in retrospect (McNamara)
Robert S. McNamara, In retrospect : the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, [1995]
Robert S. McNamara with Brian vanDeMark, In retrospect : the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, [1995]
McNamara, Robert S.
In retrospect : the tragedy and lesson of Vietnam / Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark.──1st ed.
1. vietnam conflict, 1961─1975 ── united states.
DS558.M44 1995
959.704'3373──dc20
Robert S. McNamara, In retrospect : the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, [1995]
( In retrospect : the tragedy and lesson of Vietnam / Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark.──1st ed., 1. vietnam conflict, 1961─1975 ── united states., DS558.M44 1995, 959.704'3373──dc20, )
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p.xvii
The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote, “The reward of suffering is experience.”
‘’•─“”
p.17
no transition allowance
([ check on the need for transition allowance ])
p.23
As part of the process, we shifted from a 1-year to a 5-year planning period, a revolutionary change that has now spread across the government. And we instituted the Planning, Programming, Budgeting system [PPBS] to clarify procurement choices.
p.24
the force structure we would need to accomplish it, and the budgets required to support the force structure. This integration of foreign policy and the defense budget was absolutely fundamental.
p.24
This all reflected an approach to organizing human activities that I had developed at Harvard and applied in the army during the war and later at Ford, and in the World bank. Put very simply, it was to define a clear objective for whatever organization I was associated with, develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan. Then, if progress was deficient, one could either adjust the plan or introduce corrective action to accelerate progress.
p.24
The objective of the Defense department was clear to me from the start: to defend the nation at minimal risk and minimal cost, and, whenever we got into combat, with minimal loss of life.
pp.25─26
p.25
Early in 1960 the Eisenhower administration had authorized the CIA to organize, arm, and train secretly in Central america a brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. Castro had seized power on the island the year before and appeared to be leading Cuba into the Soviet orbit. THe Kennedy administration inherited the scheme and allowed planning for the invasion to continue.
NOw, less than 90 days after his inauguration, Kennedy had to decide whether to go ahead with the operation. He called his advisers ── perhaps 20 of us in all ── to a meeting at the State department and asked what to do. He went around the table and asked each person's opinion. With on exception ── Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), who dissented vigorously ── everyone in the room supported the action.
p.26
It was a CIA operation, but all the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed it. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and I, though not enthusiastic, also said yes, as did National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and all other members of the National Security Council (NSC).
p.26
The invasion took place on April 17, 1961, at the Bay of Pig, on Cuba's southwestern coast. It quickly proved, as one historian put it, “a perfect failure”: Castro's agents had thoroughly infiltrated the brigade; contrary to CIA prediction, the Cuban people did not rally in support of the invasion; Castro marshaled forces in the ara more quickly and in greater numbers than anticipated; air cover for the landing had not been properly planned; the “escape hatch” into the mountains lay across 80 miles of impassable swamp; Washington's hand in the operation, once exposed, aroused global indignation ── the list of blunders went on and on.
‘’•─“”
p.26
President Kennedy went on national television and took full responsibility for the debacle.
Watching him do this taught me a bitter lesson. I had entered the Pentagon with a limited grasp of military affairs and even less grasp of covert operations. This lack of understanding, coupled with my preoccupation with other matters and my deference to the CIA on what I considered an agency operation, led me to accept the plan uncritically. I had listened to the briefing leading up to the invasion. I had even passed along to the president, without comment, an ambiguous assessment by the Joint Chiefs that the invasion would probably contribute to Castro's overthrow even if it did not succeed right away. The truth is I did not understand the plan very well and did not know the facts. I had let myself become a passive bystander.
p.29
We must be clear-sighted in beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy
── Montaigne, Essays
Michael Eyquem de Montaigne
‘’•─“”
p.33
Why did we fail to consider China and Vietnam in the same light as we did Yugoslavia ─ a Communist nation independent of Moscow?
p.33
We failed to analyze our assumptions critically, then or later. The foundation of our decision making were gravely flawed.
