Posted on 09/25/2012 3:46:18 AM PDT by RightSideNews
In view of the public frustration with a decade of largely unsuccessful U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impending cuts to the U.S. military budget, there is an active debate at present as to what military strategy and force structure should be fashioned for the future. Unfortunately, many taxpayers and most politicians are totally illiterate when it comes to the subject of warfare. (Judging from the dismal results in the last ten years, a similar conclusion might to drawn concerning the U.S. officer corps.) In an attempt to fill this critical knowledge void and perhaps raise the level of the on-going national defense dialogue, this essay is offered to provide the lay reader with an awareness of the basics of warfare. One qualifying note is that this essay will not deal with the morality of war or justification for going to war. While understanding “just war theory” is integral to the study of warfare, it is beyond the scope of this essay, which is intended to focus on the “how of war,” rather than the “why of war.” The appropriate place to begin a discussion of war is with the purpose of war as defined by Carl von Clausewitz in his masterwork, On War: WAR THEREFORE IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE INTENDED TO COMPEL OUR OPPONENT TO FULFIL OUR WILL . .
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The enemy was very able too. Underestimating them seemed to be a cottage industry with our leadership and the whiz kids in Washington but down where the rubber met the Type PS Ball round, both the NVA and the Main Force VC were dangerous and stuck where they were if they outnumbered you.
I think that the Admiral may be right that if we hit them without restriction from the get-go, before the enemy had a chance to get all those bundles from the Eastern Bloc, they might have seen reason but I don't think so. Even we Lance Corporals at the time knew that the only way of stopping the NVA was to visit their back yard in person. As we thought about it back then, if we were in North Vietnam "everybody's the enemy".
Semper Fi
“if we were in North Vietnam “everybody’s the enemy” — so it would have been also when dropping bombs on “Ho-land”
The admiral’s (and the AF’s) point was that we should have hit the enemy’s strategic facilities like Haiphong before they set up their sophisticated air defense system.
I taught in the Air War College during my last 3 years on active duty, and I taught military history at a university for 10 years in retirement — my only point in bringing this background up is that I’ve given a great deal of thought to and reading about Vietnam in those positions (I was very bitter about the “no win strategy” when I left Vietnam).
Here are some notes I gave my university students for them to think about —
First, regarding the failed interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the reasons for the failure can be found in the lessons learned from three wars (WWII, Korea, Vietnam) as summarized by USAF Gen William W. Momyer who clearly states the conditions necessary to employ the effectiveness of airpower in stripping away enemy military capability with air interdiction.
“OVERLORD’S LESSONS: Every major ground campaign through the remainder of World War II was coordinated with an interdiction campaign… With the interdiction campaign destroying critically needed supplies, the Wehrmacht was then forced to fall back, or if units stood and fought, their positions could be overrun because of the logistics failure. Regardless of their will to fight, the lack of needed weapons, food, and ammunition made it infeasible for German units to stay in the battle.
“From these lessons of World War II, the concepts of interdiction developed: (a) Strike the source of the war material; (b) concentrate the attacks against the weak elements of the logistical system; (c) continuously attack, night and day, the major lines of communication supporting the army in the field; (d) inflict heavy losses on enemy logistics and forces before they approach the battlefield where the difficulty of successful interdiction is greatest . . ..”
Gen William W. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars, USAF, 1978.
After Vietnam, there emerged an anti-war shibboleth that interdiction doesn’t work because the US was unsuccessful in shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but as Gen Momyer made clear, we were dropping our bombs in the wrong places – we should have been bombing the supply depots in Haiphong and Hanoi rather than bombing monkeys in the Laotian jungle.
It must be noted that much is made of the fact that the US dropped more bomb tonnage in Vietnam than we did during WWII; and therefore critics of the war frequently still say “See, we could not have done any more – there was no way we could have won” – of course such statements are uninformed and silly because Johnson controlled the targeting of North Vietnam from the White House, consequently Johnson put all targets that could have ended the war off limits – in Johnson’s own words: “They (US Forces) can’t bomb an outhouse without my permission.”
