School of War - Ep 226: Geoffrey Wawro on the Vietnam War

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Geoffrey Wawro, founding director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas and author of The Vietnam War: A Military History,  joins the show to discuss the causes of U.S. failure in Vietnam. ▪️ Times     •      01:21 Introduction     •      01:50 Schools of thought     •      07:45 Orthodoxy           •      13:24 A war of choice     •      17:49 Ambivalence            •      20:15 Korean nightmare           •      23:53 Lessons     •      28:38 Policy makers     •      32:34 Obvious flaws        •      37:10 Ground war     •      42:21 South Vietnam      •      51:30 Certain defeat     •      56:21 Local politics Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Back to the 20th century on School of War today. The Vietnam syndrome may have long ago been cured by America's lightning victory in the first Gulf War. But debates over America's war in Vietnam continue to this day. The author of a new military history of the war there, Jeffrey Warro, joins us today to give us his take. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live.

In India, the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in France. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Jeffrey Wurow, who is University Distinguished Research Professor and Director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, the author of numerous books, most recently, The Vietnam War, A Military History. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining the show. Aaron, thanks for having me. Now, to the extent that we've covered Vietnam on the show, which has not been super extensively, it's only been a handful of episodes. We have mostly heard, from what I think is typically called the revisionist school. And I thought I might start by asking you, Jeffrey, to give us a bit of an overarching sketch of the different schools of historiography on the question of Vietnam and then say a bit about where you fit in amidst all that.

Well, it's interesting because when I wrote the book and submitted the manuscript to the publisher, Basic Books, Hachet, I had a whole thing in the introduction about the historiography And the editor said, look, your average reader is going to like think they walked into some faculty. It's horrible debate. So just get rid of all that.

But the long and short of it is that, you know, essentially after the war, there was a great revulsion against the war. And the history reflected that, the sense of futility that the war just, the war was never really going to succeed, given all the disadvantages we labored under, you know, a South Vietnamese government that wasn't popular, a Vyakong movement that was popular with a strong state sponsor in North Vietnam, which itself was sponsored by China and the Soviet Union, right? And so that we were just pushing this stone up the hill

year after year after year, and it just sort of led to the disintegration in American society and the consensus, the anti-communist consensus, etc. So that the war was sort of faded to be lost. And then along, you know, later come the revisionists who say, no, actually, things were trending in the right direction.

We had turned the corner, And during the Nixon administration, he comes in in January 69. And he really kind of changed the approach. And the new MACFE commander, Creighton Abrams, changes the approach. Westmore had been doing search and destroy. And Creighton Abrams goes after like the logistics noses, but also puts more into pacification, village security. And if we'd only stuck with this, we would have won.

So I was kind of aware of this just reading, but also teaching the Vietnam case study, the Naval War College. And so we kind of reviewed the literature and we kind of set up a syllabus with, you know, that drew from both strands of thought. And I was always struck in seminars when we'd have students who were, you know, naval officers, but also from all the services and then, you know, CIA people, State Department people. And they would always, they'd always, like, lean toward the revisionist view. They'd be like, oh, man, this war was totally one of the, we'd role play. And they'd always win the war by invading Laos and Cambodia, cutting the Ho Chi Men

trail, you know, sort of starving the Viet Cong unsurgency of supplies and manpower. And they'd be like, you see, it was easy. It was just because Johnson lacked guts, right? And so that's kind of like how I always felt about it, just from a superficial reading of the literature and the scholarship. And then so when I came to write this book, I said, you know, I'm going to, because, again, so much stuff has been declassified since like the, you know, like it says the early accounts of the war and even later accounts were written.

And so I'm going to go and see what's available now. I'm going to look at this war from the perspective of decision makers at the time. What did they actually know to be ground truth? How did they actually proceed? How did they react to events on the ground? And what I discovered was there was never any sense in Vietnam, even at the highest reaches of Macfee, that we were winning this war. They always knew that we were losing this war. And they kept the thing going for political reasons to sort of show progress so that to reward

the presidents at home who can tell the public in Congress that you see we're on the front foot, we're winning in Vietnam, but MacVee always knew that we weren't winning, right? And this becomes very clear in all their internal communications, the ones that they don't kind of polish up and show to the public, the ones that they're talking to each other. And so you extend this research through the whole war from our intervention in it, from the, you know, from the decision to kind of launch the DM coup, the introduction of ground troops. in 1965, the start of Operation Rolling Thunder, right down to the beginning of Vietnamization and the withdrawals in 71, 72.

You know, all throughout, they're saying the U.S. leadership in Vietnam and the U.S. leadership in Washington internally is confessing the inability to win this war, right? So to me, that's kind of case closed. I look at the revisionist. I say, this is a fantasy land they're living in because they're basically, taking the best case numbers that were given by MACV for public consumption to show to the politicians to say, you see, we're winning, we're doing a good job, we deserve a good performance report, and they're saying that's a sign of progress when in fact, internally they knew that these

numbers meant nothing. Well, to your point about the publisher not letting you put the subdivisions of historiography in the manuscript here at School of War, you know, we're devoted to the deep cuts, but the publishers won't let you put in your manuscript. That's what our nerdy listener base is looking for. So if we could just dive down a little bit deeper than on the subdivisions, and I think where you are is sort of coming into focus for listeners. But amongst the revisionists, there's one cleavage I've noticed, which is kind of interesting with there.

