 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well good afternoon and welcome to our second issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. I'd like to note that we're gathered here together in person and we also have a number of people dialed in on Zoom. Recent DOD guidance has limited gatherings in person to 50 people so I think we're right about that magic number here but we're very glad to have you. And I'm particularly pleased to see the officer candidates who've joined us this afternoon and they are going to get commissioned in about 10 days and start the great adventure and we wish you the best of luck for your wins and following seas. To open our session I'd like to turn the microphone over to our president, Rear Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, for her welcoming remarks. Hello this will be quick because I don't want to steal a minute from Dr. Payne who is going to give us a fantastic lecture today. I want to welcome everybody in the auditorium and also those who are joining us virtually. Thank you for participating in our issues in national security lecture series and now without any further ado we'll turn it back to Professor Jackson. Thank you ma'am. Over the 2021-2022 academic year we'll be offering 16 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world, our resident faculty. The series is intended to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. We also welcome participation by the entire Naval War College community including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and members of the military spouses of Newport. Looking ahead on the 26th of October Commander Andrea Cameron will speak about climate change so put that one in your catalog. After today's lecture on Vietnam we'll conduct a short family discussion group meeting featuring several partners from Naval Station Newport. We'll pause for a five minute break between the presentations to allow those of you who wish to depart to do so. Okay all with the main event during the presentation it follows our virtual participants should feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of zoom and we will welcome questions from our audience at the conclusion of the prepared remarks. Please use the microphones located at each seat so all of us including our virtual participants can hear the question. Our guest speaker has noted that the Vietnam War was an insurgency nested within a regional war nested within an overarching cold war. Operationally North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam in the regional war for the United States however Vietnam was a hot theater of the global cold war that we ultimately won. Sarah C. M. Payne is the William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy in the Strategy and Policy Department here at the Naval War College. Her degrees include a BA in Latin American Studies from Harvard, an MIA degree from Columbia University, certificates from both the East Asia and Russian Institutes, an MA degree in Russian from Middlebury College and a PhD in History from Columbia University. Nine years of research in Australia, China, Japan, Russia and Taiwan formed the basis for her many award-winning publications. Most recently she co-edited with Andrea Dew and Mark Genest quote from quills to tweets how America communicates about war and revolution published by Georgetown University Press looking forward to reading that. So I am pleased at this time to pass the microphone to University Professor Sally Payne. Well welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. I got to start with a disclaimer. It's mandatory. What I'm saying is my idea is actually a lot of my husband's ideas because we spent pre-COVID five different summers at Presidential Archives and he's the Vietnam expert in the family. But anyway the ideas don't represent the U.S. government, the Navy or any of that stuff. So if there are any issues with what I have to say please complain to me not to them. I am going to talk today telling you about the Vietnam War. In fact I'm going to do three of them. I'm going to do the first Indochina War, the second Indochina War and the third Indochina War. And the one that you all know about is this one. It's the middle part of the second one where the United States got involved but the Vietnamese and the first one got rid of the French and the second one they get rid of us and the third one they get rid of China. Here's Vietnam, the way we study the United States, operational level, tanks that go in the Presidential Palace, the day prior one of these dicey evacuations from places where I guess you're not supposed to land helicopters. You know all about this. This is Vietnam at the operational level. This is the level at which Americans focus on this thing. But my game plan is different. I'm going to talk about Vietnam at the strategic level. The level that counts. It's got to do with winning the Cold War. It's a theater in the Cold War. So I got five parts. You'll be happy to know I'm already done with the first one. Efficiency in action. So I'm going to focus on the three middle parts. Right? I'm going to talk about containing with a disposal force, having a really high maintenance theater ally. We seem to have specialized in those and had a bust in opposing alliance and then what does this add up to in the strategic level? So in an ongoing war like the Cold War, the question often arises, opening a new theater. Do you want to do this? And if you want to, okay, where and when? This is the world that the United States faced after World War II. It's a mess. Communists everywhere. Okay. And it gets even worse because the communists win in China and that is a tectonic change. What do I mean? It is a change of such magnitude. It's going to change the international landscape for everyone, for generations. Why? Because you've got a unified communist China. And think about who its neighbors are, right? Russia, Korea. You've got all of Indochina. You've got Burma, India, Afghanistan. Oh, and for Vietnam when we get involved there, this is going to mean there's an uninterrupted, unindicatable supply line going from Vietnam through China, through Russia, all the way to Eastern Europe. It's a mess for us. So what does the United States do under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower? They respond with institution building at home