H.R. McMaster and the "lessons of Vietnam"

Review of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster (1997)

This book is often cited as being one of the most influential among today's officer corps, describing the shortcomings of the top military officials in the Vietnam War. The lesson from it is said to be that senior military officials, in particular the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), should make sure the President receives the clear opinions and recommendations from them. Scott Ritter summarizes the reputation of the book this way (see link at the end of this post):

Since its publication in 1998 [sic], US Army Colonel H. R. McMasters' "Dereliction of Duty", an indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the escalation of the Vietnam War, has been required reading for a generation of US Military leaders. Drawing upon recently-declassified documents, McMasters outlines the betrayal of the American military during the Vietnam War by its own leaders, the General officers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who put their own career ambitions ahead of the welfare and well being of their troops, allowing the politicization of the Vietnam War to occur to the point that a war all knew to be un-winnable (and unjust) was sustained for many years by those afraid to speak out lest they threaten their career and reputation.

Reading the book itself, I can only marvel at how it achieved such a reputation. Most of Dereliction of Duty is a tedious account of meetings and memo exchanges of civilian and military officials during the Kennedy and Johnson admistrations about various aspects of the Vietnam War up through most of 1965, the year Johnson "Americanized" the war by putting in large number of US troops and committing them to offensive combat, effectively putting the United States rather than South Vietnamese forces in the lead in the war.

McMaster tells the story of the decision-making process and seems to implictly assume that a decision against JCS advice was wrong. But the narrative account in the book doesn't demonstrate that. On the contrary, the JCS comes off as seriously dysfunctional.

And Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis "Nuke" LeMay comes off as a borderline crackpot; after retiring from the service, he became George Wallace's running mate in the 1968 Presidential election. LeMay was said to be the model for the Gen. Jack D. Ripper character in Dr. Strangelove; there was certainly a resemblance.

Because McMaster does not evaluate the quality of the advice being offered, he allows the reader a lot of latitude to read what they want to hear into it, including the version that Ritter's comment summarizes. And much of the officer corps wanted to hear that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his "Whiz Kids" screwed up the Vietnam War by not listening to them. Ritter focuses on the failure of the JCS. But the thrust of that criticism was that they didn't make the civilians listen to them enough. It's more like a thinly-disguised version of the stab-in-the-back theory of the loss of the Vietnam War, this version focusing on how the civilians screwed up the JCS's sage advice.

McMaster's work is newly relevant because he is one of the chief participants in the Pentagon study due to make recommendations soon on the New Way Forward in the Iraq War. As I've been saying the last few weeks, the road into Iraq was paved with bad Second World War analogies; the road out so far has been paved with bad Vietnam War analogies. McMaster's version of the "lessons of Vietnam" may loom large in the New Way Forward Bush is scheduled to unveil in January.

Telling management what they want to hear

The book offers some valuable detail on the decision-making process. But the narrative portion suffers from two fundamental flaws. One is that the phenomenon that McMaster describes and criticizes of managers tailoring their recommendations to what they believe the next level of management wants to hear and avoiding giving them bad news is a more general organizational tendency (as any reader of Dilbert is aware). It's a major them in management studies focusing on corporations. His heavy focus on personalities leaves the impression that this happened because of individual failings. Which is certainly true, as far as it goes. But without addressing the institutional dynamics involved, he doesn't provide a meaningful picture of why this happens. Much less what likely solutions may be.

Daniel Ellsberg (who is mentioned in passing in McMaster's book as a Pentagon analyst) looked at this systematic bureacratic process in his long essay, "The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine", published in Papers on the War (1972). Ellsberg argued that, contrary to the impression that American policymakers became progressively stuck without realizing the risks involved, that what was actually happening was that they were making decisions to stave off immediately unfavorable consequences without assuming that they were doing all that was necessary:

Indeed, what needs explaining is not how optimism led regularly to decisions to escalate - there is no such pattern, nor even a major instance through 1968 - but how bureaucratic optimism developed after, and out of, decisions to expland the nature of U.S. involvement. Those decisions, as revealed in internal documents, reflected more desperation than hope.

The specific years in which these new involvements and new programs were chosen and begun were without exception periods of crisis and pessimism, generally far darker than ever admitted to the public. Nor, in retrospect, do the grave assessments during these periods appear nearly so distorted or unfounded as do the moods of optimism that regularly came later. Ignorance and foolish proposals abounded throughout the two decades. Yet in the actual years of decision, the gap between estimate and reality concerning the current situation and the prospects of the specific option actually chosen was relatively small: small enough that it is hard to argue that more realism or pessimism would have changed the decision. (my emphasis)

The last observation is important in considering the suggestion of McMaster's book that if the civilian policymakers had only listened more fully and receptively to the JCS, that they would have made qualitatively better decisions. I say "suggestion", because it's hard to credit the book with real analytical conclusions.