There are pro-Westmoreland revisionists and anti-Westmoreland revisionists. That is to say they're the revisionists, you think that actually what Westmoreland was doing could have been successful, had it been essentially escalated or expanded or continued or something like that. And then there are those, I guess this is more the Lewis Sorley camp, who think that West Moreland was always misguided, but that there was a Creighton Abrams, combined action platoon, more counterinsurgency focused vision of the war that had potential. I guess my question for you, I mean, first of all, feel free to add nuance to that or reject

any of it you want to reject. On the orthodox side, what are the major subdivisions? because there's a, I know there's a, there's a school of analysis of the war that sees the whole thing, not just as a, as a tragedy, you know, strategic and human or whatever, but, but as a kind of moral obscenity. I don't, I don't fully take you to be in that camp. But then I, my, my knowledge of the, the contours of that side of the debate is, it's just not very sophisticated at all. How would you sketch out that side of thing? Well, I mean, I just, I just think that, you know, it's kind of, the, the carno, you know, published in, you know, Carno's book, Vietnam,

published in 1983 is pretty much a judicious orthodox take on the war, right? Not wildly emotional in the sense of something like Francis Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, a little more emotional, right? Talking about, you know, betrayal and complete misunderstanding of the South Vietnamese people or the Vietnamese people were at large. But, you know, it's just, what I find is in the fullness of time, so much information has become available that these schools, to my mind, aren't that relevant anymore because we can just go in and research this like any war, right?

It doesn't have to be political or polarized. You know, you mentioned that there's like a division about West Berlin. You know, and there's the ones that, like you said, sorely who will say, you know, West Berlin is completely useless and Abrams have this solution. Someone like Greg Dadis will say, well, you know, West Berlin was much better than people think, right? Right. But, you know, I look at West Berlin and I say, you know, someone like Greg Das will say, well, he did more on pacification, village security, than people let on. But I find no evidence in the records that he does, right?

Like, in other words, he makes all the appropriate noises because he's, you know, roundly criticized by the Joint Chiefs in 1966, the Proven study when they basically say, look, you're, you know, you're spending all this effort in the wrong directions. you need to focus on the people, right, on securing the people. And so, you know, he kind of like recalibrate somewhat, you know, but he still is putting all of his effort into these big, big scale, big unit operations on the extreme frontiers of South, in the uninhabited parts of South Vietnam, trying to locate and destroy these North NVA infiltrators, right? So I just don't see that there's this other West Berlin.

I think that Westbrook, he's pretty much, committed to what he's doing throughout, and it doesn't work, and so they kick him upstairs, and they bring in Abrams. But then, you know, where I, the fault I find with this, this Louis Sorley view of Creighton Abrams, which I would infer is probably the Mark Moyer view, too, is that they act like he's doing things differently, whereas my book argues, no, he's not. These, these, these, These hunts for the logistics caches of the NVA and the Viet Cong inside South Vietnam, where they basically go and they say, if we can disarm these guys, and get all their food, get all their ammo, get all their weapons,

which they have to preposition because they can't drag the supplies behind them, then we can basically, you know, knock them out. Well, this raises the temple of the war. You know, you're no longer campaigning in specific seasons. You're campaigning all year around. So the days of combat go up for the grunts and they fight more because the NVA, the VC, fight for these caches because that's all the stuff they need. So these end up being like searching destroyed battles. And just like searching to destroy them, more times is up they don't find these logistics knows because they hunt and hunt and hunt and don't find them.

So they make those kind of revisionist historians say, well, you see this was working. Yeah, it worked to an extent. but as, you know, Clark Clifford, who replaces Matt Namara as Secretary of Defense, and as Melvin Laird, Nixon's Secretary of Defense, argue, they say, everything these guys lose can be replaced down the Ho Chi Minh Trail by deliveries from the Soviet Union and China, right? So we can hunt and destroy and destroy it forever, but they're just going to keep replacing this stuff, which they do. And the Cambodian incursion in 1970s is a perfect example of that. The U.S. goes into Cambodia.

that's like 2,000 killed or wounded and, you know, destroys a lot of supplies. They don't run into a lot of troops because they all, the NVA pulls back from the sanctuaries deeper into Cambodia. But they find a lot of stuff, destroy a lot of stuff, but it all gets replaced in pretty short order, right? So how do you, it's like trying to empty out a bathtub, you know, while the taps are running. You know, it's just like you're never going to really win. Yeah.

Yeah. And we can get into it, but, you know, some of the math that you've point to in terms of what the attrition strategy was meant to achieve versus the actual manpower resources available just to the North Vietnamese does call it a pretty serious question. But let's talk about some really big first order questions about the war overall that were on the minds of people like Eisenhower and Kennedy even before Johnson comes along and really, you know, fully commits the United States. I mean, there is this sort of reasonable question about how involved do you want to be in a, you know, counter-revolutionary,

war on the Eurasian landmass in a country that, you know, Korea is bad enough, at least South Korea is surrounded by water on three sides. South Vietnam, South Vietnam obviously does not have the same territorial advantages. So you have these sort of first order questions, which reasonably give people pause, certainly give Eisenhower pause. But then you also have, you know, this question of the threat of communism itself and what the war means for the onward advance of communism. Here, your position is the first words of the book. seems very clear that this was a war of choice and that these are my words not yours but i i take you to agree with him that the domino theory is sort of bunk can you can you say a little bit about that that that

that notion that the the war in south vietnam was important to halting the expansion of communism didn't make any sense well i wouldn't go that far what i would do say you're correct and i start out with the first sentence of the book is it's a war of choice and then the next couple of sentences I talk about how, you know, when Johnson is Kennedy's vice president, he goes on a trip to South Vietnam to meet Ziem, and he comes back and he says, you know, if we don't beat the communist in Vietnam, they're going to be landing on the beaches of Waikiki, right? So I said, this was not going to happen. It wasn't like we had to go and fight this war of, this existential war of national survival. Now, there was something to the dominant theory, obviously, I mean, because, you know, if they,

if they knock over South Vietnam and then move into Laos and Cambodia, which would have been relatively easy for them, because these are much less defensible and populated countries with very small armies. And then they could have moved on Thailand and Malaysia. This was a real threat, right? And then when you look at the internal musings of the Eisenhower administration, they're really worrying about Japan and Australia. Much like today where people say,

Well, if the U.S. doesn't defend Taiwan, then all these big Asian powers like Japan and Australia will feel a drift and they won't know what to anchor themselves to. And they're going to have to gravitate toward China because there won't be any kind of American hegemon there to tie themselves to. So there was the same sense that if we don't stand in South Vietnam during the, during the Eisenhower and then Kennedy administration, if we don't stand there, then that whole American position of the Pacific will unravel. So there were real issues. And that's why both Eisenhower and then Kennedy stay on. But that's the big distinction, you know, happens between them and LBJ. Because both of them say, okay, this is important, but it's got to be kind of a limited liability operation. You know, we can't, you know, put troops in there.

