‘brush-fire wars’. 59 Military doctrine retained many of the concepts used in the
Second World War and the Korean conflict. The key addition was the concept of
air mobility, particularly with the use of helicopters, which added greater oppor-
tunities for vertical envelopment. The destructiveness of modern firepower tech-
nology raised awareness of the power of the defence, particularly when combined
with air mobility which enabled rapid concentration and dispersal of forces. The
emphasis on the defence and on destroying enemy forces, rather than clearing and
holding terrain, was almost a necessity given the challenges NATO forces faced in
Europe; this thinking was directly applied to the situation in South-East Asia. 60
From 1965 to 1968, US military involvement in Vietnam escalated steadily
from 6,000 to 536,000 personnel; some 800,000 South Vietnamese troops were
also engaged, as well as 68,000 soldiers from other countries. 61 Initially, US
strategy sought to use a combination of strategic bombing and ‘search and
destroy’ missions to inflict losses heavy enough to convince the Hanoi govern-
ment to relent in its efforts to take control of South Vietnam. Unfortunately, early
tactical victories by US forces, such as in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, might have
induced American leadership to adhere too long to this approach, which placed a
greater premium on destroying the enemy than on protecting the civilian popu-
lace. 62 Although it was a force-oriented strategy, military actions were generally
tightly controlled and limited so as to avoid provoking intervention by the
People’s Republic of China or the Soviet Union.
As the bombing increased—from 63,000 tons in 1963 to 226,000 tons four
years later—and search and destroy efforts intensified, the enemy became frus-
tratingly difficult to find. Manufacturing facilities were dismantled and moved,
and resupply lines from China and elsewhere were easily concealed in the triple-
canopy forests and hills. Hanoi’s tactics changed on 31 January 1968, when it
launched the Tet Offensive. Although the offensive failed militarily at the cost of
tens of thousands of casualties, it did undermine the credibility of the Pentagon
and the White House, both of which had been claiming steady progress militarily
and politically. Public opinion turned even more sharply against the war after the
My Lai massacre became public knowledge in the autumn of 1969, and the
shooting incidents at Kent State University and Jackson State University in
1970, where several students lost their lives. 63
US President Johnson’s policy of gradual escalation was then abandoned by the
Nixon administration, which in 1969 expanded the war into Cambodia to attack
enemy bases. This effort was conducted in conjunction with attempts to implement
‘Vietnamization’ programmes designed to replace US military forces with South
Vietnamese ones. However, the shift came too late, and widespread corruption
within the Saigon government undermined most of the Vietnamization and re-
building programmes almost from the start. By late 1970, American strategic goals
had thus shifted decidedly to ‘Peace with Honor’, which meant that everything that
could have been done to save an ally had been done, and military withdrawal would
now commence. Nonetheless, it was not until 27 January 1973, after an intensive
‘Christmas bombing offensive’ of North Vietnam by B-52s, that the Paris Peace
Accords were signed by both sides, thereby enabling the US withdrawal.
American Operational Art, 1917–2008 153