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Rumors of War & Technowar (Pt. 1)

America’s war in Vietnam has been hailed as an American tragedy, a violent and expensive trauma endured by Americans and the Vietnamese for close to twenty years.

The war in Vietnam pushed the American people to question the motives of their government, their leaders, and their nation. The American war in Vietnam has become a catch-all for expensive and utterly hopeless armed conflicts. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, many saw parallels to Vietnam — a determined and cunning insurgency, a puppet government working at the behest of American interests, and heavy American and civilian casualties. The Vietnam War has stained the American psyche. It is the war that will not go away. It, like the boogeyman, taunts Americans just as much as it haunts them.

The Vietnam War also has another legacy, one often neglected, that is just as problematic. The American war in Vietnam was a technowar. In other words, the United States, with its post-WWII can-do-ism and unyielding belief in scientific and technological progress, brought the tools, weapons rather, of progress down on the heads of Vietnamese civilians and combatants alike. When the United States could not outright defeat the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese, the U.S. sought scientific and technological solutions to smoke out and kill enemy combatants. Vietnam turned into a testing ground for the U.S. military-industrial complex, a proving ground for new technologies. Some of these technologies were radical, some downright dangerous, and, others still, straight out of some science-fiction novel. America’s technowar in Vietnam did not bring an end to the conflict. Rather, it turned a little-known war into one of the most expensive military engagements in American history, with little to show for the expenses and body counts.

The American technowar in Vietnam proved that even a superpower couldn’t win every war, despite spending tens of billions of dollars on new weaponry and tactical combat systems. The technowar in Vietnam forces us to consider the limits of forced democratization and, in terms of the Cold War, the limits to communist containment policies.

Technowars are nothing new in the American military experience. Some have been pulled off — and spectacularly so. For example, the U.S. military engagements in Kuwait, following the Iraqi invasion of that rather small Middle Eastern country. This conflict showed the United States was fighting a higher-level of warfare Iraqis weren’t able to. The Second Iraq War — Operation Iraqi Freedom — saw the capitulation of the Iraqi military and Iraqi government following a series of decisive military engagements fought across Iraq proper, all of which were filmed in spectacular fashion for American taxpayers to watch on their twenty-four-hour news programs back in the States.

American helicopter spraying chemical defoliant on Vietnamese landscape (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Before the Persian Gulf War, and before OIF, the United States engaged in a protracted technowar in Vietnam and much of Southeast Asia, to bring a closer fight to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong in southern Vietnam. The technowar in Vietnam used cutting-edge technologies and pushed the envelope concerning what a country like the United States would do to ensure victory in Southeast Asia, and beyond. As President John F. Kennedy said, the United States would bear any cost. Ironically, the U.S. would bear a burdensome cost in human lives and national treasures in Southeast Asia, implementing one of the most technologically advanced and expensive war plans in the twentieth century.

Sarah Bridger argues the American technowar in Vietnam grew out of two fundamental problems that presented themselves to U.S. policymakers and military elite during the early 1960s. First, leading government scientists and politicians alike saw a need for the United States to expand its limited war (i.e., limwar) capabilities. In other words, there was a fundamental need to counter so-called communist aggression using limited war means or non-nuclear means. Doing so meant the United States could quickly and effectively counter apparent communist aggression. Bridger also finds that leading government scientists, military brass, and politicians saw America’s limwar capabilities as a strategic weakness. The second factor explored by Bridger contributed to the increase in technological solutions to counter insurgencies in Southeast Asia. While Vietnam, and even Southeast Asia, was of little importance to the Kennedy administration, which was focused on Cuba, the region (and the implications of the conflict there) trouble both Kennedy and the previous administration under Eisenhower. Vietnam, and in a wider sense, Southeast Asia, became a pivotal testing ground of technologies that might be used in a limwar elsewhere. Therefore, Southeast Asia, and Vietnam in particular, became an important testing ground for weapons technologies like napalm and defoliants.[1]

The notion of limwar was nothing new to the American military experience, although it had little success in implementation before Vietnam. U.S. military planners, politicians, and government scientists saw Korea as the perfect example of a limited war, ironically. Korea, despite its shortfalls, was, technically speaking, a limited war in terms of time and objectives. This notion of a limwar fueled the creation of a very expensive and burdensome war in Southeast Asia, where it was hoped that the United States would curtail communist aggression, among other objectives. Unlike Korea, or, if we’re honest, exactly like Korea, the United States’ war in Vietnam embroiled the nation in a costly and utterly hopeless conflict between the U.S. and its communist adversaries in the region.