There were other mistakes as well. I will seek to identify them and to illuminate and distill from them lessons applicable to the future.
p.35
⭐️ The meeting illustrates a weakness in our form of government ── the lack of an effective way to transfer knowledge and experience from one administration to another ── and suggests the heavy price we pay. In parliamentary systems, a new government's ministers have usually served as opposition shadow ministers for several years before they take office. I recall, for example, dealing with Denis Healey of Great Britain and Helmut Schmidt of West Germany when they became defense minister of their countries. Both had been trained, in effect, for their responsibilities by serving as opposition party leaders and studying their country's security issues for many years. I, in contrast, came to Washington from having served as president of Ford Motor company. The meeting between the Eisenhower and Kennedy teams was a ppor substitute for such training. John Locke was correct when he wrote: “No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.”
‘’•─“”
p.45
Sir Robert Thmpson
Thompson had led the successful campaign against guerillas in Malaya during teh 1950s, now he was head of the British advisory mission in South Vietnam.
p.47
It is now clear they were receiving very inaccurate information from the South Vietnamese, who tended to report what they believed Americans wanted to hear.
‘’•“”─
p.96
Early in his administration, President Kennedy asked his cabinet officials and members of the National Security Council to read Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August. HE said it graphically portrayed how Europe's leaders had bungled into the debacle of World war I. And he emphasized: “I don't ever want to be in that position.” Kennedy told us after we had done our reading, “We are not going to bungle into war.”
p.203
Looking back, I clearly erred by not forcing ─ then or later, in either Saigon or Washington ─ a knock-down, drag-out debate over the loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analogies underlying our military strategy in Vietnam. I had spent 20 years as a manager identifying problems and forcing oganizations ─ often against their will ─ to think deeply and realistically about alternative courses of action and their consequences. I doubt I will ever fully understand why I did not do so here.
‘’•“”─
pp.218─219
On November 7, 1965, I sent the president a memo that, along with two others, dated November 30 and December 7, formed the basis for much of the discussion in the next several weeks. The memo opened with this statement:
<blockquote begins>
The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China. China──like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30's, and like the USSR in 1947──looms a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.
... There are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest):
(a) the Japan-Korea front;
(b) the India-Pakistan front; and
(c) the Southeast Asia front.
Decisions to make great investment to day in men, money and national honor in SOuth Vietnam make sense only in conjunction with continuing efforts of equivalent effectiveness in the rest of SOutheast Asia and on the other two principal fronts. THe trends in Asia are running in both directions ── for as well as gainst our interests, there is no reason to be unduly pessimistic about our ability over the next decade or two to ... keep China from achieving her objectives until her zeal wanes. THe job however ── even if we can shift some responsibilities to come Asian countries ── will continue to require American attention, money, and, from time to time unforutnately, lives.
Any decision to continue the program of bombing North Vietnam and any decision to deploy Phase II forces ── involving as they do substantial loss of American lives, risks of further escalation, and greater investment of U.S. prestige ── must be predicated on these premises as to our long-run interests in Asia.
<blockquote ends>
p.219
I have quoted these passages at length because, with hindsight, they provide an example of the kind of totally incorrect appraisal of the “Chinese THreat” to our security that pervaded our thinking. Among other shortcomings, they took no account of the centuries old hostility between China and Vietnam (which flared up again once the United States withdrew from the region) or the setbacks to China's political power caused by the recent events in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which I have just described. And yet, as far as I can recall and the record indicates, they reflect the views of all, or almost all, senior U.S. policy makers. Here again, the lack of expertise and historical knowledge seriously undermined U.S policy.
‘’•─“”
p.208
war game, Sigma II-65
But that same day, the Joint Staff completed another war game, Sigma II-65, that cast serious doubt on Max's predictions and the assumptions underlying our military strategy. Contrary to the belief that we could force and win large-scale ground operations, the Sigma II-65 report noted “”
Sigma II-64 war game, 153
Sigma II-65 war game, 208
p.153
The closest I came to getting a straight answer to my inquiry about the 94 targets appeared in a report of a war game, “Sigma II-64”, conducted by the Joint Staff's Joint war game agency in mid-september 1964. It concluded that “industrial and military bombing” of North Vietnam “would not quickly cause cessation of the insurgency in South Vietnam” and indeed, “might have but minimal effect on the (low) living standard” of the adversary.9
p.367
9. Sigma II-64 Final report, LBJL, pp.D-14, D-15
pp.208─209
1966 Aug 5
But that same day, the Joint Staff completed another war game, Sigma II-65, that cast serious doubt on Max's predictions and the assumptions underlying our military strategy.
p.371
3. Sigma II-64 Final report, pp.D-4 and D-5, LBJL.
‘’•─“”
pp.174─175
As Max later put it, “Once you put that first soldier ashore, you never know how many others are going to follow him.”
p.174
What one scholar has called a “food-in-the-door” strategy.
p.175
All of us should have anticipated the need for u.s. ground forces when the first combat aircraft went to South Vietnam ─ but we did not. The problem lay not in any attempt to deceive but rather in a signal and costly failure to foresee the implications of our actions. Had we done so, we might have acted differently.
