Lessons Unlearned

The U.S. Army's Role in Creating the Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

Pat Proctor

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826274373
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Colonel Pat Proctor's long overdue critique of the Army's preparation and outlook in the all-volunteer era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the twenty-first century: Has the Army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgent and information-age warfare?In this blunt critique of the senior leadership of the U.S. Army, Proctor contends that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army stubbornly refused to reshape itself in response to the new strategic reality, a decision that saw it struggle through one low-intensity conflict after another—some inconclusive, some tragic—in the 1980s and 1990s, and leaving it largely unprepared when it found itself engaged—seemingly forever—in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first book-length study to connect the failures of these wars to America's disastrous performance in the war on terror, Proctor's work serves as an attempt to convince Army leaders to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

1

PHOENIX OR ICARUS?

THE U.S. ARMY’S journey from its defeat in the Vietnam War in 1973 to its large role in the stunning victory of the Gulf War in 1991—and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait and Iraq was indeed stunning—has taken on the air of a creation myth within the Army. In the Gulf War, the Iraqi Army, in heavily fortified defensive positions, was soundly defeated by an attacking force of roughly equal numbers. The Iraqis suffered thirty thousand deaths, to the coalition’s 292. The Iraqi Army had been decimated by a monthlong, high-tech, precision bombing campaign followed by a GPS- and computer-enabled, lightning, one-hundred-hour ground war.

But as stunning as this victory was, President George H. W. Bush’s unfortunate declaration that “the specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula” was tragically premature.¹ A little over a decade later, the Army would be helplessly entangled in grueling insurgencies that it was unprepared to fight; the most capable military force in the history of the world was humbled by ill-trained and ill-equipped guerillas in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the dusty streets of Iraq.

Phoenix: Vietnam to the Gulf War

The legend of the Army’s long road from defeat in the Vietnam War to triumph in the Gulf War was fixed in the Army psyche by autobiographies like Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s It Doesn’t Take a Hero and Gen. Colin Powell’s My American Journey.² Both books recounted the tale of the Army’s emergence from the “dark years” of post-Vietnam chaos to dominance of high-intensity conflict in the first war against Iraq.

With the benefit of hindsight—and in the shadow of the seventeen years of unrelenting low-intensity conflict since the beginning of the war on terror—it seems most apt to describe the period between the end of the Vietnam War and the end of the Gulf War as one in which the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. While we now know that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would never have to defend against an invasion of Western Europe by the Warsaw Pact states, it is hard to blame the senior leaders of the Army for rebalancing their organization and better training it to face the Soviet Union in high-intensity conflict. After all, at the end of the Vietnam War, the Soviets had more than 150 total divisions and 600,000 or more men stationed across Eastern Europe.³

But Gen. William DePuy, Army chief of staff Gen. Creighton Abrams, and their successors did much more than rebalance the Army. Operating under the misguided assumption that the Army could simply choose not to engage in future low-intensity conflicts as it saw fit, its senior leaders actively expunged the lessons of Vietnam, thereby preventing the Army from preserving any of the costly and hard-won capacity it had gained to effectively fight such conflicts.

This culture of focus on high-intensity conflict to the exclusion of other types of operations pervaded the post–Vietnam Cold War Army, one that found itself engaged in a number of low-intensity conflicts—Nicaragua and El Salvador chief among them—in the nearly two decades between the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the fall of the Soviet Union. But steeped in a culture that considered low-intensity conflict outside its purview, the Army in each case ignored lessons it might otherwise have learned.

The word counterinsurgency arguably has its roots in the early 1960s, as President John F. Kennedy and like-minded observers considered the supposed new communist strategy of using “wars of national liberation” rather than high-intensity conflict to subvert and communize the Third World.⁴ Counterinsurgency thinking prompted the formation of the U.S. Army Special Forces—the Green Berets. It also seduced the Kennedy administration, and subsequently that of President Lyndon B. Johnson, into growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. But while the Army did make significant tactical innovations throughout the course of the war, it never truly institutionalized the precepts of counterinsurgency. In fact, the U.S. Marine Corps was much more aggressive than the Army—through its combat action platoons—in implementing counterinsurgency tactics at the local level. Army general William Westmoreland, until 1968 the commander of Military Assistance Command–Vietnam (MAC-V), the senior military command in Vietnam, actually tried to discourage the Marines from focusing so heavily on counterinsurgency.⁵

On March 22, 1968, President Johnson announced that General Westmoreland would be replaced as the commander of MAC-V by his deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams. When Abrams succeeded Westmoreland, he dramatically changed the Army’s strategy in Vietnam.⁶

Historians studying the evolution of counterinsurgency doctrine and tactics in Vietnam frequently characterize Abrams’s strategy as one of “Vietnamization”—building the capacity of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—and pacification, classic counterinsurgency tactics at the local, provincial, and national levels to build the capacity of the South Vietnamese government. Likewise, this strategy is frequently contrasted with the firepower-intensive search-and-destroy tactics that had prevailed under General Westmoreland’s tenure.⁷

As is often the case, the truth is more complicated. The strategy General Abrams could feasibly pursue in Vietnam in 1968 and beyond was severely circumscribed by the American public’s growing impatience with a war that had featured direct U.S. military intervention since 1964, and resulted in the death of a great many Americans, seemingly without significant progress. As a result, MAC-V was under intense pressure to keep casualties low and bring U.S. troops home.⁸ Abrams’s response was to move away from a strategy of attrition and toward one focused less on attempting to win the war outright and more on creating space and time for the ARVN and government of South Vietnam to grow to the point that they could take over the conduct of the war and free the U.S. military to leave. Abrams would focus the Army’s efforts on interdicting the flow of supplies from North Vietnam into South Vietnam and, to the extent he could, insulating the rural populace from the influence of the insurgency, the National Liberation Front (NLF, popularly known as the Viet Cong) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). At the same time, the United States would engage in its policy of Vietnamization to build the capacity of the ARVN and draw down U.S. forces.⁹

