 Good day. I'm Colonel Jerry Morlock, the Director of the Combat Studies Institute. You're about to use a video series which our instructors have prepared for the sole purpose of improving your presentation of M610, Devolution of Modern Warfare. We've taken care to make the course that you teach as similar to the one taught at Fort Leavenworth as possible and choose to add these tapes to your libraries in order to give you every advantage as you prepare to teach this new course. These tapes are similar to the weekly train-up sessions which we utilize to prepare our instructors here at Fort Leavenworth. My intent for the tape sessions was to provide you insights and tips on ways to approach the lessons of M610 that were not available in the instructor notes. I've drawn various instructors, military and civilian into the sessions based upon their specific expertise and historical background. They were asked to just talk to the lesson structure and content, giving you some additional information on the historical context and differing views on how to approach the lessons. These tapes will provide you a wealth of knowledge and direction that will significantly improve your readiness to teach our new history course. One word of caution regarding how to use these training tapes. They are not designed to be substituted for your instruction during the individual lessons of the course. As instructor preparation tapes train the training material, if you will, they are inappropriate for direct instruction to students and are not intended for that purpose. Our intent with these tapes is to improve your ability to lead the students' seminars by sharing tips and advice from some highly qualified experts. The Combat Studies Institute stands ready to provide whatever additional expertise or assistance that you may require and we've included the institute's phone, mail and email contact information on the tape if you should need it. Good luck with the evolution of modern warfare course. Have a good time. Greetings and welcome to Lesson 14, which deals with Vietnam and Afghanistan. My name is Dr. George Gavrech. Joining me today will be Lieutenant Colonel Doug Scalard and Dr. Gerald Brown. The Vietnam War plays a very important part in our military history. You can see its effects even today. Just think about Desert Shield and Desert Storm, where our generals talked about Vietnam, this being not another Vietnam. And if you look at the officer corps today, we find a split. A good number of officers fought in Vietnam, but that number is slowly diminishing. And if we look at most of the officer corps, what they have is just memories from others of what this war was about. And what we'd like to do today is look at some key issues to help grapple with an important war in our country's history and remove some of the myths that have been handed down about the war. And after we do that, we'll look at another major topic, which will be Afghanistan, and make some comparisons and contrast it with Vietnam so that we'll get a better idea about the war in Vietnam. Let's put this war in context, and let me be just very brief about this. We are in the era of the Cold War, but we definitely have competition with the communist world for influence around the world. We're in the policy of containment. We want to prevent the communists from spreading their influence around the world. And one place where we come to blows with the threat from communism is in Vietnam. It is going to be our longest war, some will say, in our history. I've identified three major things we'll be looking at, themes that will help generate broader discussion. First one is what kind of war are we involved in? Because Klaus Fitt says, if you're going to get involved in a war, know what kind of war it is, same as if you're going to get married. Know who the person you're going to get married to is, so it will remove some of the problems initially in getting into a marriage. Then we'll look at what were the U.S. goals, strategies and tactics in this war, and then we'll end by looking at how good were the North Vietnamese communists, because we do have all sorts of different interpretations of how good they were and how bad we were. And we'll use those same questions then as we look at Afghanistan and the Soviet involvement there. So let me first start out by asking the big broad question, what kind of war is this? If you remember when we talked about the American Revolution, we found that there were different kinds of wars in this larger war called the American Revolution. There was a global war eventually involving Britain fighting against France, the Dutch, Spaniards. There was a civil war aspect to the American Revolution. There was guerrillas fighting against conventional forces and conventional forces fighting against conventional forces. So it was a very complex war, as was Vietnam. How would you answer the question, what kind of war was Vietnam? Well, George, I think this is one of the better questions and something that puzzles many people that don't really look deeply into the Vietnam War. Frequently, to begin with, we overlook the strategic context. This war is part of an international political struggle. It's a Cold War war, first and foremost. That's what gets us there. That's what pits us against the North Vietnamese and their cousins in the Viet Cong in the south. And in that context, if you don't appreciate that, you cannot appreciate the strategic and operational approach that the United States takes. Some of the things we do over there don't make any sense at all unless you consider that this is a Cold War war. So you've got to consider the international political struggle. I think the main point to be brought out with that, too, is that because it's an international war, it means the people will be fighting on the ground, will be getting support from China and the Soviet Union, which allow them to sustain the war effort much longer than if they were working just with their own resources. We're not fighting the Vietnamese over regional hegemony as much as we are fighting the Soviet Union through their proxies, the Vietnamese, and to some extent the Chinese through their proxies, the Vietnamese, although as we discover later, they're not as tight altogether as we originally appreciated or thought back in the 50s. I think you've got to understand that context, though. Now, when you get into the war, that's where you start wondering, and that's what really