Had Johnson desired to end DRV aggression quickly, 1) he could have bombed the Red River dikes, flooding the principal population center of the DRV causing paralysis to most of the economy and the Hanoi central government, 2) he could have mined Haiphong Harbor and destroyed the Haiphong docks stopping the major inflow of war supplies for the insurgents in the South that were coming by sea from Communist China and the Soviet Union, 3) he could have destroyed the RRs, bridges, and highways coming into North Vietnam from China over which war supplies were imported, 4) he could have bombed the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong where the RR and truck marshalling yards/supply depots were located for the onward shipment of war materiel to supply the communist combat forces in South Vietnam, 5) he could have permitted US Forces to destroy the MIG interceptor bases instead of making US fighters wait to engage them until after the MIGs took off, 6) he could have permitted US Forces to destroy the SAM sites when they were under construction instead of making US fighters wait to engage them until after the sites were completed and tracking US fighters to shoot them down.
Johnson did none of these things, condemning American fighting men to die taking on the North Vietnamese and their weapons that had been smuggled down the Trail one soldier at a time as they emerged from jungle border of South Vietnam instead of destroying their troops and weapons en masse in barracks and supply depots while they were still in North Vietnam.
Would those actions have worked? I believe they would have worked a lot better than what Johnson permitted.
Messing with anything with our flag on it would become Something You Just Don't Do overnight.
And subvert the US media. They were a key element in our political loss of the war. The VC had been defeated. The NVA opportunistically invaded after almost all of our forces were gone, and even then, that took a couple of years before they did it.
I definitely agree that LBJ screwed all of us with his idiotic limits. He was a typical democrat in that they start wars, invest other parent's children, then make things tougher for our side to win.
Now my bona fides:I went on from Vietnam to be commissioned and the served 28 years including as an artillery battalion commander and a student at the Command and Staff College. Later I developed fire support technologies for the Marine Corps as a civilian, lecturing on fire support to several venues. So there.
You, my friend suffer from "excessive Air Forcesness". It is a disease that I am very familiar with, since my Dad and both Uncles were in the Air Force and regarded my time in the Corps as a sort of unfortunate birth defect. This disease causes one to sort of sweep one's hand over maps and say "bomb here, bomb here, war over". Not so fast - just taking Overlord into account, the massive tonnage dropped did cripple the German ability to marshall and move reinforcements to the front but didn't completely eliminate it. As it was, it was the sacrifices of the army's landing forces that defeated the Germans at enorous loss - losses that might have been reduced some at Omaha if there had been decent close air support to take out the German positions overlooking those beaches.
How about the crippling stasis at Anzio? Despite energetic interdiction by the USAAF in that theater, the troops were pinned in their enclave for months while they were pounded by long-range German artillery that the Air Force couldn't find. Despite the inspiring conceptions of Douhet and Mitchell, bombing alone never concludes the battle. And sometimes it doesn't even contribute much, as in the difficulty in locating and reducing the Chinese movements in North Korea in 1951.
In our war, if LBJ had gone with the all-out air war, it might have done much more that we really did but did we have sufficent assets in theater in experience pilots, appropraite aircraft, operational fields, ordnance in dumps to conduct a campaign of the scale you are talking about? I seem to remember that it took years to accumulate all of those assets in the awe-inspiring quantities that we eventually did have in Thailand, South Vietnam, Guam, and offshore with the carriers.
Air wars are powerful things but there are limits. The lessons we should get from analyzing Vietnam are how things went they were so we won't do the same things again. Unfortunately, we keep electing new versions of LBJ, so the point is moot.
I would like to see generations of diaperhead mothers telling their children that if they don’t behave, The Americans will get them. I want the mystery and terror of our presence to become part of their folklore, like the Boogeyman or Baba Yaga. I want them to cringe in abject, bowel-loosening fear at the sound of an approaching jet.
If they want a war — and a world — without rules, so be it.
Yep!
It has been enjoyable. This is the kind of dialogue I tried to get students to engage in.
“excessive Air Forcesness” has also been called “the Zeus lightening bolt complex.” I “joined the people who joined the Army” four times in my career, so this is not the first time I’ve heard the charge.
