Very interesting comments by retired LtGen Cushman . . . Even further interesting to me since Gen Westmoreland (and his J3 Gen DePuy) didn't support the Marine Combined Action Program up in I Corp for a number of reasons: one being that he didn't believe he could afford to tie-up American combat power with civic action, feeling it was primarily the ARVN's issue.

It would seem a younger LtCol Cushman at the time, set forth that pacification/civic action would be the responsibility of the ARVN, and that only a few very highly qualified American advisors would all that would be needed.

One wonders why Gen Westmoreland didn't give it a try, unless he felt the failed Strategic Hamlet Program had already shown it would be a waste of time, although Cushman's idea was different as apples and oranges?

Of course true counter-insurgency has two speeds: slow and stop, and Westmoreland was also facing an enemy from up north, not just an insurgency (civil war) down south, and the tache d'huile or oil spot theory put into practice would have been very slow to show results, which could have given the folks up north an opportunity to slowly mass forces to engage at their choosing.

However, wasn’t the massing of enemy forces what Gen Westmoreland was always looking for to engage with American fire power? I guess this argument goes on until all us dead head Viet-Nam vets croak. . .

.... rather much like that well-known Washington memoir "If They'd Only Listened To Me." Pity it covers only part of the story.

Unfortunately I think the man missed several problems that would have caused them to stumble even if Westmoreland had paid attention. The leaders in Saigon considered each other more the threat than the Vietnamese Communists and weren't able to work together until after 1968. The civil service, politicians, military and police were very corrupt. No South Vietnamese leader had the nationalist credentials that the Communists did. Lastly, there wasn't any national history for the people in the south. The war went on for a long time in military standards but in national history it was a blip, nothing that could establish the separation of North Vietnam from South Vietnam. Also the Americans apparently made the disastrous mistake of training the ARVN (South Vietnamese army) to use high quantities of fuel and ammunition without studying whether or not those tactics would make any sense absent the major support of the U.S*.

*Though that probably wouldn't have changed much.

There's a whole genre of German WW2 generals' memoirs which can be summarized as "how I killed half the Red Army and would have taken Vladivostok if not for stupid Hitler."

Jack Cushman did me a big favor twenty years ago, winning me a key interview for my book on the battle for Hue. I found out along the way that he was--and apparently remains--one of the great minds behind strategic post mortems and the inculcation of officers in the strategic arts.

Here's his biography:
http://www.west-point.org/publications/cushman/cushmanbio.html

Here is a terrific zinger of a post mortem he delivered on the Iraq invasion follow-up at the Army War College in 2007:
http://www.west-point.org/publications/cushman/AWCTextAsPlanned.pdf

That he was one of legions who knew more about conducting a war than Willam Childs Westmoreland cannot possibly--or reasonably--be held against him.

LTC Cushman obviously formed excellent relationships with his counterparts. The predicate for pacification and development has always been security. In the oil spot of security, you shelter and protect development efforts. At the local level, Saigon's corruption wasn't that consequential as they didn't have any people in the rural areas - at least not in 1965. There was a system of graft in which each commander forwarded a portion of their income to their commander up the chain. LTC Cushman appears to have had a different command environment than I observed. He was fortunate in that the ARVN division commander had province chiefs and, therefore, district chiefs reporting to him. This made a coordinated, cohesive effort feasible. As I have said repeatedly, General Westmoreland never understood and always thought he could outkill the NVN birth rate. This was known to be wrong. Check the Pentagon papers. In those papers are documents from COMUSMACV staking-out this killing strategy upon which he based his troop requests. This strategy also gave us over 50,000 dead.

The sniping in some of the comments above merely reveals the writers' ignorance. All U. S. Vietnam military leaders are not alike and you cannot conflate our Vietnam experience with our Afghan experience. Methods that would have succeeded in RVN would fail in Afghanistan because the human terrain and security situations are different.

What is the same is that we have pissed away any opportunity for success by waiting too long to adopt appropriate tactics. LTC Cushman and his team recognized that a bottom up approach is the only way to succeed. The Marines knew this and practiced it in I Corps. Only now are our generals talking a bottom up approach and it is too late. What our generals have finally been *forced* to adopt is then LTC Cushman's strategy.

