Air University Review, July-August 1981

Cincinnatus Inside Out: Part 1

Major Richard A. Gabriel, USAR

The much-discussed book Self-Destruction* describes the failures of the United States Army in the Vietnam War and examines much of the Army’s conduct during that war. Purported to have been written by a senior serving officer, the book cites a damning list of failures ranging from the major strategic errors of Westmoreland to the basic ignorance of tactics and troop leadership shown by commanders.**

*Cincinnatus, Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army during the Vietnam Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981, $15.95), 288 pages.

**Major Gabriel did not know the identify of Cincinnatus when he wrote of this review; indeed, it was only a few days before going to press that Cincinnatus was revealed to be Lieutenant Colonel Cecil B. Currey, USAR, retired. Although posed as a combat veteran, he never served in Southeast Asia. He is currently reserve mobilized as a chaplain.

Self-Destruction is an indictment of the Army as a profession. Cincinnatus rests his case on examples of report falsifications, blatant fabrications, other massacres in addition to My Lai, corruption at all levels, poor quality officers, personnel turbulence, drug use, assassinations, racial conflicts, AWOLs, mutinies, low cohesion, and rampant careerism that were the result of the Army’s own policies and practices and not the result of either the "unique character’’ of the war or the lack of home-front support. The list of sins is long, and, I feel, he has made a strong case to show that the ills of the military were caused by its own ineptitude.

Cincinnatus, like Hauser and Gabriel and Savage earlier, attacks an institution he loves to make the Army aware and to help head off further calamity. All those critics were hopeful that the Army would be amenable to accepting solutions, mostly to no avail. But Cincinnatus’s courageous work is worth the effort even though it may do more good than those previous efforts.

The facts presented in Self-Destruction are beyond dispute. The author’s case is airtight. Indeed, corporate suicide occurred in such magnitude that now, almost ten years after Vietnam, enough official material has seeped from within the Army to demonstrate beyond a doubt that the Army did in fact "self-destruct."

If the book has a flaw at all, it is in the author’s failure to press the analysis of why the Army self-destructed. Cincinnatus knows in his gut that the stab-in-the-back theory of Westmoreland and others is wrong; and he knows the notion that "tying the hands of the military" by civilian leaders is what caused the Army’s problems is also bankrupt. The author implies that the fundamental structure and values of the Army since 1960—modeled, as they are, after the business corporation and riddled with entrepreneurial values that enshrine self-interest and pursuit of career as the highest goals—are rotten and corrupt. It is, I feel, the system that corrupts those who serve it; it is the system that forces out the best and rewards only the sycophants. The Army does not realize that military organizations premised on economic assumptions and driven by entrepreneurial values cannot produce effective combat cohesion. Such system do in fact corrupt the human values and responsibilities on which unit cohesion, leadership, and ultimate sacrifice are based.

The suggestions that Cincinnatus makes for reform, as a consequence, are naïve and unworkable. He suggests the creation of an "institutional memory" for the Army in which computerized reports and analysis of past military situations would be made available to future military planners to help them avoid mistakes in analogous situations, He also suggests the creation of a sense of ethics and a formal code, taught by the Army Chaplain Corps. These measures would help in the short-term but are not real solutions. Cincinnatus believes in his heart that the Army wants to change and is capable of reforming itself. Unfortunately, he forgets that the present system served well the archetypes it generated, those military managers and careerists who rode the Vietnam tide to the top. There are too few honest men among them. To reform the Army now from within is to ask those who prospered by that corrupt system to repudiate their own careers and values, their very personal histories. I do not think it will be done by them.

Finally, the book remains silent on a major question: Have any of the institutional forces that produced the rot in the Army during Vietnam been changed in any way? My answer is that they have not and remain with us still. One cannot, I feel, honestly point to a single major institutional reform in the Army, since Vietnam, designed to correct its documented deficiencies. Men who dare tell the truth, like Cincinnatus, must do so anonymously, to avoid the severe retribution of the very system they love and honor.

Cincinnatus has written a powerful book, one that should be used widely at the Army’s staff and combat schools.

Cincinnatus
Inside Out: Part 2

Colonel Alan Gropman

The pseudonymous book Self-Destruction is so warped and distorted that it will not achieve its objective. That goal, according to Cincinnatus in several cloaked interviews he has given, is to reform the United States Army so that the next time it is confronted with an insurgency it fights properly and wins. There is abundant food for thought in this book, but Cincinnatus has made so much of the meal unpalatable for its intended diners, the leaders of the Army, that they will probably not eat any of it.

Although all of Cincinnatus’s main points have been made before, it is not clear to him that the root causes of the defeat in Vietnam have been fully explored, understood, and remedied. Thus, he must reiterate them. Cincinnatus asserts that the Army’s massive application of firepower showed that the military leadership paid insufficient attention to the uniquely political aspects of insurgency. Cincinnatus condemns the politically corrosive uses of free-fire zones, harassing and interdiction fire, defoliation, search and destroy with the emphasis on the later, the repeated use of indiscriminate artillery in civilian areas, regular harassment of noncombatants, and the bombing of strategically insignificant targets in both North and South Vietnam. In other words, he indicts the use of the grand tactic of attrition. Pacification, not killing, was the obvious and untried key to victory, Cincinnatus argues.

