Air University Review , November-December 1980

Civilian Control of the
Military in Southeast Asia

SERIOUS scholarly analysis of the question of civilian control of the military has traditionally been the preserve of the social scientists, usually political scientists and sociologists. In an attempt to make their subject more manageable and reduce a plethora of data to digestible proportions, these scholars tend to rely on several assumptions. Foremost among these is their use of institutional and organizational categories to define what they mean by civilian and military. For the civilian part of the equation, they rely heavily on organizational charts peopled with individuals in mufti, while for the military they look to uniform-clad bureaucrats. We are told, for example, that during World War II President Roosevelt turned the conduct of the war over to the military strategists. Or we hear that during the conflict in Southeast Asia President Johnson personally chose the targets to be struck in North Vietnam, or that at one time he even called a jet fighter pilot in midair to give him instructions. Examples like this suggest a clearer dichotomy between military and civilian than can usually be supported by the evidence. While such dramatic instances may have a ring of truth, their uncritical acceptance and repetition reinforce the idea of a rigid organizational distinction between two self-contained groups.

A corollary to this tendency to place civilians in one box and the military in another is to color the civilian crate peaceful and the military one martial. That care must be exercised in accepting such coloration has been amply demonstrated by Richard Betts,¹ who shows that the more warlike utterances and the decisions most likely to have led to military confrontation during the Cold War emanated from civilians; while the military, more attuned to martial realities, often provided the voice of moderation.

A second pervasive assumption, drawn like the first from organizational charts, is that the only type of control to be discussed is that of the formal, bureaucratic authority enjoyed by a superior over a subordinate. In the military, for example, this form of control is exercised through the chain of command, which runs from the President through the defense secretary, military chiefs, commanders, and on down. Also, too often implied in this rigid J view of control is the assumption that decisions, once made at the planning level, are brought to unaltered fruition on the field of battle by soldiers, sailors, and airmen responding automatically to perfectly understood guidance from above. Examination of the details also weakens this assumption. Leaving aside the handful of dramatic instances where it could be reasonably argued that the military set out intentionally to pursue national policy by means somewhat at variance with those envisioned in Washington, the slippage between planning and implementation is often the natural consequence of differing perceptions and of a more intimate, practical appreciation by the military of the capabilities and probable results of their technology. Analysts of civilian control would disregard this frequent and practical disconnect between theory and practice at their own risk.

How much would the traditional picture of civilian control of the military change if these assumptions were discarded and replaced with others? What conclusions would emerge, for example, if civilian were redefined not along the lines of habiliment but as a mind-set encompassing political, economic, psychological, and social factors? How many of those who in present analyses inhabit the military cubbyhole would be moved over into the civilian box? And again, what would be the outcome if, instead of looking at job descriptions of individuals to discover the locus of control, emphasis were placed on the ideas that control events, without concern for the garb of those who generate the ideas? How many of those now classified as civilians would emerge, while retaining their Brooks Brothers cover, as military?

A close examination of the air war in Southeast Asia suggests that there was a surprising degree of role changing. The traditional distinction between military and civilian often broke down, due at least in part to the nature of the conflict. Uniformed people were involved in pacification programs, monitoring economies, and dealing directly with Vietnamese province chiefs, who themselves combined military and civilian functions. Conversely, one phase of the conflict in northern Laos was the responsibility of civilians in the embassy at Vientiane. Such a crossover of roles undermines the traditional and comfortable distinction between civilian and military. As a consequence, it bends to the breaking point the formerly accepted lines of control and forces us to look to specific cases to obtain even a glimmer of who controlled whom and, even more important, what were the controlling ideas. To expect a neat generalization about civilian control of the military is more than can be hoped for.

The United States Air Force fought four wars simultaneously in Southeast Asia between 1965 and the end of 1972: a bombing war against North Vietnam in concert with the Navy and, on occasion, with the South Vietnamese Air Force; a war in northern Laos both against North Vietnamese supplies flowing to the Communist Pathet Lao and in direct support of Meo tribesmen and Laotian ground troops engaged with the Communists; an interdiction campaign against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Laotian panhandle, again with the Navy's assistance; and a war in South Vietnam itself in support of American and South Vietnamese ground forces. Each of these wars had its own objectives and methods for achieving them, and each was pursued in a command and control environment that differed in many ways from the others.

