Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [53]
In South Vietnam the briefings we received from military leaders, including General William Westmoreland, were discouraging. We received little information on efforts to build up the military, political, and economic capabilities of the South Vietnamese. I thought it was easy for the administration to order the American military, largely made up of draftees, to Vietnam, but it was a vastly more difficult task to marshal diplomatic or economic experts who could help the Vietnamese develop the capabilities they needed to be able to sustain themselves.
It was clear that the Vietnam War was an unconventional conflict that the American military and other elements of our government were not well enough organized, trained, equipped, funded, or staffed to manage. The enemy America was fighting didn’t have to win a single direct engagement with our military to survive, and they never did. Indeed, it was in their interests not to fight our kind of battle at all. They would ambush American troops on Monday and go back to harvesting rice on Tuesday. They would selectively engage our forces when it suited them, but generally avoid direct confrontation, because they knew they would lose. Their strategy was simply to hold on and make the war costly enough so that the Americans and our allies would eventually call it quits.
Further, there seemed to be little success in engaging in the ideological component of the conflict. The Viet Cong were fighting for something. Ho Chi Minh promised his followers economic progress, while the United States had been portrayed as promising only more bombs and bloodshed. Unquestionably, the people of Vietnam would have been vastly better off free of a repressive Communist regime and with freer political and economic systems. But neither we nor the Vietnamese we were supporting had developed an ability to communicate that truth persuasively. We were fighting dedicated ideological revolutionaries who would not surrender their Marxist ideology or bargain away at the negotiating table their hope for a united, single Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh.
By increasing American troop levels still further in the country, we were increasing the number of targets, which would lead to more casualties and further undermine support for the war at home. The U.S. approach seemed to be playing into the hands of the enemy—with more military bombardments and more American troops and without successfully enabling our South Vietnamese allies to take on more of the burdens of the fighting. In a report to my constituents I noted that it was unlikely that the United States “could ‘win’ this type of insurgency war for the South Vietnamese.”17
Despite our country’s good intentions, I was concerned that we were creating a dependency on the part of the South Vietnamese.18 During one of my stops in the country I visited a training facility where American flight instructors were teaching Vietnamese pilots how to fly. It seemed to me that it would have made more sense to teach the Vietnamese pilots how to be flight instructors, so they could train other Vietnamese pilots. As long as Americans were the ones training the Vietnamese, they would remain dependent on us to keep turning pilots out.
There was growing sentiment in Congress, particularly among Democrats, that the best way to express their objection to the conduct of the war was to deny it funding. That wasn’t how I saw it. My view was that even if one disagreed with the way the policy was being implemented, as I and others increasingly did, the best way to respond was to recommend corrections at the policy level.19 I wished Congress could be more involved, on a substantive level, rather than simply yanking the purse strings shut when displeased.*
In September 1967, I cosponsored a resolution to bring the conduct of the war to the House floor for debate and discussion.