The author also cites the uniformed military for not dissenting from policies of which they disapproved. Many high-ranking soldiers vigorously complained after the war that they disagreed with the tactics, programs, and policies forced on them by civilians in Washington, yet no high-ranking general ever resigned his commission to draw attention to the disagreement.

Cincinnatus is also outraged by the overt racism of U.S. soldiers. Excessive brutality, he claims, was common, and this was both morally reprehensible and counterproductive. The author blames this evil on the uniformed leadership’s use of the "body-count." That statistical indicator led to the "gook syndrome," which led to men killing "indiscriminately in order to swell a tally sheet in some higher headquarters." The entire abuse of statistics to indicate progress is heavily criticized by Cincinnatus. "Honorable officers," he writes, "were placed in situations where they had to compromise their word, their honor, and their oaths of office."

The collapse of honor led to torture, murder, and stunning tragedies such as My Lai, and then the cover-ups. Scandal and corruption at all levels were rife, Cincinnatus argues. He drags out the dismal record of malingering, combat refusals, AWOLs, desertions, drug abuse, and worst of all, fraggings.

Cincinnatus lays these ills at the feet of the senior officer corps. Repeatedly, he cites examples of "morale corroding" careerism, emphasizing excessive decorations for officers and the frequent improprieties in awarding them, the misuse of the officer efficiency report, and the harmful effects of the up-or-out officer personnel management system. Cincinnatus believes these defects led to the destruction of trust between officers and the willingness of many of them to sacrifice the well-being of their subordinates for their own advancement.

Where did the Army go wrong? Cincinnatus claims the sole cause of the disaster came from the Army’s adoption of U.S. business-managerial techniques. He vilifies General Maxwell Taylor as the individual who all but destroyed the Army introducing entrepreneurial values to the combat force.

Cincinnatus may be correct in citing the adoption of the wrong set of values for putting the Army on the failure track, but he is superficial and unprofessional in citing one uniformed individual—and an authentic war hero at that—for sending the Army in that direction.

Cincinnatus quotes not a single example of entrepreneurial policies Taylor promulgated as either Army Chief of Staff or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Why just Taylor and not the succession of Defense Secretaries from American big business, other Chiefs, and other Chairmen? Why does he not cite the difficulties of maintaining a large force in a prolonged period of peace in a democracy? There lies the institutional problem.

Cincinnatus’s other pariah is General William Westmoreland. No slur seems too low, and nearly all of the Vietnam combat disasters are laid on Westmoreland’s ignorance of revolutionary warfare. He and the rest of the Army’s leadership were guilty, according to Cincinnatus, of actions that were "little short of criminal negligence." The disaster in Vietnam, Cincinnatus argues, grew solely out of gross "ineptitude at the top," and no home front political or social turbulence contributed to the disaster.

Certainly an objective account of the succession of combat refusals, desertions, and fraggings would have to deal with the changed perception of the war after Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the election campaign of 1968 and Richard Nixon’s subsequent election. Of this Cincinnatus is silent. While the war through 1968 had not been popular, the AWOL, desertion, and other rates of decay were lower in the Army up through that year—with the in-country component at its peak—than they had been in the last patriotic war this country had fought, World War II. The Vietnam War was really several wars with distinctive watersheds. After mid-1968 came unmistakable signs of disengagement, such as peace talks, troop withdrawals, orders from the leadership to minimize American casualties, Vietnamization, and even American citizens—some of whom were former cabinet members—traveling to Hanoi cloathed in mea culpas. The American people were impatient and fed up with the war, and this tone was transmitted to the soldier, who understandably had no desire to be the last American to die in Vietnam.

Not only does Cincinnatus overlook this evidence, he fails to mention the effects on morale of the utterly inequitable and ignoble conscription system. The Army in Vietnam was not representative of the American people; it was an Army of the poor and disadvantaged, heavy with minorities. Taylor, Westmoreland, and the Army leadership certainly did not advocate a draft whose unlucky and unfortunate products they were supposed to mold into a combat force, fighting an objectiveless war 12,000 miles from home. Cincinnatus is more than just superficial in attributing simple causes for complex effects.

The author contends that the politicians bear no responsibility, asserting that the military has hidden for too long behind a claim of "political softness." But that is not the major military complaint; it is, rather, political control down to the tactical level. Robert McNamara earns only two index entries and is treated as a bit player in Cincinnatus’s drama, and Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and W. W. Rostow are not given even walk-on parts. When Cincinnatus complains of the use of statistical indicators, he should give some thought to the analytically minded civilians that McNamara brought into the Defense Department. He offers no evidence that the Army introduced or favored the body-count. Furthermore, he rails against the Army’s "zero-defects" program, but the Army did not create it. On the contrary, it is a quality-control methodology used in industry and utterly out of place when forced on the military.