The United States Air Force fought four wars simultaneously in Southeast Asia...

The "organizational chart" for control in each of these wars was set up by presidential directive in March 1966. According to this arrangement, the Joint Chiefs of Staff OCS) and the National Security Council were directly responsible for the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Since both of these groups were presidential advisers, this meant that President Johnson intended to keep close personal supervision of these operations. The ambassador in Vientiane was given control over the wars in Laos, both north and south. Control of the action in South Vietnam was delegated to the military commander in Saigon, General William C. Westmoreland. This is the way it was on paper, but it did not always unfold that way in reality.

North Vietnam

The bombing raids against the north, being the most dramatic and politically sensitive of the four wars, were monitored closely by Washington and are most frequently cited as an illustration of civilian control of the military. Despite the fact that this was the war the Air Force favored from the start and continued to espouse throughout the conflict, its shape when it began early in 1965 was molded by the political desire to impress Hanoi with America's firmness and to boost the sagging morale of the South Vietnamese. Even the so-called military aspect of this objective (that is, to increase the cost to the north of continuing its support of the Vietcong) was only partially military. Given the political and diplomatic equity that the American government had in the bombing, it was almost foreordained that the campaign would be gradual and an almost half-hearted attempt designed more as a diplomatic calling card than as a serious attempt to halt the enemy militarily.

It is fashionable to illustrate the absolute nature of civilian control over the bombing campaign by quoting President Johnson's alleged boast that the military "can't even bomb an outhouse without my approval."² It is undeniable that the organizational charts endowed the chief executive with this degree of control. But a closer look at the genesis and subsequent maturation of the bombing campaign suggests that military ideas were not as dormant as that remark might imply.

During the planning for the first bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, there was much discussion of what it was expected to accomplish and how it should be conducted. The President's civilian advisers viewed the bombing as a psychological weapon whose value lay not so much in the physical damage it would inflict as in the threat it would pose to the North Vietnamese of greater pressure to come if they did not halt their aid to the southern insurgents. Many military leaders, on the other hand, argued strongly and consistently for rapid, full-scaled strikes against military rather than psychological targets. The Joint Chiefs wanted to blitz airfields that sheltered MiG jet fighters, railroads that brought aid from China, petroleum storage areas that kept the military going, and the main roads through which reinforcements passed from north to south.³ The difference, in short, was between whether the real target of bombing should be the will or the capability of the North Vietnamese to continue their aggression in the south."⁴

For the first few weeks targets were chosen primarily for their supposed political and psychological value.

Rolling Thunder got under way early in March 1965 with the dispute unresolved. For the first few weeks targets were chosen primarily for their supposed political and psychological value. The stated objectives of the campaign were, in order of importance, to boost morale in the south, to show the north that the United States meant what it said, and to show that it could inflict pain on the north.⁵ The military criteria of inflicting physical damage and stopping or slowing the flood of reinforcements played little part. "Our primary objective," according to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, "was to communicate our political resolve."⁶

But this soon changed when it became apparent that the will of the north remained undaunted by the bombs. Exactly one month after the opening of the campaign, the rationale began to shift closer to the military one. By April the bombing was officially pictured as an attempt to interrupt the infiltration of men and materiel from north to south. The new targets reflected this military rationale. Air strikes were now aimed at transit points, barracks, supply depots, ammunition depots, and communication routes including railroads, highways, and bridges. At this point McNamara told the press:

The metamorphosis of objectives was complete two years later when McNamara told Congress that:

The enemy's capability had replaced his will as the object of attack.