derives the confusion when you get into an operational context of how this war is carried out or a strategic level operational versus a national policy level question. If you are in the Air Force, for you this might be considered a strategic bombing campaign. We're trying to take out the infrastructure in North Vietnam through such intensive bombing that they come to the peace table unwilling to continue the war. And for the Air Force, this is, or they would like it to be, primarily a war of strategic bombing. The same thing they'd done to Nazi Germany and to Japan during the Second World War. But the Air Force, too, has got a part and a role in other facets of the war. There's the interdiction campaign, the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the notion that if we can stop the North from supplying the South, we can handle the problem in the South. So there's that aspect of it. Now, the Air Force isn't alone in that particular role and strategic bombings largely them in the Navy, but when you get into the interdiction campaign, it's Air Force Navy and also, to an extent, ground troops do that. And the interdiction campaign, Ho Chi Minh Trail, everybody knows about, but it's also going down in the South and also along the coastline. So they're trying to keep the North away from the South and that's another war. If we can just hold off reinforcements, we can win this war. Then there's the war of the main force battle. That's primarily the ground war and that is the war of the North Vietnamese invading the South. That's the battalion, regimental-sized wars, the large offensives that we see in Hue, you know, the battle of Tinhang, the real big-name battles of the war where the North Vietnamese regulars mix it up with the South Vietnamese army and the American armies and Marines on the ground at a very large and costly scale. Finally, there's the pacification campaign or the village war, that war of the VC that we make so much about, particularly in America today. You know, you don't know who the enemy was over there, you know, the little boy who's had you pat and you give him the chocolate bar and as you walk away, he throws a grenade at you. Okay? The war of the South Vietnamese people that were sympathetic to the North, the Viet Cong versus the North Vietnamese regular war. And all of these are going on simultaneously and all of them are interrelated and integrated, but for an observer that tries to figure out, you know, what is this Vietnam war about, it can leave you pretty confused. You know, if you go get an Air Force General's briefing, you'll get one perspective. If you go ask a grunt in a rice patty, what's this war about? You get something entirely different. So I think the point you're making is this is a very confused war compared to some of the other wars that we have studied in the past in which the issues are not clear, the sides are not distinctly separate. For example, as you point out, it's very difficult sometimes to separate the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces, even though they may fight differently, even though they are fighting perhaps for different causes. This is a very confused war and we need to understand that that's one thing that makes this war different from some of the other wars that we have viewed in the past in this course. Some other ways that you might look at what kind of war is this, in addition to the international dimension of it, is to look at how much is it a conventional war or counterinsurgency. It involves an invasion from the North and you have to fight against the North Vietnamese, but the problem is we don't take the war to North Vietnam. So that limits how... It's not on the ground, isn't it? It's not on the ground. And then you've got the problem that there's the Civil War aspect to it. It starts out with South Vietnamese against South Vietnamese with support from the North, but because the North doesn't invade with a large convention force to occupy part of the country but infiltrates, it makes it a murkier war than if you just crossed the DMZ and occupied northern part and then said, okay, fight us in a conventional sense. So what that does is it creates a complexity and confusion about what kind of war are we involved in and the dynamics of how much is it conventional, unconventional, how much is it civil war versus conventional war will change as time goes on. It means then that as you're fighting against the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, the means Viet Cong, it means you have to try different kinds of things because you just can't isolate and only fight one kind of war to exclude the others and assume that if you just win that part everything else will fall into place, which is sometimes a major mistake that writers make when they talk about the war and try to analyze it. You also have to look at the coalition nature of this war. Absolutely. Right. The expectation of many people looking at Vietnam for the first time is folks looking exclusively on the United States. Not only is the United States they're fighting, we do have an ally in the Republic of South Vietnam. We also have a number of our other allies at various times. The Australians will have forces on the ground. The Koreans will actually send troops to South Vietnam to fight. And so we have to understand this is a coalition effort on our part as well as us confiding a very confused enemy. We also have to look at this as a regional conflict. It's a very difficult problem for us to sort out what's going on in countries such as Cambodia and Laos, both of whom will play an increasing role in this war as time goes on to the point that the United States and its allies will make incursions into both of these countries eventually in an attempt to deal with both the safe haven aspect of those countries and the use of those countries by the North Vietnamese to shuttle supplies into the South. So that's another expanding dimension of this war as we go through the later 1960s and the early 1970s. Excellent. Why don't we move on to the next broader theme, which is what were the US goals? What strategies do we employ? What tactics did we use? What was our goal in Vietnam? Did we have a clear one? How would you answer that? That's one of the great debatable questions. And you have a spectrum of answers. One, of course, the first and foremost one that's proposed to the American people is, you've got to draw the line. The communists have been steadily