I should note here for anyone who thinks of Daniel Ellsberg only as a peacenik, that the Pentagon Papers he became famous for revealing were actually a study of the decision-making process in the early years of the Vietnam War, a study in which he participated. Whatever you think about his politics, he's actually an expert on the decision-making for the Vietnam War.

McMaster actually provides a good deal of supporting factual material for Ellsberg's argument just quoted. (See the discussion below of Marine Commandant Greene.) Which brings me to the second major failing of his book.

Don't question the assumptions

The process Ellsberg describes is one in which progressive decisions are made based on a common set of assumptions, but policymakers fail to question the flaws in the underlying assumptions. But McMasters in Dereliction of Duty doesn't address the major flawed assumptions that both civilians and military advisers shared about Vietnam leading up to 1965. And while this isn't necessary for the narrative description of the decision-making process, it creates a distorted picture by omitting any evaluation of the quality of the advice and decisions on all sides.

And there were flawed assumptions galore: that the USSR and China were a monolithic Communist alliance; that Vietnam was a tool of China in that alliance; that Vietnam was vital to American interests; that all of Southeast Asia would fall to Communism and therefore to Chinese domination if the Communists won in South Vietnam (the "domino theory"); that the insurgency in South Vietnam was controlled by Hanoi; that conventional warfare could defeat a large scale guerrilla insurgency with substantial popular support; that the Americans had as much or more of a stake in the outcome as the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF; the Vietcong) did.

McMaster mentions points in time where one or another of these assumptions was questioned, at least in part. But by focusing so narrowly on the process of the interaction between the JCS and the civilian leadership, he inevitably leaves the impression - and apparently intends to do so - that the problems in this interaction were at the base of the American failure in Vietnam. But since none of the generals were advising that whole enterprise was based on gross misconceptions, it's hard to see how improvement process in the delivery of military advice would have made any substantial difference in the outcome.

Did the civilians hear about the military problems?

McMaster relies mostly on narrative until late in the book, when the text becomes more and more polemical. And I say "polemical" because his analysis does seem to be based in any obvious way in the evidence his narrative provides. He argues in the Epilogue:

Because forthright communication between top civilian and military officials in the Johnson administration was never developed, there was no reconciliation of McNamara's intention to limit the American military effort sharply and the Chiefs' assessment that the United States could not possibly win under such conditions. If they had attempted to reconcile those positions, they could not have helped but recognize the futility of the American war effort.

If the students at the war colleges, concentrated on the last couple of chapters and the epilogue instead of slogging through the rather mind-numbing descriptions of interminable conferences and memorandum exchanges, they might draw the conclusion from that statement just quoted that the JCS were warning that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

But as McMaster's narrative itself shows, that was not the case. On the contrary, the Chiefs come off like they are chomping at the bit to escalate faster. Their immediate complaint, which retrospectively became an alibi and (in distorted form) an element in the stab-in-the-back version of the Vietnam War loss, was that not all of their suggestions for escalating the war were adopted as soon as they were made. And if they had been, we would have achieved a glorious victory in Vietnam. In fact, they were still at it 1968, when Clark Clifford took over as Secretary of Defense. With half a million American troops in Vietnam and after three years of an extensive bombing campaign, the Chiefs were asking for still more troops though they also still couldn't guarantee success.

The JCS never tried to convince the civilian policymakers that the Vietnam War was futile. It's an artful twist to claim that their complaints about not doing more faster somehow added up to their warning of the "futility" of the war.

In fact, McMaster's own narrative slaps the reader in the face with good reasons why civilian policymakers should have been skeptical about the Chiefs' advice. It's hard to convey, even in a long review, the level of dysfunction McMaster's narrative shows among the service chiefs. The inter-service posturing was hard to miss: We need Marines to do this! No, we need the Army! No, we can handle it all by air power!

It's also clear from his narrative that civilian policymakers were aware of the Chiefs' complaints about what they saw as the Johson administration's excessive restraint in the war. McMaster describes a couple of occasions in which Marine Commandant Wallace Greene made his dissenting opinions explicit to civilian policymakers.

