The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [179]
The American failure to find any significance in the defeat of the French professional army, including the Foreign Legion, by small, thin-boned, out-of-uniform Asian guerrillas is one of the great puzzles of the time. How could Dien Bien Phu be so ignored? When David Schoenbrun, correspondent for CBS, who had covered the French war in Vietnam, tried to persuade the President of the realities of that war and of the loss of French officers equivalent each year to a class at St. Cyr, Kennedy answered, “Well, Mr. Schoenbrun, that was the French. They were fighting for a colony, for an ignoble cause. We’re fighting for freedom, to free them from the Communists, from China, for their independence.” Because Americans believed they were “different” they forgot that they too were white.
Failing the Lansdale program, regular personnel were added to MAAG to accelerate the training program, raising its numbers to over 3000, and a 400-man group from the Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg was sent to Vietnam for counter-insurgency operations. This violation of the Geneva rules was justified on the ground that North Vietnam too was infiltrating arms and men across the border.
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Military theory and strategy underwent a major change with the advent of the Kennedy Administration. Appalled by the plans based on “massive retaliation” which the military under Eisenhower had embraced because they promised quick solutions and less expense in preparedness, Kennedy and McNamara turned to the ideas of the new school of defense intellectuals expressed in their doctrine of limited war. Its aim was not conquest but coercion; force would be used on a rationally calculated basis to alter the enemy’s will and capabilities to the point where “the advantages of terminating the conflict were greater than the advantages of continuing it.” War would be rationally “managed” in such a way as to send messages to the opposing belligerent, who would respond rationally to the pain and damage inflicted on him by desisting from the actions that caused them. “We are flung into a straitjacket of rationality,” wrote the formulator of the doctrine, William Kaufman. That was a condition that exactly suited Secretary McNamara, the high priest of rational management. One thing was left out of account—the other side. War is polarity. What if the other side failed to respond rationally to the coercive message? Appreciation of the human factor was not McNamara’s strong point, and the possibility that humankind is not rational was too eccentric and disruptive to be programmed into his analysis.
Prompted by Khrushchev’s challenge of wars of liberation, a byproduct of the limited-war theory emerged: counter-insurgency, which blossomed into the great cult of the Kennedy years with the President himself as its prophet. The no-nonsense men of his Administration embraced the doctrine with muscular enthusiasm. It would show them awake to the new conditions of the contest. It would meet the insurgents on their own ground, deal with social and political causes of insurgency in the developing countries, catch the Communists bathing, as Disraeli once said of the Whigs, and walk away with their clothes.
Stimulated by Lansdale’s report, the President read the treatises of Mao and Che Guevara on guerrilla warfare and assigned them for reading in the Army. At his order, a special Counter-Insurgency Program was established to inculcate recognition “throughout the United States government that subversive insurgency (‘wars of liberation’) is a major form of politico-military conflict equal in importance to conventional warfare.” The doctrine was required to be reflected in the organization, training and equipment of United States armed forces and civilian agencies abroad so as to ensure programs for prevention or defeat of insurgency or indirect aggression with special reference to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. On discovering