To truly understand the Vietnam technowar and its limwar flavoring, one has to understand the rise and prominence of its architect, Robert Strange McNamara. H. R. McMaster, writing in Dereliction of Duty, argues that “A campaign issue that Kennedy had taken up with some vigor was that of the need for reform in national defense strategy and the management of the Department of Defense.”[2] McNamara was slotted for the Secretary of Defense position by the Kennedy campaign, and subsequently the Kennedy administration, because of his managerial expertise and his “academic qualifications” and “superior intellect.”[3] McNamara built a reputation for himself during the Second World War as someone who employed statistical analysis, something that earned him distrust and resistance from the traditional “military officers who discounted his new methods.”[4] McNamara later left the Army “an ardent believer in the need for statistical management and control over military organizations.”[5] McNamara and several colleagues from the Army Air Corps joined Ford Motor Company, and they were collectively known as the Whiz Kids, something that would be used to describe those analysts McNamara brought to the Pentagon.[6] Interestingly, McNamara found ways to endear himself to Kennedy, as he made inroads to becoming the president’s “dominant adviser on military affairs” following the Cuban Missile Crisis and the confusion surrounding South Vietnam.[7]

Official Portrait of Robert Strange McNamara

H.R. McMaster states that following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later under the Johnson administration, McNamara developed and perfected the notion of ‘graduated pressure’ to counter communist aggression in places like Vietnam. The idea was to apply pressure on the enemy to communicate with said enemy. McNamara’s concept of ‘graduated pressure’ was not aimed at imposing one’s will on the enemy but quite the opposite. The idea was to have one’s enemy correct behavior according to the imposition of American resolve.[8] What McNamara’s reliance on graduate pressure and quantitative analysis did was bring the United States deeper into a conflict it did not want and was ill-equipped to handle.[9] The technowar in Vietnam, in other words, was built on faulty reasoning.

Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History also offers insight into McNamara’s prominence and his graduated pressure strategy in Vietnam. McNamara, from the very beginning of his first visit to Vietnam in 1962, declared “that ‘every quantitative measurement [… ] shows that we are winning the war.’”[10] Ironically, McNamara said this with full belief in the quantitative measurements, but, as Karnow shows so well, the qualitative measurements were missing from the analyses provided. The environment in South Vietnam and America’s can-doism pushed many to falsify reports or offer reports that were mostly positive in nature.[11] Unlike McMaster, Karnow offers a rather balanced view of McNamara, acknowledging his intellect and managerial experience as being top of the line.

With a solid understanding of Robert Strange McNamara’s involvement in the development of the United States’ limited war doctrine (something called ‘graduated pressure’ by McNamara) and his assessment of the Vietnam situation, we can better understand how and why the United States got involved in a technowar. American can-do-ism, belief in quantitative measurements, and faulty strategic concepts, really flavored the war in Vietnam. Vietnam symbolized the perfect armed conflict, a war that could be won using statistical management, American technology, and the United States’ can-do attitude following the Second World War. These elements created a monumental disaster for the U.S., not to mention a tremendous cost that would undercut one of the most ambitious social welfare programs in American history, the Great Society.

