The Fall of Saigon: 50 Years on

lessons can be identified, but not learned

It’s like the fall of Saigon

Chaos. Panic. Desperations.

I don’t think younger people understand the simile above as well as those over 55 do, but as a GenX guy, I’ve heard and used it all my life—and probably always will—to describe what to the modern eye might be a Black Friday rush on Target. I was not even 10 years old when it fell, but I remember sitting with my parents watching its fall on the television.

HR. McMaster’s October 2009 article on the topic is worth a revisit today.

The key Vietnam-era conceit was that the United States had discovered the secret of using violence with minimal uncertainty and a high degree of efficiency.

And just as the opposing side of the Vietnam debate argued that an American force wedded to conventional orthodoxy was ill-suited for and failed to adapt to the challenges of combating an insurgency in the complex geographic and cultural environment of Southeast Asia, scholars such as Conrad Crane have made the point that the U.S. military was ill-prepared for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—mainly because it regarded Vietnam as an aberration and then as a mistake to be avoided.

Many historians criticize the late Robert McNamara and other architects of America’s intervention in Vietnam for having slighted the human and psychological dimensions of war and refusing to pay due respect to the complex Vietnamese communist strategy of Dau Tranh—a strategy that employed a mosaic of shifting political and military actions—and a critique of American military policy in Iraq levels a similar charge. It faults those who initially devised military policy in Iraq for having revived the Vietnam-era conceit that the United States had discovered the secret of using violence with minimal uncertainty and a high degree of efficiency: the mere demonstration of American military prowess, policy makers argued at the outset of both conflicts, would be sufficient to alter the behavior of the enemy. This flawed assumption had similar effects in each case: the United States dramatically underestimated the complexity of war and the level of effort and time required to achieve its wartime objectives.

We deferred to The Smartest People in the Room™. We thought they were the smartest because they told us they were. They went to all the correct schools, natch.

Our record of learning from the past, particularly the American experience in Vietnam, is not strong. As Yuen Foong Khong argued in her book Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, it was the misapplication of history that so muddled analysis and decision making during the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. Similarly, America’s memory of the divisive military intervention in Vietnam is easily manipulated because it is foggy and imprecise, more symbolic than historical. There are dangers in the reflexive application of historical memory; it clouds understanding and justifies poorly devised policies. Thus historian Earl Tilford argued that the only true lesson of Vietnam was that the “United States must never again become involved in a civil war in support of a nationalist cause against communist insurgents supplied by allies with contiguous borders in a former French colony located in a tropical climate halfway around the world.”

It is true that the conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan exhibit many more differences than similarities. But although the uniqueness of Vietnam limits what we might apply directly from that experience, an examination of how and why Vietnam became an American war and what went wrong there can also help us think more clearly about the wars of today and tomorrow. Indeed, as long as we resist the temptation to expect simple answers from history, strategic and operational insights from the war in Vietnam can be relevant and helpful to our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What if we are making the mistake of looking for the real lessons on the tactical and strategic levels over there, when the real lessons are more over here in the psychological and mindset of America’s elite and the people they are supposed to lead?

The way the United States went to war in Vietnam was unique in American history. No one decision led to war. President Johnson did not want to go to war, yet every decision he made seems in retrospect to have led inexorably in that direction. Not that Johnson relished such decisions: he turned to his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to develop a strategy for Vietnam compatible with his domestic priorities and one that would permit the president to avoid a concrete decision between war and disengagement.

I think what was once “unique” has become a habit.

This paragraph gets close to the heart, I think, of not just Vietnam, but our actions from the Balkans to Kurdistan over the last three decades.

The principal hallmarks of graduated pressure—maximum results with minimal investment, a conviction that the enemy would respond rationally to American action, an obsession with technology as a defining element of warfare—responded to multiple needs unrelated to the actual situation. They were, however, consistent with the education and professional orientations of the architects of the American war in Vietnam. For these men— McNamara, William Bundy, John McNaughton, and the “whiz kids” who surrounded them—human relations were best viewed through the lenses of rational-choice economics and systems analysis. The persistence of nasty, divisive, “irrational” political impulses did not figure much into their worldview. Further, technological innovations had, at least in their telling, endowed these policy makers with an ability to use force in a precise and calibrated way, one that would not set loose the dogs of war.

And even closer.