Sadly, CORDS was a terrible idea for two reasons. First, it drastically disrupted a functioning organizational structure. Second, it put too many ill-suited US Army officers in charge of provinces. Officers who ultimately reported to Westmoreland and not AID or State. Regardless of organization charts, Army officers regarded their bosses to be other Army officers whom they would see again and again in their careers. And then, there was the military's proclivity for false reporting to satisfy McNamara's thirst for data.

Westmoreland's predecessor, General Paul Harkin prepared the ARVN for a non-existent threat: the NVA invading by crossing the DMZ in conventional formations. Even General Westmoreland didn't believe that one. Starting in June, 1965, the NVA were crossing the Western border of II Corps in regimental strength - just one at that time (according to NSA and SF observations.) Of course, General Westmoreland told visiting firemen that the NVA were "cutting South Vietnam in half." I don't know, maybe he really thought that.

The sad lesson here is that we are capable of making the exact same mistakes 30 years later and that the Army purposely erased its institutional memory in reaction to its Vietnam and domestic experience. We are going to have the equivalent of the Paris Peace conference, come up with a feeble agreement, and promptly depart. Oh, and then we will erase our institutional memory of this "terrible experience." Point your fingers at whomever you will.

Poor General Westmoreland, the man who has been turned into the monster of Vietnam, and unfairly and without contextual basis in the primary records which in fact show a general who was very much concerned and interested in pacification.

General Cushman's post reads to me in the same deeply problematic way the Sorley's new biography of Westmoreland reads: slashing criticism not based on primary evidence but on memory, and in this case decades and decades after the war. Read his post: the excerpts from the contemporaneous letters from his wife do not suggest at the time that Westmoreland didn’t get and appreciate the importance of pacification. It is only his post war remembrances that make that criticism.

If Westmoreland didnt care about pacification why did he issue a directive to all his commanding officers right after the battle of Ia Drang (in 1965!) that battlefield victories were important but pacification ultimately was the key to success?

If Westmoreland didnt care about pacification why did he start CORDS under his watch in 67? He didnt have to but he did and he committed to one of the largest adaptations in terms of time and resources that the American Army made during the entire war. Virtually all of the programs that Abrams used when he was in command were put into effect by Westmoreland.

There was no tactical cipher (call it oil spot, Galula-esque, anticipating 3-24, whatever) to success in Vietnam that if ONLY, ONLY the US would have done this or that differently, tactically on the ground, we would have won. General Cushman and many others might consider rethinking the idea that we lost the war in Vietnam because of monster-dolt generals who didn’t get Coin, or because (in Nagl and Krepinevich’s view) the American army was too stupid to figure out how to do it right. No, we lost the war in Vietnam because we failed at strategy; and strategy should have discerned that the war was unwinnable based on a moral and material price the American people were willing to pay.

What General Cushman’s post is about, just like Sorley’s new biography, is not an attempt at a reasonable historical truth through evidence, but a battle over the MEMORY—shaped by the trauma of losing that war by many of its veterans. And in that sense Westmoreland has been annihilated in the battle over the memory of the war.

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Westmoreland seemed to have gone beyond General Cushman's March 1964 advice that "if he could find the right thirteen senior advisers for the four ARVN corps and the nine ARVN divisions, and that if they put into place something like what we were now doing in the 21st Division, he could win back the countryside."

Here are the relevant excerpts (you can see the full text of the message below at: http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_ii/10_18.html):

1. With regard to an increase in U.S. advisory effort, we have gone about as far down the advisory route as it is practical to go without passing the point of clearly diminishing returns. At the present, there are a total of 5,100 military advisors within RVN, extending thru all echelons from the high command down to battalion and to district (country) level. During the past year the advisory effort measured in terms of manpower has increased by 42 per cent.

....

A. The only significant area where it appears that an addition to advisor effort might be warranted would be at the district level. Advisors are just now arriving for the last of 113 districts. Initial evaluation clearly indicates that the district advisory program is sound and is paying off. If momentum can be maintained another 25 of the regular five-man teams could be used by early summer and will be requested.

