suggests the creation of a Congressional Budget Office-like intelligence watchdog for Congress. Decision-makers could reduce cognitive impairment through educational courses. His boldest proposal is to reduce the number of political appointees in the executive branch. Ideally, the intelligence community could then serve as a check on the executive branch, preventing at least some future foreign- and security-policy failures. Pillar readily acknowledges that his ideas for reform have little chance of passing.
Policy-making will always involve uncertainties. Unwillingness to enact true reforms only compounds them. Pillar believes that American strategy should “favor the cautious and agnostic over the bold and confident.”
Pillar served his country from the Vietnam War through the two wars in Iraq. Such a strategy applied to those wars might have saved the United States a lot of blood and treasure. But what would the United States be if it had followed the “cautious and agnostic” strategy in 1776, 1861, and 1941 instead of the “bold and confident” it did follow?
The Gun
C. J. Chivers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 496 pp. Prologue. Notes. Index. $20.
Reviewed by Alexis Doster III
In 1986 we had The Social History of the Machine Gun (Johns Hopkins University Press), by John Ellis. Now we have a new, even more social history: The Gun, by C. J. Chivers, dedicated to that ubiquitous child of the machine gun, the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. Chivers is a New York Times foreign correspondent, who, according to the flyleaf biography, was once a Marine Corps infantry captain. He is devoted to the use of such words as “bloody,” “chilling,” and “disturbing,” which telegraph to the reader Chivers’ intention to find fault wherever possible.
The book is divided into three parts. The first looks back to the beginnings of the machine gun. While Chivers gives us a useful if sketchy history, he seems more determined to do a hatchet job on the character of each individual who participated in the development of the gun. Poor Dr. Gatling, inventor of the hand-cranked, multiple-barrel gun of that name, is pilloried not only because he may have juggled his books before an infusion of cash from Colt, but also because he hoped the Gatling gun would replace enough soldiers that casualties would be reduced. (One wonders if Chivers knows that the Wright brothers voiced something like the same hope for their invention.) Inventor of the true, automatic, machine gun, Hiram Maxim is condemned, mostly it seems, because he was an obstreperous person who wanted to make a profit and because he never showed any remorse over the deaths caused by his invention.
By now it should come as no surprise that Chivers’ description of World War I tactics for and against the machine gun tends toward the “lions led by donkeys” version of the Great War, in which unimaginative and hidebound generals sent brave men over and over again into the teeth of impenetrable machine-gun-based defenses. This view has been debunked by recent scholarship.
The book’s second section deals with the birth and deployment of the AK-47 itself. Again, while giving us many relevant facts and stories, Chivers doesn’t put them together coherently. Instead, he spends many pages hounding the unfortunate Mikhail Kalashnikov for inconsistencies in the stories told by him and by the Soviet state about his childhood, upbringing, and the invention of the famous gun.
In a more satisfying passage, Chivers describes how the AK-47 was produced and distributed in vast quantities, ultimately throughout the world, by the Eastern bloc’s state-run industries, dysfunctional distribution systems, and the Soviet Union’s insistence on commonality of calibers and weapons. With millions of AK-47s and their descendants in arsenals filled to bulging, the Eastern bloc found it easy to sell or give away AKs to any they wished to influence.
The third section leads off with Chivers’ tale of the development of what he considers to have been the United States’ reaction to the AK-47: the M16 assault rifle. Chivers flails the Army and Colt for the M16’s “pitted chambers” that caused widespread failures of the rifle in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. Pitted chambers are caused by moisture. Troops were told by the Army that the gun did not need as much maintenance as their older weapons had. This was wrong, and it cost lives, but the bad advice was not the result of some grand conspiracy of the Army and Colt. Further, Chivers is wrong when he asserts that earlier U.S. service weapons had had chrome-plated chambers and bores to protect them from pitting.
Lastly, we come to what I think Chivers means to be the heart of his book, the section on the suffering caused by the diffusion of the AK variants into the trouble spots of the world—the Caucasus, Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. In these places, thugs, gangs, and revolutionaries real and self-proclaimed use them to dictate policy at the end of a gun. That the AK-47 is a hallmark of lethal disorder in much of the Third World is undeniable. That anything can or even should be done about the millions of AKs out there is another question.
If the reader is drawn to books that are concerned with finding fault in history, then perhaps he or she will find The Gun useful. I would recommend, instead, Assault Rifle and Machine Gun, both by Anthony G. Williams and Maxim Popenker (Crowood, 2005, 2008). The reader of these volumes will get more information with less filler.
The United States Coast Guard and National Defense: A History from World War I to the Present
Thomas P. Ostrom. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011. 264 pp. Intro. Illus. Notes. Bibliog. Index. $39.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Jim Dolbow, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve
Professor Ostrom does it again. Coast Guard history buffs will enjoy his latest book, a much-needed contribution to the field, in which he highlights the service’s most important mission—national defense—which has historically been overshadowed by higher profile missions such as search-and-rescue (SAR), marine safety, and maritime law enforcement.
Ostrom is well-suited to write a book about the Coast Guard’s role in national defense, since he served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve from 1961 to 1969 and taught history at Rochester Community College in Minnesota. His previous books include The United States Coast Guard in World War II: A History of Domestic and Overseas Actions (McFarland, 2009) and The USCG on the Great Lakes (Red Anvil Press, 2006).
On 28 January 1915 President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Act to Create the Coast Guard, which stated, “The Coast Guard as established January 28, 1915, shall be a military service and a branch of the armed forces of the United States at all times.” In the 96 years since the Revenue Cutter Service was merged with the U.S. Lifesaving Service to create the Coast Guard, it has fought in every “hot” war alongside its sister services, not to mention in the Cold War and no shortage of smaller scale contingencies. After reading this book, no one will ever exclude the service when mentioning the branches of the U.S. military.
Besides surveying the Coast Guard’s role alongside its sister services in the major conflicts since World War I, some of the book’s most interesting prose covers the service’s role in defending the U.S. homeland, the Arctic, and the Great Lakes regions, as well as in action against non-state actors such as pirates and narcotics traffickers. Other chapters highlight the Coast Guard’s heritage, budgets, assets, and training.
The chapters on the service’s role during the Korean War and the Cold War with the former Soviet Union deserve special mention because the two subjects have received little scholarly attention from historians and policy makers. Likewise, the book’s chapter on aviation is timely, given that 2011 marked not only the 100th anniversary of naval aviation, but also U.S. Coast Guard aviation.
Ostrom relies on many, including books long out of print, Naval Institute Press titles, Proceedings articles, open-source news articles, author interviews, and congressional testimonies.
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Secretary of State Colin Powell called the Coast Guard a “unique instrument in the nation’s national security tool bag.” The United States Coast Guard and National Defense documents the service’s wartime partnership around the globe with its four sister services. The book should be required reading for everyone who wears a Coast Guard uniform.