October 31, 2006
Nixon and Vietnam Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz writes, of Nixon and Vietnam, that “if many military analysts now view his faith in air power as misplaced, nevertheless the shift from a ground war to an air war allowed him to reduce troop levels from 475,000 in late 1969 to 156,800 by 1971 and just 24,200 by 1972, and to thereby defuse the antiwar movement.” I am not sure many military analysts think this, because I am not entirely sure Nixon thought this, although I could be wrong. My memory, admittedly dodgy, is that Nixon thought that sufficiently trained and well-equipped Vietnamese infantry, backed by sufficient air power, could substitute for American infantry. There is some reason to think that he was at least partially correct. Vietnamese ground forces backed by American air power defeated the North Vietnamese at An Loc in 1973. That was a major battle, with something like 150,000 casualties, and it was a clear South Vietnamese victory.
We’ll never know if that success would have been repeated in subsequent North Vietnamese offensives, because after 1973 U.S. tactical air power did not again intervene in the fighting. Of course, if U.S. willingness to intervene against subsequent offensives had remained clear, there might not have been an infinite series of such offensives. In the event, South Vietnamese air power didn’t do the trick. Some analysts claim that was because South Vietnam was not sufficiently generously supplied by 1975, when the North Vietnamese launched their final offensive. Others argue that people who cannot defend themselves do not deserve too many efforts by others. In some cases, maybe so, but it seems a hard saying. If one thinks with hindsight of the neighboring case of Pol Pot and the regime he overthrew, which we failed to defend, it seems a monstrous saying. George McGovern is not least admirable because when the news of Pol Pot’s genocidal rule got out, he proposed that the U.S. intervene again in Southeast Asia. Noam Chomsky is not least contemptible because he denied that genocide, even after enough news got out to persuade almost all other observers, and he attacked McGovern for suggesting that we were obligated to do something about it.
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