Although terms like “signals” and “messages” were banished from the lexicon of U.S. military affairs after Vietnam, the search for magic bullets—and a related neglect of the human and intangible dimensions of warfare—persists even now. The strategic concept for future war that emerged in the 1990s bears a striking resemblance to an earlier, repudiated approach to the use of force. This concept resurrects a set of theories tested and found wanting four decades ago.

A point of order. This article was written in 2009, my last year on active duty. I spent the previous four years working on the operation in Afghanistan. A large part of NATO and the U.S. plan involved “signals” and “messages.” Heck, Effects Based OPLANS were thick with such things.

On the eve of the (Iraq) invasion, a senior Pentagon official predicted: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks, or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.” More than six years later, it is clear that the initial planning for the war misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the enemy, and underappreciated the difficulty of the mission.

If you recall my thoughts on the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in FEB 22,

Short-War Snake Oil Salesmen are Worthy of Little but Scorn: a bit more muted than a year ago, even in winter of 2023, American short-war salesmen continue to push the WESTPAC 72-hour victory concept. In the run up to the start of the war in the winter of 2022, Russia’s leadership was sold a quick victory in Ukraine. As we’ve discussed in prior posts, their decision making process was a classic case of multi-layered optimism filtering. Political leaders like shortcuts. They like hearing things that confirm their priors - and like flies around a barnyard, yes-men (and women) surround such personalities. Smart leaders ensure they are not surrounded by yes-men. Unwise leaders create organizations where only the obsequious rise.

Short wars are seductive and brief well. They are easy to wargame. Unless you are off Zanzibar or Grenada, they never really work out. They are products of the delusional, corrupt, or criminally incompetent - uniformed and civilian.

The errors of Vietnam and Ukraine are the errors of the mind, of the incentives and disincentives of those who are promoted and are put in positions to offer advice to overly confident, insecure, and self-important politicians.

Back to McMaster’s 2009 article. That mindset always returns because it is seductive, as seen in recent discussions about how we should fight China on the other side of the Pacific.

Does this sound familiar?

The conviction that technology offered a panacea not only impeded U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq to begin with but also slowed the ability to adapt once the true nature of those wars became apparent. In late September 2004, as the insurgency in Iraq was coalescing and U.S. forces were preparing for the battle of Fallujah, the secretary of defense continued to make the case that “speed and precision and agility can substitute for mass,” reiterating that the war plan was designed “to take advantage of the speed, precision, and agility that we have.” Such views go a long way toward explaining the mismatch between ends and means in Afghanistan and Iraq, where for years the United States chased ambitious aims with inadequate resources (especially numbers of soldiers and units committed).

The final two paragraphs should be shown to everyone responsible for preparing our military for what awaits across the international date line.

Like McNamara’s whiz kids, advocates of the revolution in military affairs applied business analogies to war and borrowed heavily from economics and systems analysis. Both graduated pressure and rapid decisive operations promised efficiency in war; planners could determine precisely the amount of force necessary to achieve desired effects. Graduated pressure would apply just enough force to affect the adversary’s “calculation of interests.” Under rapid decisive operations, U.S. forces, based on a “comprehensive system-of-systems understanding of the enemy and the environment,” would attack nodes in the enemy system with a carefully calculated amount of force to generate “cumulative and cascading effects.”

But the U.S. experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq demonstrated that it was impossible to calibrate precisely the amount of force necessary to prosecute a war. The human and psychological dimensions of war, along with the friction and uncertainty when opposing forces meet, invariably frustrate even the most elaborate and well-considered attempts to predict the effects of discrete military actions. Emphasis in planning and directing operations, therefore, ought to be on effectiveness rather than efficiency. The requirement to adapt quickly to unforeseen conditions means that commanders will need additional forces and resources that can be committed with little notice. For efficiency in all forms of warfare, including counterinsurgency, means barely winning. And in war, barely winning can be an ugly proposition.

As I’ve covered countless times here, I remember the discussions at C5F in the hours, weeks, and months after the attacks of 9/11/2001. One thing we kept referring to, as we thought that we were just going to do a punitive expedition into Afghanistan or wherever we found the guilty hiding, was that we were not going to repeat the errors of the Vietnam War.

Well, we failed. We forgot the greatest error was: arrogance.

Maybe the next generation will say, “Let’s not repeat the errors of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq”, and actually follow through. I hope so.

We owe it to the tens of thousands of Americans who died in the Vietnam War, and the thousands who have died—and multiples of that maimed—in our wars since.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, it is the least we can do.

We owe them humility.

h/t HRM actual.