One comes from a meeting in July, 1965 between the JCS and members of the House Armed Services Committee, a meeting which took place in the office of the Committee Chairman, Mendel Rivers of South Carolina. The Army and Air Force chiefs gave estimates of the number of troops they thought would be required that were lower than what they had estimated in internal discussions. McMaster writes:

[Admiral David] McDonald said that the Navy would require 40,000 more sailors, but did not state whether the increase would require mobilization of reserve forces. Although Green believed that the committee members must have deduced from the discussion the need for mobilization, the Chiefs never made that requirement explicit. Near the end of the meeting, one of the legislators asked Greene directly how many men would be needed to win the war in Vietnam. Amid the confusing and contradictory estimates of his colleagues, however, Greene's estimate of five hundred thousand made no visible impression on the legislators. (my emphasis)

In other words, the Congressmen heard Greene's high estimate - and ignored it.

In a later meeting that same month, President Johnson met with the JCS and the service secretaries (who are civilian officials). McNamara had made it clear he wanted the discussion restricted to three options that had been previously defined. McMaster writes:

Greene did not abide by McNamara's "ground rules." The Marine commandant began speaking softly. The president told Green, "I don't have a hearing aid." Greene responded, "Well, Mr. President, I'll speak louder and make sure that you and everyone else in this room hears what I have to say." McNamara was visibly upset as Green expressed frustration over limitations on military force. He urged intensifying Rolling Thunder [the bombing campaign], blockading North Vietnam, and mining Haiphong Harbor. He told the president that winning the war in South Vietnam would take five years and five hundred thousand soldiers and Marines.

Ignoring Greene's estimate, the president continued to use the fear of escalation to parry JCS calls for more resolute military action. (my emphasis)

Is all the military advice worth hearing?

McMaster presents his case, more by implication than explicit argument, in a way that must be appealing to conservatives, who imagine themselves boldly speaking truth to power when they repeat some stock conservative slogan. The basic idea is that if the Chiefs had just put the cold facts - which they in their military wisdom had, except for all the dissension among them - in front of the civilian officials, that would have made the scales fall from their eyes. But as these examples illustrate, it didn't. McMaster also provides many other cases where McNamara and Johnson himself became aware of military advocacy that didn't match exactly with their views. It's the President's job to make these decisions. If the Chiefs can't agree among themselves in many cases, why should we assume that the President, who does have a wider responsibility, would automatically agree with them even when they present a unified set of recommendations.

McMaster's account bristles with instances in which the Chiefs were clearly promoting ideas that were based on bolstering their own service at the expense of the others and ideas that were just plain bad. He calls out the first kind clearly, because possibly the most substantial argument that he makes is that inter-service squabbling had a great deal to do with the Chiefs' advice not being taken as gospel by the civilian policymakers. But there are plenty of instances of the latter in his book, too, including almost every appearance by Nuke LeMay. Here's an example from August, 1964:

Since February General LeMay had pressed for the use of American air power against North Vietnam, arguing that the Gulf of Tonkin retaliation should serve as a starting point for sustained air strikes which would destroy all ninety-four targets [in North Vietnam] on the JCS list. On August 17 LeMay sent [JCS Chariman] General Wheeler a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, whose thesis was that "the total commitment of Hanoi to the success of the insurgency is the key to the strength of the Viet Cong." The study argued that Hanoi provided the Viet Cong with leadership, a sophisticated political-military apparatus, a compelling ideological theme, and a secure military base. LeMay tried to use the study to persuade his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs that action against the North was necessary to defeat the insurgency in the South. Air Power, he contended, offered the "best chance of success," and could win the war without the introduction of Army troops or Marines into South Vietnam.

In this case, the RAND study was wrong. And Nuke LeMay was wrong about the magic power of bombing. With senior military advisers like this, the American people had reason to thank God that the civilians weren't accepting any fool advice they were getting in cases like this.

But McMaster avoids that kind of qualitative analysis. It's like a management study of a disastrous product failure that focuses exclusively on process issues and ignores whether the positions being debated had any reasonable basis in the marketplace. Or whether the assumptions actually proved valid in the actual experience after the rollout.

One valuable thing that McMaster does do is to show how the experience of the Kennedy administration in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 shaped the relationship of his national security team toward military advice. (Most of the team carried over into the Johnson administration.) Today, the Cuban Missile Crisis is seen as a successful instance of crisis management. And it is literally used as a textbook case of how management decision-making can avoid the perils of "groupthink" by making certain that a wide range of options are considered and that each of them is examined critically. We also know today that the nuclear warheads were already in Cuba and that Soviet commanders there had been delegated the authority to use them in case of an American invasion of the island.