and abroad and also containment. And this is an impressive list of things I haven't got time to go into. What the United States, if you're looking at what we do militarily, most of our troops in the Cold War are not going to Vietnam. Actually, it's Germany, Japan, and Korea. And we're sending what are called disposal forces to those places and I'll get to that in a minute because here's the problem. If you look at the world in 1960, there's way too much communism in Eurasia and there's all that green stuff in Africa and other places. These are places that are about to become independent and they really don't like the West with their colonial agenda of the past. And when you fast forward to 1980, you can see a lot of them chose the other beverage, which is not capitalism, but it would be communism. So Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had a lot of crises to deal with. Eisenhower did pretty well. Kennedy had more trouble. And what they're doing is they're focusing on crises to have to do with Europe and also the Middle East because Asia, they want to keep Vietnam or it's into China in those days on the back burner. Why? Because it's a marginal part of the world in those days. Asia doesn't become a jargon out of trade until the 80s or 90s. Now Eisenhower does pretty well with his crises. He settles out the Korean War and it works well enough. But Kennedy leaves a mess for Johnson to deal with. There is just roiling instability in the Congo, in Laos and in Vietnam. And for Kennedy, he accepts a neutralist government in Laos that doesn't remain neutral for long. But when he does this, this increases the odds that the United States is going to get involved in Vietnam. Why? Because if you don't contain in Laos, well, where is it going to be? It might be Vietnam. And when Johnson looks at the world, he's going looking at Vietnam, the last place he wants to be, he goes, it's going to be another Korea. And the communists from Chinese communists, they're going to get in it. And it's 10,000 miles away and it's not worth fighting for. And it's the biggest damn mess I've ever seen. And yet he couldn't figure out any way not to get involved. And the whole process he thought would follow with a mean, destructive debate. And he was right. It was even worse than he imagined because it continues down to the present. So the United States decided in 1964 to intervene in Vietnam with a really big disposal force. What do I mean by disposal force? Well, look at U.S. troop deployments. Most of them remain in continental U.S. Why? It's about homeland defense and other things. A disposal force is not disposable. It's the troops that you have at your disposal that if you lose them, if it really goes bad, you're not going to jeopardize homeland defense. So the United States puts a big disposal force in Vietnam, puts them in other places as well. For those of you who think that the South Vietnamese didn't fight much in this war, I just want to make it clear, yes they did. At the beginning, they're dying at rates of 8 to 1 compared to us. In the Vietnamese Vietnamization period when we're trying to turn things over to them, they start dying at a rate of 6 to 1. And by the time we were out in 73, it's by a rate of 118 to 1. And Americans don't cover this story when they discuss the war. So the United States decides on where and when. It's Vietnam in 64. But then when we do go in there, we find our theater ally to be the biggest piece of work ever. And we have real problems dealing with them. And just like ancient Corinth that got the ancient city states of Athens and Sparta in a much larger, longer, and more costly war than they ever imagined possible, that is precisely what the two Vietnam's did to their respective allies. All right, Sunza, here's this wonderful old chestnut. They were always peddling in the strategy and policy department about know yourself, know your enemy. Well, actually, the United States knew quite a lot about the Soviet Union, much less about China because we purged all of our China experts with Joe McCarthy. And we were truly ignorant about either Vietnam, North or South. And what we were doing is what I call playing a game of half-core tennis where we're focusing all on Team America at the operational level. Are we winning or losing at the operational level? Balls appear magically out of nowhere. Who knows where all the extra rackets are coming from? No one would ever cover something like football in this way where people have deep knowledge of opposing teams. Why on earth it's ever going to work in the most consequential interaction that human beings ever have beyond me, but our country plays this game the world over. For example, the United States thought that this man, Ho Chi Minh, was in charge until 1969. Well, not really. He was ousted by Le Duan in 1964. And it is because Le Duan followed a Southern strategy. He wanted to win the war in the South. That's why Johnson escalates because of him, not him. Ho Chi Minh wanted a Northern strategy. He wanted to build up the economy in the North and precisely to avoid the kind of intervention that this guy got them all involved in. The United States only figured out that Ho Chi Minh had actually been ousted in 1964. It took us about 25 years to figure it out when we finally got around to reading a few Vietnamese and Chinese language sources. So to avoid this problem in your own lives, do the 30-second rule. When you're picking up a book that's about a country you don't know about, do 30 seconds to just flip through the bibliography to see if there are any sources in the language of that country. If not, find something else in addition. All right. The United States had real troubles with this man, Diem. And Diem, the head of South Vietnam, had real troubles with us. He felt that he was being led around like a puppet on the string and he did not like it. Nevertheless, despite not liking each other, the United States spends a fortune in Vietnam. We got all kinds of people killed there. Huge forces sent. Many more than the Chinese or the Russians. All right. But the Communist side also has alliance problems. And here you have the head, he's a North Vietnamese diplomat talking about we had problems with our allies. We can't afford to be owned by either one. So what are we going to do? We're a little country. And here's what was going on. Eventually, both China