While this strategy did ultimately succeed in extricating the United States from Vietnam, it failed to achieve the stated policy objective of three presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon—over the previous decade: a viable and independent South Vietnam able to defend itself against subversion from within or aggression from North Vietnam. The Nixon administration finally achieved peace by acquiescing to the NVA remaining in South Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal.¹⁰ As a result, two years after the withdrawal, amid a roar of accusations and counteraccusations in Washington, DC, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975.¹¹ To the shock of the nation and the world, America had lost what to that time had been its longest war.

In the course of U.S. involvement in Vietnam the war had been, at various times and places, a low-intensity conflict, a high-intensity conflict, or both simultaneously. Before the direct intervention of U.S. military forces against the NLF and North Vietnam, which began in 1964, the war was largely a low-intensity conflict. As the escalation of U.S. ground troops was matched by an escalation from North Vietnam, the Army began to face NVA regiments and divisions in high-intensity conflict. At the same time, it continued to face a low-intensity conflict against the NLF for control of the rural population in large swaths of South Vietnam. And, occasionally—most notably during the siege of Khe Sanh,¹² the Cambodian incursion, the Laotian incursion, and the spring 1972 NVA offensive, the Vietnam War was decidedly high-intensity in character. Despite this ambiguity, the Army took away many lessons on low-intensity conflict during and immediately following the war.

Due to the length of the war, the Army did wrestle with the problem of rotation of personnel into and out of theater. While troops were initially deployed as whole units to Vietnam, as the war dragged on, soldiers began yearly rotations into and out of country on an individual basis. This practice had its precedence in the Korean War as early as 1951.¹³ The policy had been implemented to reduce the incidence of “combat fatigue” that had afflicted veterans of World War II and Korea, but it came with significant drawbacks. For one, units were forced to contend with a constant influx of inexperienced soldiers. Worse, rotations hurt unit cohesion, as a nearly continuous turnover of personnel repeatedly filled small units that had built close bonds through the trials of combat with strangers. To make matters worse, while soldiers rotated every year, battalion commanders rotated into and out of their units every six months. The logic behind this policy was that it would produce the maximum number of lieutenant colonels and colonels with combat experience. In practice, though, it was terribly disruptive, crippling the Army’s effectiveness in Vietnam as each unit was continually forced to overcome the mistakes of inexperienced leaders. As James Kitfield quotes an anonymous general, “It was . . . almost as if the services were using Vietnam to train officers for the next war, as opposed to fighting the one very much at hand.”¹⁴

By 1968 the Army was keenly aware that it was not trained, manned, or equipped to fight the low-intensity conflict components of the Vietnam War. General Abrams himself would tell Gen. Cao Van Vien, chairman of the South Vietnamese General Staff, “You know, we’ve been to [the Command and General Staff College at Fort] Leavenworth or something, and had all those lessons and books. And I don’t remember anybody talking about the stuff you and I are talking about today. They didn’t have any lectures on that—anything! And they don’t have F.M.s [field manuals] about that. And here we are, we’re all mixed up in it, supposed to be helping.”¹⁵ This disconnect between what was being taught in training and education in the United States and what Army units were actually doing in Vietnam did not end with the Army’s leadership; soldiers were not being prepared, either.¹⁶

One low-intensity conflict capability that did not grow as much—and in fact regressed—over the course of the Vietnam War was the skills involved in training host nation forces to fight. Before the direct intervention of U.S. forces in the war in 1964, the American role in Vietnam was primarily an advisory one.¹⁷ One effort that did flourish under General Westmoreland was to raise Regional Force (RF) companies and Popular Force (PF) platoons in rural areas. But this effort was spearheaded by the ARVN and approached almost as busywork while U.S. forces did the heavy lifting of fighting the NLF and NVA. By the time General Abrams took over for Westmoreland in 1968, Vietnamization was little more than a euphemism for U.S. withdrawal and a handover of the war back to the ARVN.¹⁸

Many observers also came to realize the importance of the populace to the low-intensity conflict in Vietnam. A number of outside observers, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Marine lieutenant general Victor Krulak, were critical of Westmoreland’s attrition strategy, advocating a more population-centric approach. When Abrams took command of all U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1968, he made population security a centerpiece of his strategy. This “one war” approach included protecting the population from the NLF to allow civil-military efforts to proceed. Abrams’s new strategy also explicitly addressed a more nuanced application of force, imposing limits on the amount of firepower that should be employed in populated areas.¹⁹

For those observers who acknowledged the need to put the population at the center of operations in a low-intensity conflict, the civil-military effort, commonly referred to as pacification, was a central concern. Westmoreland largely ignored pacification in favor of large, set-piece operations to find, fix, and destroy the NLF and NVA. A study in 1966, the Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam, not surprisingly concluded that pacification was being neglected, insisting that the war could not be won without winning the civil-military effort at the “village, district and provincial levels.”²⁰ By 1967 Westmoreland did have a more robust pacification effort in place in South Vietnam. Notably, this effort—the Civilian Operations and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Phoenix or Icarus?
• 2. Somalia, Haiti, and Force XXI
• 3. Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Army After Next
• 4. Kosovo, the War on Terror, and the Objective and Interim Forces
• 5. “The First, the Supreme, the Most Far-Reaching Act of Judgment”
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author