Kennedy's intensely suspicious of the uniformed military. He says, you know, once we let them in, once they get their nose under the tent, They want more money. They want more missions. They might more platforms. They want more bases. They want more everything. And then suddenly a small commitment becomes an enormous commitment.

And, you know, like every president in this era from Eisenhower to Nixon, they're all worried about the budget. They're all worried about deficits. They're all worried about the debt. And so they're trying to like, and they're trying to pass tax cuts and they're trying to build new federal departments, the great society. But, you know, Nixon has all of his federal initiative as well. So, and Eisenhower, of course, worried about the military Nusworkout. So they're trying to kind of keep the military commitment small. They're trying to enjoy a bit of a peace dividend after World War II in Korea, right?

And so they just, they're, they're determined to keep it small. Whereas Johnson comes in and says, look, there's no way this little third rate peasant state can stand against the United States of America. So let's just go in and get it over with. And then, this does not adequately assess, like, the real issues, you know, with North Vietnam. Like, there are real sources of strength and how long they can fight and how doggedly they'll fight. But what's so interesting about Johnson's actual strategy that you, you know, you analyze in some detail is the way you just phrased it, let's go in and get it over with, does not, to me, sort of accurately characterize what then happens. Instead, it's sort of this effort at exquisitely calibrated apple. of pressure that are going to ultimately persuade the North Vietnamese and the communists more broadly

to give up. I mean, there's a separate argument about whether or not throwing everything at it would have solved the problem either, and that's a separate, interesting debate. But it seems like one of the real sources of tragedy here. Well, you say it well in the book, I think, is that everyone in this story, or at least most of the major players in this story on the American side, all think they can have their cake and eat it too, or eat their cake and have it to, whichever way the phrase is conventionally applied. And that certainly applies to Johnson. He wants to draw the line against communism at South, at the South Vietnamese border, which is a legitimate debate about whether or not you would want to draw the line there. Likuan, you and others were certainly happy that we did,

but nevertheless, a legitimate debate. But then he does, but then there's this ambivalence about how much we're actually going to pay to do it. And the communist sense that ambivalence, right from the start. Right. And, you know, when, when Johnson and Mac Bundy, and Robert McNamara, when they sit down and they talk about there's no way how this little North Vietnamese peasant state can stand against the United States. That's because, you know, the U.S. at the time is just phenomenally rich. It has a $50 billion defense budget. This is, you know, back in early 1960s, so it's a big defense budget, you know, probably half a billion today, right? And they're like, so it doesn't take much. It won't take much for us to defeat them. In other words,

we're not going to have to throw a World War II type effort at North Vietnam. We can just like shave little bits off with our huge defense establishment, commit those to Vietnam, and defeat them. And it just, it just, Johnson is very unsophisticated about military matters. So he just says, yes, of course they won't be able to stand. But even the guys who peer more deeply into the question, like McNamara, like Mac Bundy, they like, they're pretty convinced too. They're like, look, we have the, you know, we have the ability to raise the level of pain on them to such a level that they're going to be like, okay, this is not worth it. So let's just cut a deal. And that's, you know, from all these administrations have the same objective. It's not to win the war.

It's to just get annoyed to the peace table where they will agree to respect the two-state solution, right? And so they figure, how hard can that be? We'll just hit them. We'll bomb North Vietnam. And then West Berlin comes in and says, we can like kill enough of them that they're going to like quail. And so we'll just kill them in ground warfare and we'll bomb them in North Vietnam and we'll bomb them in South Vietnam, wherever they appear.

And eventually they'll say, look, this is impossible. Let's make a deal. What role does the memory of Korea play? in all of this, but then especially in Johnson's thinking, because of course, this is not a distant memory. This is only a few years earlier, a decade earlier, that the Korean War played out some similar conditions. I mean, certainly some strong parallels between the two conflicts. The Korean War, of course, goes on. It starts badly.

It has a pretty good spell, and then it goes really badly, and then just kind of peters along bloodily and frustratingly until Dwight Eisenhower essentially threatens to start World War III if they don't knock it off. I mean, Korea is like the eternal nightmare that hangs over the Vietnam War, that, you know, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, and even Nixon are subject to. And the reason being is that in 1950, after Incheon, you know, we were poised to win that war, terminate the war. But then MacArthur pushes his luck, goes all the way up to the, you know, in the North Korea, Chinese border, Yalu River, and provokes that Chinese intervention by getting too close to the Chinese war. And so like 300,000 Chinese troops come swarming over the border. And then suddenly that war that looked to be over in 1950 is still going on in 1953. And it destroys Truman's presidency. He doesn't even run in 52 because he realizes that he's so unpopular because of this quagmire in Korea.