and Russia have a massive competition in the third world. And Vietnam becomes the key theater in the third world for them. And they're peddling different product lines in the communist world of things. And this is great for the Vietnamese because suddenly other people are interested in them. Now, initially, it's only China that gets involved in Vietnam. Why? Because it's on their border. And so immediately after the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 49, they are immediately sending all kinds of military advisers, all sorts of heavy equipment and the works. And this is why the French are surrounded, outgunned and defeated at Diem Ben Phu in 1954. And this leads to the Geneva conference where the French are out, but Vietnam's divided and the North are totally upset because they felt they should have gotten the entire country. But they didn't. All right. So eventually, you get the Russians in there as well. And this is highly advantageous to Vietnam because when you have big two powers who disagree with each other, going after trying to court the little one, the little one can extract maximum benefits from both, which is precisely what the Vietnamese do to the communists. But the key is the big two have to disagree. If the big two agree like at Geneva that, excuse me, Vietnam is going to be divided, then the little ones have no wiggle room. Okay. The Vietnamese were all very well aware of this. And so they're going to be playing this game of trying to play off the Chinese and the Russians to maximize aid. And indeed, the Chinese provide an incredible amount of help building roads. This is how you get the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which is important because also it goes all the way to Eastern Europe, right, if you get into the Chinese railway system. And all this Chinese aid makes possible the Tet Offensive. If you look when Chinese aid peaks, it's during the Tet Offensive in 68. And it's also during 73 during the Paris peace negotiations. And it goes way down in after 1960, 69 because of the Sino-Soviet border war. And if you look at the Russians who get in, evolved a little later, by Tet, they're providing more aid than the Chinese are. And by the way, the Russians are providing this really high end aid that the Chinese can't, particularly aircraft and surface-to-air missile SAMs that I'm going to get to later. So a key part of the Chinese aid is providing rail transport for the Russian aid because the Russians don't want to send it by sea because we can sink it surreptitiously. And they can't afford this stuff. So if you look at Soviet military aid, again, it's going to go down after the 69 Sino-Soviet border war when they almost nuke each other. All right. So in addition to providing military aid, logistical, economic aid, they're also having China as your big buddy provides a degree of sanctuary because the United States doesn't want to repeat of the Korean war with Chinese flying across the border. So these are all really important things. So from the point of view of the great powers, Vietnam is an incredibly expensive little dish to have on the side, right? If you're going to be befriended Vietnam, if you're a communist or capitalist, it's a very expensive event. And this is typical that the smaller power tends to know much more about the big power than the big power has ever bothered to invest in them, right? Remember, Americans don't even know who's in charge in the North Vietnam. And the smaller powers leverage this knowledge to their advantage. Very expensive proposition. So the United States was frustrated with our theater ally. So what do we do? We come up with some operational solutions that have some really nasty strategic side effects. One of them is when Kennedy is dealing with Diem, Diem initially is doing quite well in his counterinsurgency, but then he's not doing well on it. And we decide that it's his fault, that he's the problem. And when the United States understands that the South Vietnamese military, some elements might be running a coup, we just step back from it. And Diem is assassinated, followed, I think in November 2nd, 1963, followed 20 days later by Kennedy himself, completely different reasons. But it was a pivotal event. Why? Because Diem had actually been capable of holding the country together. This is what happens after he goes. In 1964, there are seven coups. These are the people we need to hold South Vietnam together. They're all killing each other off until the United States bankrolls the last one. We bankroll General Two of the Army and his appropriately named but arch rival General Key of the Air Force. And they form a marriage of convenience that becomes inconvenient and Key gets the boot and Two stays there until 75. While this is all going on, joint operations are out. Why? Because the Navy and the Marines, the Vietnamese ones, had supported Diem. Well, if the services in Vietnam were running coups against each other, no wonder that no one can coordinate. Total mess. So, while all this is going on, here's our ambassador of the time, former General Taylor, and he talks to his Vietnamese hosts, our allies. He said while this is going on, do you all understand my English? We Americans are tired of coups. Maybe you guys don't get it. Like, what's your problem? So, here we are, diplomacy in action, telling our allies that we think they're just so incompetent. And, well, I don't know what that's supposed to do for you. The North Vietnamese, excuse me, are overjoyed. They're looking at these cues and going, what is not to like? And, in fact, they time, this is when they time a big offensive in South Vietnam. And this is when Johnson comes up with the operational solution, which is called massive escalation. And, oh, well, the PRC notices that, and they got a solution too. It's called ramp up the aid. So, we have everybody upping the ante all around the table, and it's expensive indeed. So, we're getting frustrated, Americans, about what to do about all of this. And so, the United States typically tries to leverage its technological superiority. And so, we clear a lot of areas when we win engagements, but then the North comes right on back. And the more frustrated we get, the more bombs we dump on people. And this is problematic because given the bombing restrictions on the North, the United States is bomb, trying to bomb North Vietnamese