expanding since the Second World War. Eastern Europe had fallen to communism. They had made inroads into the northern part of Korea, which the United States blocked in 1950. It had been steadily being propagated in Asia, as well as parts of eastern and southern Europe. And the United States saw its role in the world as to stop this communist expansion. This is about the time the domino theory comes into effect, the early 50s, and it's almost got the power of law, by the 60s, where if one of these little countries falls, if South Vietnam goes down, it's going to take Cambodia and Laos with it, and then Thailand and then the whole region goes down. And at the strategic, the macro level, the national level, our goal is to stop that. But when we do that, our goal is really defensive in nature. We're not going to try to overthrow, for example, the North Vietnamese. We're certainly not going to try to do anything against the Chinese. The Korean War made that very clear that despite our great technological advances, any war in those directions is going to be very costly. So it's primarily, at the strategic level, a very defensive goal. We are containing the expansion of communism. And to a large extent, that's monolithic communism. You know, red is a red is a red, be he Russian or Polish or Chinese or Korean or North Vietnamese, they're all the same and we don't like them. And the only good commune is a dead commune. That's right. I think it's a good point. What you've done is, the basic goal is to prevent communism from spreading. And in there you could phrase it as we want to preserve an independent non-communist South Vietnam. But you've added to it a lot of meat, a substance which is, it's a defensive strategy. We're afraid of getting involved in the larger war. We misread the Chinese during the Khmerian War. MacArthur, the great failure out there in Asia, said the Chinese are not going to get involved. They did get involved. So we're concerned about this war spreading too much and getting the Chinese involved. So we limit ourselves. It's a defensive posture that we're taking to preserve the government in South Vietnam from falling to the communism. At the national level, again, at different levels of war, you can have a national strategy of defense. But at a military strategic level below that, you can use offensive operations to support that defense. So it varies back and forth, depending upon what level you're at. But at least at the very highest level, again, we're not trying to overthrow the communist governments. That is a defensive strategy. Now, what goes along with that when you say that is how Klausowitz tells us, you can't win the war without offensive actions. So at the very highest level of national strategy, we're fighting a defensive war which takes all of the national strategic initiative and places it firmly in the lap of the North Vietnamese. They get to decide when they want to stop attacking, when they've had enough. And if they decide they're never going to have enough, the war goes on forever because we're not going to do anything positive to stop them from doing it. I think one way too, as you look at strategy to try to implement that political goal of preserving South Vietnam, preventing it from falling, there are two parts to it. There's the non-military political side of strategy and then there's the military strategy. What can we say about the kinds of strategies we're employing this war on the political side? One that comes to mind is we're going to have to, as time goes on, strengthen the South Vietnamese government. And as this war drags on, we have to make it more legitimate. We'll talk about having elections to give it legitimacy. We'll talk about questions of reform. We'll talk about issues of financial reform, try to attack the corruption. That is important because if the government is weak, the army on the South Vietnamese side is weak, and means we have to do more. So we have to work the political side in conjunction with what's happening in the military side. One can't win without the other working well. And this is a problem that we face when we look at fighting this war on the strategic level, political-military interface. Any other comments about the political side? All of these, of course, are legacies of the post-World War II period. The basic philosophical underpinnings of such things as the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine are inherently tied up with the policies that we pursue in Southeast Asia. We don't invent these policies for Southeast Asia or for South Vietnam. We have all in some ways been tried and tested in previous conflicts. The ideas of legitimacy, the ideas of economic viability, all of these have their antecedents. And at this point there's no reason to believe that they won't work. Let's not judge the ends by what we see people attempting to do in the late 1950s and up to the mid-1960s. All of these things were done before and they had proven themselves, so you're trying them again. The fact that they're not going to work in Vietnam should not deter us from judging them in terms of what is going on. From the time the United States begins to assume a role in Southeast Asia in the mid-1950s until we become involved in a full-blown ground war by the mid-1960s. If you look to the dilemma that the military faces on the strategic side, we cannot go after the center of gravity in Hanoi with ground forces. We basically follow a strategy of attrition, trying to wear down the enemy, killing him, destroying as much of his resources so he'll give up. And in that comes the measure that you have of how well you're doing because it can't be just holding terrain because where your troops are not it's up for grabs as we get into a body count. What do you think about the whole notion of a strategy of attrition as a way we fight this and taking it down to the level of measurement that we're doing well becomes the body count which has all sorts of problems related to that concept? I think our strategy devolved into, you know, if we can't do what we want to do, we'll do what we can do. And if we're not permitted by our political masters to take the war to the North Vietnamese for all sorts of reasons that seem to be well founded based on recent history, you know, the Chinese went into Korea when they got nervous about the integrity of the North Korean government and territory, what's to say is not going to happen here again. So for pretty good