And Eisenhower wins by saying, I'm going to go to Korea and end this war. And he does because he still can threaten nuclear weapons. and have a credible threat of that. But barely, right? So this is like Lyndon Johnson's waking nightmare, that he's going to be turned into the Harry Truman of his day, that his otherwise popular presidency characterized by war on poverty, great society, all these domestic reforms,

civil rights act, voting rights act, that he's going to be derailed by this unwinnable quagmire of a war, right? So as a result, he has to do everything he can to prevent a Chinese intervention of the war. If he can just limit it to North Vietnam, he feels like he can pressure them enough to make them quit. But if he goes all out and he like mines Haiphong Harbor or he bombs the railways crossing from China into North Vietnam, then that might invite a Chinese intervention of the war. And he even has a same concern about Cambodia laws. If he goes in there, these are Chinese spheres of interest. that might provoke it, right? So they're always kind of like shrinking from taking these steps

because it might convert it into a Korean war. And I don't think that this is unrealistic. In other words, I think a revisionist might say, well, you see, this was an unrealistic threat. Like, they should have just gone for it and damn the consequences. But the Chinese per reddit, I mean, this is the cultural revolution. Mao is like, you know, fired up and looking for these sorts of distractions, and he sees this kind of war, this kind of revolutionary warfare as a way to extend the Chinese version of communism as opposed to the Soviet revisionist version of communism, and as a way to, you know, virtually annex Vietnam by extending Chinese military support and this Chinese doctrine of revolution of warfare into the Vietnam War.

There's no shortage of irony, though, is there that this great fear that over doing it is going to lead to disaster or quagmire or some combination of the two. I mean, ultimately what Johnson gets is quagmire, politically fatal quagmire. And it seems to me, I mean, maybe you would say this is a revisionist strain of thought, but it does seem to me that in your account of his concern of the Korean legacy, he sort of learns half the lesson or a partial lesson, which is, it's a good lesson, which is you can overplay your hand. And when you overplay your hand, there could be bad consequences. But then he doesn't take the Eisenhower part of the story seriously enough, whereas Eisenhower, faced with a series of very bad options, actually does

threaten massive escalation, and it does actually work. And it works because the world takes Dwight Eisenhower seriously, or at least the Chinese do, and the Russians do. It also works because the Chinese don't have a nuclear weapon, right? Whereas, you know, they do have a nuclear weapon by the time of Vietnam. And that, you know, in the nuclear rattling the nuclear Saber, you know, after the NBN Fu, you know, John Foster Dulles, Ike's Secretary of State, you know, famously offers Georges Bido, the French Prime Minister, two atomic bombs to drop on the Viet Minh surrounding the NBN Fu. And, you know, the French refuse, right?

And there's a big debate inside the Joint Chiefs in Washington. And, you know, the heads of the Air Force and the Navy are four nuclear strikes on the vietnam gather at the Nbian foo. And Matthew Ridgeway, the Army Chief of Staff, says, no, no. He says, like, because this will then suck us into this land war in Asia. And, you know, and we'll never get out of it, right? So, and he rightly perceives that, you know, getting into this war is going to basically drag the Americans into a kind of quicksand.

There is no, there's, there's, there's no visible way to terminate it because the will of the North Vietnamese to unify the country and to bring the country under a communist regime is unlimited. And they have the sheep, they have the resources, they have the population, they have the military aged population, and they have these great power of benefactors who will keep them going. And so their will is unlimited. And someone like Ridgeway, you know, already in 1954, perceives this. It says, what are you even thinking about? You know, it's much more than bombing this army.

they'll replace that army and they'll keep coming. And then what do we do once we're committed to this war? So can we talk about some of these strategic concepts and then how they trickle down into operational concepts? This is where I found your book really, really interesting. And in particular, this notion of graduated pressure. Is graduated pressure, is it kind of the successor to massive retaliation and flexible response? Or is it sort of, is that a category error? Is it a different place?

Obviously, massive retaliation is the, is it? Is the Eisenhower, you know, if you mess with me in Europe, obviously I don't have the troops to deal with you Soviet Union, but I have nuclear weapons and I intend to use them. And then Kennedy wants something more flexible to deal with different kinds of contingencies. Where does graduated pressure fit into this? That's a great question because, you know, obviously Eisenhower to save money had introduced New Look. And New Look was like relying on nuclear weapons, right? So it's always, don't try to push us around because, you know, we're going to draw down our convention. forces, but if you drive into Europe or you drive into Korea, we're just going to drop noose on you.

And that's sort of the massive assured response, right? When then Kennedy comes in and says, well, this is not really a feasible defense doctor because there's so many kind of gray areas where we have to engage where you're not going to escalate to a nuclear war, and they know it, right? Because by now, the international odium of dropping a nuclear weapon is such that you just can't do it lightly, right, like Newlook implies. So graduated pressure fits into this flexible response idea. But the reason your question is so good is because that's the point I'm making the book is that on its face, it seems to fit into flexible response.

Well, we're going to graduate the pressure upward. We're going to keep adding pressure until they break. But flexible response was premised on you start like low. I mean, you'd go all the way to a full on conventional intervention. with everything you got or even nuclear strike, if need be. And because of this fear of involving the Chinese and the Soviets, they block these upper rungs of flexible response. And so graduated pressure just becomes like graduating pressure

in sort of the middle of the spectrum and then stop. And it immediately dawns on the North Vietnamese and their great power backers that this is where the U.S. is, that they're not going to go all the way, that they're not going to, they're not going to flirt with a war with communist China or the Soviet Union, that they are going to stop. And so there's no incentive for these guys to go to the peace table, to make a deal, to agree to a two-state solution, because they know the Americans aren't going to go all the way. What kind of policy planning process, and I realize that term might be not well applied to the Johnson administration as a function

in practice, but what? What kind of process leads to this outcome and talk about some of the, this, the outcome of this strategic conception? And, you know, who are the major personalities involved in it? Yeah, another great question. You know, I talk in the book, I talk, I say that these Johnson councils of war in the White House were like a political science seminar because all the, all the major decision makers were, it was LBJ kind of listening. And it was Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor, Dean Russ, Secretary of State, and they would, and their deputies, and they would talk in these terms about, you know, graduated