‘’•“”─
pp.210─211
Some critics have asserted that the united states lacked a military strategy in Vietnam. In fact, we have one ── but in? assumptions were deeply flawed. Beneath Westy's strategy lay the implicit assumption that pacification and bombing would prevent the Communists from offsetting losses inflicted by u.s. and south Vietnamese Army forces through recruitment in the South and reinforcement from the North. That key assumption grossly underestimated the Communists' capacity to recruit in the South amid war and to reinforce from the North in the face of our air attacks. Moreover, American military and civilian leaders assumed the U.S. and South Vietnamese military could force the Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars to slug it out on the battlefield in a more or less conventional war. Then U.S. mobility and firepower, together with bombing to choke off supplies and reinforcements from the North, would force them into a settlement. If the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army refused to fight on our terms and reverted to hit-and-run tactics, as some believed they would, we had assumed the u.s. and south vietnamese forces, backed by a strong pacification program, could wage an effective anti guerrilla war. And, finally, we believed that the pacification program in the South would serve as our insurance policy, keeping the insurgence from being able to find supplies and recruit fighters there. <skip last statement>
All these assumptions proved incorrect.
p.211
We did not force the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army to fight on our terms. We did not wage an effective anti guerrilla war against them. And bombing did not reduce the infiltration of men and supplies into the South below the required levels or weaken the North's will to continue the conflict.
With Washingon's tacit agreement, Westy fought a war of attrition, whose major objective was to locate and eliminate the Vietcong and North vietnamese regular units. With [senior u.s. administration leaders]'s tacit agreement, Westy fought a war of attrition. No alternative to this
“search and destroy” strategy seemed viable, given the decision not to invade North vietnam with its attendant risk of triggering war with china and/or the soviet union (a risk we were determined to minimize) and our unwillingness to expand massively our ground operation into Laos and Cambodia.
p.211
[Military historian and former career army major Andrew F. Krepinevich] argues that Westy “simply developed a strategy to suit the Army's preferred modus operandi, force structure, and doctrine.”
p.211
[Military historian and former career army major Andrew F. Krepinevich]
the opportunity to win a decisive battle of annihilation by invading North Vietnam,
attrition
attrition strategy best fit the kind of war it had prepared to fight ....
the natural outgrowth of its organizational recipe for success
playing to America's strong suits,
material abundance and technological superiority,
the nation's profound abhorrence of u.s. casualties.
p.212
Gen. William E. DePuy, Westmoreland's operation officer and principal planner in 1965─1968,
[We] eventually learned that we could not bring [the Vietcong and North vietnamese] to battle frequently enough to win a war of attrition.
, but it turned out that it was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the fact that the Ho Chi Minh trail was never closed. It was a losing concept of operation. 7
p.212
Why this failure? Gen. Bruce Palmer, Jr., whose views on the air war I quoted earlier, offered a compelling explanation. The chiefs, Palmer writes, “were imbued with the ‘can do’ spirit and could not bring themselves to make ... a negative statement or to appear to be disloyal.”8
That certainly explains part of the failure. But the president, I, and others among his civilian advisers must share the burden of responsibility for consenting to fight a guerrilla war with conventional military tactics against a foe willing to absorb enormous casualties
p.213
Quite simply, they were adapting to the larger u.s. presence.
‘’•─“”
p.221
Ia Drang battle
November 14─19, 1965, in the Ia Drang Valley in west-central South Vietnam, near the Cambodian border.
fierce fighting amid elephant grass and anthills as high as a man's head.