forces in Viet Cong, who are in South Vietnam. So, actually, the bombs are falling on our buddy who notices all of this. If you do a comparison with the Korean War that worked out a little better for us, most of our bombs, and it was horrific in Korea, fell on North Korea. And an awful lot of it fell on Pyongyang where Kim Il-sung was hanging out, and he was desperate to get out of this war. Well, Le Duan is hanging out in Hanoi where no one's touching him. This is a description of what it's like to be near where B-52s are bombing. This is by a senior member of the National Liberation Front. It's terrifying. You're doing this to peoples whose hearts and minds are up for grabs. It doesn't make the South Vietnamese government look good with its big buddy doing this. And the story gets better. Under President Kennedy, it's hard to see in jungles. Put Agent Orange on, you can see a little better. And we dump all sorts of Agent Orange. And it's, again, mostly on South Vietnam. It affects 4 million people, creates tens of thousands of birth defects. Imagine if the child missing limbs is your child. And then if you look where what's being Agent Orange, you'll notice it's hitting a lot of coastal population areas. And it's hitting areas where the Ken, the preponderant ethnic group of Vietnam live. These are the people who you want to survive at the end of the day in South Vietnam. And in addition, it's going into upland river systems that are then supposed to provide water to lowland fields. Well, imagine, this is what an Agent Orange landscape actually looks like. Imagine if this, these are your family fields. And you're looking at this and going, why would this ever glue loyalties to Saigon? Why would it make anyone hate Hanoi? Might it not produce the opposite effect if this is what you're doing to people? And in fact, people flood into the cities in unprecedented rates, creating all sorts of social problems. So the North uses this to drive a wedge between the South Vietnamese government and the South Vietnamese people because they can use all of this to validate their propaganda. And it's interesting, Diem had been dead against sending U.S. troops to Vietnam. He thought it was a terrible idea. He may well have been right. And then the North is keeping it secret all the horrendous costs of this bombing because they are losing a lot of people. So back to Sun Tzu, Sun Tzu, the strategist we like to emphasize at the War College Release Strategy Policy Department. And what you find is the North Vietnamese are really attuned to the ideological terrain of their big power allies and the psychological terrain of their big enemy. And they first attack their enemy's strategy. So when Diem is pretty good at settling out the insurgency in rural areas, they do a targeted assassination program that removes all officials from rural areas. And when the United States tries to clear places, they're back and at it. And then also they're attacking the American-South Vietnamese alliance. They want to drive a big wedge in there. And so there are all these negotiations between the North and the United States, over 200 of them, and they go nowhere. Why? Because as one witness has said, the North Vietnamese are busy fighting while stalling. What they want to do is use these negotiations to discredit the United States. And like other recent negotiations, the South Vietnamese are not present, whereas the North Vietnamese are. So the South Vietnamese look like puppets because they aren't even in on it. And the North Vietnamese, it looks like they're getting legitimacy as a recognized government. And this, the North, is going to weaponize this propaganda. They're going to highlight South Vietnamese brutality and the endless costs of U.S. casualties. And if you look at how they time their offensives, it's with U.S. presidential elections. So that American voters just look at this and it's a quagmire. It just never goes away. More and more people die, costs are up. I mean, who wants to be in Vietnam? It's a producer of pineapples. And they're very successful at drawing this wedge in between governments and peoples. So it has very corrosive effects on the alliance, our alliance with the South Vietnamese, but two can play at this game. The United States also decided that it was going to wreck the Sino-Soviet alliance, the one that truly count. And we're looking for solvents. And from presidents, Truman onward, the solvent we're going to use has got to do with trade and restricting it. If you think about the West and the industrialized world, it's like this wealth-producing juggernaut. And we're going to give the Communists a time out from the juggernaut. If you can't behave, you can't play with us. And this is where blockade sanctions and embargoes come in. So if you take a non-performing communist economic setup, and then you put a lot of sanctions and embargoes on these people, it's going to depress trade further, and eventually it's going to shatter the thing. Eisenhower predicted it would take 40 years. He was right. So the plan was to make China totally dependent on Russian trade, because it'll put a lot of pressure on things. This is what the National Security Council comes up with, is you want to make China get the good stuff through Russia, because Russia can't afford enough of it. And part of this strategy starts with a blockade. As the Nationalists lose the Chinese Civil War and they decamp to Taiwan, they blockade the China that they left behind, all the way from Shanghai all the way to Hong Kong. The Communists take the islands outside of Shanghai pretty rapidly. That leads it down to the Duchen Islands. But this is really important. Why? Because this forces Chinese trade inland. They're going to do, instead of sending things along the coast where you might lose things, you're going to send it inland through the railway system. And for your imports, you're going to get them via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Well, this is a fabulously expensive, inefficient bottleneck producing, import reducing, and alliance annoying way to trade. And that's definitely the plan. And so you got Eisenhower, the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who's explaining things. He said, look, Soviet industrial base is a fraction of ours. They've got all these needy allies. Let's just turn all these leeches on the Soviet economy