pressure. Well, if we signal this much strength and they don't get the message, then we'll signal a little more. If they don't get the message, then we'll signal a little more. And you have, this is the time when Johnson's saying, you know, nobody can even bomb an outhouse in North Vietnam without my permission. So the White House, is controlling this war, very tight, saying we've got to keep the dogs of war on a tight leash, right? So they don't run in luck and then bring in the Chinese, right? So they keep saying this. Now, meanwhile, the joint chiefs are all going, this is insane. Like, this is not going to work. They are not going to respond to these little pinpricks, these surgical strikes,

dropping a bridge here, taking out a road there, taking out a power plant over there, taking out a radar station along the coast. No, they need, we need to go in with like, and establish, like, what they call an outer parameter of violence, like the level of violence that they will be really shocked by. And then they'll be like, whoa, we really need to do something, you know, do some kind of deal with the Americans. But again, Johnson shrinks from that, not only because he's fearful of a Soviet or Chinese intervention,

but because he thinks that will then anger the North Vietnamese and make them less willing to negotiate. So he's trying to kind of cajole him. I'm going really easy on you. I could go harder, but I'm going easy on you because I want you to make a deal with me, right? And so they never responded to this. And he can't raise the pressure higher without risking a wider war. So he's kind of trapped in this thing.

The thing that's interesting about the Joint Chiefs, and that's that great book by H.R. McMaster, Derelliction of Duty. It's a really good study. You put that together with Halberstam's the best and the brightest. and you see this incredibly timid conduct by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They all know better. They all know that this strategy for Vietnam is a dog. It's not going to work.

And they know it's got to word not only because of their professional viewpoints, but because they were game it, 1964, 1965, 1966, the Sigma Games. They game this out every year, two, three iterations of the game. And North Vietnam wins every time. under almost all circumstances. And the only way for the U.S. to win, if it can win, I don't think they ever really decide, other than dropping nuclear bombs,

which they're not going to do, is to really maximally raise the force levels and sort of Americanize the war, take over everything, but that's not going to happen either due to budgetary restrictions. But they do say, look, we have to do more. But they don't tell the president that, because they're all afraid of Lyndon Johnson. This is McMaster's book brings us

out brilliantly. You know, they're just terrified of him. He's completely cowed them. And they know that if they protest, he's going to replace them with somebody else or just kind of, or put them in the outroofs so they're no longer privy to like sort of the internal decision making of the administration. So the decision making ends up being LBJ, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Russ, and a couple of others. Yeah. Yeah, it does seem like a curious theory of victory that we are going to be willing to escalate incrementally while it nevertheless being entirely clear that our escalation has a ceiling. I wonder at the highest, at the political level in the White House around the table, is there any reflection on that at any point that that's got sort of an obvious flaw?

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, remember Curtis LeMay, who's, you know, bombs away LeMay, who's chief of staff of the Air Force in the early stages of the war. he's the one who's always in favor of it, he puts it bombing them into the Stone Age. And he says, you know, this, he says there's no point in, you know, swatting flies in South Vietnam, when we should be going after the manure piles in North Vietnam that sustain the NVA and the VC troops in South Vietnam. And so he just wants this like thorough growing, thoroughgoing devastation of North Vietnam with, you know, with strategic bombing. But also, you know, it wants amphibious invasions with U.S. troops. the North Vietnam. So there's an understanding that that's where you need to be if you really

intend to win this war. But again, for political reasons, they don't want to go that far. But, you know, that's another issue that I have with the way the war is handled by historians is I feel it too often they look at it discreetly as like the Vietnam War. And all these guys like leaning over a map in Washington looking at Southeast. Asian figuring out what to do. When in fact, in this where I try to establish in the book, this is much wider context of the war. This war is something that's happening in an American policy that is much broader. So they're looking at parallel threats all over the world in Europe, the Middle East, and in Korea where you've got like the Pueblo incident in 1968

and then Taiwan Street. And they've got to make detachments to all these areas. And the cost of these detachments and the cost of these operations are huge in addition to the costs of Vietnam. And then you've got all the American domestic policy under all presidents, which is expensive. And you've got, and so they don't have unlimited funds to pour into Vietnam. So even if you say, okay, LeMay was right, we shouldn't have gone all the way, that would have been a much more expensive war that would have sucked all the residual force capability out of the U.S. military, All the reserve forces that were made that were like earmarked for other contingencies, like a Soviet invasion of Central Europe, you know, would have been sent to Vietnam.

That was just ludicrous. That was not going to happen. So, and even as it was, but my book shows how the end of the war, we basically drawn down our reserve forces. So there's like one reserve division left in the United States that can go anywhere. Because like, you know, you got seven army and two marine divisions in South Vietnam, right? And so everything's like stretched to the breaking point. All the R&D programs for the Defense Department are being put on hold. Things like Merv warheads for ICBMs, things like an ABM system, things like fourth generation

fighters. Everything's being put on a hold to pay for this war. And this is at a time when inflation is out of control, it doubles in the mid-60s, doubles again by 1970. When the deficits are out of control, the national debt is escalating. quickly, we're about to devalue the dollar in 1971 and go off the gold standard because of the impacts of this war. So in other words, I feel like the revisionist's argument that we could have done so much more and won this war, I say, you know, with what money and with what troops?

The decision making in Johnson Circle puts me in mind of a great piece that Jim Webb wrote, this is a long time ago. I want to say this is like 20 years ago, and I want to say it was in the Washington Post. And it was complaining about the treatment in, you know, popular culture of the baby boomers as a generation. And the piece makes this point that has stuck with me ever since. He sort of describes, I think he's describing an attack he was part of in Vietnam. And he says, you know, this kid over here who did this incredibly brave thing and who, by the way, was a volunteer in the Marines.

