Stand By For More Vietnam Comparisons

The long awaited request from General Stanley McChrystal for more troops has (sort of) arrived. At least it has been presented to JCS Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen in Germany. The Voice of America report states that General McChrystal has requested as many as forty thousand more pairs of boots on the ground. The WaPo gives no precise figure.

If customary practice has been followed, the request will contain several different force packages so that the risks and benefits of each can be assessed up the chain of command. In any event, the requested force would be on top of the sixty-eight thousand scheduled to be in-country by the end of the year. Thus, even at the maximum, the total number of American military personnel in Afghanistan would be 108,000. This is well below the maximum in Iraq and a mere fraction--roughly a fifth of the maximum deployed in Vietnam.

It is inevitable that comparisons with Vietnam will be made by the historically illiterate in Congress and within the chattering and academic classes (including journalists not even born by the time of the infamous Tet Offensive.) Most of these comparisons will ring in the combination of the Tet Offensive and the Westmoreland request for an additional 100,000 men, which was denied by President Johnson.

It is important to recall that the Tet Offensive gained its political and psychological power because it came soon after the highly positive "Report to the Nation" offered by the top US military commander in the theater, General William Westmoreland. His statements both in Congressional testimony and on a wall-to-wall media blitz were both optimistic and unjustified as the now declassified intelligence materials of the day show.

When the Viet Cong staged simultaneous attacks in all of South Vietnam's major cities including a tour d' theatre by penetrating the US embassy in Saigon, these were seen through the prism of Westmoreland's jolly, upbeat assessment. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that the VC were not only defeated by US and South Vietnamese forces but virtually obliterated as a viable military force.

When General Westmoreland requested another 100,000 men, he properly emphasized that this augmentation would allow more dramatic and successful offensive operations against the North Vietnamese army while continuing the counter-Viet Cong campaign and necessary defensive deployments. Whether the granting of the requested augmentation would have changed the endgame of the US wars in Vietnam is a question hotly debated by historians of the war. Suffice it to say that there is no rewind function in the great tape recorder of history.

The validity of the Vietnam analogy is called into question immediately by the vast gulf separating the grimly realistic assessment of the war offered by General McChrystal and that offered by General Westmoreland. There is no false or unsupported optimism in the McChrystal view. There is no reason to conclude that there is a light at the end of the tunnel absent the requested augmentation.

Another factor vitiating the analogy is the lack (so far) of a Taliban version of the Tet Offensive. Nor is one really in the cards. Taliban might be able to stage a mediagenic series of suicide bomb attacks directed at soft or semi-soft targets, but it cannot pull off what the much larger, much better equipped and combat competent Viet Cong sapper teams did at Tet. Another reason for arguing against a Taliban Tet is simply that intelligence is better employed, less polluted by commander's desires, and far more comprehensive than that which existed in Vietnam on the eve of Tet.

Still another reason for decrying the Vietnam analogy is the reality of the US forces fighting in Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, the men and women in Afghanistan today are volunteers, not draftees. A major mistake of the planners of Vietnam was the use of draftees, but none saw the consequences of relying on the same mechanism which served so well in World War II and Korea. A final reason for rejecting the Vietnam analogy is simply that the US losses over the eight years of war are far, far below those incurred in Vietnam over the same period, barely one percent of the Vietnam butcher's bill through today.

While historians both professional and amateur can debate the consequences of LBJ not providing the augmentation desired by Westmoreland, there is little, if any, reason to doubt General McChrystal's conclusion that without the additional combat forces, there is a high probability of the US and its allies suffering a military defeat at the hands of Taliban and the other Islamist jihadists in Afghanistan.

There. The Geek has laid the Vietnam analogy to rest before the quackers have brought it forward. He will have nothing more to say on that particular subject. That ought to make you happy.