The Rolling Thunder campaign lasted more than three years before President Johnson stopped it on 1 November 1968. During this time, target lists were gradually expanded and oriented in the direction originally sought by the Joint Chiefs. In addition to hitting preselected targets, airmen were permitted to fly armed reconnaissance missions in which they could strike targets of opportunity not specifically designated by Washington. Early in 1966, the boundaries of these armed reconnaissance areas were increased, although 30-mile rings were drawn around Hanoi and Haiphong, the north's two major cities, which remained off limits to the bombers. In June the administration approved strikes against seven major petroleum depots within these rings, and in December the rings were reduced to ten miles. In 1967 some exemptions were given for striking particular targets even within these rings. In August of that year, further relaxation of restrictions allowed the attack planes to bomb 52 of 57 targets that previously had been proscribed.⁹

Each step in this gradual addition of targets was the result of a compromise between the political and military pressures at work on the President. The military pressures were not always voiced by people in uniform. From the outset the American ambassador in Saigon, Maxwell Taylor, deplored the piecemeal application and urged expanded bombing.¹⁰ The CIA director, John A. McCone, was even more emphatic:

But the strongest "military" tones came from a different civilian quarter, the United States Senate. Following a review of the first two years of the campaign, the Preparedness Subcommittee in August 1967 strongly urged that the military voice be listened to. As a result, the bombing increased. Shortly thereafter Secretary McNamara resigned. ¹²

Viewed solely from the aspect of targeting, military inputs seem to have carried at least as much weight as civilian ones in determining the shape of Rolling Thunder. Even by the traditional bureaucratic definition of civilian control, there was a slight relaxation of civilian oversight as time passed, due mainly to the administration's disappointment with the initial results and relative downgrading of the bombing campaign when American troops began pouring into the south in late 1965. From the targeting point of view, therefore, it is an oversimplification to speak unqualifiedly of civilian control of the military.

But while the influence of civilian ideas on targeting was gradually watered down during Rolling Thunder, it never wavered on the second of the Joint Chiefs' demands, namely, that the bombing be quick and full scale. From the outset the Chiefs wanted to catch the enemy off guard and not give him time to recover and regroup. In their view, the advantages of hitting targets, even the right ones, would be lost if the job were not done quickly. But the job was not done quickly. Because each increase in the bombing campaign resulted from a compromise, it ended up being three years of gradualism rather than decisive escalation. The bombers were called off 8 times between 1965 and 1968, once for 37 days, in hopes that the North Vietnamese would negotiate. Instead they replenished themselves. Looked at from the aspect of pace, civilian control of the campaign remained predominant.

For a year and a half after the bombing halt of 1 November 1968, the skies over North Vietnam remained relatively quiet. American planes continued to fly reconnaissance missions below the 19th parallel, and they were permitted to strike back at antiaircraft guns that fired at them. Throughout all of 1969 only 285 attacks were made against antiaircraft guns in the north, compared with 105,700 sorties against a wide variety of targets two years earlier at the height of the campaign.¹³

The decision to continue the bombing halt through 1969 had a military as well as a civilian foundation. Richard Nixon's assumption of the presidency early in 1969 provided an excellent opportunity, had he wanted it, to end the bombing halt and resume Rolling Thunder. But military logic was by now dictating otherwise, and the bombers were carrying out the same mission elsewhere: on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Laotian panhandle, where full-scale interdiction campaigns were under way. It was a military judgment that this was a more fruitful area in which to slow down enemy infiltration than north of the demilitarized zone.

Throughout 1970 and into 1971, American planes met increasing resistance over North Vietnam in the form of more sophisticated antiaircraft systems and stepped-up use of MiG fighters by the enemy. Slowly the rules were relaxed to permit attacks on the defenses up to the 20th parallel and as soon as enemy radars locked on to the attacking planes; American bombers no longer had to wait until fired on to attack. It was the air commander's (General John D. Lavelle) liberal interpretation of this latter rule that led to his replacement early in 1972. The meekness of the American response in the north allowed a massive North Vietnamese buildup of forces, and in April 1972 they poured across the demilitarized zone in a murderous attack on the south.

The American air response to this invasion constituted the second campaign against the north, called Linebacker. Most of the restrictions were removed as American planes struck targets throughout North Vietnam up to within 30 miles of the Chinese border. Ten-mile rings around Hanoi and Haiphong were reinstated, within which planes could not strike without specific authorization. But the targets were military, and the pace was swift. For the first time in the war, U.S. planes mined North Vietnamese harbors, particularly that of Haiphong, which was the major entry point for materials from the Soviet Union. These American actions were based solely on the military need to stem the enemy's invasion. Civilian control, in the sense of civilian ideas as motivating factors, were secondary. The Linebacker campaign (April-October) was aimed primarily at the enemy's capability and only tangentially at his will. During the eight months of the campaign, U.S. aircraft flew more than 41,500 sorties over the north,¹⁴ and the invasion ground to a halt. This was a military campaign, pure and simple.

