Document created: 14 October 2003
Air University Review,
November-December 1973
For an examination of U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia, the role of air power in achieving those objectives, and the reasons for success or lack of success in that achievement, an appropriate departure point might well be a brief examination of World War II and the international climate at that time. The overall objective of the Allied forces was rather simple and straightforward: the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. To achieve this objective, air power was allowed to operate with little constraint and with the full backing and support of our nation. The large-scale strategic bombing campaign against Germany and Japan proved to be a decisive factor in bringing the war to an end. In its most comprehensive conclusion on conventional strategic bombing that applies to the air war against both Japan and Germany, the World War II United States Strategic Bombing Survey states that “heavy, sustained and accurate attacks against carefully selected targets are required to produce decisive results when attacking an enemy’s sustaining resources.” It further concludes that “no nation can long survive the free exploitation of air weapons over its homeland.”
The introduction of nuclear power at the close of World War II brought about the realization by policymakers that the application of unrestrained military power could produce catastrophic results. The relatively unconstrained use of military power that prevailed during World War II was replaced by the tense atmosphere of the Cold War years, which led ultimately to the concept of limited war.
The limitation of war has been a key concern of U.S. Defense policy for many years. Much has been written on the dilemma of how to use military power to achieve a national objective in the face of an armed challenge without allowing the conflict to escalate in intensity through the spectrum of warfare. As the strategy of massive retaliation gave way to the doctrine of flexible response, the United States developed conventional capabilities for deterring or coping with limited conflicts. These capabilities were intended to provide the decision-maker with options which would be credible in terms of the various levels of military confrontation. It is essential to recognize that to gain the initiative from an aggressor requires the national will and readiness to select options that make the aggressor’s risk and cost incompatible with the objectives the aggressor hopes to achieve. One must, on the other hand, be forewarned that it is possible to select options which, in order to insure against drawing other nations into the conflict, offer a relatively lower probability of achieving military or political success.
Let us examine the Southeast Asia conflict. Some analyses of air power in the Vietnam conflict, particularly those done on the 1965-68 time period, have been critical of aerial bombardment as an instrument of national policy. These retrospective analyses, applying their own interpretations of the intended objectives of the bombing campaign, conclude that air power fell short of realizing these objectives.
Viewing these critical analyses, proponents of air power are much tempted to take issue with the conclusions and to offer pointed rebuttals in an effort to exonerate the principles and concepts of air power. To do so would, in essence, be engaging in the same sort of Monday morning quarterbacking that was employed by those analysts who have produced the stinging reviews of air power. It would seem more appropriate to consider objectively the bombing campaign during the 1965-68 time period, present the facts as we know them, compare results of that earlier period with the recent successful results of the 1972 air campaign, and arrive at conclusions based on our comparative analysis.
The administration in late 1964 and early 1965 faced an uncertain and perplexing decision in Vietnam. Concern over Chinese military reaction in the event of direct U.S. intervention was acute. There was a lack of public awareness in the United States of Hanoi’s involvement in South Vietnam. The political situation in the South was unstable, and underlying the entire Indochina question was the unknown quantity of the Soviet commitment to North Vietnam (NVN).
Given the political and military environment of early 1965, the administration at that time chose closely controlled air attacks to signal U.S. intentions. The problem the administration faced was how to make such a signal clear and yet not risk unwanted escalation. There was inherent concern that the attacking of high-value targets in the North could carry the same risks as a full-scale campaign. The international political climate was against widening of the war. Rationale for the early decisions that limited the employment of air power in NVN appeared in a speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson on 7 April 1965 when he stated:
Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam and its freedom from attack. . . . We have no desire to devastate that which the people of North Vietnam have built with toil and sacrifice. We will use our power with restraint and with all the wisdom that we can command.
The objectives of the air campaign launched in 1965 were defined by President Johnson:
—To back our fighting men and our fighting allies by demonstrating that the aggressor could not bring hostile arms and men to bear against South Vietnam from the security of a sanctuary.
—To exact a penalty against North Vietnam for her flagrant violations of the Geneva Accords of 1954 and 1962.
—To limit the flow, or substantially increase the cost, of infiltration of men and materiel from North Vietnam.
