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In the years following the U. S. involvement in Vietnam, there has been an apparent hesitancy to re-engage with the Communists anywhere. Congress, for example, acted to prohibit U. S. action in Angola. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia a few months ago, the United States was a quiet spectator while the clients of China and the Soviet Union acted. VCe stood by, even though an anti-Vietnam War senator advocated U. S. involvement in the cause of human rights. There are now unspoken doubts, not only as to our right to intervene again forcibly in the affairs of the world, but also as to the military means to do so. This legacy from Vietnam should interest all American military men, because the leadership in the national military establishment accepted the Vietnam involvement uncritically and overplayed a role in response to a manufactured strategy—counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency was corrupted into a strategy, then into a shibboleth. It assured support for virtually every person, idea, or weapon which could be Warped into a counterinsurgency concept. The counterinsurgency mentality became the fulcrum by which the United States was wedged into Vietnam and out from the position of being the major anticolonial power in the world. The saddest aspect of the whole tragic drama was that this nation s wounds Were largely self-inflicted. Our rush toward national involvement was reflexive—almost spastic. Much had been written to portray the terrible, grotesque picture of a knee-jerk reaction to a Soviet provocation in the nuclear spectrum of war. This prospect was a dreadful, insane thing, but it was considered in a sense inevitable, because an American President would have only a | support “just wars of national liberation” in a speech with the title “For New Victories of the World Communist Movement.”1 Robert S. McNamara, U. S. Secretary of Defense, gave the official American response in a 17 February 1962 speech in Chicago. The result was not thermonuclear devastation, but it was a national wasting of real and moral strength in Vietnam. Secretary McNamara’s speech “The Communist Design for World Conquest” had a subtitle. It was “Some Shift in Our Military Thinking Required.” The major shift was described near the end of the speech: “. . .we shall have to deal with the problems of‘wars of liberation’. ... In these conflicts, the force of world communism operates in the twilight zone between political subversion and quasimilitary action. ... In all four Services we are training fighters who can, in turn, teach the people of free nations how to fight for their freedom.”2 The secretary had articulated a strategy — counterinsurgency. The Joint Chiefs of Staff publication Unified Action Armed Forces (JCS Pub 2 of November 1959) outlined the entire counterinsurgency concept in nine numbered paragraphs. It was included as just one of many capabilities and responsibilities of the armed forces. However, with an active war being fought in Vietnam, counterinsurgency was sucked up into political and military thinking and developed its own language and literature. No longer just one Cold War capability, it was by then the reason for war, the way of war, and the word for war. It became a corrupted idea that developed momentum and be- |
Quarter of an hour in which to react. Isn t it a pity that more chariness was not exercised in the lower end of the conflict ladder when unconventional war Was considered? On 6 January 1961, Chairman Nikita Khrushchev announced Soviet intentions to | 'Nikita S. Khrushchev, speech of 6 January 1961, in Kommunist, January 1961, pp. 3-37; condensed in “For New Victories in the World Communist Movement . . . ," Current Digest of the Soviet Press. 15 February 1961, pp. 16-19; 22 February 1961, pp. 8-15 + . 2Vital Speeches of the Day. 17 February 1962, p. 298. |
^roceedine-s / Anril 1979 | 57 |
. . we shall have to deal u ith the problems of‘wars of liberation'. . . . In these conflicts, the force of ivorld communism operates in the twilight zone between political subversion and quasi-military action. ... In all four Services we are training fighters who can, in turn, teach the people of free nations how to fight for their freedom.”
U.S. Marine
Robert S. McNamara U. S. Secretary of Defense 1962
came both a means and an end. And, if it is possible for an idea to be animated, the injured concept struck back by corrupting its misusers.