The final air action against the north took place at Christmastime 1972, when Hanoi appeared to be stalling on peace negotiations. The campaign, called Linebacker II, had as its stated objective persuading the leaders in Hanoi that they would be better off coming to terms. For eleven days beginning on 19 December, almost 2000 sorties flew against targets in the Hanoi and Haiphong areas. The bombing stopped on 29 December, and three days later negotiations resumed. The extent to which Linebacker II forced the north to return to the negotiations is still a matter of dispute. What is beyond question, however, is that one purpose of the air campaign was to get the enemy back to the conference table, and, even though the targets were military and the pace swift, civilian goals controlled the attacks. More clearly perhaps than in any of the four air wars, and even more than in earlier campaigns in the war over the north, air power was being used for and controlled by civilian purposes.

In sum, the eight years of air activity over North Vietnam remained largely under civilian control, even when that control is defined as a set of ideas rather than as a group of people in civilian clothing. But even here the picture of civilian control is not as absolute as is often suggested. During a few periods, particularly in 1972, military control in the sense of targeting and pace predominated.

Northern Laos

To the west of North Vietnam lay Laos, one of the three states that earlier had formed the defunct French Indochina and one in which the North Vietnamese had historically been strong, especially in the two northeastern provinces which abutted North Vietnam. North Vietnamese assistance to the local Communists, the Pathet Lao, continued throughout the war. Since an agreement in 1962 limited the number of outside military personnel allowed in the country, responsibility for the American effort to support the Laotian government was given to the U. S. ambassador in the capital, Vientiane. A glance at the organizational chart would suggest clear civilian control of operations. Would a closer look at the air action confirm or change this conclusion?

Of the four air wars, the one in northern Laos (called Barrel Roll) was by far the smallest. Until 1968 only 2 percent of all the air power used in Southeast Asia was devoted to operations there. The goals of both the North Vietnamese and the United States were the same for the area. Both sides realized that the fate of Laos was tied directly to the outcome of the battle in South Vietnam, and neither side aimed for complete victory in the tiny kingdom. The war followed a seasonal pattern. Each year between November and April, the dry season, the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies swept westward across the central Plain of Jars, stopping short of the capital. When the rains resumed in April and May, they were driven back by government forces and Meo tribesmen supported by American air power.

The United States supported these operations because they tied down large numbers of North Vietnamese, who would otherwise be freed to fight in South Vietnam, and because Americans gained access to territory from which they could both monitor the infiltration down the eastern trails and direct the bombing campaign over North Vietnam. Operations in Laos had little raison d'etre of their own. Since northern Laos was a sideshow, living in the shadow of the greater effort to the east, the United States never developed as clear a policy for the war in that country as it did for the other wars. One of the ambassadors later told Congress that he could not recall having received more than half a dozen instructions from the State Department in over four years.¹⁵ Into the vacuum created by this absence of guidance flooded varied and at times competing programs, diluting what would appear on the surface to be the ambassador's total authority to control the war.

The United States Air Force flew two types of missions over northern Laos. On the one hand fighter-bombers from Thailand struck at the network of roads and trails over which equipment and men flowed from North Vietnam to the Pathet Lao. On the other, American planes led by forward air controllers covered Meo ground troops when they were engaged with the enemy.

Although the ambassador was responsible for American activities in Laos, the 1962 agreement relative to the kingdom prevented the United States from stationing planes in the country. The embassy had to borrow planes from the Seventh Air Force in Saigon. While Seventh Air Force had the planes, however, it had little say in how they would be used. Air Force aircraft for all four wars came from a common pool tended by the Seventh Air Force commander. First priority for using these planes went to the needs in South Vietnam, followed closely by the requirements for strikes against infiltrators in southern Laos. North Vietnam and northern Laos got what was left. In fact, the majority of missions were flown in northern Laos by airplanes diverted from North Vietnam or from southern Laos either because of poor weather or lack of immediate targets in those areas. The Seventh Air Force commander had to weigh each request that came to him from Vientiane against competing demands for aircraft elsewhere. Since he was responsible for not only the quantity but also the types of planes needed in four theaters, he tended to view the war in northern Laos differently than did the ambassador. Being closer to the ground action, the ambassador wanted planes to support Laotian ground forces in their battles with the enemy. The Air Force, taking a broader view, wanted to concentrate on interdicting the supplies coming in from North Vietnam and being stored behind the battle lines.