and eventually they're going to crack. And so the idea is the United States is going to embargo China totally. Our allies are going to sanction various things. And then we're going to not allow US merchant marine in there. And then we get clever. We say, if anyone else's merchant marine goes there, we will penalize them in other ways. And here's the big coordinating mechanism. It's the coordinating committee for multinational, multilateral export controls, or COCOM. And it's set up right during the Chinese Civil War. And who is it? It's all the most industrialized countries. The countries that produce the high-end exports that places like China and Russia need. And so they have a big list of things that they're not going to sell the Russians and the Chinese. And then in the Korean War, the list gets 200 additional items, especially with China's name on it. After the Korean War is over, some of the restrictions are lifted, but not for China. China always has the most restrictive list, which is called the China differential. Why? This is going to force China to get the good stuff from Russia. And Russia doesn't have enough good stuff, so it's going to be polarizing to do that. So if you look at what happens to China's trade, in 1950, 70% of it had been outside the communist bloc. Well, it reverses as a result of this. And the China differential is unpopular with their allies. So we've delayed, but eventually we have to give it up in 1957. But then Mao solves it for us with a great leap forward, which is wrecking his economy in a completely different direction. So Mao really wants to get rid of these trade, this whole trade restrictions and blockades. And this is why there are two Taiwan Strait crises. In the first one, Mao takes back the Duchenne Islands. And this is a big deal. Look what the United States sent to get the Taiwanese out of there. Six aircraft carriers. I believe that's a lot in your line of work. And the blockade is reduced to places, points further south. And then Mao launches a second Taiwan Strait crisis. And this gets rid of the blockade entirely. And Mao is so mad at the Russians, Khrushchev, who didn't help him in any of these things. It's corrosive to the Sino-Soviet alliance. And in fact, Russia has a lot of gripes about these crises because Russia and China have a French treaty that has certain clauses that force Russia to intervene. And Russia is thinking, you're going to get us into a nuclear mess. You are insane with all of this. Moreover, Russia is really mad at the Chinese. Why? They look at the United States with all of its allies. And we have basing rights with all allies and friends and partners all over. We got basing rights everywhere. Well, China won't let Russia have any basing rights. And Russia is going, what's all that about? And China has got gripes of its own. After the two Taiwan Strait crises, Russia breaks its promise to provide the blueprints for an atomic bomb. And then Russia pulls all of its advisors in 1960. These are on major military projects that are now going to go nowhere or have difficulty going anywhere. And Russia starts ramping up the divisions on their border. And by the time you get to 69, you've got 27 divisions. So there's a lot of gripes going on. And then understand in the background of all this is a cultural revolution. As a result of the great leap forward, actually the great leap backward, it produces the great famine, kills 40 million people and change. A lot of people to kill of your own. This is when Mao needs the young and naive to use them, the Red Guards, to take out the old who might have unseated him. These folks are really anti-Russian. And so all this Russian aid is supposed to be getting to Vietnam. Well, these kids and others are taking it off the trains, delaying it, stealing some of it, pilfering it, reverse engineering it. Oh, and even better, they relabel it saying it's coming from China, a nice fraternal country. And then they're abusing any available Russians. And this just is a total mess. What's coming by train really key are these things, surface to air missiles. Russia doesn't dare to send them by sea. It's too expensive if they get sunk. And so US pilots, these things got their attention. Well, unbeknownst to them, this is the real story. US pilots got so good it would take 50 of these things to finally hit a plane. And therefore, pilots are thinking, well, I'm going in there because I want to get the assigned target du jour. Actually, the strategic event is the more of these things you can suck up, the more dangerous it's going to be for the Sino-Soviet alliance. And oh, this explains why you do the after-actor bombing assessment surveys. We send the plane right back into where they just bombed, and it's soaking up a lot more SAMs. And the story is you can't tell people this because the strategy would immediately become, it would be nullified. But that is the SAMs were a big piece of what's going on. So before you decide that, or people have said that Johnson's crazy with his air strategy, understand that the restrictions, the bombing restrictions that were in before 1969, the Chinese absolutely would have intervened if we played a more aggressive game. Think about it, China is like us in this sense. You don't want to do any fighting on home territory. You want to away games. And China has a history of fighting on its borders, and it'll fight for them. But after 1969, that wasn't going to be the case. And before you dismiss Johnson as just an incompetent president, this is his legislative achievement. And notice the numbers aren't consecutive because I had to delete a lot of it to fit on this slide. So before you decide this guy is stupid, you need to ask the question when you're evaluating the operational strategy that seems awfully dangerous for pilots and things and bombing restrictions to go, well, why are we in Vietnam? What is the policy objective? And often it can't be made public. Why? Because it'll tell the enemy. And we're doing assisted suicide. We're helping the communists kill themselves. You don't want to alert the patient because they'll take countermeasures. Johnson is using Vietnam to wreck the Sino-Soviet alliance. And it had been going on for a number of years, from Truman all the way through 1969. And this is when it bears fruit because all of a sudden you have Russia, they're going around. You reshuffle