In my judgment the manner in which the air strikes were conducted did not signal strong intentions. Air operations in NVN were initiated under strict controls and specific guidance. The air campaign from 1965 to 1968 undulated with phases of gradual expansion and reduction. Our national leaders provided significant interludes in the bombing, to which it was hoped the enemy would respond by reducing the scope and level of the conflict; there were pauses for Vietnamese national holidays; long periods of poor weather reduced our air efforts and gave the enemy respite. Because of political constraints, the campaign operated under a set of firmly defined ground rules relating to target selection, areas to be bombed, level of effort, and tactics to be used.
Our limited application afforded the North Vietnamese some significant advantages. In 1965, NVN had made little preparation against air attacks: military targets such as petroleum, oil, and lubricant (POL) facilities and factories were not dispersed; her labor force was not mobilized for logistical repair and movement. The gradual application of air power allowed NVN to correct these deficiencies and denied us the capability of fully exploiting them. Additionally, the North Vietnamese and their allies demonstrated how rapidly a rudimentary air defense system can become significantly imposing.
The compounding effects of the political constraints and a strategy of graduated response resulted in the United States’ launching an inconclusive, though expanded, bombing effort in hopes of persuading the enemy to capitulate.
Limited to relatively less lucrative, less meaningful targets, air power had the difficult task of carrying out an interdiction campaign against a target system consisting of jungle trails, mountain passes, and widely dispersed and, in relative terms, inconsequential supply caches. Our forces were asked to do several things that they had not been designed or structured to do. These were to locate and track small targets in difficult terrain, and to attack them at night and in adverse weather with munitions that had been designed for other purposes.
It is appropriate at this point to refer to the objectives of the 1965-68 campaign as set forth by President Johnson. Those objectives were, by their nature, limited in scope, and the application of air power over the North was in consonance with the goals perceived by the administration. Unlike the full-scale employment of air power in World War II, the early bombing campaign had specific, limited objectives. As General Maxwell Taylor wrote, “The overall purpose was to apply limited force with limited means to gain limited results.”
A review of the record reveals that air power was quite effective in achieving these limited objectives. Allied military forces and the people of South Vietnam were strengthened with the knowledge that air power was striking the enemy in his own territory. The North Vietnamese, with the conflict brought into their own homeland, had to devote critical resources to defense and repair. Moreover, the interdiction campaign was effective in limiting the flow of men and materiel to the South; greatly increasing the cost of NVN’s aggression; and reducing the ability of the North Vietnamese to conduct offensive operations in the South. Weapons limitations and political constraints notwithstanding, there is good evidence that the bombing of critical chokepoints resulted in significant blockage of the NVN supply lines. Because of the role air power played in curtailing the southward flow of men and materiel and the reduction of stockpiles brought on through increased ground action by the allies, the North Vietnamese were forced to withdraw several of their units from the ground battle. This withdrawal was interpreted as a gesture on the part of the North Vietnamese to reduce the level of conflict and played a part in the decision to halt the bombing in the fall of 1968. However, there was the belief in some quarters that perhaps we stopped the bombing at a time when Hanoi’s steadfastness had begun to waver. History may well give credence to that belief.
While not totally unrestrained, air power in the December 1972 campaign was given the opportunity to strike key targets, some of them of such significance as to be classified strategic. Not only were the political constraints less rigid, but we had also succeeded in the development and employment of some weapons with capabilities nonexistent during the 1965-68 time period. Electro-optically and laser-guided weapons added a new dimension in the art of aerial bombardment. The unprecedented accuracy of these weapons caused a severe crippling of the North Vietnamese logistic system and allowed air power to strike key industrial targets with little collateral damage. We have convincing evidence that the early results of the 1972 campaign were far more successful than our efforts during the 1965-68 period. Critical supplies and utilities such as POL and electrical power were reduced to a level that only the minimum essential functions of NVN government and defense could be maintained. Also the mining of Haiphong harbor by air power in the 1972 campaign reduced the resupply to NVN by sea to a trickle.
Throughout this long and unpopular war, the North Vietnamese had shown little willingness to negotiate a settlement, primarily because they were able to sustain their logistic networks and maintain constant pressure on the armies of South Vietnam, Laos, and, in the latter stages, Cambodia. Their intransigence signaled long-held intentions of eroding the will of their enemies to resist and ultimately the taking over of all of Indochina. However, after the decision of the President in 1973 to resume the bombing of NVN (this time with determined intent and less restrained application of air power), coupled with intensified diplomatic overtures, the North Vietnamese backed away from their intransigence and entered into serious negotiations to conclude a peace settlement.