B. Our current thinking is that Special Forces teams might be utilized as advisors in remote and least secure districts--perhaps up to 25 more in all.

....

2.B. We have reviewed the tactical operations of the past two years for occasions where employment of U.S. ground forces would have been desirable and feasible. We have found such instances to be few and far between. On balance, they do not seem to justify the presence of U.S. units, even disregarding the political problems involved.

.....

4. Recommendations:

A. That we adhere to the advisory system improving and expanding it as necessary. Additional district advisors will be required if the GVN presses on with the war.

B. That the U.S. continue to provide only operational support along current lines augmented and reinforced as the situation requires.

"These teams were to go into the target hamlet, determine the people's needs, assist in agricultural and economic development, establish intelligence nets, detect and eliminate Viet Cong infrastructure, act as a link between higher governmental agencies and the people, and eventually restore the legitimate government in the hamlet."

"Coups in Saigon in November and January brought in the new division commander, Colonel Cao Hao Hon."

Call me naive but teams attempting the impossible are doomed to failure. Restoring 'Legitimate coup-based government' seems to me to be an impossible to overcome contradiction. But assuming all his suggestions were followed and the VC infrastructure was 'eliminated' and for eliminated you really should say murdered or assassinated. Euphemisms, such as 'eliminate' rather than kill and 'legitimate government' cloud rational assessments. A better plan would have been to abandon the impossible. Allow the Vietnamese to sort out their situation and trade would have resumed decades earlier; Vietnam wouldn't have been Agent Oranged and all the other pointless grief and loss that results from involvement in losing fights. How many, and I suggest it began with the Philippines [which still isn't right], distant interventions must occur before the large lesson of the 20th-21st centuries are obeyed. Foreign invaders lose, without any significant exception, unless the invader genocides the invaded [as the US did, for all practical purposes, the Native Americans].

1. Was there ever really a south Vietnam or was that just a colonial construct?

2. Why didn't LTG Cushman codify COIN into the regular Army once he had three stars?

Yes, I can produce a birth certificate from Sai Gon, 1964, Republic of Viet Nam, about six months after this COIN operation in Do Xa, II Corps.
http://www.hmm-364.org/1964/doxa.html

Correct me if I am wrong but it was the NVA that seized Saigon and not the Viet Cong? Perhaps that was the real problem with the Vietnam war. Harry Summers had it correct that we fought a strategic defensive war and that COIN was a tyranny of fashion. I have not seen anyone refute the thesis of On Strategy.

COIN makes us feel good about ourselves until we have spent billions and lost lives accomplishing very little. I think General McClellan would have been a great counter-insurgent in his day. There is a logical reason why the Army discarded COIN after Vietnam. It doesn't work.

I have run my course on the issue of Westmoreland. . .but in the spirit of bipartisanship and mending fences, keep in mind on the 23rd of this month not to sweep your house/quarters, nor dump your trash that day; thus avoiding throwing out any good luck with beginning of the Lunar New Year. . .enter the Dragon.

Chuc mung nam moi - Happy New Year. . .again! : )

But I don't think the original article was making a strong case of 'if he'd listened to me...' If so, it was passive and vague, at least to me as a civilian.

Here are some questions:

First, It was my understanding that the Pentagon used the euphemism 'counter-insurgency' to describe the whole Vietnam War. This was the government's 'politically correct' term used so officials would not have to call it a War. It was a 'military action.'

Second, what about the Vietnam strategy of 'destroying a village' to 'save' it'? And the napalmed villages?

Is the author saying these actions would not have occurred had Westmoreland been firmly committed to counter-insurgency as defined in the article?

Iraq once again proved that strategy is everything. Perfect implementation of COIN or other methods is not going to work if the strategy itself is based on fundamental misreadings of the situation itself - especially the political and cultural dynamics of the 'enemy' or occupied country.

In the end, the N. Viet/Viet Cong already were implementing their own COIN-type strategy in the South by 'liberating' villages one-by-one. Which also brings to mind the entire concept 'war of attrition', something America is uniquely unqualified to win.