political military reasons, at least on the surface, the military is not going to be permitted to do some of the things that it would like to do. And it kind of finds itself in the realm of well if you can't take enemy ground away from him, which is something that's measurable. And you really can't say who controls any one piece of ground outside of the major cities at least in the early 60s. You know, you control wherever you send American soldiers and when you leave with those soldiers, you no longer control it. Okay, so you can't really measure capturing ground in the South because you can't be everywhere. So what can you measure? And we kind of fall into, well, we know when we kill him. When we kill somebody, we know that guy's not going to fight us anymore. And if you take an approach of, well, there's only so many of these folks and we've got population statistics, they're going to reach a point where their population can no longer support the war in theory. And that point becomes what Westmoreland will call the crossover point, the light at the end of the tunnel where the North Vietnamese effort will steadily be declining through lack of troops anymore. It's not pretty. It's not the way the Army would like to do business or the U.S. military would like to do business, but it sees that that's all that's got open to it. It's only options. Okay, but that's a strictly military analysis. That doesn't get into the political side of things. You know, the establishment of the legitimacy which we've been trying to do since the elections were called off in 54 and the initial underpinnings of the next Vietnam War after the French, or the 56 elections rather, those were called off and the underpinnings of that next war start forming. Then we try all sorts of things to establish the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government not only in Vietnam itself, but also in the United States. DM is billed to the American people as the George Washington of South Vietnam. It kind of shows we're a little out of touch with those. Here is a Catholic being billed as the founding father, if you will, of a new democracy in a primarily Buddhist country with his little contingent of a little government based on nepotism. So we're not dealing with that very well and by the time DM is assassinated, right around the time Kennedy is assassinated, there's not a whole lot of folks in the United States that are going to cry for him. But then he succeeded by a series of generals, strong generals that replaced each other and the legitimacy falls off there. What are we fighting for in Vietnam? If we can't even say that the South Vietnamese government is legitimate, it's like a banana republic. They turn over military dictators every year and bring in groups of them and disband them and another. So that's hard for the military to deal with and it's not entirely the military's place to deal with that kind of thing, but it falls into the, you know, how do you deal with this problem strategically? For the U.S. military, it becomes a matter of, well, we can't touch that kind of thing. We can't make this guy legitimate or anybody running that state legitimate. We can't do what we'd like to do militarily invade the North. Well, what can we do? We can kill them in the South and we can count how many we kill and our strategy is channeled and becomes ever narrower until that's all we've gotten. Just go find them and kill them. Even the notion of attrition, however, is not new. There are political, historical ansities to the whole concept of fighting the attrition of war. There's a political war being a prime example in which states fight each other until they are both exhausted, one being more exhausted than the other. The problem for the United States in the 1960s is they had clearly forgotten that lesson in the half a century earlier, that states, once they are ginned up and once they are committed, they are still fighting to a tremendous degree of loss beyond what would have been anticipated by the political leaders at the outset of that conflict. The question is, how many North Vietnamese do you have to kill to convince the North Vietnamese government to back off? And the answer to that question is we don't know because we never get to that point, but by all estimates, some two million of the 17 million people in North Vietnam are victims of this war, either through the bombing, through sending ground forces to the south, etc. So the problem with attrition as a policy is nobody can tell you in advance how many of these people we have to kill, how many bodies we have to stack up in order to be successful. Well, and the way we go about it is an attrition strategy of not how much he can stand implying that how much killing do we need to do to affect his will. We're focused more on his material capability. How much can we kill so that what he can bring to bear against us is insignificant. We never try to get into the heads of the North Vietnamese leadership to understand them. We keep trying to influence them. Well, we'll send them a signal by having a couple of days of bombing campaign and we'll draw the protected circle around Hanoi a little bit tighter. We'll bomb a little bit closer to their capital and we'll let them know that we really mean business and it will stop their reaction. But we never try to figure out are they reacting to this? What do they see when we bomb them and then stop bombing? We think we're sending signals of power. They think we're weak. We don't have the willpower to do this. Carry this war through to victory and do what's needed to be done to win. There's a wonderful line in Dave Palmer's book Summons of the Trumpet where he talks about an attrition strategy and he says, you know, attrition is not a strategy but he's wrong. Attrition is a strategy. It's the North Vietnamese strategy. Not all the time they try wars of conquest and, you know, Tet certainly is about gaining land and they lose that battle but over the long haul what's winning for them is their strategy. And historically attrition strategies are the strategy of the weaker side. So we ourselves as the militarily stronger side in this war adopted the strategy of weakness that our enemy then played to the hilt. Attrition should be recognized as also being more than just body counting referred to resources. Attrition applies to resources as well. The Air Force, for example, whose bombing campaign in the North focused on the petroleum industry as