The links of counterinsurgency were forged out of the Cold War, and early post-World War II confrontations with the Soviets established two patterns in the U. S. mentality: the American people accepted confrontations of relatively short duration and high risk with the subconscious comfort of assured atomic superiority, and American leaders felt domestic political pressures to respond to Soviet challenges, lest they be considered soft on Communism. Also, World War II peace settlements made us mechanistic in our thinking. We accepted surrender lines in Germany, Korea, and elsewhere as spiritual, as well as political and geographic, divisions. Free men lived on one side of the line, slaves on the other.
The Communists stopped crossing geographic lines after the Korean War, and the techniques of infiltration and subversion were reemphasized. By then, the threat was seen as less Soviet Russian and more Communist, and our leaders were increasingly frustrated by their perception of a propaganda predicament. In the war of words we could not develop propaganda to match that of the Communists, nor could we find the means to produce Free World- disciplined cadres to counter their party zealots. Also, as the Soviets’ arsenal of thermonuclear weapons grew in size, the very cornerstone of American strategy and diplomacy was being pried loose.
When Mr. McNamara announced counterinsurgency as the official Washington response to “just wars of national liberation,” he turned the mind and the assets of the United States to a new doctrine. But language can be cruel. What we were (and are) threatened by is the Soviet Union; what we declared ourselves against was insurgency. It was a fateful choice, for if the worst tool of insurgency is terror, the equivalent response to counter it is repression. What happened after the McNamara speech was a corruption of the American position in the world. The nation that had used its position and strength to hasten the British out of India, turn the Netherlands out of the East Indies, and withhold decisive aid to the French in Indochina now pushed into a situation in which it appeared that the United States was replacing France in a continuation of the colonial war.
Using the most powerful position in the United States save that of the president himself, the Secretary of Defense unleashed the resources of the Department of Defense to foster a generation of counterinsurgency believers by creating massive activity in all areas of the military establishment and a feeling of great expertise which, in turn, created great expectations. There was also a means of managing everything—the “country team” method.
The country team melded all political, military, economic intelligence, and propaganda capabilities of the various bureaucracies into a corporate conglomerate with the ambassador as the chairman of the board. The only exception was at the home office where it was the Secretary of Defense, not the Secretary of State, who was chairman of the big board. Any uncorrupted critic at the time could have concluded that, from the position of the Secretary of Defense alone, war was what was contemplated, not civic action, etc. Counterinsurgency was the code word for intervention, but it was so benevolent in its language regarding the economic, social, and political roles for the military that war, when it became our war, was almost alien and in many respects an admission of failure. Can a strategic concept be blamed for so much? I think the answer is “Yes.” Our country and armed forces suffered so much from their involvement in Vietnam that something must be salvaged. In the hope that out of controversy comes understanding, my assertion is that the Vietnam involvement could not have been accomplished without the corrupting of counterinsurgency from a capability into a strategy.
The Counterinsurgency Chimera: A chimera in mythology was a flame-spewing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a dragon’s tail; in modern times it epitomizes a vain fancy—an absurdity or an impossible conceit—a creature of the imagination. This one word is the ultimate critique of the whole counterinsurgency era in U. S. strategy. The counterinsurgency chimera assumed that domestic power was continuous at home and transferable abroad, regardless of internal changes or external differences. The first assumption was grotesque, because the powers granted a U. S. President for nuclear war (and used in the Cuban Missile Crisis) were time-sensitive. Congress had relinquished its war-making responsibility in only a specific situation: nuclear war or the immediate threat of nuclear attack. However, the congressional power of the purse could be circumvented by the Secretary of Defense. The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 gave him enormous power and a huge budget. The size and method of presenting it allowed financing the fighting in Vietnam without earmarking specific funds for the purpose. For example, accounting techniques could be used to shift ammunition from NATO forces to be used in fighting in Vietnam or to generate funds to do so. It took a long time for the American people to conclude that the Vietnam involvement was an il-
legitimate war, embarked upon without congressional declaration, and operated like a budget overrun. That is, one starts production, then depends upon Congress to bail out the operation in the interest of national security.