Auto Biographical Note by Walter Russell Mead, Winner of 2002 Lionel Gelber Award for his book Special Providence, American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.
Mr. Mead is Senior Fellow for United States Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.
I was born in South Carolina, a state where memories of the U.S. Civil War remained vivid. In the small community where my father (an Anglican priest) had his first church, there were still a few people who remembered slavery. Jim Crow still ruled, and the races were strictly segregated with even drinking fountains labeled for "white" or "colored" use. As the struggle for civil rights intensified, families - including mine - were bitterly divided and many southerners, black and white, lived in the shadow of physical violence.
The legacy of the Second World War was even more vivid. The fathers and uncles of my friends had often served overseas. The Carolinas are full of what in Special Providence I would call Jacksonian values; some of those ideas began to take shape in my head as my friends and I, spell bound, looked at the war booty veterans brought back: knives, guns, helmets, medals and, in at least one case, a dried human ear.
The Cold War was very much part of daily life in those years. Like many people in my generation, I will never forget the week in October 1962 when the world trembled on the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. Like so many others, we had air raid drills in our school; even in the fifth grade it seemed very improbable that one either could or would want to survive a nuclear attack. But there was a domestic dimension to the Cold War. We moved to a university town (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) and the battles over whether communists should speak at the university divided the community. The family three doors down from us reported our nextdoor neighbors to the FBI for doubtful loyalty; the three-doors-down lady also called my father a pinko in a book she published about communist influence in the university.
In 1963-64 my family moved to the outskirts of London for a year, where I learned about strange foreign practices like cricket and high tea. History was, of course, here too: not only in places like the Tower of London where my brother Chris and I shuddered in fascinated horror at the headsman's block, or Stonehenge where we could still wander freely among the pillars. It was at the House of Commons where by sheer luck I happened to visit on the day when Winston Churchill made one of his last appearances. (Since not many children visited the House at the time and he only came twice more after I saw him, it's possible that I may someday become the last surviving person to have seen Churchill there.)
Through a very unusual set of coincidences, I received a full scholarship to what remains perhaps the most famous prep school in North America. Groton School, founded in 1884 by Endicott Peabody with a board of trustees that included men like J.P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt, has produced more than its share of American leaders - including Franklin Roosevelt of the class of 1900. During our orientation to the school, the new boys were introduced to the school's oldest living alumnus - Henry Howe Richards who, as a faculty member since 1898 had been one of Franklin Roosevelt's high school teachers and who, I was told, as a young boy had known an old woman who had known George Washington in her childhood.
The Vietnam War, then at its height, was to some degree Groton's war. Groton alumnus MacGeorge Bundy was National Security Advisor. As public opinion - and I - turned against the war, I saw in my teens what I had seen during the civil rights movement: a great public event and controversy reaching deeply into the private sphere. The Civil War had divided brother against brother; the same kind of thing was going on the politics of my time, dividing the generations and leading to students rioting in Harvard Square against the policies of their fathers.
My twenties were hard. I wasn't fit for much besides school; unfortunately the Ph.D. track held little appeal to me. At Groton and before I had fallen in love with an older kind of education - generalist, at least quasi-classical, literary. Fortunately I continued to read in history, literature and political science while teaching and doing odd jobs and working to develop my writing.
My first book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, was a reflection on the breakdown of the old forms of American liberal politics that I had known. As one of the first books to look at the impact of globalization on politics in the western world, it argued that the internationalization of economic activity would internationalize politics. Political activists in western countries could no longer think simply about improving the wellbeing of workers and communities in the advanced countries; poor wages, poor working conditions and lax environmental protection in the developing world could undermine what progressives had imagined were the permanent triumphs of social democracy in the western world. A courageous editor at Houghton Mifflin - with some encouragement by Jonathan Schell, who read the manuscript of an unknown writer and gave it a generous endorsement - published Mortal Splendor. The book didn't make any money, but the reviews were strong and from that time on I've been able to earn a living by writing and speaking.