the primary enemies, and I'll show you how this works. You have Russia and China fighting over this place. And Russia is going around because it's the middle of the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese have gone crazy. And it's asking us and its Eastern European allies if they obliterate China's nuclear facilities. Well, at this point, the Russians and the post-Chinese both get it. They're each other's primary enemies. The United States used to be the primary enemy of both. But now they are. And this opens all kinds of options for us. Because if they're fighting there, potentially, that means there is no way on this planet that China is going to send a lot of troops into Vietnam. And if that's the case, well, then we can do different things with our bombing missions. Because here you have Johnson's opening gambit when he gets involved in a big way, which the Whits have called Rolling Blunder with all these areas that you can't bomb. Well, that's off the table now. We bomb anywhere and everywhere. The problem is that this option comes too late. By the time 69 is rolled around, the United States, China's pulled people out. We're pulling people out. And we're doing it because there's another strategic game to play. Because if the Russians and the Chinese are arguing, we got this wonderful wedge where they're courting us. And the Russians don't get it. They are always our primary enemy. China never was. And China now goes, aha, we share the primary enemy. And the United States wants to use China first to get out of Vietnam. And then after that's over to gang up with the Chinese and do something awful to the Russians. And oh, by the way, Chinese belligerency is going to cost Russian economy busting militarization of its long border. It costs a fortune. So as a result of all this, in 71, it's Taiwan on the U.N. No, excuse me, off the U.N. And the PRC on. And there's no reason not to do this because China and we are in on things together. And the Vietnamese of both varieties realize they're absolutely expendable in these plans. In fact, you have the North Vietnamese who are absolutely appalled when they see the Chinese inviting Nixon on in for a nice little happy hour. And then the Russians are going to do likewise. And the North Vietnamese consider this the second betrayal. The first one was at Geneva in 54 when they're stuck with a divided country. And now they think the Chinese are trying to do it to them again. So what do the North Vietnamese do? They want to break the peace. And how are they going to do this? They think this is when they're going to time the Easter offensive. It falls right after the Nixon's trip to China, but before the Moscow summit, an attempt to just derail the Moscow summit. Well, guess what? No bombing restrictions. Conventional forces. What's not to like about this from the U.S. point of view? We just wipe out the Easter offensive from high and above. Le Duan is furious. He understands he's lost sanctuary. And he blames the Chinese and says, you're a bunch of traitors because he gets it that he's going to pay a huge price. And indeed, when the United States wants to get him back to the negotiating table and to settle the war on our terms, that's when we do linebacker number two. And here's Le Duan saying, it's worse by far than anything Johnson ever did to us. It's just wrecked our economic base. Yeah. But it doesn't change the outcome of the Paris peace accords. The North gets everything it wants, but at a really high cost. The other guy to try to, to the other little ally who's trying to overturn the peace negotiations is this guy, too. And he'd already done it once, in fact, when it was prior to Nixon's first election. Candidate Nixon told this guy, don't accept President Johnson's peace offer. So he didn't. What he winds up getting from Nixon is remarkably the same. And he's in much worse shape. He would have been better off accepting whatever Johnson had to do. And anyway, so it tells you little allies can cause really enormous hassles. As the Second Inno-China War is winding down, and the balance of power is now going to be shifting in Indochina, this is when the Chinese come down under the command of Deng Xiaoping, and they take the Paracel Islands in 1974 from the beleaguered South Vietnamese government, and we do nothing. And it's going to leave an enduring territorial problem for the future, our parting shot. Two weeks before Saigon falls, Cambodia falls. And these are Khmer Rouge fighters. They hate the Vietnamese. Chinese like them. And things, the fight for who's going to dominate Indochina is still out there. And the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot killed about 25% of the population. China supports all this, we support China. Meanwhile, Vietnam done like this one little bit, and then it forms an alliance with Laos, which China doesn't like one little bit. And the Cambodians and the Vietnamese hate each other because they've been fighting over borders forever. And China is really resentful about Vietnam potentially dominating Indochina. And this is where you get more exciting things. This is another Deng Xiaoping operation, which is the third Indochina war, the first part of it, when China decides they've had enough of Vietnamese all over the map, hundreds of thousands of them in the wrong places, and China invades right on in. And from a China's point of view, Russia's not going to get in there to help the Vietnamese. Why? Because the Chinese have naval assets in the parasails, so nothing's getting into Haifeng that the Chinese don't want in Haifeng. And here's Deng Xiaoping's thinking about all of this. He's looking about it at this war and thinking, I can't lose, either way. Why? Because if he wins operationally, he's going to roll back Vietnam. He doesn't actually roll back Vietnam. They up the anti in Cambodia, so that little event doesn't happen for him. But he also thinks if the People's Liberation Army does a really bad job, which they do, they take enormous casualties and are just a logistical military mess, if that happens, it's going to give Deng Xiaoping enormous leverage on reining in the People's Liberation Army. In fact, he said in 75 that it was a swollen, slack, arrogant, total mess. So he proves that the Vietnamese Russian alliance is a dead letter because the Russians can't help these people at all. And then what he does