The second assumption became a delusion. Mao Tse-tung’s people’s war strategy was the result of 20 years of experience in which theory and practice were interrelated into mutually reinforcing techniques. These techniques were absolutely applicable to the realities of the Asiatic peasant mentality and were aPplied with consistency and flexibility by a single force in complete political control of the military means. Mao chose protracted war because it fit the facts and his purposes. Counterinsurgency was selected because it was the reciprocal of insurgency. However, there was not a single successful third- party application of counterinsurgency techniques in the post-World War II period that resulted in third party control of the situation, and no U.S. leader had ariy political experience in this area. The delusion Had to be that the will of Washington leadership c°uld transform the facts. Power on a sufficiently Hrge scale can create reality, but it must first achieve total control. If control is frustrated and the desire for accomplishment remains, the perception of reality
distorted. Then it is difficult to separate desire from reality and discern clear distinctions between ends and means, because to the victim of his own delusions, the means become the end.
From the small seed in Mr. McNamara s speech sprang orchestrated supporting speeches and articles from the Washington elite. For the lesser lights, there were service-school courses, conferences, and new layers of politico-military committees all engendering a tremendous sense of movement, change, and excitement. A modern chimera was being born. An irreverent mythologist might have criticized the mislocation of the parts the body of the lion, the head of the goat, and the curious spectacle of the dragon’s tail wagging the creature about. H would not have made an impression even if it had been understood. But it was not a time for underhanding; it was a time for action.
The Counterinsurgency Elite: The existence of an elite, esoteric military organization came early to the attention of President John F. Kennedy, and it was seized upon as the cost-effective weapon for Vietnam. If the United States were to develop a full-spectrum war capability, the U. S. Army Special Forces were seen as the opposite-end approach to massive retaliation. Glamorous, secret, bold, and ready, the Special Forces were the military counterpart of the political inclination of the times. They were to be the Jesuits in the counterreformation of democracy in Vietnam. It was a misused group of priests.
The Special Forces were created as small, highly skilled nuclei to support indigenous guerrilla or partisan forces, and their orientation was overwhelmingly toward Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain. It was a training and logistics capability— superbly prepared and conditioned for clandestine insertion and survival, but not designed to lead or politically activate a guerrilla force. The proper use of a U. S. Special Forces team in Vietnam would have been to drop it into North Vietnam to support the South Vietnamese partisan groups fighting behind enemy lines—if there had been any such groups anywhere to be found.
In the majority of cases, U. S. Special Forces in Vietnam were used as the French had used their officers and noncommissioned officers with Indochinese units-—as a cadre to organize, train, and lead indigenous troops. This was a complete inversion of the Special Forces concept, which was predicated upon strong indigenous leadership and courageous, dedicated, tough partisans operating behind enemy lines, protected by the intelligence network of a sympathetic populace. Because there was no such thing north of the 16th parallel and the South Vietnamese
Government had only nominal control of the Montagnards, U. S. Special Forces were inserted into Montagnard areas and added to an already convoluted command structure.
The fact that they were already in a fighting and leading role when all other Americans were only “advising” or “hauling” increased the elite and separatist attitude of the Special Forces and reduced the potential for coordination of operations on the U. S. side. To the South Vietnamese Government it didn’t matter. It had enough problems and competitions in other areas. Although South Vietnamese Special Forces were nominally in control in some Montagnard areas, this only made the U. S. Special Forces’ role more difficult; the Vietnamese despised the Montagnards, and the Montagnards hated the Vietnamese. However, the focus was never on the poorly trained and partially motivated Montagnards; it was always on the elite U. S. Special Forces. At headquarters briefings, the fewer than ten Special Forces base units “protecting” the Laotian and Cambodian borders from North Vietnamese infiltration looked impressive—if the location boxes were drawn large enough and the scale of the map and nature of the terrain ignored.