one of its targets with the clear objective of reducing or eliminating petroleum as a resource to the North. The problem for the war was that petroleum was not an important element in the North Vietnamese resourcing of the South. Most of the supplies that go south don't go south on trucks. They go south on bicycles. And so by going after the wrong target you can, in fact, eliminate it or at least reduce it significantly but it may not make a difference in how the war is fought. Sure. And to try to go about this war saying, well, for the Germans, bombing those Romanian oil fields without the panzers. Well, that's true. But like you're saying, this is a people-powered army. Even if you went to the technology that they used, the arms industry, you know, the weapons, who's making the AK-47s? You don't bomb the AK-47 factories because they're in China and they're in Russia. Most of them are in Czechoslovakia. Well, in Czechoslovakia, that's right, Eastern Europe. You can't play by the same rules that we played by, particularly in the strategic bombing, but it creeps into our thought all across the spectrum of this war of somehow we are trying to make this the type of war we want it to be. Make it the kind of war we want to fight because that's the kind of war we're good at and they just will not, they won't cooperate. That gets us to talking about Vietnamese and how good were they, what were their strategies and tactics. I think one way to look at it is that they're an active player and they influence what we do. We have to react to them and they have to react to us. The war has its conventional aspects and its unconventional aspects. There's a conventional war plus counterinsurgency for us. For the North Vietnamese, they can play either one depending on what we're doing. We want to make it conventional and build up our large forces to try to get them to do the big battle. If it's not to their favor, they're going to go into small unit tactics, guerrilla activities. If we go too much chasing after them in small units with small units, then we run the risk of them massing some power, overrunning a few posts out there in left field, so to speak and the political fallout back in the United States would be devastating. We don't want the NBN Fu or anything on a smaller scale. So we face a dilemma here. The more conventional we go, a smart opponent determined to do the long haul will go unconventional. The more we chase him with counterinsurgency, the more he's going to shift over and look for an opportunity to do some big damage with big units to us. So this is, I think, one thing to keep in mind as we look at this whole notion of the enemy is not passive. He's active and he could do things like how the North Vietnamese have options to allow them with their strong will to keep this the long haul as long as it takes to try numerous different kinds of things and make this a long drawn out war. But how smart are they in all this as they're adjusting because our strategy has to adjust, their strategy has to adjust, same with our tactics and their tactics. So the problem is not the adjustment is analyzing how good was the adjustment. Don't criticize we've changed a bit our strategy because we had to, in response to the enemy, were we adjusting properly to meet his adjustments is the one issue you ought to keep in mind. What about the North Vietnamese? How smart are they? Is this a long drawn out plan that they have that comes to fruition at the end with a victory? Or are they making mistakes and stumbling through like we're kind of stumbling through trying to understand this strange creature called the Vietnamese war? I think there's two real good questions in there or two real good issues. One is who are they when we say the North Vietnamese? We're making an assumption that everybody in Hanoi thought the same way. And we do that just like we think all communists think alike because we don't know any better and we don't try to find out. Throughout this war we never make a serious effort to find out who our enemy is. They have dissension in their ranks serious dissension about how this war should be fought particularly after Tet when the United States is doing tremendous damage to their war effort. We never know about that and we never try to find out what kind of things are going on in the enemy's head. They are not homogenous being that has one direction and one direction only. One division that is present is the one how conventional should we go how unconventional. That's the one burning issue. That's right. We have the same kind of division within the political side how do you employ the military on the military side how should we be employed you've got differences between Marines so we're not monolithic either as well as they are not they're like us having tensions conflicting views on how to wage this war. And that answers the second part of this question many Americans and it seems to be part of the popular culture about Vietnam right now is that they played one strategy the entire war the North Vietnamese played one strategy and it was a strategy of patience and attrition and the United States was pretty well doomed from the start to fail to this strategy. The Vietnamese were going to beat us great jokes that western journalists used to tell when they see new American commanders coming into Vietnam about here comes another great western warrior about to lose his reputation to General Giap Ho Chi Minh and they build up a myth about the enemy this myth of infallibility that's just not true it's almost like Montgomery Field Marshal Montgomery in Africa in the Second World War has to pass an order to his army to stop talking about General Rommel he's got the Brits so cowed that Montgomery forbids them to speak his name you almost see that in Vietnam this notion that they don't make mistakes and yet they do make mistakes their first and foremost mistake is they think we're the French they treat our fire bases our outposts as if they were French outposts they would attack them and try to draw in reinforcements and ambush the reinforcements but our reinforcements aren't traveling primarily by trucks we have armor columns and we have helicopters and it takes them a long long time to deal with that and figure out how to fight that we have firepower the French never dreamed of Den Bien Phu the French asked for a stand up battle Giap gave them a stand up battle Giap outgun the French at the type of battle they wanted to do