Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)
Biography: Andrew Krepinevich is a defense policy analyst and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and adjunct senior fellow at Center for a New American Security. Before that he served 21 years in the Army, graduated from West Point and earned an MPA and PhD from Harvard. He has taught on the faculties of West Point, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and Georgetown University.
Overview: An overview of American failure in Vietnam in which he argues that the United States could have won the Vietnam War had the Army adopted a small-unit pacification strategy in South Vietnam’s villages, rather than conducting search and destroy operations in remote jungles. Krepinevich seeks to answer how the best-equipped, supported and most advanced army in the most powerful nation in history could fail to emerge victorious?
Central Thesis: The US Army was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency conflict environment.
Scope of Book: Krepinevich emphasizes the Army’s stubborn insistence on pursuing a strategy of attrition, through large-unit operations and heavy firepower, and largely ignoring the political and social dimensions that form the foundation of successful counterinsurgency warfare. The result was a high-cost, low-payoff strategy which the Army stuck with until civilian leaders in the defense establishment openly challenged the policy after the Tet Offensive.
- Proposes the idea of an “Army Concept” of war—the Army’s perception of how war’s ought to be waged—reflected in the way the Army organizes and trains.
- Army focus is on the conventional fight and high volumes of firepower. Army concept develops a revulsion to casualties, hubris, and requires an immense amount of resources.
- Talks about two ways the counterinsurgency was impressed upon the Army (but ultimately failed)
- Kennedy’s attempt at change through a revolution from above.
- MACV Advisors attempt through a revolt from below.
- Regardless, the Army failed to adapt training and service schools to teach counterinsurgency. Insufficient training, an inability to define doctrine and frequent personnel turnover led to an unprepared army in 1965.
- Army also created a culture of “good news” where reports of problems were ignored in favor of good news.
- Author laments that the Army was convinced that the essence of the conflict in Vietnam was military and not political in nature. Army was interested in waging the war it had prepared for—mid-intensity conflict in Europe—rather than an insurgency. In 1965 the war shifted from one of advising South Vietnam on how to execute operations against an insurgency to showing them how, by example.
- Gave lip service to COIN while adhering to “The Concept” of fighting to defeat the insurgency rather than work on political issues of pacification. This led to a two-war concept that saw Pacification as “The Other War.” Abrams attempted to rectify this but it was too little, too late.
- The US adopted a counterproductive strategy of attrition, and really had a strategy of tactics. Attrition with massive firepower used as a morale raising/life-saving measure. US Infantry divisions were very “heavy” which lent well to attrition strategies but they were not well suited to long-term patrolling and pacification missions.
- Battle of the Ia Drang Valley validated the Army’s use of “The Concept” in fighting counterinsurgency.
- Resources devoted to the COIN fight were too insufficient to matter. Which then allows the author to paint the problem with US Strategy during the Vietnam war as one of resource allocation.
- By 1968 faith in attrition as a strategy remains even though pressure from higher builds to leave.
- The author praises the pacification programs of the Marines and suggests that their methods could have been profitably employed by the Army.
- Krepinevich describes two ways to measure US effectiveness: In its ability to buy time for South Vietnam to build its capabilities and the extent of the US’s effectiveness in defeating insurgent forces. The author concludes that the US fails on both accounts.
- More significantly, he suggests that the Vietnam experience has had little effect on the doctrine by which the Army is currently preparing for future low-intensity engagements
Commentary: Initially published in 1986 a mere 11 years after the fall of Saigon. This is a decidedly operational and strategic level book and leaves out many of the smaller operations. The book agrees with Nagl’s assessment in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife but has since been challenged by Gregory Daddis in Westmoreland’s War—which posits that the Army did in fact embrace COIN concepts. Unfortunately, with a high personnel turnover rate, anything smaller echelons did would not last. At the end of the work he laments that the US learned very little in Vietnam in spite of its anguish there. He also prognosticates that “Low-intensity warfare represents the most likely arena of future conflict for the Army, and counterinsurgency the most demanding contingency.” (p. 274)