The Army and Vietnam (1986) by Andrew F. Krepinevich

There are several ways to read Andrew Krepinevich’s “The Army and Vietnam,” which was published in 1986 when many wounds from the Vietnam War were still raw. First, it can be read as a summary and general assessment of the decade long Army experience with counterinsurgency (COIN) in Southeast Asia. Second, it can be viewed as a critique of the Army’s organizational inflexibility (or fundamental inability) in embracing new ways of war. Finally, it is a superb case study in institutional resistance to change, which is applicable to any large bureaucracy (civil, military or corporate).

When this book first came out it was the second aspect that mainly captivated defense policymakers, especially during the 1990s Revolution in Military Affairs debate when it was feared that the Air Force’s fighter pilot culture would undermine the move toward unmanned aerial vehicles and the Navy’s surface warfare leadership would stymy the move to semi-submersible, long range arsenal ships. Meanwhile, many officials were asking seriously, “Do we really need an Army?”

Today, after a near decade of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first aspect of the book has come into sharper relief, although it has been largely drowned out by the flood of COIN-focused books hitting the market even though most of them are of far lesser quality than “The Army and Vietnam.”

The core of Krepinevich’s argument is that US Army leadership never wavered from their support of the “Army Concept” of war, which he describes as “the Army’s perception of how wars ought to be waged and is reflected in the way the Army organizes and trains its troops for battle. The characteristics of the Army Concept are…a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties.” It can be summed up in the Army phrase: “It is better to send a bullet than a man.”

Counterinsurgency would play a large role in Vietnam, but the political pressure for the Army to more seriously adopt that form of warfare pre-dated US escalation in 1965. It was Khrushchev’s 1961 announcement of support for wars of national liberation that prompted newly elected President John F. Kennedy to order the US Army to more fully embrace COIN operations as part of his administration’s new defense policy of “flexible response.” From the very start, and straight through to the humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam a decade later, Krepinevich claims that the top Army brass paid mere lip service to COIN and more often than not actively undermined any substantive changes away from the Army Concept of conventional, firepower-first mindset.

Despite several high level attempts to push the Army in the direction of more counterinsurgency focused operations, including the Special Group, Counterinsurgency (SGCI), the Stilwell Report, and the Howze Board (all in 1962), which highlighted the inadequacy of Army COIN training, doctrine and organization; the Program for the Pacification and Long Term Development of Vietnam (PROVN) in 1966, which argued that pacification ought to be given top priority; to the 1968 efforts of the new assistant secretary of defense of defense Paul Warnke to shift US strategy from attrition to pacification and population security, Army leadership (Wheeler, Westmoreland, etc.) clung tenaciously to a strategy of kinetic intensive search-and-destroy missions that sought to bleed the enemy white.

The only genuine structural change ushered in by the Army during the Vietnam era was “airmobility,” which Krepinevich claims was only embraced by the orthodox Army leadership because it was packaged in such a way that it supported the Concept of conventional mid-intensity warfare in Europe and had the added benefit of stealing back ownership of close air support from the Air Force. Rather than help the Army address COIN, the author claims that airmobility merely provided the service a quick fix to avoid it all together. As far as the Army was concerned, COIN was compartmentalized to the Green Berets (special forces). It was confidently held that superior firepower, mobility and communications, all augmented by airmobility, would trump any advantages the VC had on the ground with the local population.

As the population-focused operations in Afghanistan grind on with mixed results, belief in the validity of COIN has certain suffered of late. But the author, writing in the mid-1980s, is clearly a believer in the efficacy of population-centric COIN efforts in Vietman. Krepinevich lauds the tactics and results of various COIN programs employed during the course of the Vietnam War, especially the Strategic Hamlets program (January 1962 to November 1963); the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) (before control of the operations were transferred from the CIA to MACV in Operation SWITCHBACK in July 1963 and the role of Green Berets was reoriented toward search-and-destroy missions rather than pacification and training); Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons (CAPs, which stressed night patrols, minimum firepower, and intimate, long term contact with villagers, a program that Krepinevich says General Westmoreland and the rest of MACV detested as a waste of manpower); and the “Ruff-Puffs” (Regional/Provincial Forces, locally recruited paramilitary forces that, according to one study, accounted for up to 30% of VC casualties at the cost of 2-4% of US resources).

The author’s main conclusion is that these promising COIN initiatives were never adequately supported. Whenever the Army was forced to make trade offs, it always chose the side that most closely mirrored the Army Concept, whether that meant better supplies for regular forces over Ruff-Puffs or concentrating intelligence gathering on regular units over VC infrastructure or favoring massive firepower that created refugees over sustained, local pacification efforts. Over time, COIN did receive a greater share of the resource pie, but it never came close to emerging as the priority.

In sum, the Army placed a disproportionate share of emphasis and resources on combating the external threat (i.e. invasion from the North) because it more naturally fit with the Army Concept of mid-intensity conventional operations. The true threat — the insurgency internal to South Vietnam — was neglected because it was different and didn’t neatly fit with the Army’s standard procedure, pathways to promotion or fundamental image of itself as a force the engages and destroys the enemy in open combat.

“The Army and Vietnam” is a compelling piece of scholarship and should be on the reading list for any serious student of counterinsurgency, the Vietnam War, or organizational change.