Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Together these late 1965 documents detail Westmorland's theory of victory in Vietnam. The first one provides guidance to senior commanders about how he wanted them to fight the war and the second presents his evaluation of the troops' performance and recommendations for improvement. They show that he fully understood the need to provide security for the South Vietnamese so pacification and nation-building programs might succeed. Hence, they send an obvious but sometimes neglected message to policy makers and commanders today: in a counterinsurgency environment, the successful approach will contain an aggressive warfighting plan and a well thought-out nation-building/pacification program.
HOW General William Childs Westmoreland, the American theater commander in Vietnam in 1965, chose to campaign against the Viet Cong insurgents and the North Vietnamese regulars speaks powerfully to the conduct of war in the age of terror. To demonstrate this, two documents are presented. Westmoreland wrote neither of the documents and signed only one of them. However, he had made his views unmistakably clear to senior subordinates and members of the MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) staff responsible for drafting such documents. Consequently, when they wrote the papers, they accurately and forcefully reflected his ideas on fighting and winning the war in Southeast Asia.
Despite its misleading title, the first document-"Tactics and Techniques for Employment of US Forces in the Republic of Vietnam"-contains a vigorously written, well-crafted, full-fledged theory of victory.1 Dated 17 September 1965, it laid out the necessary conditions for achieving victory and provided to senior American commanders and units practical steps and guidance, presented in a methodical and logical way, to achieve the necessary tactical, operational, and strategic objectives to defeat their Communist adversaries. Moreover, it made clear that when military victories were won, their significance lay in the degree to which they advanced and supported South Vietnam's pacification/nationbuilding effort. Westmoreland and his senior subordinates knew that if they failed to integrate the "fighting" war with the "other" (i.e., pacification) war, they would not succeed-their efforts and sacrifices would be for naught.
There is little doubt that Westmoreland realized just how ambitious the American program was, noting that U.S. forces confronted "a unique challenge" in South Vietnam because they had "never before . . . engaged in military/political activities of...