This underlying difference of viewpoint surfaced in various ways during the nine years of fighting in northern Laos. Several times the ambassador sought to have some of the planes set aside for his exclusive use. The Air Force resisted any attempt, whether on the part of the Marine Corps or the U. S. Army in South Vietnam or by the ambassador in Vientiane, to carve out separate globules of air power to be dedicated to only one type of mission. In its view, airplanes should be used to perform several different roles, and aircraft were most effective if they were controlled by the air commander in Saigon, who could move them about to satisfy different requirements. In short, the Air Force insisted on maintaining flexibility.

One of Washington's principal concerns was to avoid involving Communist China and the Soviet Union in the war.

Thus disagreement erupted from time to time into controversy over which type of aircraft was best for the limited war in northern Laos: propeller-driven planes, which could get closer to the action but were vulnerable to ground fire, or jets, which flew faster and higher but were less prone to hits from below. The ambassador in Vientiane, wedded to close air support in this relatively relaxed war, pleaded for more propeller planes. The Air Force favored jets since they were better for interdiction and could also be used in the other wars. Since by early 1968 propeller planes had been virtually driven from the skies over North Vietnam and southern Laos by sophisticated enemy antiaircraft weapons, the only place they were still effective was in northern Laos. The Air Force viewed the ambassador's requests for these planes as attempts to create his own air force composed of planes that could not be used elsewhere. Although the controversy simmered on, the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense supported jets and, by inclusion, emphasis on interdiction rather than close air support. In order to get planes, the ambassador traded away some of his control over the military with which he was originally endowed. Even though the ambassador had authority to validate the targets that would be hit, the finite nature of Air Force resources and the Air Force's need to control their use resulted in substantial de facto military control of operations.

Whereas in North Vietnam it was the process of target selection that took the edge off civilian control, in northern Laos the absence of attack planes in the country had the same kind of effect but to an even larger degree.

Southern Laos

American air attacks against North Vietnamese infiltrators on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos began in sporadic fashion early in 1965 as an adjunct to Rolling Thunder. Although the North Vietnamese had been using the network of roads and trails as a two-way street for years, intelligence reports noted a major increase of southbound traffic late in 1964 and into the early months of 1965. Planes from both South Vietnam and Thailand began striking trucks, truck parks, transshipment points, and enemy soldiers in April of 1965 in what soon became a regular series of interdiction campaigns.

Civilian control bowed to the reality of an overwhelming military presence.

As in northern Laos, weather determined the timing of the bombing programs. The North Vietnamese moved supplies and people during the dry season (November through April) and repaired and restocked supplies during the remainder of the year when the roads became muddy and impassable. American planes hit them during the dry periods and planned for the coming campaign when it rained.

At first these strikes, like those over North Vietnam, were limited by political factors. One of Washington's principal concerns was to avoid involving Communist China and the Soviet Union in the war. Also, since the planes were bombing in Laos from bases in South Vietnam and Thailand, the ambassadors in those three countries played an important political role in controlling the strikes. Of particular sensitivity was the position of the Laotian government. Technically the Laotians were neutral in the war between the Vietnams. The American ambassador in Vientiane strove to preserve this neutral stance and adopted the position that American military interests should not interfere with it. He was insistent that the United States could not carry out its interdiction program in southern Laos without the full, cooperation of the Laotian Prime Minister, Souvanna Phouma, and that Souvanna's confidence could be gained only by being completely frank with him. This meant that the United States, if necessary, would have to pull its military punches on the trail if failure to do so would jeopardize the political situation. Air operations would have to be controlled very carefully. Pilots were ordered to abort missions, for example, rather than inflict damage on friendly villagers. The Air Force would have to forego the use of napalm rather than risk the alienation of a friendly people and government. In short, the United States would have to bend over backward in executing its military mission in order to maintain the political foundation of its activities.¹⁶