As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the focus of my curiosity about the world began to change. The United States, which many thought was in irreversible decline, had somehow found a new balance. Despite a chorus of doomsayers predicting that Reagan's deficits would ruin the country and his hawkish foreign policy would precipitate a new confrontation with the Soviet Union, we somehow got through the 1980s with the economy improving and the Soviet Union in decline.
At the same tme, America seemed to be changing direction. In the first twenty years of my life, it seemed as if the traditional pillars of American life were crumbling. Traditional values in the South were being widely and rightly repudiated in the name of racial equality. Age-old ideas about gender roles and homosexuality were being challenged as both women and men took another look at institutions like marriage.
Meanwhile, at what was then the Twentieth Century Fund and is now the Century Foundation, Richard Leone took a huge risk and commissioned a book on American foreign policy from me. Thanks to this grant, and to an article assignment from Lewis Lapham at Harper's Magazine, I was able to travel for six months in 1990 through a Europe in transition. I was in Berlin for the end of East German border controls and saw Checkpoint Charlie taken down and hauled away.
Leasing a car in Paris, I drove as far north as Hammerfast in Norway and through all the former Warsaw Pact countries before driving across Turkey and entering what was still the Soviet Union near Batumi on the Black Sea. I spent a month driving across the crumbling Soviet Union.
Yet the most lasting impression of this trip wasn't the feeling of liberation that swept through countries like what was still Czechoslovakia and Poland; it was the eerie sensation, over and over, I had talking to people getting ready to murder their neighbors. In Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and Georgia I met intellectuals and artists who were arming themselves psychologically and literally for civil wars that were already beginning to smolder. Over the next decades many of the hotels I stayed in would appear, devastated and burning, on the nightly news. Here too the future looked more like the past than most people expected.
I would continue to travel widely through the 1990s, ultimately visiting more than 60 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America while thinking through the ideas that turned into Special Providence, even as I continued to study American and world history.
One important influence on the book may surprise some readers. Since 1996 I have had several opportunities to discuss American history and politics with Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly of the Republic of Cuba. Alarcon and I could not disagree more on many of the most important issues; he is a convinced Communist while I am a Liberal and an aspiring if not very successful Christian. Had I been born in Castro's Cuba I have little doubt that I would have ended up in jail or Miami. Yet President Alarcon is a shrewd observer of American politics and our disagreements have both challenged and sharpened my insights about why, in spite of everything, American foreign policy so often works.
The book that came out of all this reflects interests I have followed all my life: the interplay of change and continuity; the similarities and differences between the United States and Britain; the unexpected but profound ways in which developments abroad shape American life; the regional, religious and cultural diversity that, I increasingly believe, makes the United States work.
And behind it all is William Faulkner's sense of the vital if sometimes hidden links between the present and what came before. "The past ain't dead," he once wrote; "it ain't even past." That's certainly true in the world of foreign policy, and I hope Special Providence leads others to reflect on the ways in which the American past continues to shape the world's present.
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... but it's a shame the largest strategic point is lost. What does it matter now that the oil spot approach wasn't supported? Our national interest wasn't harmed by the loss, and Vietnam is freer and closer to a capitalist society than theaters in which the history books are more likely to record us in the win column - notably Korea. Wil the same be said about Iraq? Afghanistan? COIN and all other doctrines are a means to an end. Not the end themselves.

