Wrong on Nam, Wrong on Terror
The War
That Never Ends (for the U.S. Military High Command)
And It’s Not the War on Terror
By Danny Sjursen
And It’s Not the War on Terror
By Danny Sjursen
Extracts from the article:
Vietnam: it’s always
there. Looming in the past, informing American futures.
A 50-year-old war, once
labeled the longest in our history, is still alive and well and still being
refought by one group of Americans: the military high command. And almost half
a century later, they’re still losing it and blaming others for doing so.
Of course, the U.S.
military and Washington policymakers lost the war in Vietnam in the previous
century and perhaps it’s well that they did. The United States really had
no business intervening in that anti-colonial civil war in the first place,
supporting a South Vietnamese government of questionable legitimacy, and
stifling promised nationwide elections on both sides of that country’s
artificial border. In doing so, Washington presented an easy villain for
a North Vietnamese-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency, a group
known to Americans in those years as the Vietcong.
More than two
decades of involvement and, at the war’s peak, half a million American troops
never altered the basic weakness of the U.S.-backed regime in Saigon.
Despite millions of Asian deaths and 58,000 American ones, South Vietnam’s
military could not, in the end, hold the line without American support and
finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North Vietnamese invasion
in April 1975.
There’s just one
thing. Though a majority of historians (known in academia as the
“orthodox” school) subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the
vast majority of senior American military officers do not. Instead,
they’re still refighting the Vietnam War to a far cheerier outcome through the
books they read, the scholarship they publish, and (most disturbingly) the
policies they continue to pursue in the Greater Middle East….
…an
entire generation of senior military leaders, commissioned in the years after
the Vietnam War and now atop the defense behemoth, remain fixated on that
ancient conflict. After all these decades, such “thinking” generals and
“soldier-scholars” continue to draw all the wrong lessons…
…Senior
commanders, some now serving in key national security positions, fixated on
Vietnam, have translated that conflict’s supposed lessons into what now passes
for military strategy in Washington. The result has been an
ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged ceaselessly from South Asia to West
Africa, which has essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the
can-do belief that counterinsurgency and advise-and-assist missions should have
worked in Vietnam and can work now…
…Officers
have long distributed professional reading lists for subordinates, intellectual
guideposts to the complex challenges ahead. Indeed, there’s much to be
admired in the concept, but also potential dangers in such lists as they
inevitably influence the thinking of an entire generation of future
leaders. In the case of Vietnam, the perils are obvious. The
generals have been assigning and reading problematic books for years, works that
were essentially meant to reinforce professional pride in the midst of a series
of unsuccessful and unending wars…
…Just
as important as which books made the lists is what’s missing from them: none of
these senior commanders include newer scholarship, novels, or journalistic
accounts which might raise thorny, uncomfortable questions about whether the
Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable, or incorporate local voices
that might highlight the limits of American influence and power….
Serving in the Shadow of
Vietnam
Most
of the generals leading the war on terror just missed service in the Vietnam
War. They graduated from various colleges or West Point in the years
immediately following the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops or thereafter:
Petraeus in 1974, future Afghan War
commander Stanley McChrystal in 1976, and present National Security Adviser
H.R. McMaster in 1984. Secretary of
Defense Mattis finished ROTC and graduated from Central Washington University
in 1971, while Trump’s
Chief of Staff John Kelly enlisted at the tail end of the Vietnam War,
receiving his commission in 1976.
In
other words, the generation of officers now overseeing the still-spreading war
on terror entered military service at the end of or after the tragic war in
Southeast Asia. That meant they narrowly escaped combat duty in the
bloodiest American conflict since World War II and so the professional
credibility that went with it. They were mentored and taught by academy
tactical officers, ROTC instructors, and commanders who had cut their teeth on
that conflict. Vietnam literally dominated the discourse of their era --
and it’s never ended.
Petraeus,
Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had
reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught
the young officers where to lay the blame for that -- on civilians in
Washington (or in the nation’s streets) or on a military high command too weak
to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam’s shadow, the
shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead
to twenty-first-century disasters…
…None of today’s acclaimed military personalities seems willing to
consider that Washington couldn’t have won in Vietnam because, as former Air
Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak (who flew 269 combat missions over that country) noted in the recent Ken Burns documentary series, “we were
fighting on the wrong side.”…
That war and its
ill-fated lessons will undoubtedly continue to influence U.S. commanders until
a new set of myths, explaining away a new set of failures in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and elsewhere, take over, possibly thanks to books by veterans of these
conflicts about how Washington could have won the war on terror.
It’s
not that our generals don’t read. They do. They just doggedly continue to read
the wrong books.
In
1986, General Petraeus ended his influential Parameters article with a
quote from historian George Herring: “Each historical situation is unique and
the use of analogy is at best misleading, at worst, dangerous.” When it
comes to Vietnam and a cohort of officers shaped in its shadow (and even now
convinced it could have been won), "dangerous" hardly describes the
results. They’ve helped bring us generational war and, for today’s young
soldiers, ceaseless tragedy.
Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former
history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in
Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq
War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence,
Kansas. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and
check out his new podcast Fortress on a Hill.
[Note:
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an
unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the
Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
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