perfidy

Mac Owens has an excellent and detailed look at the second half of the Vietnam war - the post Tet period. Owens discusses the value of the Combined Action Program or CAP that I mentioned in the comments to several recent posts here, and the progress that had been made in stabilizing South Vietnam in the three years between Tet and the Easter Offensive.

A sample:

Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress."

Most studies of the Vietnam War focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after Tet 1968 emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the U.S. from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's disgraceful memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."

... Far from constituting a mere holding action, the approach followed by the new team constituted a positive strategy for ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. Bunker, Abrams, and Colby "brought different values to their tasks, operated from a different understanding of the nature of the war, and applied different measures of merit and different tactics. They employed diminishing resources in manpower, materiel, money, and time as they raced to render the South Vietnamese capable of defending themselves before the last American forces were withdrawn. They went about that task with sincerity, intelligence, decency, and absolute professionalism, and in the process they came very close to achieving the goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace."

... The Marine Corps approach in Vietnam had three elements, according to Krulak: emphasis on pacification of the coastal areas in which 80 percent of the people lived; degradation of the ability of the North Vietnamese to fight by cutting off supplies before they left Northern ports of entry; and engagement of PAVN and VC main-force units on terms favorable to American forces. The Marines soon came into conflict with Westmoreland over how to fight the war. In his memoir, A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland writes:

During those early months [1965], I was concerned with the tactical methods that General Walt and the Marines employed. They had established beachheads at Chu Lai and Da Nang and were reluctant to go outside them, not through any lack of courage but through a different conception of how to fight an anti-insurgency war. They were assiduously combing the countryside within the beachhead, trying to establish firm control in hamlets and villages, and planning to expand the beachhead up and down the coast.

He believed the Marines "should have been trying to find the enemy's main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population." Westmoreland, according to Krulak, made the "third point the primary undertaking, even while deemphasizing the need for clearly favorable conditions before engaging the enemy."

Read the whole thing, it's a keeper.