At first glance, Ia Drang seemed a sound u.s. military victory. American soldiers, as expected, fought bravely and well. But the North Vietnamese had chosen where, when, and how long to fight. This proved to be the case all too often as the war went on.
p.221
open-ended ── increase in u.s. forces and carried with it the likelihood of many more u.s. casualties.
p.222
; South Vietnamese Army desertions had skyrocketed.
p.222
an even higher level of violence, destruction, and death.
p.237
From the beginning of our involvement in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese forces had been giving us poor intelligence and inaccurate reports. Sometimes these inaccuracies were conscious attempts to mislead; at other times they were the product of too much optimism. And sometimes the inaccuracies merely reflected the difficulty of gauging progress accurately.
p.245n
⭐️ Our concern over the risk of confrontation with the Soviets was borne out of the following summer, when I was summoned to the Pentagon one Sunday morning. Moscow was protesting that u.s. warplanes had struck one of their merchant ships docked at Campha harbor, northeast of Haiphong. Assured following an investigation by Adm. Oley Sharp that the story lacked merit, I instructed my public affairs office to issue a scathing denial. Some weeks later, the commander of the u.s. air force in the Pacific, Gen. John D. Ryan, on a trip to Thailand discovered that a flight of four u.s. aircraft had indeed struck the Soviet ship while attacking nearby anti aircraft batteries. WHen the planes had returned to their base in Thailand after the mission, two of the four pilots reported the story to their wing commander, a colonel, who then ordered the gun camera film destroyed and the after-action reports altered. THe colonel was later court-martialed and fined. To my knowledge, this was the only occasion during my seven years at the Defense department that an outright lie by a military officer affected my understanding and explanation of an event.
p.252
But one thing I am certain: we failed miserably to integrate and coordinate our diplomatic and military actions as we searched for an end to the war.
p.273
‘’•“”─
p.280
In June 1967, I decided to ask John McNaughton, my assistant secretary for international security affair (ISA), to start collecting documents for future scholars to use.
p.281
1969, 7,000-page study
p.280
McNaughton's tragic death in an air accident
‘’•─“”
pp.321─323
It is sometimes said that the post─Cold war world will be so different from the world of the past that the lessons of Vietnam will be inapplicable or of no relevance to the 21st century. I disagree. That said, if we are to learn from our experience in Vietnam, we must first pinpoint our failure. There were 11 major causes for our disaster in Vietnam:
1. We misjudged then ── as we have since ── the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries (in this case, North Vietnam and the Vietcong, supported by China and the Soviet Union), and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
4.
11. Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues, involving the great risks and costs ── including, above all else, loss of life ── associated with the application of military force under substantial constraints over a long period of time. Such organizational weakness would have been costly had this been the only task confronting the president and his advisers. It, of course, was not. It coexisted with the wide array of other domestic and international problems confronting us. We thus failed to analyze and debate our actions in Southeast Asia ── our objectives, the risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear ── with the intensity and thoroughness that characterized the debates of the Executive Committee during the Cuban missile crisis.
‘’•─“”
p.332
A major cause of the debacle there lay in our failure to establish an organization of top civilian and military officials capable of directing the task. Over and over again, as my story of the decision-making process makes shockingly clear, we failed to address fundamental issues; our failure to identify them was not recognized; and deep-seated disagreements among the president's advisers about how to proceed were neither surfaced nor resolved.
As I have suggested, this resulted in part from our failure to organize properly. No senior person in Washington dealt solely with Vietnam. With the president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and their associates dividing their attention over a host of complex and demanding issues, some of our shortcomings ── in particular, our failure to debate systemically the most fundamental issues ── could have been predicted. To avoid these, we should have established a full-time team at the highest level ── what Churchill called a War cabinet ── focused on Vietnam and nothing else. At a minimum, it should have included deputies of the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the CIA director. It should have met weekly with the president at prescribed times for long, uninterrupted discussions. The weekly meetings should have been expanded monthly to include the u.s. ambassador and u.s. military commander in Vietnam. The meetings should have been characterized by the openness and candor of Executive committee deliberations during the Cuban missile crisis ── which contributed to the avoidance of a catastrophe. Similar organizational arrangement should be established to direct all future military operations.
George C. Herring, America's longest war : the united states and vietnam, 1950-1975, 1986
The pentagon papers : the defense departments history of united states decision making on vietnam, Senator Gravel ed. 5 vols. Boston : Beacon press. 1971
Theodore C. Sorensen
Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, 1972
George W. Ball, The past has another pattern : memoirs, 1982
Bruce Palmer, Jr., The twenty-five year wars : American's military role in Vietnam, 1984
Lexington : university press of Kentucky
⭐️ ‘’•─“”
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