Seymour J. Deitchman, in an article entitled “The ‘Electronic Battlefield’ in the Vietnam War,” shows how the American war in Vietnam quickly escalated from a run-of-the-mill war to a technowar over a period of a few years. In 1964, with the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Johnson administration was given the green light to counter communist aggression in South Vietnam. Immediately the two antagonists, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese and the United States stood at two opposite sides of the spectrum. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese utilized well-tested guerilla tactics, hiding in the jungles and grasslands and using the terrain to ambush unsuspecting enemies. On the other side of the scale, the United States pursued a technology-oriented war from nearly the beginning, using helicopters to ferry troops, supplies, and firepower across South Vietnam. “Helicopter mobility was not, of course, the only use of advanced technology by U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. Characteristically, given its culture and capability, the United States turned to technology to help solve many problems encountered in that theatre of warfare.”[12]

The United States would go on to use an advanced sensor surveillance system to try interdict movement on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The U.S. would also employ some of the nastiest weaponry, technological marvels at the time, in the name of a limited war. These were napalm and the rainbow herbicides used indiscriminately on the Vietnamese countryside.

Deitchman further discusses how the sensor surveillance system that the U.S. military developed was the brainchild of the Jason Group, set up at the behest of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. The idea behind the sensor surveillance system was to help stop the flow of war materials and personnel from the North into the South using the Laotian ‘panhandle,’ as Deitchman calls it. Deitchman, someone involved in the project, claims that the sensor surveillance system was a joint project between the military branches. When it was all said and done, the United States military established a rather impressive border surveillance system that stretched over 100 kilometers of South Vietnamese real estate.[13]

Deitchman illustrates the final product of the border surveillance system established by the United States military in South Vietnam:

The target acquisition portions of both parts of the air-supported barrier were to consist of distributed sensors delivered by air, monitored by continuously orbiting aircraft that would receive the sensor signals and retransmit them to the Barrier Operations Center, later called the Infiltration Surveillance Center, at the Royal Thai Air Force base at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. In the final implementation, targets were distinguished from false alarms caused by animals, aircraft overflights, and even heavy rainfall, through the use of computer algorithms implemented on two advanced IBM-360 computers (later reduced to one). Two large output display screens showed the road net and sensor locations, with activated sensors highlighted. The targets acquired were then to be transmitted to dedicated attack aircraft, airborne and on call. [14]

As the passage above illustrates, the United States military pursued a technological solution to stopping the flow of troops and material from the North into the South. Deitchman shows that the border surveillance system cost nearly two billion dollars by fiscal year 1971.[15] According to Deitchman, the border surveillance system predated the ‘Network-Centric Warfare’ doctrine that would be proposed by the Navy in 1990s.[16]

The border surveillance system shows that the United States tried, using its unflinching faith in technology and progress, tried to win the war in Vietnam using technological means. In other words, the United States hoped to create a secure border between North and South Vietnam in order to create a little safe haven, a pocket if you will, for South Vietnam. According to Deitchman’s observations, the system appeared to work quite well, considering the problems it faced. The high-tech border security system did not end the war in Vietnam, nor did it end the insurgency in South Vietnam. Rather, the high-tech security system implemented by the United States only served to make the financial burden of the war worse. Ironically, the United States would expand its military operations into Laos and Cambodia under the Nixon administration, creating a nightmare for American policymakers and military brass. The war in Vietnam did not end, did not lessen, due to the implementation of this border security system. The so-called McNamara Line did not hold, so to speak. Instead, the United States became embroiled in an even more problematic conflict, one that would have some serious ramifications for the region and the United States itself.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Bibliographic Notes:

  1. Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), 63–69.

  2. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), 2.

  3. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 2–4.

  4. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 2.

  5. McMaster, Dereliction, 2.

  6. McMaster, Dereliction, 2.

  7. McMaster, Dereliction, 41.

  8. McMaster, 62.

  9. McMaster, 62–63.

  10. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 271.

  11. Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 271.

  12. Seymour J. Deitchman, “The ‘Electronic Battlefield’ in the Vietnam War,” The Journal of Military History 72, no. 3 (2008): 873.

  13. Deitchman, “The ‘Electronic Battlefield,’” 873–79.

  14. Deitchman, 878.

  15. Deitchman, 885.

  16. Deitchman, 886.

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