General William Westmoreland’s approach to fighting the Vietnam War was to find NVA and Viet Cong troop concentrations, force them to fight, then use technology and superior combat power to annihilate them. The ultimate goal of this approach was to force North Vietnamese communists to give up their goal of overthrowing the Republic of South Vietnam and uniting the country under communist rule.
Critics have harshly criticized Westmoreland. They’ve called the general’s big-unit approach the wrong war at the time, or fighting the last war. They claim that since the Vietnam War was a guerilla war that the United States should have been trying win over “hearts and minds” instead of trying to obliterate enemy troops. Since Westmoreland was essentially using a strategy of attrition it became necessary to find a metric to measure progress, or lack of it.
The measure used was the infamous “body count.” Critics claim that the body-count metric caused field commanders to inflate combat kills to mollify their superiors and enhance their career prospects which led to a distorted view of how the war was going.
There is some justification for these critical views, but I contend that Westmoreland’s approach was the correct one given the situation he inherited.
More specifically, political decisions that allowed the South Vietnamese military to murder President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 had destabilized the republic. Military defeat at the hands of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) loomed ever more likely at the dawn of 1965.
The heavy influx of U.S. ground combat troops (the so-called escalation) that President Lyndon Johnson authorized quickly beat back the communist insurgency and bought the republic time. The well-known battle in the Ia Drang valley in November of 1965 where a U.S. Army battalion of 1st Cavalry Division troopers fought an NVA regiment and stopped an early invasion attempt by communists to capture the Central Highlands and cleave south Vietnam in two. With U.S. ground troops and air support long gone in 1975, this strategy was reactivated and ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic of South Vietnam.
I’ll get back to this topic later but Westmoreland was correct to use U.S. combat power to hold off the communists and smash much of their war-making capability. After stalling the insurgency, Westmoreland left, General Creighton Abrams took over and pivoted to a more “hearts-and-minds” approach.
Johnson left office, President Richard Nixon took over and began withdrawing U.S. troops. By all accounts the Republic of South Vietnam was making steady progress. I’ll continue this narrative in my next post.
Military History Topics 