What had Nuke LeMay's wise advice been during the Cuban Missile Crisis? McMaster writes:

LeMay told the president [Kennedy] repeatedly that he did not see "any other solution than direct military action." he argued that the blockade option would be "almost as bad as the appeasement [of Hitler] at Munich" and, he suggested, would encourage further Soviet aggression and result in the United States gradually drifting into war under unfavorable conditions. LeMay declared that if the president took strong action, the Soviets would be forced to back down and would not respond in Berlin or antwhere else. The other Chiefs reinforced LeMay's argument, describing a surprise air strike, blockade, and invastion as the "lowest-risk course of action."

There were good reasons why the civilian policymakers weren't ready to concede all decision-making on military matters exclusively to the uniformed military.

What is the alternative?

Another serious flaw in McMaster's presentation is that he virtually ignores the traditional notion that strictly "military" advice should focus on the enemy's capabilities, not on the enemy's intentions. The civilian policymakers are responsible for integrating the military advice and intelligence findings with an overall policy. Ultimately, the President and the Congress are responsible for the decisions for war or peace. And the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces has to make the call on what military policies will be implemented.

The implicit notion underlying his conclusions that the advice of the military should be conclusive is a bad one. Even a variety of militarism.

But that doesn't mean that military leaders should be allowed to duck responsibility for their own decisions and recommendations. They have an important role to play, and the generals had their share of responsibility for the failures in Vietnam. Not least of which was their wild overoptimism in their public pronouncements and their unfounded confidence in their ability to impose a military solution by attacking North Vietnam.

Some of the Chiefs' complaints were valid. For instance, the prohibition in 1965 imposed by McNamara as SecDef on striking surface-to-air missile emplacements that were designed to be used against American aircraft while they were under construction. But even in that seemingly obvious case, it wasn't purely a military call. There was a concern that Russian technicians would be killed in those strikes. That was a political factor - with definite military implications - that had to be taken into account.

What also gets very lost in the welter of boring memos and conflicting estimates, almost all of which were based on deeply flawed assumptions about the nature of the war in Vietnam, is the more specific dynamic in the national security organizations that is going to make any President of any political persuasion extremely sensitive to public dissent by his chief national security officials against major policies of the administration. Many critics of the Iraq War have rightly pointed to the sidelining of General Shinseki after he suggested prior to the invasion of Iraq that the occupation of Iraq would require far more troops than were available or than Cheney and Bush intended to commit as an example of the lack of realism on the part of the administration.

But the very idolization of the military that has been promoted by Republicans especially, and by the Christian Right in particular, means that any administration would find it very difficult to allow senior military officials to go public with major disagreements over basic policy in a war. Conservative ideology, which McMaster's book can be used to support, holds that the military should be allowed to "fight the war to win". Even if the conservatives making the point can't give any coherent definition of what "to win" might be.

So, you have President Bush saying over and over and over again that he's giving his military commanders full discretion on how to fight the war. Anything they say they need, Bush will give it to them. The claim is bogus, at least to some degree. But conservative dogma requires him to make that pretension. And to do that, part of the trick is to make sure the generals don't present any formal proposals or advice to the President that he's not willing to accept.

It works in the Cheney-Bush administration essentially the same way in did in Johnson's, although McMaster's account obscures the way in which that process works because it is so focused on showing how the Chiefs' advice failed to get to Johnson. And it would work the same way in an Al Gore or John Edwards administration. Some Presidents will be better than others about making sure they have a wide variety of options from which to choose. But especially as long as the military is treated as a sacrosanct institution that can scarcely be criticized by an elected official, no administration is going to allow the generals to dissent publicly on major issues.

Bad "lessons of Vietnam"

In the end, McMaster winds up arguing, again more by implications than by actual analysis, that more deference to the military advice of the JCS would have produced a signficantly better result in the Vietnam War.

But his narrative of bickering between civilian and military officials, and among the military officials themselves, doesn't establish that case. A counter-factual case could be made, and many of them have been. But McMaster's book does make such a case. It mainly points out again and again and again that civilian policymakers didn't do exactly what the JCS wanted them to do. Hey offers no alternative to the dysfunctional processes among military leaders that he describes in his narrative other than to suggest that more personal pluck on the part of the Chiefs could have overcome it. And he doesn't deal with the often poor quality of the Chiefs' advice.

Let's hope his contributions to the current Pentagon study on the Iraq War are more substantive than suggesting that we just trust our infallible generals and "unleash the military".

Links:

Scott Ritter has some caustic comments about McMaster's advocacy of the Pentagon's current counterinsurgency approach in Iraq in The military's recruiting problem Alternet.org 01/19/06

See also News Briefing with Col. H.R. McMaster 01/27/06 DOD Web site

Tags: dereliction of duty, h. r. mcmaster, mcmaster, vietnam war