December 12, 2006
On Max Boot Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 PM EST Today’s lead article on AmericanHeritage.com is adapted from Max Boot’s book War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today. The article begins with American victory in Iraq in 1991, which was achieved at astonishingly small cost in American lives, and involved the defeat of a large, well-equipped, and veteran Iraqi Army. How did this happen? As Mr. Boot tells the story, “The answer may be found in the wholesale transformation wrought in the 15 years since American soldiers had stumbled, dazed, defeated, and demoralized, out of the jungles of Vietnam.” On this account, the American Army was seen as “the bumblers who had been defeated outright by the Vietnamese,” but in the Gulf War a better-trained American army of superior recruits, equipped with weapons of unprecedented quality, especially precision-guided munitions, routed the Iraqis. There are other ways to tell this very small part of Mr. Boot’s long, in my view largely accurate, and genuinely interesting story. For one thing, American soldiers had not been “defeated outright” by the Vietnamese, who arguably never won a battle against them, and those American soldiers did not stumble out of Vietnam; they left an independent South Vietnamese government in control of most of its territory, territory it was able to very effectively defend in the following year. It was also a government the American Congress refused to support when it was subsequently assailed by North Vietnamese armor supported by fighter bombers, and if you incline toward the most sinister interpretation of the 1972 peace agreement, it was already half-abandoned and half-betrayed by the Nixon Administration. If this way of telling the story rings a bell, it should; it has been recounted on this blog before. I have no quarrel with Mr. Boot’s account of the excellence of the American force that fought in Iraq, but his implication seems to be that the American force that fought in Vietnam was defective in ways that would have made a victory over Iraq unlikely or hideously expensive, on account of its demoralization and its other asserted defects: On the strength of later remarks, Mr. Boots seems to suggest that the American Army that fought in Vietnam was also grossly mutinous, toxically racially divided, drunken, and drug-addicted, qualities that by clear implication marred its combat proficiency. There were indeed problems with the American Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are problems in most armies. Zhukov’s World War II army was undoubtedly drunken, and it was in its own way racially divided, as was Wellington’s army, and as was Grant’s. Eisenhower’s army was known to drink, and had much worse interracial violence than the American army suffered in the early 1970s (and in the late fall of 1944 had what were considered serious problems with morale, including significant levels of desertion). None of these forces did too badly against armies that were—to put this politely—as combat-experienced as Saddam Hussein’s. As Mr. Boot points out, there were other problems in the volunteer force of the mid-1970s, but some of those problems, as well as some of the earlier ones, seem likelier to have been the consequence of perceived defeat than the cause of that perceived defeat. Morale did suffer after the American army that fought in Vietnam got the idea that it was not going to be fighting until the war was won. Had Grant’s army, or Eisenhower’s, been told that it had been defeated, or that it was marking time until a negotiated agreement could be reached, morale would probably have suffered pretty significantly. Sometimes demoralization causes defeat, but the perception of defeat is also a very likely path to demoralization. One of the less attractive episodes in recent military analysis is the insistence by the French officer corps that demoralization in the ranks caused the defeat of 1940. Modern research strongly suggests that this was a self-exculpatory lie; very bad strategy, very bad luck, and several other weaknesses are now thought to have caused that defeat, but not peculiarly bad morale in the ranks. As it happens, I have known a few men who commanded small units in Vietnam, and a few who fought in the ranks, and none of them blamed the outcome of the war on the defects of the men they commanded or fought beside. I am uneasy about any post-hoc accounts that exhibit a tendency even remotely similar to that displayed by the Vichy officer corps and shift the search for prime causes from defects of civilian leadership and military strategy toward alleged defects in the lower ranks. How would the American Army of the mid-1960s, or the late 1960s, have done against Saddam Hussein’s troops, had they fought over the same terrain in which they later waged the 1991 Gulf War, in an impossible world in which they had been comparably armed? My guess is, very well indeed. While Mr. Boot points out that the American army of 1991 had a vast technological superiority over its enemy, Western armies have very consistently done well against non-Western armies for a long time, even when equivalently armed, and Arab armies have since 1948 exhibited significant defects in maneuver warfare. I am not sure how well the American army of 1991 would have done in a protracted guerrilla war, and Mr. Boot makes no claims for its capacities in such a context. But I am pretty sure that the defects of the American army in Vietnam were defects of strategy. I fear that the morale of any American army that is told that it stumbled out of Iraq dazed and defeated may not stay rock-solid either, and if that happens, my guess is that the fault will again be bad strategy.
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