General William Westmoreland died last night, at the age of 91. General Westmoreland, by all accounts, was a brilliant tactician and a gifted organizer. He met with great success as a battlefield commander in both World War II and Korea. He reached the pinnacle of his career when he was named a four-star general (the highest military rank) and given control over all American forces in Vietnam. His organizational abilities served him well; he oversaw the expansion of American involvement from the small role of supplying mostly advice, pilots, and special forces, to an all-out force deployment of over half of a million men. This logistical feet is awe-inspiring, and well worth remembering.
But Westmoreland also represented all that was wrong with American involvement in Vietnam. He viewed the war in start terms. Real, finite, soldiers fight wars with real weapons, and they require real supplies to do it. So, the answer is to kill the enemies soldiers faster than they can be trained and to cut off the enemy’s supply lines as traumatically and swiftly as possible. This would force the enemy to surrender, and prevent him from fighting in the future. And of course, to do this you need to have enough troops present and enough firepower available to meet the enemy full-on, no matter where he chose to reveal himself.
And so, the war was fought. American troops slept in safe headquarters, cities, and make-shift bases. When reports of the enemy came from a particular location, American troops were dispatched post-haste to the area, in large numbers and with extreme firepower. Soldiers were instructed to pay attention to body-counts and to kills, and to report them back fully; reports that were added up and proclaimed with great interest. Once the area had been decimated, and American troops were convinced that any enemy soldiers had been killed or fled, the Americans returned back to their bases to wait for the next announcement of enemy movement on some other hill.
This was how General Westmoreland viewed the war, and he felt this war was a success. After all, he was bombing the supply routes and counting the kills, and how could the enemy go on fighting like that? If they were not meeting success, it was because the politicians in Washington were not allowing him to fight the war like he wanted; they were withholding potential draftees, or forbidding him from attacking those portions of the enemy supply line in Laos or Cambodia. To this day, this vision of the war has many supporters; the war was lost because of a lack of political courage to do what was necessary to win the war.
There are several problems with this view. First of all, General Westmoreland’s war was not going as well as he would have hoped. As soon as the American troops arrived, many of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops would hide in tunnels and caves, or would blend into the population by donning civilian clothing. When the Americans left, the VC or North Vietnamese would reveal themselves, punish any local civilians who had assisted the Americans, pick up whatever unspent ordinance or trash that the Americans had left behind (out of which they made simple bombs, grenades, and booby-traps), and resume business as usual. American forces were also extremely predictable; the enemy quickly learned how to force the United States to react to a bluff, in order to divert attention away from the real supply lines or their real objective.
Second, Westmoreland forgot the simple tenant of warfare passed down by Clausewitz: war is politics by other means. In other words, war is a political tool, used by political masters, towards a political goal. The purpose of any war is not to win the war; the purpose of the war is to achieve the goals that the politicians lay out. And, of course, that war must be fought within political constraints in order to achieve that political outcome. The general’s job is to tell the president how to win the war based on the constraints that the president gives. If the war is unwinnable given those constraints, then the general needs to tell this to his president. It is absurd, however, for a general to complain that political constraints made a war unwinnable. The purpose of the war is to further the president’s, and the country’s political goals; it is not the job of a president to conform his desires to the vision of the general in order to fight the war that the general can win.
We would do well to remember these lessons in Iraq. First of all, we need to realize that as long as American troops sleep in their well-guarded, fortified bases, and the insurgents sleep among the general population, the Americans can never root them all out. Guerrilla forces cannot be conquered or annihilated; they must be rooted out. Effective training of the Iraqi security forces and police forces is a good start, but even then those forces must be trained to operate within, and among, a population, and not simply to go from their barracks out to meet the enemy, and back again.
Second, we need to remember that the political concerns in Iraq take precedence over military concerns. The purpose of the Iraq war is not to win the Iraq war. The purpose is to establish a stable, democratic Iraq that can take care of itself. While I personally believe this goal to be unreachable, if it does succeed it will be because every military action taken was with that goal in mind. But we need to take less of the focus of the Iraq war off of how many troops we have on the ground and how many terrorists we have killed or captured, and we need to put it on supporting and protecting the budding democratic institutions that we are attempting to establish.
General Westmoreland was a brilliant commander who was trained to fight World War II; unfortunately that’s not the war he was given. But we should not draw the conclusion that wars are only worth fighting if the politicians will let the generals turn them into World War II. Instead, we need to expect people to fight the wars they are given with the tools they are given, and the constraints they are given.
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