But while neat in theory, this picture of civilian control was modified in practice by the "fog of war." In southern Laos, this fog consisted of bad weather and heavy jungle and mountainous terrain, similarity of targets, an elusive enemy, inadequate navigational aids to handle more than 5000 strike sorties a month, and a most complex set of bombing rules devised precisely to avoid political embarrassment. In one way these factors tended to increase civilian oversight of the bombing. Because of them there occurred from time to time accidental bombing of friendly troops, civilians, and villages. Each time such an incident took place the ambassador had to explain to the prime minister what went wrong. As a result, controls over the bombing became progressively stricter.

But in another, more subtle way the climate and terrain of southern Laos modified the ambassador's control. As in the northern part of the country, targets were at first nominated by the embassy staff to Seventh Air Force in Saigon. These targets were discovered by embassy-dispatched ground teams that roamed the countryside reporting by radio the location of supplies and soldiers that should be struck. The Seventh Air Force commander found this system of locating and reporting unsatisfactory. Due to at mospheric and climatic conditions, the reports were often so late that the enemy had gone by the time the planes arrived. In addition, the heavy jungle canopy made it difficult for pilots to find the targets that had been reported to them by someone else. The terrain and climate also made it next to impossible for planes to follow up their strikes with reconnaissance missions to assess the results of their bombing. As its navigational and reconnaissance equipment improved over the years, the Air Force found it much more effective to locate its own targets, and its success in hitting them and reporting the results improved greatly. The embassy's control of targets was weakened.

Another factor worked against the ambassador's tight control of targets on the trail-the use of B-52s in the interdiction campaign starting early in 1966. The question of who would control the big bombers was carried on in strictly military channels between the Strategic Air Command, the Military Assistance Command in Saigon, and Seventh Air Force. While delicate compromises were worked out to ensure that the huge planes would be able to perform their role in Southeast Asia without being diverted from their worldwide strategic alert mission, these decisions involved civilians in the theater only peripherally.

The momentous events of the first half of 1968--the Tet offensive in February, the announcement in March of the coming end of Rolling Thunder, and the American decision in the summer to begin deescalating in Vietnam--virtually ended the ambassador's control of air operations along the trail. When the bombing stopped over North Vietnam, it intensified in southern Laos. As a result, the portion of southern Laos that bordered on South Vietnam came to be treated as an extension of the battlefield in South Vietnam and came under the control of the military commander in Saigon. The Air Force had built a large infiltration monitoring center on the Laotian-Thai border from which it used air-dropped sensors to keep track of movement on the trail. As more and more targets were developed from this center, the role of the ground teams, and with it more of the ambassador's control, waned. Both the ambassador and Souvanna were more interested in the war in the northern part of the country which posed a more direct threat to the government. Consequently, they were willing to trade off control of strikes on the trail for more aerial assistance in their fight against the Pathet Lao. The aerial interdiction campaigns against the trail between 1968 and 1971 (called Commando Hunt) were solely military in purpose and were controlled from Saigon with little interference from Vientiane.

The objective of the air attacks in both parts of Laos, north and south, was military: interdiction and close air support in the north, interdiction alone in the south. Although an eye was kept on the fragile status of the Laotian government, the air strikes were designed not for political persuasion but for stopping or slowing down the enemy. From this aspect, it is of secondary importance whether control was exercised by civilian-clad members of the embassy in Vientiane or uniformed airmen in Saigon. The purpose was military and, therefore, so became the control.

South Vietnam

Before the United States decided in 1965 to send ground forces to South Vietnam, the American air effort consisted of training and advising the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF). Air operations were strongly flavored by both the political relations between the north and the south and by the internal politics of South Vietnam. American Air Force advisers were prohibited from flying combat missions, although it proved impossible to train the

Vietnamese without doing so at times.¹⁷ Aircraft bore Vietnamese insignia, and no jets were thrown into combat. The voice of the American ambassador in Saigon was heard throughout the councils, which determined the nature and extent of American participation.

