"Did General William Westmoreland actually have a..." Topic

… LOGICAL STRATEGY IN VIETNAM?

"Attrition was an important part of Gen. William Westmoreland's approach, but never to the exclusion of other methods. Some have portrayed the 1964-68 leader of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam as an unimaginative officer who failed to grasp the complexities of the war. They say Westmoreland fixated on enemy body counts and failed to pursue alternative strategies that would have produced better results. Having researched and written about the Vietnam War for more than 20 years, I am convinced that Westmoreland pursued the most logical and sophisticated strategy that he or any other U.S. commander could follow given the inherent limitations on his authority…."

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Armand

Nope. Surely we can all agree on this much. Whatever a logical strategy might have been, Westy did not have one.

I personally don't think he had many options or much talent and was selected largely because he looked the part.

I liked the last line of this interesting article;

"Given the hand he was dealt, Westmoreland pursued the most appropriate strategy any MACV commander could devise between 1964 and 1968."

To mix the metaphor, he had (at least) one hand tied behind his back throughout

The one hand tied behind the back metaphor is popular.

But the real issue is there was nothing worth fighting for in VN and the US military and government knew this from the start. Any further escalation was just not worth the cost or the risk. Westmoreland wanted many more troops and a call up of reserves. There was serious talk of nukes. But those in a position to decide would not give the go head for either.

Few appreciate how appalling the GVN actually was. At best a huge embarrassment to the values Americans hold.

Totally agreed.

But how much of what you have said was down to Johnny on the Spot, Westmoreland?

Name me a legendary US general who could have done better. Grant, Sherman, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Pershing, MacArthur, Washington, Schwarzkopf etc etc.

The US involvement in VN was not quite as hopeless as that of the French, but purely because their ground forces were massively better supplied. Not that they were better troops, just that both were dependent on a totally corrupt and incompetent local govt and military high command.

Was the whole war worth it, when it ended in an obvious defeat? The answer could yet be yes, although if I had lost a kid or my own legs in VN I might not think so. Somewhere there was a need for a "Line in the Sand". So far and no further or the dominos will lead to an escalation.

Is Ukraine hugely different from VN? OK, the main difference is that we only are supplying the means to fight, the training, probably the intelligence, to a people who seem to be using it rather than running a black market on supplies. It is not asking Asian kids to fight an Asian war and instead then sending in Uncle Sam's best as in VN. Poor ARVN, they had the potential to be just as good as VC or NVA, they were they same people.

The reasons for the failure of the ARVN could fill a long thread. I don't subscribe to any idea that national or racial characteristics make good or bad soldiers. So whether they were the same or different people is to my mind a red herring. There were certainly ARVN units that fought tenaciously in the last year or two of the fighting and NLF/PAVN units that performed less well than the better units.

The key to a proper understanding of the US intervention in South East Asia is that the US wanted out by late 1967. Westmoreland was talking up the success of the attrition strategy and as good as saying the enemy were unable to conduct serious offensive action. Then Tet broke and he mishandled that badly and looked like a liar or a fool.

The US was never going to invest enough manpower, money or political capital in the region to do more than it already had by 1967. They simply had no interests in the region to defend. Someone once said the US has no allies, only interests. We would all do well to remember that.

Everything post Tet was just to save face. And more than half the US KIA came post Tet 1968. Without even trying to count the hundreds of thousands of locals who suffered during the final 7 years of the 30 year struggle for independence.

Thanks.

Armand

LBJ interview 4 or 5 generals for the Vietnam command role. All but one said that the U.S. would need to pursue an entirely new type of war, and that it would not feature large, conventional units maneuvering WWII style. Westmoreland said that Vietnam was a conventional war in disguise.

LBJ picked Westmoreland.

emckinney,
Which ones did he interview? I was only aware of Westmoreland and Krulak. There were other advisors he interviewed and sent over to evaluate the situation.

Wolfhag

IMO, the war in Vietnam was conducted to perpetuate the war in Laos and as covertly as possible. Papaver somniferum is a lucrative crop.

For this reason I suspect, having overall American command in Vietnam as clueless as possible would have been considered an advantage to the folks in Langley.