they try the same thing with the United States at Da Nang and other places hamburger hill you name it they try the stand up battle with American forces and they are squashed hands down every time we're not the French it takes them a long time to figure that out that's a major bone contention between Giap who's trying to replay his earlier victories and his tractors who are saying you can't treat the Americans like the French they're slaughtering our folks we need to go back to a lower level conflict so this notion of the infallibility of the communists and I grouped the Viet Cong in with the North Vietnamese there are certainly two different entities it just doesn't play out if you get into and study this war there are two different points recent scholarship gives I think a much better appreciation of the TED offensive in their strategy there was a debate should we continue unconventional or should we go more conventional and Giap argued that the time was right for the major uprising that if we attacked in numerous places at the same time we being the North Vietnamese we could do serious damage to the South Vietnamese government we can cause a popular uprising and leave the Americans holding on to nothing so he argues let's go for the gusto let's go during TED and they attack and they're focusing on winning the war really quickly what they find is we're able to do damage to them the South Vietnamese government and troops do damage to the North Vietnamese some people probably in the cities might have voted for Ho Chi Minh in election they see rebels coming out of the hills they're going to fight to protect their city and join the South Vietnamese forces no popular uprising what it does it leads to a tremendous loss of people on the North Vietnamese side Giap looks bad his position within the Politburo drops it's a failed strategy particularly in the Viet Cong extremely suffered a lot exactly good suddenly discontent emerges in the United States to new levels North Vietnamese slowly moved to exploit the growing discontent back in the United States but we were not a target meaning the public in the United States was not a target for this TED offensive point but they stumbled into it they were flexible enough and adjusted to be able to take advantage of it in the long run so it's not that they're smart they've drawn out strategy but they have the will to keep trying banging their head if they have to and those things flexibility and determination can sometimes hide error from a distance weakness those errors are compounded by errors being made in Washington absolutely the North Vietnamese cannot exploit those failures unless there are failures on the side of the Americans we have to keep that in mind certainly when Johnson goes to Vietnam in 1967 he comes back and presents himself to the American people having been to Vietnam and having confirmed himself that everything is under control and then the disaster of TED falls upon his head is a major factor in the entrance of other contenders into the 1968 Democratic primaries in the decision in April of 1968 for Johnson to pull out of the presidency those errors on our side play right into the hands certainly it all goes back to knowing your enemy knowing yourself yes, a very good point but this notion that we see the light at the end of the tunnel in 1967 they use that term it captures the public imagination we're winning we might not be there yet but there's progress we're going to win this thing the enemy's capabilities are falling off we never ask the enemy about that just like throughout World War II German capabilities are steadily falling off as they're retreated on the eastern front and later on the western front but five months before the war ends there they are launching a battle of the bulge a massive offensive could they afford to lose those troops? no but they were desperate in 1968 by our assessment perhaps they never should have done the TED offensive and by some the enemy's assessment after the battle they said they think they never should have done it but we never allowed for the capability that they could have done it the very fact that the 1968 election becomes a referendum on the war an indication to what extent it has reached into the streets of America although as you pointed out earlier George that was not the intention right and again it goes back to knowing yourself too what is the referendum on the war? okay there are many Americans that are very dissatisfied with the war to LBJ's mind and to others that dissatisfaction means they want us to get out popular polls show that even at the time of TED if not a majority very close to a majority of the American people were in favor of continuing the war if the United States pursued a strategy that would bring it to victory it wasn't a nationwide peace movement as some would have you believe today what's Nixon's campaign promise in 1968 which brings him to victory he has a plan that's right I have a plan here peace with honor and that sells a presidency I think the thing too to keep in mind when we talk about the public no matter how noble the war effort is I'm thinking of World War II a president has to worry about public opinion he has to worry to keep the people focused on the war effort we saw that in the Civil War the noble quest by Lincoln Union the war is dragging on and on an election is coming people like Grant and Sherman are worried that Lincoln might not get re-elected there's a quote-unquote peace candidate they're striving to get to Atlanta to give it as a gift to Lincoln to help him with his re-election FDR has to keep Americans focused on the primary enemy Germany not on Japan we've got to get soldiers on the ground in North Africa to start fighting there all those kinds of things are very important to keep in mind in any kind of war you have to rekindle the spirit to keep the loyalty of the people for the war effort and Vietnam is nowhere unusual in this regard the kind of war that it is it's difficult to bring concrete results quickly and the people start to fade away we need to now fade away into a new subject which has a lot of reading Afghanistan let me throw out a few things to consider and then I'll open up for discussion if you were around in 1979 and the Soviets were going into Afghanistan the feeling would be among major analysts that the Soviets were going to have an easy time winning in Afghanistan they were not going to have the problems we had in Vietnam they were