If counterinsurgency could have worked at all, the U. S. Army Special Forces would have made it work even though the implementation of the concept in Vietnam represented a complete reversal of their training and orientation. It was apparent that it was not working long before larger U. S. fighting units were inserted. Foreign elites were as ineffective in practice as the elite-developed counterinsurgency concept was as a theory. But by the time counterinsurgency was a proven failure, the counterinsurgency mentality had generated its own momentum. When U. S. troops came in numbers, they did not drive into the North to wage war; they settled into the South to augment counterinsurgency. Included were units of the U. S. Marine Corps, which had a unique capability for employment in the north.
The Management Mirage: The most persistent illusion in Washington was that Vietnam could be “managed.” It was a mirage. What Washington got was a reflection of its own desires through manage-
How young they look, how young they were when, as members of “McNamara’s Band of Brothers," Cyrus Vance and Harold Brown became, respectively, Secretaries of the Army and Air Force and, with Paul Nitze as Secretary of the Navy, they brought the V. S. armed services to heel.
ment of the reporting system. Assumptions made in Washington drove the reporting machine in Saigon. The reporting was so pervasive and detailed that it overwhelmed every other aspect of the involvement.
Management was the hallmark of the McNamara era. Military leaders either joined the management movement or they moved out to the fringes. Or they just moved out. The Department of Defense brought the armed services to heel by the circulation of a few elite individuals at the top and by reporting techniques designed to eliminate decision-making at any lesser level. Men loyal to the McNamara system dropped down from DoD and brought the services into line: Harold Brown to the Air Force, Paul Nitze to the Navy, and Cyrus Vance to the Army.
The same techniques were applied to the U. S. involvement in Vietnam. The basic decisions and assumptions were made in Washington. Men to manage the U. S. involvement were selected on the basis of their compatibility with the DoD system, and reporting was devised to feed back progress toward the established goals. There was an essential difference. The basic management problem was, as always, control of the situation. In Washington, the Department of Defense had the legitimate authority and multiple means to control the armed forces of the United States. However, the situation in Vietnam was substantially beyond the means and methods employed; what was achieved was control of the reporting, but this extended only to the governmental bureaucracy. DoD antagonism toward the press was rooted in one practice; the press reporting was not confined to data nor amenable to authority. As the involvement wore on, it was apparent that, if the press was anywhere near reality, Washington was reporting a mirage.
Elaborate statistical reports were devised to check on the progress of the war, and endless efforts went into refining data that were frequently suspect. The illusion was that somehow better management by the Americans would substitute for bad government by the South Vietnamese. The leaders of South Vietnam
soon learned the data game also. In 1964, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor spoke out on the well-known fact that large-scale corps and division sweeps by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) were ridiculously unproductive. In an effort to get regular ARVN forces into contact with the Vietcong (VC), management goals in terms of desirable numbers of small-unit operations were established by the Americans in Sagion. Almost overnight, Vietnamese- supplied statistics reflected hundreds of small-unit operations and greatly increased contact.
Once U. S. troops were in the fight, a worse choice came forward; the statistic by which success was to be judged was body count. Ihe fallacy of this approach linked to the misrepresentation of VC. strength has been so well presented as to make repetition unnecessary. Counterinsurgency was essentially a collection of techniques raised to a strategy, and the statistics to support its application were misleading. There was, however, a moral problem as well. Elevating the statistics of body count to a goal without pursuing a commitment to victory became obscene.
Despite enormous efforts, all that Washington could manage was the collection of data. And despite the enormous resources of the Americans, neither the leaders of South Vietnam nor the Vietcong were ever forced to modify their behavior. So, lacking control of the real situation, the reporting was conditioned to reflect the desires and decisions of Washington and the light at the end of the tunnel remained a management mirage.