is this is when all the economic reforms are taking place, where China is rebuilding its civilian economy. And that goes on for a number of years until Tiananmen hits. And in Tiananmen in 89, the Communist Party had to call in the People's Liberation Army to retain power, and they just massacred the demonstrators. And at this point, Deng Xiaoping realizes there needs to be a new deal out there. And here's how the deal works. And it's a deal made among the military, provincial leaders, central government, party elders. The idea is the People's Liberation Army is absolutely necessary for stability for the Communist Party to maintain power. But the People's Liberation Army has got to chill on ideological issues because they've got to privatize and do a lot of economic reforms. But if this happens, there's going to be a lot of money. Money, a lot of it's going to go to the People's Liberation Army and a lot of it's going to go to the provincial governors and others who are supporting all of this. And so this is what the plan is going to be. So if you think about this, the Sino-Vietnamese war and Tiananmen are very consequential. This is when China decides it's going to really upgrade its military in a big way, and we're still dealing with this mess today. But if you go back simultaneously on what's going on at Tiananmen, this is when the Soviet empire falls apart, and in 1991 the Soviet Union is no more. And so if you look at Vietnam, it was always a theater in a greater Cold War, which the United States first used in an attempt to contain China, and then it moved on to breaking the Sino-Soviet alliance, and then it moved on to trying to work with China to take out Russia, which ultimately happened. Many factors in that, one of them is the militarization of the very long Sino-Soviet border. Imagine if we had to put those kind of nuclearized forces along our Canadian or Mexican border, it would be economy-busting. So you can ask who won or lost the Vietnam War, who lost it? Well, certainly South Vietnam lost it. You can also argue that the Soviet Union lost it. It was never as powerful after the divorce with China. It didn't help it at all. And China, you could argue, lost it in the sense that it winds up with this much unified Vietnam and also Vietnam with its tentacles deep into all kinds of neighbors, which is precisely the kind of counterbalancing power China doesn't like. You can look at, go, well, all right, then who won the Vietnam War? Well, clearly the North Vietnamese won that thing. But what about the United States? And for us, Vietnam was a theater in this overarching Cold War. Was it an ideal theater? No, it certainly wasn't. Did it solve everything the Cold War? Not remotely, but it contributed to some of it. And I've explained how, and the United States and its allies did win the war that counted, which is the Cold War. So that concludes what I got prepared for you today. And I would be happy to answer any questions that you all might have. Thank you. Any questions in the auditor? Oh, the Dean? Uh-oh. Am I still employed? So this is Phil Han, Dean of Academics. Sally, wonderful presentation. You talk about the United States and its allies and the South Vietnamese. I didn't hear you talk about the Viet Cong much. And I was wondering, you said the North Vietnamese win the war, but how do the Viet Cong turn? How does it work for the Viet Cong? And I bring this back because you talk about how the U.S., it's at the operational level, takes measures that do not help the counterinsurgency going on in South Vietnam. But the counterinsurgency is over by 68 because of TET. So how does that, first, how does the U.S. efforts affect the insurgency, which is over after the TET offensive? And how does the Viet Cong come out of this war? My understanding about Viet Cong is they're also out after TET. And they're, in a way, a disposal force for the North. And in fact, it might even be a disposable force because ultimately the North wants to dominate the South. And the Viet Cong are Southern Vietnamese and there are apparently ethnic differences in things and cultural differences about which I am no expert. But they're wiped out in TET. That is my understanding. And as for the counterinsurgency, we do really quite well on islands and places the bigger the maritime part of the border, the better because insurgents can't resupply. So when you look at Vietnam with its endless border through all this real estate that is very difficult to patrol, if people want to run an insurgency against you, they're going to and it's going to be bad. And this is an important thing to know. You can look at a map before intervening in a place and go, ooh, how many interesting people are there nearby who might be wanting to send people to cause problems? And so this is why we're a maritime power, islands, peninsulas like Korea was, even that was expensive. Those are the better places for us. Any other questions? Ma'am. Dr. Payne, thank you so much. Because I know you have quite extensive knowledge about China today, I was wondering if you might tell us how they may be reflecting back on this time frame and how that narrative may be changing in the current world order? I don't know the narrative changing. I think there's this view of, oh, Americans costs get high and then we just bail. Instead of understanding, there are tectonic changes in the background. We reassess. This is the huge advantage of democracies. Dictatorships tend to double down and just wreck themselves. So this is our big advantage. So in our own period, there's this huge tectonic change. What is it? Our country is now exporting energy. We hadn't done it for a number of years. And we've become the swing producer and petroleum products. It doesn't mean petroleum is not important. Of course it is. But it means the Middle East is far less important than it was and years ago. And this accounts for a reassessment of where the existential threats really are and this reassessment of moving assets to Asia. So on the Chinese, I don't know how this would affect them other than thinking that we're incompetent. And hubris is something that gets people of all persuasions into trouble. But the Chinese Communist Party is in real trouble right now. But that doesn't make them safe to deal with. I don't think I've done a good job answering your question. I don't know the specifics on this war. But