Well, he was a baby boomer. And it kind of gives a list of people like that. And then it starts talking about people like Johnson's sort of younger set of advisors. And last time I checked those guys were all in the quote unquote greatest generation. And I'm pretty sure they're the ones responsible for this. And it was the baby boomers fighting. That piece has always stuck with me for some reason. Let me ask you about how this concept of graduated pressure then trickles down onto the battlefield.

So we've mentioned Westmoreland a number of times. He takes command kind of at the start of this phase of major combat operations, major American combat operations in Vietnam. Talk about search and destroy, these air mobile tactics. How does the ground war take shape? Well, I mean, he's, you know, in his first commander's estimate in 1965, Westmoren says, well, like, ideally to win this war, I would have a much bigger army, you know, 700,000 troops. And I would be authorized to take the flight into North Vietnam and into Laos and Cambodia to, you know, cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia and into North Vietnam to basically wrong foot the North Vietnamese army, you know, force them to leave their troops. troops at home to defend against this U.S. invasion instead of sending them south on the Ho Chi Man Trail to infiltrate South Vietnam. But, you know, Johnson's like, well, that's never going to

happen because, as I said, again, I feel like a lot of revisions think that we had unlimited potent, we didn't. You know, we had all these other global commitments. So Johnson's like, it's not he's averse to sending more troops to Vietnam. He's averse to the expense of it and the fact that it's going to draw troops out of every other theater of the U.S. U.S. is currently responsible for. So he's like, you know, I'm authorizing you, you know, three, four, five hundred thousand troops. Surely you can do something with this, right? And, and Westwood says, okay, well, if that's all I got, you know, I'll just, I'll fight this search and destroy campaign where I will basically kill, I'll go on these search and destroy

missions, find the NVA infiltrators, find the VIA main force units, and I'll kill so many of that, you know, will reach the crossover point around, you know, this is 1965. He said by 1968, we should be killing more of them than they can put into the pipeline. And then they're going to say, okay, I give up. So, you know, that's the idea. And, you know, that you'll just run up the body count to such a high number that the North Vietnamese won't be able to take it anymore. Well, you know, my book makes the following arguments, A, they had two million young men of military age that weren't even serving. And they get 120,000 new young men at military age who turn 18 every year

in North Vietnam, a country of 20 million people. So you weren't going to be able to kill enough, right? And so, and then B, 90% of search and destroy operations, more than 90% of the surge and destroy operations make no contact with the enemy. So you're running these enormously expensive, intensive operations with, you know, air, ground, munitions, fuel. You know, you're spending 45, you're burning 45 million gallons of fuel a day in Vietnam in 1967, right? Running all these operations, all these operations. And most of them aren't finding the enemy. So Search and Destroy is hugely, hugely inefficient, hugely costly and hugely and efficient. C. Certainly destroying neglects the overriding question of the war, which is population

security. You know, while Westbourne is committing forces to these uninhabited areas like the Iodrang Valley in the Central Highlands or Dacto or Kaysan, you know, out on the outer frontier of South Vietnam where nobody lives. All these villages are falling under Viet Cong control because there's nobody there to protect them except for the Arvin. And everybody knows that the Arvon's not doing its job. It stays in this little basis on the outskirts of towns and it doesn't go into the villages and doesn't stay in the villages, doesn't protect the villages. And in fact, when they do go into the villages, they steal all their chickens and they rape the girls and all that kind of stuff, right? So they're not even really well-liked and they've become, it's easy for the

vicaraturedive as bad guys. So while Westbillet is flailing around on the periphery, because country is falling more and more and more under the Yukon control, which is ultimately what undoes it, this sheer ineffectiveness of his style of war. And that's why it's hoped that Craden Abrams, who replaces him in 1968, in June of 68, that he will bring in a new method and kind of go from the frontiers of South Vietnam where West Berlin is operating to what Abrams calls the demographic frontier, where the population lives, and he'll focus there and I'll win the war. But as my book demonstrates, he doesn't really translate it in anything real or lasting. Well, let me ask you a question right there then.

You obviously, you criticize the execution, but you have some degree of sympathy to the idea of a more population-centric strategy and mechanisms like the combined action platoons and things like that. Is there, these are the sorely title, right? Like, is there a better war at any point that was possible, that maybe there's no coup in 63 that takes down DM, where, you know, I don't want to complicate this too much, but is there an alternative history here at any point, in your view, where the line is held against the North Vietnamese at less cost to the United States, potentially for much longer through use of population-centric tactics or what have you. Go ahead. I'd say the alternative is something like where we are intervening on behalf of. of a country like Zelensky's Ukraine, right? Where you have a popular leadership and a state that, you know, that is viewed as legitimate

by its people, and you have a military that's fighting for its national survival and fights hard. What we have in South Vietnam is a situation exactly like Afghanistan. You have an illegitimate government. You have an illegitimate state. A state that's not recognized as such a thing by the people because, you know, they're being harassed, they're being bullied, they're being neglected by this, by this, they're being shaken down by their provincial governors and district officials and the military coming through and abused.

So, and we were aware of this throughout. So again, this is another thing that I feel like revisionists don't, don't deal with, is that they don't say, they don't ever look at the nature of the South Vietnam regime and how unpopular it was. because it's basically this big patronage game where, you know, remember you have ZEM, and then ZEM is followed by three different, well, dozens, really, but like three major coup governments. And each time there's a coup, you know, in 63, 64, 65, 66, those are the main ones.