Sadly, the mirage didn’t disappear with the U. S. departure from South Vietnam. The dictatorship of data is still with the armed forces. Statistical and financial management consume increasingly large chunks of military leaders’ attention and time. Less and less time is devoted to people and training. Attention is turned from problems and focused upon accumulating numerical information. The sterility of managing numerical information and the limits of financial management techniques ought to have been one of the prime lessons from Vietnam.
Lessons bought in blood ought to have an indelible quality, and Vietnam will have paid for itself only if we learn the lesson that techniques are not strategy and management is not leadership.
Advice Without Consent'. The United States entered Vietnam through the advisory door, and if we had been content with the restrictions of a purely advisory role, the wounds and scars of our Indochina experience might have been minor and not disfiguring. It was not our first experience in the Far East with the hazards of being an advisor. The American experience in China during World War II would have been instructive had it been given even cursory consideration. If we had the capacity or desire to learn from our tragic experiences in China, the limits of advice would have been recognized in South Vietnam. The U. S. predilection for advice to the Orient should have ended with the defeat of Chiang Kai- shek and his confederation of military commanders on the Chinese mainland.
The problem facing any leader of a country which becomes the client of a powerful nation is to maintain sufficient independence to be respectable and to keep the national interests of the client country from becoming skewed into serving exclusively the interests of a foreign power. This sets an outer limit upon consent. If the advisee’s problem is political independence in the face of technical inferiority, the advisor’s predicament is equally difficult. He is not just the technical adjunct to sophisticated weapons and equipment; in the eyes of his government, he is the guardian of his country’s interests and the lever by which political, economic, and even social changes are effected in the client country. The precise predicament of U. S. military advisors in Vietnam was that, even when they knew what should be done politically, they did not have the power to see it done; and, of course, when they did not know what to do, they gave poor advice.
There is another complication in being a military advisor in a foreign country. The image of the foreign counterpart is linked to the advisor’s career and professional reputation, which in turn unleashes powerfully distorting forces. What happened in this respect in Vietnam was that the U. S. advisory effort was sucked up into the vortex of the existing governmental and military structure in South Vietnam.
In the early 1960s, the entire U. S. advisory complex found itself fragmented, confused, and frequently engaged in the internecine struggle that passed for a balance of power and provided some governmental stability in South Vietnam. The truth is that long before the term “Vietnamization” was coined to cover the U. S. withdrawal from the fray, the U. S. advisory insertion into Ir.dochina was “Vietnamized.” Every existing level of military activity in the country was “advised.” Thereby, Americans soon became advocates for their particular counterparts, and the various internal struggles and contradictions in South Vietnam were resonated and aggravated by U. S. advisor partisanship. This involved more than just differences of opinion on how to fight the Vietcong; it constituted a hierarchy of struggles inside the counterinsurgency tent.
Inside the big tent, at the country team level, the governmental and military organization of South Vietnam developed natural allies in parallel U. S. advisory groups. These alliances surfaced in the internal power struggle which, if it was philosophically tilted toward U. S.-backed war goals, was strictly personal to South Vietnamese leaders. It made for a crazy war. The U. S. Agency for International Development pushed for economic development. Province advisors pushed for distribution of regular forces among the provinces—with competitions inherent in the distribution. Corps and division advisors supported their counterparts in keeping control of large formations to counter Vietcong attacks and to make occasional “safaris” into VC strongholds. The State Department and the military had their own struggle between the military dilettantes in the department and the rising politicalization of military advisors linked to South Vietnamese military leaders who be
came political figures after President Ngo Dinh Diem’s death. Almost incidentally, it seemed, there was occasionally some attention devoted to the war against the Vietcong.
Perhaps the biggest “war” of all in the early days was that of the U. S. advisors to prevail in advising—in achieving consent by their Vietnamese counterparts. U. S. strategy demanded that counterinsurgency must become the placenta through which U. S. advisors pumped idealism, leadership, and winning ways (Western style) into the bloodstream of South Vietnamese politicians and military leaders (soon to be one and the same). I£ never came off because the mechanism was as faulty as the strategy was unreal.
