[555] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: "Watch me pull laissez-faire capitalism out of this
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Prez H. Cannady)
Sat May 5 20:00:21 2001
Message-Id: <200105052359.TAA19518@melbourne-city-street.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 05 May 2001 19:59:36 -0400
To: "Sourav K. Mandal" <Sourav.Mandal@ikaran.com>, mit-talk@MIT.EDU
From: "Prez H. Cannady" <revprez@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <200105052238.SAA06053@dichotomy.dyn.dhs.org>
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At 06:38 PM 5/5/01 , Sourav K. Mandal wrote
>
>In what way? The Vietnam War, which I *think* was the first conflict
>to use the draft extensively, was hardly an unmitigated success.
Keep thinking. The Vietnam War employed a partial mobilization that
never came CLOSED to the levels experienced even in peace time the
decade before, and definitely not as high as the World Wars. You
cycled two million people through service over a space of eight
years, and that's with a draft already in place that had been going
on since the Cold War began. You had over fifteen million in uniform
through World War II.
The Vietnam War mobilization, in comparison to the Persian Gulf War,
actually rounds out to about the same. About seven or so divisions
in place, a Marine Force, two carriers and a gunline, and one
and a half air forces. Not very large at all, compared to the manpower we
deployed to Europe and the Pacific.
Militarily, Vietnam was a great success. By the end of the
war, we had accomplished our primary military objective--pacification
of the South--with the destruction of the Viet Cong's ability
to wage war by 1971 (thanks to their stupid attempt to wage
urban warfare during Tet). We won every major engagement with the
exception of Ia Drang in 1965. Finally, the raw figure: for every
six Americans you ended up with one-hundred dead Charlies or
Victors.
Failure in Vietnam was political and logistical, not operational.
Partial mobilization and gradualism made the war much more costly
and dragged it out. Additionally, the decision not to cross the
parallel into the North with ground forces -- more importantly,
Johnson's public pledge NOT to invade the North, meant that the
North Vietnamese would always retain the initiative. By extension,
so would the Viet Cong. As the defenders (anybody who tells you
that the Viet Cong were on the defensive needs to learn something
about combat), we were forced to resort to search and destroy
missions for potential amassing offensives instead of cutting
off the enemy at the neck.
The South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, the Song Tay prison
camp raid, the Christmas bombings demonstrated that had we
actually taken the war to the North, we could have won it
early on and with much less cost. So long as we backed off,
as Nixon learned early in his first term, the Hanoi
delegation at Paris enjoyed playing their little games during
the talks. When shit started to fall from the sky like
God on exlax, they scrambled back and sought desparately
to placate the United States.
That brings us to our political failure. After 1968, after
a lot of trial and error, we finally found that Vietnamization
and the Operation Phoenix were two sets of tools that we
could use to really win the war. Problem is, Washington had
decided after the embarassment of Tet in the face of
Westmoreland's honest, yet sorely inaccurate assessments
of his pacification, that we no longer wanted to win the war.
Not that we couldn't or even that we shouldn't. We simply
decided it was time to leave. By the time Westmoreland was
recalled to serve as Chief of Staff for the Army and Abrams
was sent in, the feeling in Washington was that the Van Thieu
government (nice man, he lives not too far
from here), was unable to concentrate on prosecuting the
war and that ARVN -- although well equipped and trained --
suffered from abyssmal leadership. Reversing that trend would
be essential to meeting all of the United States' goals,
which included stablizing South Vietnam and preventing
aggression from the North. Since those two essential pieces
of the puzzle were still missing, we decided that we would leave
with whatever victory we could pull out of it.
Never forget who lost South Vietnam. We did what we could,
but Van Thieu's government was incapable of leading and nobody
in South Vietnam was willing to take the responsibility. Instead,
the South Vietnamese became accustomed to the United States
providing their security. In the end, when we were gone, they
panicked and flooded into the ARVN with record numbers. The
greatest fighting in Vietnam took place a year after we left,
when the North renewed its offensive campaign. Thousands of
South Vietnamese died fighting for their country, killing
tens and tens of thousands North Vietnamese communist aggressors.
In the end, it was Van Thieu's poor decisionmaking (recalling
forces out of the III CTZ and back towards Saigon, then
reversing those orders midtrip) that gave PAVN the needed
opportunity to run for Saigon. By 1975, you've set the
stage for three decades worth of Vietnam flicks.
The lesson here is that victory has several different meanings
to several different people. Regardless of what you personally
think about the Vietnam War, Nixon ended up winning his second
term on the basis that he could get us out of the war. He
didn't promise South Vietnam's survival, because by then America
had done one of the coldest things in our history -- abandon
an ally in face of the enemy.
Rev Prez
* * *
Presley H. Cannady, Class of 2002, Electrical Engineering
Acting Chairman, College Republicans
CR Website <http://web.mit.edu/republicans/www/>
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