My simple reply is that the GPS-guided PGMs have replaced the Norden bombsight. Satellites and drones provide surveillance for locating targets that wasn’t even dreamed of a couple decades ago, let alone WWII. Mitchell, Douhet, and Trenchard were about a century ahead of their time. The technology of the early and mid 20th Century just couldn’t begin to support their warfighting concepts. We are only now approaching the required level of technology.
Look — I agree that there is no replacing boots on the ground to control territory and politics. My “message” in today’s world is that Americans don’t do COIN well — pursuing that strategy is fighting on the battlefield of the enemy’s choice. Americans put steel on the target best — that is our strong suit. Not to use U.S. technological strength to maximum advantage would be as stupid as going to the Ia Drang to assault an enemy-fortified mountain instead of bombing the Haiphong docks. It’s just a dumb way to squander U.S. lives.
We didn’t have to occupy Hanoi to make it all but impossible for the DRV to resupply major, meaningful forces in the RVN. The logistics to move the amount of ammo required by the VC/NVA just to stay in the field (not to mention to be on offense) required much more infrastructure than bicycles and porters. If Johnson had targeted that infrastructure before it was heavily defended as I have outlined previously, Adm Sharp’s prediction would have been fact.
Regarding the enemy today — Islam — I lived in Peshawar and worked with the PAK military daily for more than a year. The only thing those people understand is who has more force and who has the stones to use it. Compassion and not using force to preclude collateral damage is understood as weakness and cowardice, not some humanitarian virtue.
All jihadist organizations are sponsored by nation-states. Without nation-state support they are like gangs of thugs terrorizing local neighborhoods.
I know this war plan won’t happen in my lifetime, but what we need to do is go after the supporting nation-states and wipe a couple cities of ragheads from the face of the earth. The ragheads would understand that message and jihad against the West would cease for a a century or two — as it did after the crushing jihadist defeats in 732 and 1683. Jihad is like Haley’s Comet, it will be just keep on coming back — it is built into Islam. All we can do is smash it when it appears. The get-tough principle needs to be implemented domestically as well.
The ultimate solution is to make Mecca/Medina into radioactive holes and post a sign — “Allah — Out of Business.” Islam is based on the belief that Allah is all powerful and Islam can’t lose. That is the belief that must be destroyed to end jihad. It was the same thing with Hitler and the Emperor.
Your take on the Islam is spot-on: it's not so much a religion as a recipe for conquest and subjugation. I lived in the Middle East for a while and I learned first hand that there is no such thing as coexistence- they have to be in charge or else.
Firepower is the one edge we have at this moment, they have mass. We absolutely must keep that advantage at all costs. I have been trying to lever the Marine Corps towards the next evolutionary moves towards the future but they are stubborn and slow to move with this generation of top leaders. Maybe after the younger set who have been blooded in Iraq and Afghanistan take the reins (and we rid ourselves of the current administration), we'll see movement.
Hope so.
Have genuinely enjoyed the discussion with you! Wish you "fair winds and following seas"...
Semper Fi
It’s been very enjoyable for me as well.
Since you’ve lived in Dar al-Islam, did you by chance read my Right Side News post “Our Society Has Lost Sight Of Reality”? It’s at — http://www.rightsidenews.com/2012092717100/editorial/rsn-pick-of-the-day/our-society-has-lost-sight-of-reality.html — I’d be interested in your opinion.
What has amazed me about Petraeus’ revival of COIN in FM 3-24 and in McChrystal’s implementing plan for Afghanistan was the absence of Islam and jihad! I wrote an MA on COIN (Walt Rostow was my thesis advisor at UT) and taught at the USAF Spl Ops Sch — the essence of COIN is knowing and taking advantage of the target culture. Islam IS the culture of raghead land. Bush, Obama, Petraeus, McChrystal, and all the neo-cons pretend Islam isn’t a big factor. The idea of “replacing” Islam with democracy is ludicrous.
Incidentally, I have very good memories of working directly for generals Dennis Murphy and Chuck Pitman when they were the C5 at ROK-US CFC. Great Marines!
Keep’em flyin’
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