At every stage of the war, the leverage used by the United States to get the South Vietnamese to consent to U. S. advice was the amount and kinds of resources supplied. Behavior modification experts would quarrel, however, with the techniques used. The greater the South Vietnamese failure was, the more quickly the United States was to reward them with more money and materials. Rewarding failure is not generally considered conducive to success, but often when the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated, the inevitable response was another “shopping
list” until finally the list included U. S. combat troops—more and more.
There was initially an ambivalence toward inserting U. S. ground troops. There was always the feeling that the war would continue to go unnoticed by the American people as long as only money and resources were expended. Against this reservation was the attraction of being able to execute and demonstrate—to show as well as to tell. When it came, the decision to insert U. S. combat troops was seen as an exercise in will rather than an escalation of faulty strategy. The advisor had finally found the limit to advice. Later on, when the war was re-Vietnamized and the American troops left, the South Vietnamese were to learn the price of consent.
Counterinsurgency Comes Home: The war in Vietnam became one of the most radicalizing experiences in the 200 years of our national life. By way of Vietnam, the forces of anti-colonialism were reflected and resonated in the U. S. civil rights movement. The Vietnam War was anathema to the movement on three major counts:
\ The perception is that cannon fodder always comes from the lowest economic classes, and this meant a disproportionate number of blacks.
^ Tax monies which could have been spent for social Welfare were being spent on a war which was seen as racist.
^ The war diverted attention away from the movement” and tended to distort it into only another antiwar manifestation.
The other revolutionary forces of the 1960s used the war as a rallying point against what they saw as repressive, arbitrary authority, and help for the radicals came from a very uncharacteristic place the returning warrior. The rotation system of Army draftees acted as a radicalizing generator. Perhaps the greatest strategic oversight of prowar political and military leaders was the failure to understand the full implications of rotating increasingly radicalized youths from civilian life into the armed forces in Vietnam, then back to civilian life. This led to conditions of near-anarchy in the ranks in such things as marijuana smoking, which had to be tolerated, and finally to "fragging” when disaffected soldiers used acts of terror against their own officers and noncommissioned officers to limit the aggressiveness of U. S. combat actions. These antiwar actions in Vietnam regenerated as drafted soldiers returned home and testified against the war. Never before had American people seen—literally, on television—their own soldiers in significant numbers returning medals in disdain to publicly repudiate a war still in progress.
As protesters in the United States became more militant, they openly supported the enemy and made allies of the Vietcong. Then Washington started to see domestic protest as insurgency and to equate protesters with guerrilla warriors against the government. Many protesters espoused the disruptive acts advertised by Mao without thinking of the underlying philosophy or the consequences. The government brought to bear the techniques of counterinsurgency—also without considering the consequences. As the protesters became militant to the point of terrorism, the government crossed the lines of legitimacy. Just as the radical factions in our domestic life were fed on the war in Vietnam and inclined toward the tools of terror, the legitimate role of authority in our society was warped in the direction of repression. After a while, the executive branch of the government started to use counterinsurgency techniques and agencies at home, even though they had been developed for export only.
Long war strains have everything to do with the price (increasingly high) of front-line soldiers. Not only does the law of supply and demand operate to reduce individual zeal and corporate combat effectiveness, but time peels away rhetorical embellishments and leaves the bare bones of death and destruction. The longer the war continued, the higher became the visibility of the cost in casualties and money. The initial easy public acceptance turned to uneasy toleration. It was a subtle change which protesters were quick to exploit. Washington command
The McNamara fixation with the tools of financial management inside the armed forces remains as the substitute for strategy and the replacement for the elusive hut critically valuable quality called military leadership.
authority faced a dilemma. Unable to censor the media and unwilling to opt for all-out public support for a real war, the tendency grew to try to discredit or eliminate protest by the application of counterinsurgency techniques domestically. Thus it was that instead of counterinsurgency infecting South Vietnamese leaders with democracy, the corruption of the war came home to us.