going to show us how to do it if you looked at some of the arguments that were made on the Soviet side the advantages that they had one they had a totalitarian system they would not allow for public discontent to emerge they would not allow for free press to critique what is going on in Afghanistan if things went badly it was in their national interest it wasn't like thousands of miles away in some godforsaken land but it's bordering right on the Soviet Union because it's close they would have easy time with logistics just across the border they would be able to call upon their own Muslims within their own country who know Muslims in Afghanistan some of them speak the same language so there wouldn't be this great cultural gap between the Soviet effort and the people they were fighting the Afghans and when they actually got to the point of the arrow they could nuke them if they needed to they could probably throw chemicals at them they could do all sorts of atrocities because they wouldn't have the moral restraints that they would have under in Vietnam these were some of the points that were made and then when they looked at the Afghans the Afghans are no North Vietnamese they don't have this Hanoi a center of gravity a safe haven that could only be reached by bombing they're not unified like the North Vietnamese Communists who have a Politburo who have a party who control the military they're fragmented they're rag heads they're more primitive weapons versus what the sophisticated North Vietnamese have these were the kinds of jargon these kinds of stereotypes these kinds of prejudices almost racial statements that were being made during this time and the people were surprised that the war dragged on and on and on until according to the Afghan rebels they helped put one nail in the Soviet coffin because of the war effort they helped bring the Soviet empire down one of the things I think you could do is talk over some of these things that were strengths for the Soviets and another thing that you then might say as in anything nothing is invincible in every strength there's also a weakness for example a totalitarian system Marshall said democracy cannot stand a 7 years war I would argue a totalitarian system would have a hard time fighting a 7 years war because it costs money does the Soviet Union have wealth resources to fight that long and still worry about the main threat which is us in NATO that's where their primary focus is even though they're fighting down in Afghanistan sure it's in their interest but if it takes too long you start wondering how important is it if bread lines are getting longer our economy is hurting we need to get out because though it's next door we could go down from within if we don't solve the problem sure you have Muslims in your own society but what kind of Muslims do you have the ones you're going to listen to are communists they're apparatchniks they're people who've moved up in the system by the Soviet ideology they probably feel very distant from the Afghan rebel so you don't have a cultural insight into the Afghans as a communist member sitting in Moscow directing the war effort there that is not to your advantage sure it's next door and you've got a logistics space but it's one of your weakest areas for a logistics space you can drive across the border but there are only a few roads that can be used and the rebels can interdict them sure the rebels are using more primitive weapons they're fragmented in a way their strength is to fight with fragmentation I like to think of them as divided we stand united we fall their strength in resisting has been decentralized way of execution of fighting and they don't present a convenient center of gravity target there are too many centers of gravity in the different rebels and tribes deep down inside they want to fight and because you come in as an outsider almost from the word get go 99%, 98% maybe 95% of the population is against you because they don't like foreigners their history is one of resisting and everybody turned against you whereas in Vietnam we had a lot of people who did not want a communist victory it's just that we couldn't give them a victory fast enough so those are the things that are some of the things you might consider about sure it's important to remember to every strength there's a weakness and it can be exploited and this is what the afghan resistance does it eventually turns all those strengths into weaknesses on the soviet side I think there are some the way you started off there was a natural tendency by particularly americans particularly american military people and military commentators to look at the soviet invasion of afghanistan and look at our own recent experience in vietnam and you know the notion military people that were saying the soviets are going to show us how it should have been done and we made some of the they made some of the same mistakes that we made in not understanding what they were dealing with when they went into afghanistan you know they were going in for a quick incursion stabilize the government and they were going to be out of there and they found themselves in a much bigger problem than they had ever anticipated because they didn't give enough time to thinking about what it is they were getting themselves involved with goes back to that first strategic question that clauselwood tells you to ask yourself if you're going to go to war what kind of war are you going to get yourself into for the americans as this thing dragged on there become more and more points of comparison and it's useful to look at them and then i think do some contrasting as well just as the soviets one of the points of contrast is they're right there next to afghanistan they're contiguous with it and you can launch from soviet territory right into afghanistan for the rebels there's some benefits too they're contiguous with pakistan and ally of ours and there's weapons flowing freely and so there is a comparison with the vietnam war there you know the arms are coming in and the soviets find themselves in the same position we were in we could not at least openly bomb lay house in cambodia although we certainly did it covertly but the soviets cannot bomb pakistan because then they'll get us mad and that kind of goes to why they don't use the nukes either they couldn't hide bombing iran or pakistan but we could hide our involvement in cambodia to a large extent for a while well it goes to kind of the way they use