In actuality the 1972 campaign can be analyzed in two distinct phases. Phase I began with the resumption of full-scale bombing of North Vietnam following the Easter offensive in the South and lasted until mid-October when it appeared that peace was at hand. Phase II, in December 1972, lasted only eleven days, but those eleven days may well prove to be the most decisive period of the entire war; a period that, when the final accounting is taken, should provide unprecedented evidence of the capability of air power to achieve national objectives.
The difficult reality that the Hanoi leadership had to face was that its 1972 Easter offensive in the South had been a costly failure in terms of achieving even minimal military objectives. Moreover, the launching of the Easter offensive precipitated our decision to resume the bombing of the North, after which the North Vietnamese came to the conference table for serious negotiations. Patrick J. Honey, an eminent British authority on North Vietnamese affairs, in an interview with U.S. News and World Report (6 November 1972), was asked the question, “How important was the bombing of the North in pressuring Hanoi toward a negotiated settlement?” Mr. Honey answered:
The heavy bombing of North Vietnam was perhaps the vital factor which kept pressures on North Vietnam and maintained their interest in continuing the negotiations with Dr. Kissinger. In 1968, on the advice of Clark Clifford [former Secretary of Defense], the bombing was stopped. This removed any sense of urgency on the Communist side. As a result, the negotiations got nowhere. But now the North Vietnamese leaders knew the bombing would continue. Therefore, they had an incentive to settle as soon as possible because the bombing hurt.
At the end of October 1972, the North Vietnamese indicated they wanted to talk, and we stopped bombing in the North. However, it soon became apparent that discussions had reached an impasse; not only were the North Vietnamese showing signs of assuming once again their posture of intransigence toward meaningful negotiations but there was clear evidence that they were again about to launch a major offensive.
A decision was reached by our policymakers to resume bombing of the North, this time with the full might of all the U.S. air power resources in Indochina, including B-52 bombers. During an eleven-day period, B-52s flew more than 700 sorties against military and industrial targets in the Hanoi-Haiphong area in conjunction with about 1600 sorties by fighter-bombers. In an article in the Washington Post (24 January 1973), Joseph Alsop commented:
The targets chosen, it might be emphasized, were all war-connected, being military supply dumps, railroad switching and marshalling yards, electric power stations and so on. Judging by Hanoi’s figure of under 1400 persons killed in the bombing, the B-52s clearly did a remarkably accurate job.
Pointing to the Hanoi casualty reports, the London Economist said the German Air Force “killed almost as many in a single night in what now seems to be the relatively mild bombing of Britain in 1940 and 1941.” This intensive bombing campaign, flown against the most concentrated air defense system in the world, signaled again to Hanoi the steadfast resolve of our commitment to South Vietnam and our willingness to employ air power to its maximum effectiveness in an effort to move the peace negotiations off dead center. It must be emphasized that it was the total air effort over the North that brought about the successful results: B-52s, tactical air fighter-bombers, electronic countermeasures and chaff aircraft, defense suppression aircraft, and MIG defenders working in a concerted effort to place weapons on targets. As Charles W. Corddry stated in the Baltimore Sun (24 January 1973):
The twin instruments of this strategy were the swift, systematic and sustained bombing campaign over North Vietnam with greatly intensified pressure in December, and the closing of its ports by naval mining.
Joseph Alsop summed up the December campaign this way:
. . . there is no question at all that the renewed bombing got the President what he was aiming for.
Even some of the political analysts who had earlier opposed the use of air power in the North began to change their minds. Commenting on the political significance of the recent bombing campaign, Stewart Alsop stated in Newsweek Magazine (29 January 1973):
According to Hanoi’s figures, the B-52 bombing killed 1,318 people in Hanoi in twelve days. That is a lot of dead people. But the fact remains that the bombing was not mass bombing. . . . If it had been, there would have been no more Hanoi.
I have written almost ad nauseam that the supposed omnipotence of air power is “the great American illusion.” But I am beginning to wonder if the President was right and I was wrong. . . . It is surely at least possible that it [the B-52 bombing] too has led to important political results—a respectable American extraction from a hated war, and perhaps even an end to the Communists’ remorseless use of every form of violence, from tank-supported invasion to mass assassination, to impose their rule on South Vietnam. In that case, many more than 1,318 will be saved, which is why I begin to wonder if I was wrong.
