Postgraduate Special Project
(M1D069)
Supervisor: Prof. Matthew Jones
Essay title: Why did the US military fail to defeat the insurgency during 1965-1968?
As it has been held true for over thirty years now, when the Americans utter the word ‘Vietnam’ they generally mean, not a country several thousand miles from their shores but, a whole complex of social conflicts associated with a great divide in the American experience. This is not too hard a truth to accept since only in this conflict did the United States suffer a comprehensive military and political rout, an unprecedented defeat and humiliation, and only out of which emerged the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome”. Viewed from the West, and more especially from the United States, the Vietnam War has been regarded as “a peculiarly American problem.”[1]
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War covered a time span of at least 20 years though the US intervention in Vietnam, arguably, spread over a longer period. However, the period 1965-1968 under Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency should be remembered as a watershed in this America’s longest war as these years were punctuated by several key events. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 was followed by the massive introduction of American ground combat troops in the summer of 1965. Then the year 1968 was marked by the shocking Tet Offensive and, subsequently, Johnson’s withdrawal of his candidacy from the presidential election in this same year. 1965-1968 could be termed a period of US escalation and exhaustion. The US military power was applied but soon brought to its limits vis-à-vis the Vietnamese insurgency. Failing to secure a US victory over the insurgency, the US military was led to a quagmire and ultimately to a humiliating defeat.
To answer the question why the US military failed to defeat the insurgency during 1965-1968, it is of utmost importance to acquire insights into the nature of the struggle waged by the Vietnamese against what they called “the US imperialists.”[2] These insights would provide a backdrop against which the military strategy that the United States pursued could be projected, thus unveiling the shortcomings, the incompatibility and even the inapplicability of the US strategy. This essay, therefore, will focus on analyzing the insurgency in South Vietnam and the US military that Johnson applied on this theatre. But as insurgency and counterinsurgency form part of military doctrines, the essay will be commenced with a brief theoretical background to the subject matter.
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Conclusion
Criticizing both the military and civilian leadership during the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers, Jr., a US army colonel who served as battalion and corps operations officer in Vietnam, believes that a different strategy could have brought victory to the United States. In an effort to identify what could have been applied as alternative strategies, Summers holds that Lyndon Johnson should have sought a declaration of war, and/or the basic American objective should have been to prevent North Vietnam infiltration, and so on. To evaluate how workable these alternatives could have been in securing an American victory in Vietnam over 30 years ago would require tremendous serious academic efforts. Jumping in any hasty conclusion on hypotheses as such is tantamount to being ignorant about and irresponsible to history. Yet, whatever the American strategists could have done to secure a victory, or at least to avoid any humiliating defeat, it is worth keeping in mind an Asian assumption on military thinking that goes “the necessary precondition for one to win a battle is that he must know himself and his enemy.” Having misunderstood the nature of the struggle of the Vietnamese and having fought a wrong kind of warfare, the United States did not meet even the prerequisite condition for a victory. Along similar lines and taking into consideration many other parameters of the struggle, including the time-attested art of insurgency in Vietnam’s history of national safeguarding, alternative strategies, if any, had no guarantee of producing a victory./.
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