their weapons you don't see nuclear weapon use in afghanistan some international team with a bunch of geiger counters is going to get in there and show that a nuke was popped but non-persistent chemical agents the yellow rains that the afghans talked about they can use those and have enough plausible deniability that the international community might look a little less scant but can't really prove that they've been using them and they try to leverage that technological advantage of theirs just like we were trying to leverage all the technological advantages we had thinking that that's going to somehow translate all these technologies will translate into some kind of strategic advantage but we never really address and the soviets never really address who it is they're fighting and they've got another they've got again you mentioned the contrast what is the center of gravity that they're going against at least we could focus on Hanoi that might have might have been the wrong focus for us but at least we could focus on Hanoi where are the soviets to focus on with all these factions that the Mujahideen consist of you have some comparison you must be very careful when you talk about Afghanistan as being a soviet vietnam I think the contrast are far more poignant than the comparisons in that case in the first place it's very difficult to have some outside support for a insurgent force in afghanistan yes the united states in a few other countries support the Mujahideen morally, diplomatically politically and minimally with some material help but it's never significant it's never enough to tip the balance one way or the other there are other problems in drawing this comparison one is the fact that the soviets are bolstering up a failed regime in Hanoi excuse me in Kabul well, there's possibility they also started failing in Hanoi they certainly were bolstering a failed regime in Kabul exactly and that was something that had wide-ranging diplomatic and political consequences the issue of legitimacy is much more prevalent for the soviets because the Kabul government is disliked by 95-98% of the population there's no way you're going to sell it to the Afghans and you're not going to do that the other thing is for anyone who has ever been to Afghanistan and I have been there it's extraordinarily difficult to communicate from one place to another very minimal infrastructure road network the ability to move is very restricted and so whenever the soviets try to reinforce or to develop areas in which to operate they're funneled down very very few roads which can be easily interdicted which is a very different problem than within the borders of South Vietnam now we have problems in Southeast Asia in interdicting material down the Ho Chi Minh trail but that's a political problem not necessarily an operational problem so I think you have to be careful in making that comparison another is as you pointed out the tradition of the Afghans has been very fiercely independent people which is something that was not true of the people in the former French colonies in the end of China and so that must be born in mind as well I would think compared to our American Revolution I think a lot of the people in North Vietnam and South Vietnam during the French struggle with us being there were kind of like the silent majority they would have to be left alone and everybody is trying to convince them to join the side not in Afghanistan another problem is to have a better understanding in retrospect and that is the Soviet Union was never as viable and strong as we always thought it would be already in the 1970s the Soviet Union is having very serious economic problems those economic problems will ultimately help bring down the Soviet Union in the 1980s and those problems are already in the 1970s we have our problems quickly in the United States in the 1960s in the early 1970s the Soviets have their problems but we have a viable means of transferring power that is through elections and constitutional systems the Soviets have yet to resolve that issue for themselves and the Brezhnev government for example Brezhnev gets older and older and less and less capable of governing what's going to happen when he leaves who's going to come to power what are their policies going to be if we have our problems in establishing long-term policies the Soviet system has multiple problems in establishing those long-term policies and so we need to take all that into consideration as well so I think that it's perhaps a misnomer with this comparison between America and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan that's a good point I think it's time to close up one of the things I think you might consider as you compare this to the 19th century where Europe was gobbling up the rest of the world is going back to the international setting we're in an era of post-world war too with the notion of self-determination people have a right to choose their own governments look at the United Nations controlled by us at the beginning and then 100 new nations almost virtually 100 new nations appear and they attack us now in the United Nations it's the wave of wars of national liberation people struggling for independence within the context of the Cold War where one side is fighting against the other side usually the superpowers come in one side takes one side the other takes the other side the Soviets are giving the support that the North Vietnamese need to fight us and it's not a popular war to be in around the world the same way in Afghanistan the Soviets find the way to the world is against them so it's not that we're, let's say dumber people in the 19th century who seemed a little more successful back then there was a monopoly on the gambling gun at the time there was less rivalry to undo the guy but kind of dividing the world in so influence and then grabbing colonies along the way that has changed the force of self-determination has emerged grabbing territory from someone else exchanging lands here and there which used to be the way things were done in Europe before no longer seems to operate so it's in a different climate international setting, strategic environment that the Vietnamese war and the Afghan war are fought has influenced tremendously how you actually fight at the point of the arrow you can't ignore the larger environment communications values, international diplomacy all those things they weigh in and how these wars are conducted thank you very much