Cincinnatus’s inconsistency is almost as stunning as his shallowness and bias. He criticizes the military for its failures but notes that the Army never lost a major battle. He condemns Maxwell Taylor’s attempts to provide service members with language training, but indicts the Army for its inability to train its people to speak or read Vietnamese. He attests that the Army did not "understand the need for pacification. . . . It relied too heavily on technology and the lavish use of firepower. . . ." Yet he quotes approvingly from Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea (1965):

There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert. Where these means cannot, for whatever reason, be used, the war is lost.

Cincinnatus, furthermore, must stand guilty of shabby scholarship. On the book’s dust jacket, he is advertised as a Ph.D. in History, but his notes and bibliography are padded. Although there are 33 pages of notes, most of the sources that specifically document his assertions are secondary. Worse, Cincinnatus footnotes the unnecessary—such as citing Genesis, chapter and verse, for "Am I my brother’s keeper?" —but leaves undocumented some critical passages. Here are several that will stand for many:

• "As early as the end of 1961 . . . twenty-two American generals had found berths for themselves [in South Vietnam]." This is evidence of Careerism, writes Cincinnatus, but it goes undocumented and is erroneous.
• "Disengagement," Cincinnatus argues, was possible in 1961, but the Army insisted that "its warriors could bring the insurgency in Vietnam to a rapid defeat. . . ." No documents for that assertion, no quotes from any Army leader accompany that passage, and it flies in the face of the evidence cited in The Pentagon Papers, The Best and the Brightest, and The Irony of Vietnam.
• "Heroes," writes Cincinnatus, "were awarded high medals for acts of ‘valor’ performed while they were so spaced out on drugs that they had no idea what they were doing." Possibly true, but the author cites not a single example or document.
• "According to some reports, troops of the 101st Air Mobile Division offered a reward of $10,000 for the assassination of the officer who gave them the order to attack the meat grinder in the Au Shau valley, Ap Bia." But the author gives the reader no clue as to where to find such reports.
• "For the year 1969, the Army admitted to at least two hundred documented fraggings," and more in 1970. Perhaps, but Cincinnatus does not cite the Army’s admission.
• "The CIA supported" the Vietnamese political power structure "by protecting Vietnamese officials’ poppy fields and flying their heroin out of the country on Air America planes." No sources for that serious allegation either.

Also as disconcerting is the author’s misuse of documents. He quotes several times from Robert W. Komer’s 1972 Rand Report Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on US-GVN Performance in Vietnam, obviously using Komer as an authority, but he distorts Komer’s judgments. Komer writes mainly about the failures of the civilian apparatus in Saigon. His major criticisms are saved for the U.S. State Department and the Agency for International Development (AID), although Komer is also quite critical of the Army.

Cincinnatus, in his attempt to garner authority for his single-minded condemnation takes a paragraph in which Komer indicts both State and AID for not critically examining their performance and substitutes the phrase "Green Machine" (which is to be nowhere found in the Komer passage) for the civilian bureaucracies Komer is condemning. Similarly, Cincinnatus argues that "army managers failed to get vitally needed information that the war was not progressing as they so desperately wanted to believe. Komer concurs." But reading the page cited from Komer indicates that he was referring mainly to civilians in the Defense/State/AID/Vietnamese apparatuses. Cincinnatus may in fact be correct, but the use of Komer as authority is illegitimate.

Cincinnatus’s military historical judgement is also lacking. He lays the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the French use of American ideas and equipment, but no serious historian has ever claimed that, and Cincinnatus makes no attempt to prove his assertion. He argues that insurgents must "raise and equip a standing army and win some battles" in order to succeed. He cites as evidence Fidel Castro’s success in Cuba. But Castro did nothing of the kind and won Cuba by default as the Fulgencio Batista regime collapsed from within once President Dwight Eisenhower indicated that the United States would no longer support the Cuban dictator. Castro’s only successful venture from the hills was his victory march into a vacated Havana. Cincinnatus implies that Army generals favored the use of strategic hamlets (SH) in Vietnam, but he cites no evidence. In fact SH was a bad idea that had worked elsewhere under vastly different circumstances and was imposed on the Vietnamese by civilians. Cincinnatus asserts that the Air Force "enthusiastically" supported Lyndon Johnson’s air war against North Vietnam, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Air Force detested the limitations on equipment and targets and the stifling control from Washington. The author argues that bombing was indefensible both tactically and strategically because it did not contribute to military success. It was in fact counterproductive, writes Cincinnatus, and for evidence he cites an antiwar British observer who noted that the 1966 bombing "welded" the North Vietnamese together unshakably. The truth is elsewhere: While North Vietnamese morale was not appreciably weakened by the pinprick raids permitted the Air Force and Navy in 1966, it was almost shattered by the Linebacker campaigns in the 1970s. But of the effect of these later campaigns on the Hanoi spirit, Cincinnatus writes not a word

All of these defects, especially the selective use of evidence and blatant bias, wreak major harm on Self-Destruction. Cincinnatus claims in interviews that he only wants reform, but his failings as a scholar and historian will ensure that it will not start with his book.

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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