South Vietnam still exhibited many of the characteristics of a feudal society. It was still largely decentralized with a weak degree of sovereignty emanating from Saigon. The people of the country lacked a tradition of looking to the government for strong central direction. Military, as well as economic, social, and political, affairs tended to break down into parochial groups and be colored more by local conditions than by a sense of nationalism. The VNAF was a poor country cousin of the Vietnamese army which controlled it and which itself had strong political overtones. The VNAF was politicized not only in the sense of organizational control but also in its mission and its modus operandi. It was split into four parts, each assigned to one of the army corps. Even though the Americans had introduced the idea of centralized control and worked to strengthen VNAF headquarters, the force still operated largely on the local level. For example, targets were chosen and approved by the local civilian chief of the province in which the fighting was taking place. It was not unheard of for a province chief to call in air strikes on his personal political enemies who were not Vietcong at all. Even at the "national" level the air force figured prominently in political shakeups. A substantial part of the force was always kept on "coup alert," ready for action if the political opponents of the incumbent head of state threatened to oust him. In September 1964, for example, Prime Minister Nguyen Khanh remained in power in the face of an attempted coup solely because the chief of the air force refused to contribute his planes to the revolt.

Many uniformed people will continue to bemoan the restrictions and controls that prevented them from doing their best.

The large infusion of American ground and air forces starting in mid-1965 changed this. The American decision to intervene militarily was an admission that earlier attempts to defeat the Vietcong by economic and political means were not working. The principal focus now became military, and the commander of the Military Assistance Command for Vietnam (MACV) was given wideranging control of the war. There remained, of course, organizational guidance from Washington. Military plans and requests for forces and materiel were approved there. The objectives of the war were also determined there. Military operations were harnessed to the national goal of, at first, defending the South Vietnamese from the insurgents and, after 1968, of preparing them to defend themselves.

The United States government placed a remarkable amount of trust in the judgment of the MAC V commander and denied him little that he requested. In 1965 the Secretary of Defense assured the military that it would be given whatever was needed to turn the tide.

Partially to avoid the Vietnamese political limitations, which had plagued the earlier advisory effort, and partly to defuse a possible Communist charge of colonialism, the MACV commander, General Westmoreland, kept the American military command separate from that of the Vietnamese, thereby allowing him to pursue American solutions to his military problems. In theory, Westmoreland was a member of the "country team," that is, a member of the ambassador's staff and subject to his overall authority. But the preponderance of military force in the country rendered such authority largely fictional. A good illustration of this is the pacification program, which attempted to keep the loyalty of the rural population by protecting them against the Vietcong and improving their living conditions. This was essentially a civilian idea pursued by the Saigon government for years with little success. It did not stop when the Americans arrived in force. In 1966 American support for pacification was increased and reorganized and put on a more formal footing. Since it began at the local district and provincial levels, and American military advisers were already predominant at those levels, the entire program was placed under the control of General Westmoreland. The President appointed a special representative with the rank of ambassador to oversee the program, but he was placed on the staff of the MACV commander.¹⁸ Civilian control bowed to the reality of an overwhelming military presence. Yet the controlling idea was civilian, even though responsibility for its success resided in a uniformed general.

The position of the Air Force in this command structure was an intricate one, complicated little by civilian control but seriously by the military command and control arrangements that had evolved over time.

Restrictions imposed on air power in South Vietnam itself by "civilian control" were of two types, neither totally civilian nor particularly stultifying. The most general inhibition was a strategic one, the early decision to emphasize the ground war in the south rather than bombing the north. This decision was an amalgam of civilian and military thinking. It satisfied the civilian desire to be able to picture the war to the enemy and to the world as a defensive one and avoid making it appear like an attempt to subdue and conquer the north. But it was also the strategy favored by the American ground forces, which saw it as the only immediate solution to the imminent collapse of South Vietnam in the summer of 1965. Many in the Air Force continued to believe this was the wrong way to go and felt that air power was not being used to its best advantage when it was employed as a backup to ground fighting.

The second type of "civilian" restriction was embodied in the rules of engagement that prohibited aircraft from operating in certain specified politically sensitive areas, such as near or across neighboring borders or around populated regions where mistakes could prove to be especially embarrassing politically.

