The Army and Vietnam

by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.

Book Overview

Many senior army officials still claim that if they had been given enough soldiers and weapons, the United States could have won the war in Vietnam. In this probing analysis of U.S. military policy in Vietnam, career army officer and strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., argues that precisely because of this mindset the war was lost before it was fought.

The army assumed that it could transplant to Indochina the operational methods that...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801836573
• ISBN13: 9780801836572
• Release Date: March 1988
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A review from the perspective of Civil Affairs

Review of The Army and Vietnam, by Andrew Krepinevich Date: 09 June 2009 ________________________________________________________________ Introduction Andrew Krepinevich (USA LTC Ret.) heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA). As a US Army Major working at OSD he authored a book called The Army in Vietnam, which critically assessed the approach used by DA to the ongoing insurgency in South Vietnam. The book is well researched and provides an exhaustive set of references. Book Summary Organized chronologically, Krepinevich takes the reader from the advisory years of 1954-65 through withdrawal in the mid-70s. Although easily dismissible as yet another failure narrative on an unpopular war, it provides a clear-eyed assessment of the systemic disconnects between DA, DoD and NCA and the mid-level officers, NCOs and civilians on the ground in Vietnam. Krepinevich does not gripe but cites examples of grounded solutions which, had they been adopted into practice, could have influenced both the tactical and strategic outcomes of the war. He ends the book with a ringing indictment of the strategy of attrition and explores the two competing strategies offered by DA/DoD at the time, the El Paso plan and the Enclave or oil-spot approach. El Paso Discussed in detail in COL Harry Summers book On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context, the plan called for ...a joint U.S.-ARVN-ROK push across the Laotian panhandle form the DMZ to Savannakhet on the Thai-Laotian border. Once in place, the plan held, such a force could have blocked North Vietnamese access to South Vietnam...allowing the RVNAF to destroy insurgents in the South, a job in which, Summers contends, the Army should not have become involved. Indeed, Summers states that the Army's fatal mistake was becoming overly involved in combating the insurgents, thereby missing the real threat-the North Vietnamese (Krepinevich 262). Enclave Proposed by Ambassador Taylor in 1965, Enclave accepted the idea of the stalemate where U.S. forces could neither win the war for the RVNAF nor be driven out of Vietnam through military action (Krepinevich 264-265). Further, ...the strategy called for the military to recognize the war had been won by the South Vietnamese and that the most effective role for American troops would be to aid the RVNAF by controlling the densely populated coasts areas (Ibid). CORDS Headed by Robert Komer (President Johnson's special assistant for pacification), Civil Operations and Revolutionary Support (CORDS) capitalized on and enjoyed the early and continued support of the CIA, a key player in Vietnam from the beginning. The CIA's assessment that the majority of supplies for the enemy originated inside Vietnam was controversial , and was the study which gave life to CORDS. At its height, over 6,000 officers and men of MACV worked with civilians on the project, with the intent of pacifying the Vietnamese countryside by ...pulling together...Stat

Fighting the Bad Fight

Why did the United States lose in Vietnam? Many in the military like to blame the politicians, arguing they meddled in tactical operations or put unreasonable restrictions on those on the front lines. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., a U.S. Army major at the time he published this book (now a retired lieutenant colonel) disagrees with these views. He argues that the Army entered this conflict with equipment and methods more appropriate for fighting a conventional conflict in Europe against the Nazis (or Soviets) than they were for an insurgency in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Even though this situation was a lot like Napoleon's troops arriving in Moscow with the light summer gear they expected to use when they reached British India, generals and staff officers figured heavy firepower and advanced technology would be enough to carry the day. "Simply stated, the United States Army was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency environment" (p. 4) The strategy that the United States adopted in Vietnam was also inappropriate. Under General William Westmoreland the Army pursued a strategy of attrition. The problem with this approach is that it depend on resources not skills, and by trying to depend on sheer volume, Westmoreland put the enemy in the position of just needing to survive in order to emerge victorious, which gave them an enormous advantage. The general believed that the real threat to the South Vietnamese came from the conventional units of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). If the Americans destroyed these units, they would take the pressure off of the South Vietnamese government, and allow them to destroy the Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas. The problem with this plan was that Westmoreland had no plan on how to follow up on these battles. More importantly, he and his staff were ignoring the realities of Vietnam: the NVA were supporting the main effort, which was the VC insurgency. According to Krepinevich, the U.S. Army--despite pressure from the White House--showed little interest in counterinsurgency. The Army took years before it started making any serious effort to train its soldiers in low intensity conflicts, and even then much of it was nothing more than a series of cosmetic gestures. Existing training courses got new names, and training exercises in mock Vietnamese villages took place in climates that did not exist in the actually country. The Army placed little emphasis on having intelligence officers learn the language, culture or history of Vietnam. As a result, they focused on the things they knew and understood--finding and destroying the enemy's big units. The problem is in fighting insurgency, the real prize is the support of the people and this requires winning small battles, patrolling on a regular basis, and destroying the support infrastructure of the guerillas. To that task, the counter-insurgent must know the environment in which they are fighting and this the American solider neve

