This bitter little story was making the rounds during the closing days of the Vietnam War, says Harry Summers in On Strategy.
There is more to war than the things that can be measured, quantified, computerized and put through ‘Systems Analysis’, a concept that was first articulated by MIT’s Jay Forrester. Focusing on what can be quantified is akin to looking for your lost car keys under the lamppost.
Systems Analysis had overlooked what Clausewitz called the “moral” factor, i.e., the will to fight.
The story of Vietnam is largely the story of three presidents, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, and the story of three men who worked for them: Robert McNamara, General Westmoreland and Henry Kissinger.
McNamara, a graduate of the Harvard Business School and president of Ford Motor Company, was appointed the defense secretary by Kennedy in 1961. He introduced a quantitative approach to warfare. At the heart of it was Systems Analysis, which revolved around costs and benefits, often focusing on changes at the margin. Under McNamara, the economists ran the show.
They focused on rational behaviour. But rational behaviour was not always found in life, let alone in warfare. It could not answer some fundamental questions. How can I destroy the enemy’s strategy? How can I keep him on the defensive?
When Hanoi appeared to be acting irrationally, the Systems Analysts assumed they were bluffing. Civilians were guiding military operations since it was assumed that civilians were better trained in ‘modern analytical techniques’.
A pivotal lesson that senior military officers had learned did not lend itself to formal articulation: power has a psychological and not just a technical component. Men can be led by statistics only up to a certain point. Then more fundamental values predominate.
Henry Kissinger noted that young Systems Analysts were brought into the Pentagon to shake up the military establishment. But they overreached when they started telling the generals how to fight wars. A pivotal lesson that senior military officers had learned did not lend itself to formal articulation: power has a psychological and not just a technical component. Men can be led by statistics only up to a certain point. Then more fundamental values predominate.
Ironically, McNamara, an early advocate of the Americanization of the war between North and South Vietnam, had concluded as far back as the spring of 1967 that the war was unwinnable. However, General Westmoreland argued that the war could be won with an additional 200,000 troops. Speaking to the National Press Club in November 1967, he stated that while the enemy was winning until 1965, they were now on the run.
Army Chief General Harold Johnson, commented, “I only hope he has not dug a hole for himself” by making these prognostications and added, “The platform of false prophets is crowded.”
President Johnson did not want to send any more troops, beyond the 535,000 already in the field. He had lost public support for the war in the US and declined to seek reelection. Ironically, Westmoreland was promoted to army chief.
The North Vietnamese army chief, General Vo Nguyen Giap, said that while Westmoreland was a well-read soldier, he should have known that even if the US had put in more than 400,000 more soldiers in the field, it would have made no difference to the way the war ended.
It’s unclear whether McNamara had ever read, let alone understood what Clausewitz had written about the moral factor in his treatise, On War. David Halberstam, in reviewing McNamara’s memoir about Vietnam, notes: “To McNamara, numbers still have an almost poetic quality, and one of the few moments in this book when he comes alive and seems almost lyrical is when he talks about them: ‘My mathematics professors taught me to see math as a process of thought -- a language in which to express much, but certainly not all, human activity. It was a revelation. To this day I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world. Of course, it cannot deal with issues of morality, beauty and love, but it is a powerful tool too often neglected when we seek to overcome poverty, fiscal deficits or the failure of our national health programs’.”
As far back as 1969, Clark Clifford, the US Secretary of Defense who succeeded McNamara, had called for American troops to be brought back home. Most notably, he had concluded that, “American military power cannot build nations, any more than it can solve the social and economic problems that face us here at home.”
The war, which in Vietnam is called the American War, was McNamara’s war, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. It killed 3 million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 Americans and caused enormous financial harm to both countries. Halberstam says, “Vietnam of all wars most resolutely withstood quantitative analysis. The numbers never revealed the burden of the immediate past; they failed to show, for instance, that the other side’s commanders were the architects of a great revolution that had already defeated first the French and then the Army of South Vietnam, aided and advised by Americans. The science of quantitative analysis, which McNamara had cherished because it seemed to have such purity, was like a god that failed him. Bring systems analysis to a badly aberrated policy and it is no help; humans will simply jiggle the numbers as necessary.”
Colonel Summers recounts a conversation he had in April 1975 in which he told a Vietnamese counterpart that they had never defeated the US on the battlefield. The Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark for a moment and then ended up having the last word, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
As far back as 1969, Clark Clifford, the US Secretary of Defense who succeeded McNamara, had called for American troops to be brought back home. Most notably, he had concluded that, “American military power cannot build nations, any more than it can solve the social and economic problems that face us here at home.”
Had that lesson been learned, the US would not have stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years. It would have departed after the Taliban were deposed in December 2001.
Further, had that lesson been learned, America would not have gone into Iraq in 2003 to depose Saddam, to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he never had, and to engage in nation building.
Sadly, the US failed to remember its past, confirming once again the truth of George Santayana’s admonition, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”