But greater restrictions on air power arose from within the military itself. The Air Force had much wider responsibilities than did the other services and consequently a much more complicated system of controls. For the bombing campaigns against the north, the Seventh Air Force commander in Saigon worked for the Joint Chiefs, who acted through a military command in Hawaii. For air operations in northern Laos, he coordinated with the ambassador in Vientiane. For the war in South Vietnam, which later came to include the extended battlefield in southern Laos, a small southern section of North Vietnam, and Cambodia (now Kampuchea), he was the MACV commander's deputy for air operations. At the same time, he came under the cognizance of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force in Washington. Serving so many masters led inevitably to doctrinal differences and, at times, seemingly irreconcilable pressures on the Seventh Air Force commander. Convinced of the correctness of Air Force doctrine on the indivisibility of air power, for instance, the air commander in Saigon, while on paper responsible for all air power in South Vietnam, found himself pressured to split his assets into four almost separate air forces--the United States Army, Marine Corps, and Navy and the Vietnamese Air Force--each striving to do its own thing. The constant centrifugal pull of these forces represented a major limitation to his ability to maintain the flexibility of air power he needed.

In sum, greater control was exercised on air power within South Vietnam by the military, whether that word be defined as uniformed people or military ideas, than by civilians and civilian concepts.

ANALYSIS of civilian control of the military at the Washington decision-making level is useful during peacetime, when carefully negotiated separation of powers does not have to be tried in the crucible of combat. (Even on this level, however, the traditional definitions of "civilian" and "military" should be altered to include ideas as well as people.) But the best laid plans of control are inevitably confounded in wartime when they become subjected to personal, doctrinal, political, economic, and psychological pressures, few of which can be fully foreseen or planned for. The "fog of war" still remains beyond the grasp of the computer.

In a war such as that which was fought in Southeast Asia, the lines between civilian and military are blurred even more than in a more conventional conflict. This makes it even more important to rely on ideas as well as the people who create them. No clear-cut conclusion on the lines in the Southeast Asia conflict is possible. Many uniformed people will continue to bemoan the restrictions and controls that prevented them from doing their best. From their point of view they are justified, even though controls appeared to have come as frequently from within the military as from without. Some civiliansuited individuals, on the other hand, still look back on the conflict as one in which military power was properly tailored to fit the body of national objectives. And from their perspective, they, too, are right. In the face of these divergent viewpoints, about all that can be concluded from the experience is that civilian ideas were as often expressed and acted on by the military as were military ideas by civilians and that the most fruitful locus of investigation into civilian control of the military during wartime lies not as much on the planning level as on the field of battle.

Notes

1. Richard Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Cold War Crises (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977).

2. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York, 1978), p. 378.

3. The Pentagon Papers The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel edition, 4 vols (Boston, 1971), 3:288-89

4. Ibid., p. 290.

5. Ibid., p. 340.

6. Ibid., p. 333.

7. Ibid., p. 360.

8. Ibid., 4:200.

9. Lewy, p. 385.

10. Pentagon Papers, 3:334-36.

11. Ibid., p. 353.

12. Ibid., 4:203-5.

13. OASD Statistical Summary, Table 304, 5 December 1973.

14. Lewy, p. 411.

15. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Security Arrangements and Commitments Abroad: Kingdom of Laos, Hearings, 21-28 October 1969, p. 517.

16. Carl Berger, editor, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973 (Washington Office of Air Force History, 1977), p. 101.

17. General William W. Momyer, USAF (Ret), Air Power in Three Wars, 1978, p. 67.

18. Major General George S. Eckhardt, Command and Control, 1950-1969 (Washington Department of the Army, 1974), pp. 68-69.

Colonel John Schlight (B.A., Saint Vincent’s College; M.A., Fordham University; M.A., Ph.D., Princeton University) is Chief, Special Histories Branch, Office Of Air Force History, Bolling AFB, D.C. He previously served as director of academic affairs at the National War College and is a tenured professor of history at the United States Air Force Academy. Colonel Schilght is the author of two books, Monarchs and Mercenaries (1968) and Henry II Plantagenet (1973), and many studies on Southeast Asia.

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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