James McPherson in the conclusion of his book on the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, writes,

". . . when secessionists protested that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. . . . The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had. With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the founding fathers – a government of limited powers that protected the rights of property and whose constituency comprised an independent gentry and yeomanry of the white race undistributed by large cities, heartless factories, restless free workers, and class conflict. … Their secession was a pre-emptive counterrevolution. … ‘We are not revolutionists,’ insisted James B.D. DeBow and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, ‘We are resisting revolution . . . . We are conservative."

The Army isn't the only institution that erased its memory of Vietnam. Today's high school history books give short shrift to WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Beginning in 1965, a good way to dodge the draft was to become a teacher and/or marry someone and have a child or two. Those teachers retired 10 years ago, but they left their stamp on the curriculum, the system, and its administration.

To address the easy ones first. The term counterinsurgency was in all the relevant books put out before the Vietnam War. The Department of Defense (the Pentagon) doesn't choose how to refer to a conflict. Heck, we had the Korean War in which there was no declaration of war. The term had long referred to a conflict in which a guerrilla force attempted to overthrow an incumbent national government. You could call that revolutionary war. Cuba was called a revolution. It just doesn't matter. You want a conflict to formally be called a war? Get a President and the Congress to follow the law. Then we can charge people with treason and hang them! Too bad we didn't declare war on North Vietnam; then we could have hung Jane Fonda and I wouldn't have to see her on TV shows and switch channels.

The major who told the correspondent that we had to destroy the village to save it was referring to a singular battle. The Viet Cong seized a town, dug-in, and decided to hold it. ARVN and US forces retook the town in the manner of WWII. When small arms couldn't do it, artillery and air strikes were called-in. Current Afghan ROE wouldn't permit that if "innocent" civilians were in the town. Tet was the only other occasion when VC and NVA forces attempted to enter and hold a town. The way to avoid blowing towns off the map is to not make war. The VC burned Montagard villages with the people in them.

Although there are concepts and tactics to be learned from the Malayan Emergency, it bore no resemblance to Vietnam or Afghanistan. The smaller population (than South Vietnam) was far easier to manage. The insurgents, CTs, were ethnically Chinese and the population that they preyed upon was almost entirely the Chinese minority in Malaya. As in Algeria, there was an extensive, multidisciplinary colonial government in place throughout the country. Ethnic Malays were integrated into that government at all levels. As in the Philippines, they had been promised independence after the Emergency was over. The British colonial governor had absolute power over the country and went unfettered by the government in London. The "oil spot" concept started in Malaya as did strategic hamlets. In Malaya, that meant villagers relocated and placed behind barbed wire. The wire was to deny the Communist Terrorists access to supplies from both willing and unwilling citizens. Some concepts could be applied to Afghanistan, but there is no viable governmental infrastructure and it is too late.

We should not want to forget Vietnam and Malaya because we can learn from both the differences and the similarities.

One line in LTC Cushmans letter struck me very hard-" the degree to which the communist can inspire dedication and fanaticism among their cadre which we do not yet understand". Here lies I think an essential lesson for us as a nation and a central global power. Before we involve ourselves anywhere we need to know and understand the people who live there and ask ourselves if there is any basis on which we can effectively sync indigenous goals with our own.We also need to be clear in our own minds about what we want and why and the price we're willing to pay- this is solely the job of the political leadership and the people and ought to be ruthlessly honest and thorough. This is a duty we owe to the americans in uniform who will actually pay the price and no military action should be undertaken without it. Contrast LTC Cushmans quote with LBJs " I will not send american boys to fight asian boys wars" Which force was better prepared for the Indochina war and which people understood what is to be done? What amazed me then and even more so in Iraq was the incredible mental toughness that american soldiers( all services) showed in persisting in a fight in which the enemy chose the time and place to attack and evade year after year only occasionally engaging in a stand up fight while "what for" arguements raged over their heads. If you don't know what for don't send them-ever!

Reading Cushman's simplified version of "How we would have won the war if only someone had listened" actually reads an awful lot like the COIN strategy we all believed we were doing for GEN McChrystal in 2009-2010. Put in all these experts in the PRTs, examine the atmospherics, help the local police/military build capacity and in a perfect world they will figure out how to secure themselves. Like most great ideas, the theory sounds great on paper, but when you face a partner government that is corrupt and lacks the will to help itself, combined with a porous border with a neighbor that either lacks the will, desire, or capability to stop enemy infiltration, well you just aren't going to succeed. We were dealt a bad hand in Vietnam and an equally bad hand in Afghanistan. Ignoring the reality of decisive, external factors beyond our control pretty much ensured the greatest COIN strategy ever devised wasn't going to work regardless. And FTR, I completely agree with RVN when we have our Dubai/Oman/Paris/whatever peace talks and sell out Karzai it will be a contest to watch just how quickly the rats either desert the castle or fall into traps after we declare victory and walk away.