The political control denied American leaders in Vietnam was present domestically. Also present was a mounting sense of American executive frustration. The nerve-wracking demands of fighting a counterinsurgency war in a strange land by advocating an open society there, while attempting to limit criticism at home, tended toward paranoid schizophrenia. Short of getting out, there seemed to be no end to mounting frustration. In a sense, counterinsurgency built the road which ran through Mylai to Watergate.
The political wreckage in the wake of counterinsurgency as a strategic fixation included the blighted career of one American President and the disgrace of another. However, other and more lingering disabilities were incurred. The abuse of executive power, starting with the application of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, led to attitudes that outlasted the war. The fact that the war was seen as a military activity led Congress and the people to become both anti-authority and anti-military. Once congressional antipathy toward the war surged, its worst manifestations emerged in a collective desire to punish the military because it was misused by the executive branch—a similar situation to the post-Watergate attitude toward the intelligence agencies.
The executive solution to continued war without risking more mutiny within the ranks or more serious rebellion at home was to stop the draft. The expedient then was to fill the ranks with “all volunteers.” Unfortunately and as usual, the military spent little time on the “why” and devoted itself to the “how.” The military literature is full of testimony that “the all-volunteer force works.” That is to say, we can secure the numbers needed to fill the shrinking active forces—at a cost of something over 50 times more than the Soviet conscript is paid. So the Soviets keep up their forces and pump huge numbers of well-trained men into their reserves, and our own active forces become a monetary burden and our reserve forces face a disaster.
What does the all-volunteer concept signal to the Soviets? The interpretation may be that America has reached the next-to-last step in decadence with a quasi-mercenary army and no intention to fight another war. It would cost too much money. We simply couldn’t afford it. Personnel costs for a larger conscript army at all-volunteer prices are an absurdity. Both of these may be false signals, but false signals are the worst kind—confusing to both sides.
Also confusing are the links with the counterinsurgency past which connect forward to future detriment. The McNamara fixation with the tools of financial management inside the armed forces remains as the substitute for strategy and the replacement for the somewhat elusive but critically valuable quality called military leadership. Management in the McNamara era was not just a tool of leadership; it was an alternative—an option. Management’s limitation is that it springs from a different spirit; it fosters a money mentality and is manipulative rather than exemplary. We are now learning that when management is substituted for military leadership, unionism replaces loyalty and discipline. Unionism in the ranks is the reciprocal of McNamara’s management fixation left over at the top echelons of the officer corps.
There is a yearning to forget Vietnam, but the legacy remains. There is an unspoken national discontent with the end of the involvement, a gnawing conviction that too much was paid with nothing received in return. Treasures of men, money, energy, and moral and spiritual capital, perhaps beyond recovery, were spent without stint—and without the benefit of a declared war. For that and other executive breaches of the Constitution, the Congress is now inclined to limit all executive powers and agencies, including the armed forces. And the armed forces? The armed forces are moving farther away from the citizen-soldier and closer to industrial day laborers in uniform. What came home from Vietnam was counterinsurgency corrupted and corrupting. It may have come home to stay.
Colonel Long was drafted in 1941 and commissioned through officer candidate school. He studied Chinese language at Yale University, then served in China during World War II. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio while he was fighting in the Korean War in 1951. During his Army career, he was an infantry officer and parachutist and commanded everything from a company to a brigade. In Vietnam he served on the staffs of Generals Paul D. Harkins and William Westmoreland. Colonel Long has a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University and a master of library science from the University of Rhode Island. His writings on counterinsurgency and American revolutionary warfare have been published in the Naval War College Review, Military Review, and Army. From 1968 to 1971, Colonel Long was senior Army advisor to the president of the Naval War College and taught seminars on the impact of social and religious factors on strategy. He retired from active duty in 1972 and is now president of the Newport Institute, an organization which does and promotes research in national defense and management.