There's a shuffling of all the province chiefs, all the district officials, all the military heads, all the bureaucratic and ministerial heads, because the new guys have to put their guys in. So the state functions all fall apart and have to be begun again by people that are usually not very competent. And so the whole country is kind of ungoverned during these periods. And you always see this big surge of Viet Cong activity because there's nobody kind of lining the shop. And so this goes on and on and on. And then, you know, and there's never a time in the entire history of South Vietnam where government officials and Arvin and VNAF generals are seen as competent and seen as brave and seen in. enterprising and seen as resourceful. No, they're always seen as parasitic and lazy and corrupt and

unreliable and nasty, you know, so, I mean, with rare exceptions, right? So I'm saying, like, how do you come in and take a regime such as that, which has lost the loyalty of its 18 million citizens and somehow stand it up and make it popular and make it survive? This is the underlying problem that every president, every MACV commander is aware of that we, that if only we had their guys on our side instead of them. You know, so they always say, why are the North Vietnamese so good and these guys are so bad? Well, it's because the North Vietnamese, you know, believed in what they were doing.

These were true believers, you know, communists and those that weren't, they were coerced into being true believers or purged, right? And so, and but for the most part, these were poor developing companies. So the North Vietnamese were able to implant a level of fairness and equality that they couldn't even glimpse in South Vietnam. And so this fact alone made it very hard to conjure a scenario in which the United States and South Vietnam would win because South Vietnam was so unable to help itself. Is there any point in the timeline? I mean, I find it very plausible that by the time you're in, you know, 1964, things have already gone so horribly wrong. that this massive war, massive American war, I should say, that erupts from it is, it's all variations on a failure. You've already had strategic failure to even find yourself in this

situation in the first place. Can you go left on the timeline to any point where, where this alternative is possible, or are South Korean politics so screwed from the start that it's just, in your view, out of the question? Well, I mean, there was a belief in Zem, you know, when you think about the beginnings in the 1950s and then, and then, you know, after, and after 1954, you know, we talked, we talked about him as the miracle man and that, you know, he was the ultimate third force candidate that he was tainted neither by the French nor by the communists, that he was a true non-communist Vietnamese nationals and who had been, had taken a very principled stand against both the French and the communists.

That's why he was living in exile in New Jersey in 1954 because he couldn't be in Vietnam because the Min wanted to purge him, right? And he seemed like a brave man with the courage of his convictions. And so I think that's what gave the U.S. hope going into it. But once in power, he made this whole thing, like his successors, a family affair. He had three brothers who he put into the sort of power positions in the South Vietnamese government and just sort of ran it increasingly tyrannically and sent about, you know, trying to kind of neuter the South Vietnamese military so there wouldn't be any coup threats and putting his own placement into all the key ministries. And this is what leads to the great sort of Buddhist struggle movement in the 1962, 63.

when the Buddhists say enough, you know, and he based, and Diem based himself too much on the Roman Catholics of South Vietnam, who were only 20% of the population. And so there's this sort of outcry by the Buddhists who are more like 40% of the population, but also by all the students who feel like they're being stifled by this very despotic regime, which had had had such early promise and had received so much American aid. So this is what persuades even John of Kennedy. Look, we need to get rid of ZEM.

and Kennedy thinks, if we get rid of Ziam, we can bring in these kind of young, energetic, dynamic officers who will take the bull by the horns and straighten things out in South Vietnam, win the fight against the VC and establish a strong state in South Vietnam, which will then have elections and return to democracy. And none of that ever happens, right? It's just a kind of sequence of disappointments, all charted by the U.S. Embassy. the records coming back from all, you know, all the U.S. ambassadors, you know, Lodge, Nolting, bunker. You know, they're all like saying, God, you know, we try so hard to make these guys behave like

a, you know, like a accountable democratic state and they won't, you know. And so there's no time when you can really look at it. The revisionists would say, oh, well, around 1969, 70, everything was improving because Nixon had sort of up the ante and Abrams had gone after all the logistics caches and really crimped their supply lines and and they were, you know, Viet Cong activity had really slowed down and the U.S. and the South Venus had pacified war villages taking it back under government control. But this was all temporary. You know, the NVA and the VC had had a really good nose for what was going on. And when they saw, like, the American strengthening

or kind of getting the upper hand in any area, they would just melt away, right? And they would lay low. And they would exert their pressure indirectly. Like nighttime business to villages, threatening people, you know, murdering officials to, you know, to encourage the others, you know, not to collaborate with the American South Vietnamese regime.

So they were waiting. They were waiting because they knew that the U.S. timeline was very limited. that Nixon was on this kind of withdrawal plan to get out of Vietnam, and when that happened, they would reemerge. So I want to go back to the beginning in a second and ask you one more question about politics and patronage and things like that, but just to stick where we are for a second here, I was struck by the confidence with which you assert in the book that, you know, Vietnamization and the end of the war from the American perspective, you know,

is going to condemn the South Vietnamese to certain defeat. That's your view. You know, I just struck by, I'm curious your response. I'm struck by the actual defeat as it went down in 1975. It follows on Watergate and the destruction of Nixon's power and his succession by a president, you know, less committed to the policies that Nixon supported. And then, of course, by the U.S. Congress pulling support. So you do have events in American politics that essentially undermine any ability of the United

States to respond in any way supportive of the South Vietnamese when the North Vietnamese predictably make another play for total control of South Vietnam. So, you know, you could imagine a world, right, without Watergate and a world where America remains committed on some level to re-intervention on some level to prevent the fall of Saigon. Would that be wise? I don't know. That's another, that's another question. But it's your confidence that the defeat was certain that struck me. Why do you, why do you think that? Well, I mean, you're right in that. In 1972, the North Vietnamese Army was well in the way to winning the war, and then Nixon, who had, you know, have Vietnamized a lot of capabilities, literally had to fly, you know, U.S. strike aircraft and B-502s, all the way back

from the United States, back to Southeast Asia to stop this Easter offensive in 1972. So you're right, if they've done the same thing in 1975, you might have had the same result. But, you know, by the time, when I'm writing this book, by the time I get to 1970, I've been so privy to the outcry in Congress and in the media and in the streets against this war. And so the effect in Congress is, you know, they're avoiding the talking Gulf resolution. They're passing amendments saying, you know, no more U.S. ground troops in Cambodia or Laos. You know, the Senate version said no air personnel either, but the House stripped that out, which is why you go into Laos and 71. as so many American pilots could kill.