China's in trouble and but that doesn't make them less dangerous. I urge you all not to choose a kinetic solution for them to use all instruments of national power. My guess on them is if they start losing a conventional war, they'll start throwing nukes around and the world that we know will change. You think we argue about wearing masks? Wait till someone throws nukes. We'll really argue then. Any other questions? Good afternoon, Professor Payne, Commander Ross here. There was one question on Zoom in the chat. And the question was, why attack cities only as a last resort? Oh, that has to do with Sunja. The reason why is they're valuable. And therefore, if you're planning to take them, you don't want to take damaged goods. It's also highly alienating. Usually, if you bomb concentrated populations, particularly if there are people you're going to have to work with later, they truly hate you. So that's the reason for that. Sally, there's a belief that the POW situation drove the United States to make arrangements and ultimately leave Vietnam. Did that really have any impact or was that such a minor piece of this whole puzzle? I don't know the answer to the POW is, but having spent time in the archives, it's these strategic things of why we're in there. And the Cold War was serious business, right? It's serious business now with China. There was a book that was written by a couple of senior People's Liberation Army colonels back in 2000, 2000, talking about unconventional warfare against the United States, like environmental warfare. Yeah, we've done that. We're damning the Mekong and other places. Resource warfare. Yeah, we've done that with heavy, with rare earths. Drug warfare was another one. Yeah, we sent fentanyl into the United States. You're looking at all the cyber things. In fact, typically maritime power has a moat while our moats being breached by cyber and other things that changes our world. And we need to learn how to deal with it. Cyber would be a big one as other people weaponize propaganda and misinformation and do this to us. So I don't know about the POWs, but I tried to change the subject. Any way. Yeah, whatever. Any other questions? Sure. Really, I'm blind to begin with and reflection my glasses. Sir. Oh, you're right. These things take a long time. It was Eisenhower. It's incredible. You can read his planning documents. He was a big planner of exactly what they planned to do. And we did it. It was how we're going to weaponize trade. We're going to do very selective exchanges so that we brought communists to us so they could see what miserable lives they lived compared to them, et cetera, et cetera. It's a very long range strategy where each president achieves a little bit and then opens possibilities for the next one. So the archives are pretty clear on this one. There are a lot of smart people working in Washington, but you can't make other people. Anyone is a parent. You cannot even make small people make decisions that you want them to. The notion that you're going to make countries of tens of millions, let alone, well, now China, a billion, make decisions is just not going to happen. But you want to set conditions to protect yourself and then that will encourage them to reassess. And it takes a long, long time. Yeah. Commander Ross here again. We have another question in Zoom chat. So in hindsight, was the war in Vietnam worth it? Oh. Oh, is it worth it? I think we were profligate with the lives of our young that we could have done exactly the same thing, been in there, and done it without losing nearly as many of our kids and not killing nearly as many South Vietnamese as we did. And how do you avoid that? Well, A, all the services need to talk to each other often, and then there's Goldwater Nichols that has made that happen. But another piece of it is you've got to talk to your civilian counterparts. And I was talking to someone who does wargaming here today who just showed up in my office, the doors open, people magically appear. And thinking about, I don't know the first thing about wargames, feel free to deal with me afterwards. But you really need to be able to be thinking about all the elements of national power that you're going to exert military pressure. But if you're only looking at the one instrument of national power, there may be other things that will achieve what you want to do. I think the beauty of the maritime system that we have is with allies. And we can't push them around. Some of our best allies are truly in our face. And that together, we have created a system. It's a wealth producing system where we coordinate with each other often with non military instruments to deal with things. For instance, Putin is in Ukraine and he got it right that no one was going to intervene militarily because he had the better position. Well, okay, we're sanctioning the Bejesus out of the man. Have fun with that. And we can just wait him out. He'll die eventually. There'll be another one. And this is the beauty of our juggernaut system, this maritime, think about it. We operate on exterior lines. We can have the most massive alliance system or buddy system where we, those who cooperate can join on in and make wealth together. And those who are uncooperative, they get a global time out. And then there are the compound. You think about interest rates, say compound, you make money. Well, if you shave one or two percentage points of growth off a country in 20 years, it's a really major effect. Just compare North and South Korea today. North was always the richest part. And it was the richest part even after the Korean War. Well, get sanctioned long enough and make stupid choices long enough. This is what it looks like. So thank you very much. And one thing you can count on when Dr. Payne speaks is you're going to learn stuff you never knew. If you thought you knew about the Vietnam War, guess what? You didn't know that much. So thank you again, Sally. Okay. What we'll do now is take a five minute break. And those of you who would like to stay for the family discussion group, we're going to hear from our fleet and family support group. And we're going to hear from our sexual assault prevention group. So if you want to stay for those discussions, please do. If not, take this break to depart. And we hope to see you in a couple of weeks when we talk about climate change. So thank you very much.