vietnamsstrategicthinking

 CHAPTER 15 The Bombardiers Ever since the First World War, air power has held political allure, seeming to offer the promise of almost painless victory. The promise has not always been fulfilled, but it is part of the nature of air power that its real effects are often difficult to separate from those claimed; it is often distant if not invisible, and a pattern of organizational misreporting has, from the start, accompanied it.* Strategic bombing of the enemy’s war-making capacity and attacks upon civilian areas to destroy his morale were first attempted during the Sino-Japanese war in the middle thirties. In the Second World War the British and American air forces pursued radically different approaches to the concepts; the British made much greater use of massive bombing of German cities than the Americans. Some of the reasons were technical: the Americans developed more effective bomb sights, which enabled them to hit critical industrial targets on daytime raids. Without such me...

  CHAPTER 14 The Battle  The war quickly took on a pattern that changed little during its five years. Communist offensives began with the dry season in January and ended as the monsoons spread the waters over the land in May and June. During the wet seasons the scale of the warfare depended in part on how badly either side had been mauled in the months before. Within months of the 1970 invasion the Communists had isolated Phnom Penh, gained half the country and over 20 percent of the population. Each year they captured more. It became a war over the lines of communication. Despite the ambitions Kissinger expressed in "Strategy Three, Variant Three," the government controlled only a number of enclaves around Phnom Penh and provincial capitals—Kompong Thom, Kompong Cham, Svay Rieng, Takeo, Kampot, Kompong Som (the renamed port of Sihanoukville), a large area around Battambang in the northwest, and a strip of land between Battambang and Phnom Penh. Apart from Battambang, none wa...

 CHAPTER 13  The Embassy EMBASSIES OFTEN have personalities that reflect not so much their transient staffs as the mission to which they are committed. An embassy is also a coalition. In an American embassy, the ambassador may be a member of the State Department, but he is appointed by the President, and his domain contains State Department officials and also men from the Pentagon, the CIA, the Agency for International Development and others. Inter- and even intra-departmental rivalries in Washington itself are rarely subsumed by the fact that all these persons are now representing their country out of one building in a distant land. But when they are all engaged on a single, agreed mission, the rivalries can be controlled. No such harmony was possible in Cambodia. The embassy was a short-lived and frantic affair. Created in 1969, it grew like a military Toys in 1970 and 1971, settled into a resigned torpor in 1972, and died in 1975. Its personality throughout the period was s...

 CHAPTER 12 The Strategy THE NIXON DOCTRINE proposed that the United States could provide the material and counsel for an Asian country to withstand internal or external attack while remaining politically detached. In this spirit, the White House professed the Cambodian government to be independent, a friendly power whom Washington was helping to help itself. But from the start the United States attempted to control events there. In the fall of 1970, the administration debated just what sort of war Cambodia should fight. This discussion helps to establish that the "limits" implicit in the declared Nixon Doctrine had little place in the real relationship. The debate began over interim aid. By September 1970 there was a financial crisis. The military, despite Ladd's caution, had already spent almost all the forty million dollars that had been intended to last until July 1971. More money was required at once. Both the White House and the State Department had hoped to continu...