But between 72 and 75, there's just this revulsion inside the United States against the war in sort of establishment circles. And it has to do with the interminable nature of the war that just goes on and on and on. But the cost of the war, the cost of the war is really high. And so they're cutting the budget. They're cutting the aid budget to Vietnam.

That's why I say Vietnamization is such a sham. Nixon gives them all this stuff like tanks and ships and aircraft and helicopters and artillery and but they don't get the fuel they don't get the munitions they don't get the training and so you're you know between 72 and 75 that the south vietnamese military is converting fighter pilots to infantrymen because they can't get hours in the cockpit because there's you know because of the arab oil shock fuel is too expensive the u.s isn't giving them any fuel they have they have far lit whereas they always had more munitions than the North Fiatimae's, now they have far less munitions, right? So the vialization to me is just like a way

for window dressing for Nixon to say, well, if and when they fall, it's their fault, not mine, right? So the point is, is yes, if Nixon had been still represent and he'd gone in in 75, like he'd gone in in 72, they would have staved off defeat. But then how many more years were American taxpayers willing to keep bankrolling this South Vietnamese state that continue to, needed America lingering in the background to bail them out. One last question. I want to be respectful of your time, but I've been struck by your, you know, your critique of South Vietnamese politics and your parallels that you draw to Afghanistan.

And I don't even really know how to ask this question. It's just something I've been resting with since my own time in Afghanistan. I mean, if I had taken a poll in 2010, where I was in Central Helmand province, of all the Afghans I knew, to include the Afghan soldiers that we were fighting alongside, And I asked them, hey, in 10 years or so, when the Americans have left, do you think the government in Kabul will still be in control of Central Homeland Province? I promise you it would have been a 0% return, 0% to include amongst the soldiers, all of whom had, as it were, their own post-war, post-American plans about what they were going to do when the Afghan National Army collapsed. And it would tell you what they were. So, like, it rings true.

And I understand where you're coming from. On the other hand, it strikes me as, and again, this is just like something I'm thinking theory. and have been thinking through for some time now without it ever resolving itself in my mind. We as Americans have this notion of good government as something which is, you know, small our Republican, public-spirited, fair, and that's the source of its legitimacy, right? And we look down on patronage and, you know, setting up your friends and, you know, your family and positions where they're going to profit as obviously corrupt. And that's obviously going to be unpopular.

And this just always struck me as a bit brittle. That is to say that because we felt that government had to be a particular kind of Western vision of government, that's what we would insist upon. It would then fail because people who were put into positions of various forms of smaller Republican authority would treat it like a patronage position anyway. And the whole thing was just a mess. And I, you know, I'm just, I guess what I'm pressing back on a little bit is, is what I take to be the implication of your points that there was no sort of nonmodern, non-Western form of government that might have been successful. I mean, that is to say is, are there, are there forms of

patronage that are less, or forms of corruption, that are less corrupt or less predatory than others, is this lack of a political vision seems to me to be consistent in our failure in Afghanistan and Vietnam, this, this, this lack of a nuanced grasp of the local politics and our ability to navigate them. And that's not really a question. That's more of just a mess of a comment, but any response to it would be most welcome. Yeah, no, it's a great question. And, you know, obviously, Afghanistan is so much different from South Vietnam, right, because Afghanistan is, You're dealing with all of these different nationalities, ethnic groups, jostling, competing with each other inside Afghanistan, right? Strangling for control.

And you don't have that ethnic fragmentation in South Vietnam. Southern Vietnam, you have the possibility where the people are largely Vietnamese with some ethnic minorities on the frontiers, the molten yards and so forth. You could cohere a popular country, right? That was the whole hope behind Ziam. And I don't, you know, nobody expected this to become the classic sort of Jefferson. Sonian democracy. No, it was more like, you know, you look at Max Boots book on Ed Lansdale, you know, The Road Not Taken, you know, talk about how, you know, you're looking for McSysai type figure, the guy who ran the Philippines and defeated the hook insurgency in the 1950s. And,

you know, McSysai was, was somebody who was, you know, who was, he was a strong man, but he was not corrupt, right? And he really brought order and he brought, you know, he pacified the country. and stabilize the country and earn the gratitude of the Filipino people and kind of like, you know, save, you know, Filipino democracy, if you will. That's the kind of figure that they were looking for it. And that's the kind of figure who never emerges in South Vietnam. And so if they had had one of these coup governments and some strong general had emerged who had, you know, taken, you know, the essential reforms to make the government

popular, that's all that would have mattered. It wouldn't have mattered if they kept the parliament open if he had just kind of created, you know, he stabilized the country and created security. But in fact, what you see in every, in first CM and then all the coup governments, for example, take the example, a very important example of land reform. This is the most important issue in South Vietnam because the land had all been owned by the French. And then when the French scuttle, these big, you know, sort of South Vietnamese oligards take over. And so these peasants are all as basically sharecroppers on these rich guys' absentee landlords land. So it's like we need to give them land the way when the Viet Cong come in, they seize the

estates and give it to the people. We need to do the same thing and sell it. They won't do it because their buddies are the oligarchs. And so the Vietnamese people aren't, the self-eatio aren't stupid, they see this. And they're saying, well, I'm not going to attach myself to this regime as a taxpayer, as a soldier, as a supporter, until it does something good for me. And it never does. Jeffrey Warro, author of The Vietnam War, a military history.

It's been a really, really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. That was great. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.