A postoperation summary of the eleven-day bombing campaign provides irrefutable evidence on the nature of the targets struck and the crippling effect that air power had on North Vietnam’s war-making potential. Bombing the rail system alone resulted in an almost total suspension of rail traffic in the Hanoi-Haiphong area. In the past when North Vietnamese rail installations had been struck, repair crews were at work immediately building bypasses to the damaged areas. During the eleven-day campaign, the rail system was struck with such intensity and regularity that, as postmission photography reveals, repair crews made no attempt to restore even token rail traffic. Concurrent with raids on the rail system, B-52s and fighter-bombers struck major supply depots where the North Vietnamese stored war materiel prior to shipment to the South. Resultant damage, confirmed by photography, was the virtual destruction of several hundred warehouses and storage buildings. Raids on North Vietnam’s three major power plants reduced the country’s electrical power output from 92,000 kilowatts to between 17,000 and 24,000 kilowatts, causing a complete blackout of all but the critical functions of government and defense that required electrical power. Militarily, the December bombing campaign achieved the intended objective of seriously degrading the enemy’s capability to wage war in the South. Far more significant, however, is the fact that our nation’s political objectives were supported by the rapid, concentrated application of air power in an effort to bring about a cease-fire and the ultimate end of the war for the United States in Southeast Asia.
There are several conclusions that can be drawn from this examination of the role of air power throughout the Indochina War. First, there is the realization that air power along with other U.S. and allied forces had been engaged since 1965 in one of the longest wars in U.S. history. Militarily, a long war is disadvantageous. If we possess a capability to apply force rapidly and massively (massively in relation to the opposition, not in absolute terms), presumably we can end a war quickly. With such an alternative available, if we allow the war to continue over an extended period it is because of a decision to impose restrictions on the forces we employ—a decision prompted by a desire to limit the scope of the conflict.
Nevertheless, from the purely military point of view, such restrictions produce numerous disadvantages. The enemy is given time to study, adjust to, and counteract our strategy, tactics, and weapons. He is given time to deploy new weapon systems or to perfect and expand existing ones (witness the formidable North Vietnamese air defenses built up during the earlier bombing campaign); to create different routes of supply (the jungle highways through Laos and sea-fed routes through Cambodia); to train large numbers of people to be effective troops; to redistribute, his population; to disperse his vital industries; to duplicate and build bypasses to critical communications links; to develop and employ successful propaganda themes. In short, we may surrender or seriously compromise the initiative and so make the war much more expensive and difficult to win.
Second, when the political climate requires the imposition of constraints on military forces, serious consideration must be given to existing limitations in force capabilities. This is not to say that military forces can achieve an objective only when unconstrained and given a free rein; but, rather, a balance must be reached in the decision-making process between political constraints and force limitations so that the ability to achieve a desired objective is optimized. It is in this area that the “can-do” spirit of the military sometimes works at cross-purposes to the accomplishment of an assigned task. The overriding tradition in the military is to salute smartly and move out even when faced with limited capabilities. Just as military leaders must face the reality of political constraints, so is it important that a nation’s policy-makers understand that extensive political constraints in concert with force limitations may produce an outcome that falls short of anticipated objectives.
Finally, as the limitations in force capabilities are reduced by advancing technology and the changing face of the war brings about a lessening of political constraints, the appropriate application of military power can indeed contribute significantly to the achievement of desired objectives. I believe that the experience of the eleven-day campaign in December 1972 should provide convincing lessons in the future employment of air power as an effective instrument to be used in support of national policy. Perhaps these valuable lessons will allow us to update the findings of the World War II Strategic Bombing Survey, to show that “no nation can long endure the swift, accurate, concentrated application of air power and still hope to achieve any measure of victory.”
The ultimate objective in Southeast Asia has been identified as a just and honorable peace. Air power, alone, cannot take full credit for bringing the war to an end; but the establishment of serious peace negotiations and the long-awaited cease-fire agreement that followed were in large part due to the application of air power.
Hq United States European Command
General George J. Eade is Deputy Commander in Chief, United States European Command. During World War II he flew 37 missions in the ETO. He has spent much of his military career with the Strategic Air Command, as a B-29 pilot; Director of Operations, 7th Air Division, England; Commander of 2d Bombardment Wing and 7th Bombardment Wing; Chief, Single Integrated Operational Plans Division, Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff. Prior to his present assignment General Eade was Deputy Chief of Staff, Plans and Operations, and Air Force Operations Deputy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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