The best book on Vietnam

Krepinevich has a cult following among professors and students at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. After reading his work I understand why. It is rare that ones comes across a book that radically changes the way one looks at military history. Thousands of books have been written on Vietnam and the movies "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now" brought the war to millions of Americans. Until I read this book, I thought I understood the causes and conduct of the war. Krepinevich brilliantly analyzes how the U.S. Army planned for and conducted the war. How it tried to fight the war it wanted to fight, vice the war as it actually existed. Army leadership brought their conventional mindset to the jungles of Vietnam. The inability to adapt to change proved a greater threat to the U.S. Army than the North Vietnamese Army. The book rises above the personal narrative style that dominates most Vietnam books. Instead, the book is based on solid military analysis. Even more telling was how the U.S. Army failed to grasp the lessons of counter-insurgency following Vietnam and quickly returned to the conventional mindset it preferred. The writing is crisp and powerful. The lessons of this book remain vital today as the U.S. continues to struggle on how to best defeat America's latest enemies.

Still very full of lessons

Although coming to this work as a result of a contemporary (2006) news story about the author I was shocked at the relevance of the book to the issues facing the US Army (and others) in Iraq. The Army and Vietnam is a fascinating study of how not to organise and fight a counter-insurgency campaign amongst a resentful populace using the most aggressive and technologically advanced "shock and awe" methods. It appears, not least from the paucity of reviews, that this is a book that was seen to lack relevance or lessons for America's warriors. How wrong they were. I would strongly commend this book both to students of the history of the Vietnam War and those looking for a fresh, professional, perspective on the problems the US faces in Iraq.

Most Interesting book I've read on the Vietnam War

This book deserves to be far more widely read than it is--and I have no idea why it isn't. Krepinivich's thesis is a brilliant one--the US army was "conceptually" unprepared to fight the Vietnam war: it brought a cold war mentality to the jungles of Vietnam and spent the first seven or eight years of the war trying to "find" this war. The US army imagined that the Viet Cong was a variant of the Soviet army--they "must" have been controlled by a central organization and "must" have had "hidden armies" lurking in the jungle. Decively defeating them would, the Army believed, end the war. In fact, Krepinivich convincingly argues, the VC was not in the jungle at all--but in the cities along the coast. "We should have done less 'flit'in' and more 'sit'in'", he says. The war was actually fought more effectively after US troop reduction prevented the "jungle search" strategy from being implemented. This was something akin to what the Marines performed in I Corps: rather than participate in large scale jungle sweeps, troops were divided up and put in small villages with radios. The strategy was more hazardous as troops, because of their small numbers might be overrun. However, it was more effective because it allowed allied forces to prevent the VC from retaking a village after they had withdrawn from their major operation. This book should eventually allow for US military operations in the first part of the war to be put in the context of greater US cold war culture. The "willing blindness" of the US military during much of the sixties came from what amounts to a cultural fixation on a way power was imagined to function. Even in '71, Nixon believed that the Vietnamese communists was controled by a "COSVN", which functioned like a sort of "tumor": nip the tumor and the body will fall. This, Krepinivich proves, was all part of the American imaginary. Our blindness went far beyond the generals: it was part of our culture.