Abstract
In 1968, William J. Lederer, a former career US Navy officer and writer, perhaps best known for his co-authored 1958 book The Ugly American, published a new book detailing numerous American failings in the Vietnam War.1 Among the laundry list of these failings, Lederer highlighted the ways in which the US objective of building a strong and stable South Vietnamese state was actually being undermined simply by the very large-scale US military presence. Apart from his focus on the problems associated with the lack of cultural knowledge and sensitivities of the hundreds of thousands of US personnel based there, he also detailed the ways in which the massive basing and logistics system that allowed the US military to operate in the first place, was causing, or at least exacerbating on an exponential scale, corruption among South Vietnamese officialdom. Lederer concluded that rather than blaming the Soviet Union or China for supporting the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese with war material and food, helping them to maintain high morale, assisting them with recruitment, and stimulating their ‘determination to resist and defeat the United States’, that actually a greater portion of the blame should be laid at the feet of Saigon and Washington. In other words, ‘We are our own worst enemy’.2
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Notes
William J. Lederer, Our Own Worst Enemy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1968).
Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars: The Inside Story (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010)
See, for instance, David Kilcullen’s chapter ‘Intelligence’, in Understanding Counterinsurgency Warfare: Origins, Operations, Challenges, eds Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 141–59
Major General Michael T. Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul D. Batchelor, ‘Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan’ (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, January 2010).
In Vietnam, for instance, the US military command required hundreds of lawyers to process these cases. See William Thomas Allison, Military Justice in Vietnam: The Rule of Law in an American War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 28
Cecil B. Currey, Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam’s Notorious US Military Prison (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1999), pp. 145
Lieutenant General Joseph M. Heiser Jr., Logistic Support (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, US Government Printing Office, 1974)
Lieutenant General Carroll H. Dunn, Base Development in South Vietnam, 1965–1970 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, US Government Printing Office, 1972).
Memorandum from McNamara to Wheeler, Subject: ‘Deployments to Southeast Asia’, 11 November 1966, FRUS, vol. IV, Vietnam, 1966, Doc. 301. See also Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), p. 306.
Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
For instance, the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam removed a large proportion of the dollars that had formerly buoyed up the economy. Moreover, the industrial and service sectors associated with the US military presence faced the loss of their market. This resulted in an increase in unemployment and a fall in wages for city dwellers, which in turn created social tensions in urban areas. Furthermore, as the South Vietnamese leadership relied on corruption associated with the American presence to pay off political supporters, less money meant it was harder to buy political support. T. Louise Brown, War and Aftermath in Vietnam (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–54
Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hills Books, 2003), pp. 193–261.
Aram Roston, ‘How the US Army Protects Its Trucks — By Paying the Taliban’, The Guardian, 13 November 2009; Peter W. Singer, ‘Can’t Win With ‘Em, Can’t Go to War Without ‘Em: Private Military Contractors in Counterinsurgency’, Foreign Policy Paper Series, no. 4 (Boston, MA: The Brookings Institution, September 2007).
Lederer, Our Own Worst Enemy; James Hamilton-Paterson, A Very Personal War: The Story of Cornelius Hawkridge (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971).
An egregious description of British efforts to mute criticism in the case of Uzbekistan’s human rights problems can be found in Craig Murray, Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2006).
During the Vietnam War, for instance, priority in supply was given to US forces, at least from 1965 to 1968. As a result, South Vietnamese forces often had to make do with inferior equipment than their American counterparts. Indeed, efforts to supply the ARVN with M-16 rifles was delayed for years since the rapidly growing size of US forces meant they received higher priority. In practise, this meant that ARVN soldiers battling the AK-47-armed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were placed at a firepower disadvantage. See, for instance, Brigadier General James Lawton Collins Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 1950–1972 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1975), pp. 100–3.
D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counter-insurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy 1941–1966 (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1967), p. 104.
Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
George Lepre, Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2011).
For an overview of the revisionist arguments on this point, see Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), pp. 112–23.
Sarah Kreps, ‘Elite Consensus as a Determinant of Alliance Cohesion: Why Public Opinion Hardly Matters for NATO-Led Operations in Afghanistan’, Foreign Policy Analysis 6, no. 3 (July 2010): 191–216.
By 1969 there were almost 69,000 third country combat personnel present alongside 550,000 American and 850,000 South Vietnamese troops. See Eugenie M. Blang, Allies at Odds: America, Europe and Vietnam 1961–1968 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2011)
Frank Logevall, ‘America Isolated: The Western Powers and the Escalation of the War’ in America, the Vietnam War and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, eds Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Jonathan Colman and J.J. Widen, ‘The Johnson Administration and the Recruitment of Allies in Vietnam, 1964–1968’, History 94, no. 316 (October 2009): 483–504.
In 1964, there were only 40 correspondents covering the war, whereas by January 1966, this number increased to 282 and continued to rise. William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998), p. 63.
The most notable exception to this in recent years has been Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (London: Allen Lane, 2008).
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1990), p. 434
Melvin Small, ‘The Domestic Course of the War’, in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999).
Hubert Zimmermann, ‘Who Paid for America’s War? Vietnam and the International Monetary System, 1960–1975’, in America, the Vietnam War and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, eds Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Robert Warren Stevens, Vain Hopes, Grim Realities: The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976)
Burton I. Kaufman, ‘Foreign Aid and the Balance of Payments Problem: Vietnam and Johnson’s Foreign Economic Policy’, in The Johnson Years, Volume Two: Vietnam, the Environment and Science, ed. Robert A. Divine (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1987).
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 699.
For an extensive treatment of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, see Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Harvard Sitikoff, ‘The Postwar Impact of Vietnam’ in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
See: Laurent Cesari, ‘The Declining Value of Indochina: France and the Economics of Empire, 1950–1955’, in The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis, eds Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 175–95.
Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review Book, 2006), pp. 538–40.
John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961–1974 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 8–10
John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution: Vol. II Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare 1962–1976 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978), pp. 241–2.
Andrew Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict’, World Politics 27, no. 2 (1975): 175–200.
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War — Revised and Expanded Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 265–6.
In 1965, Soviet and Chinese assistance to North Vietnam expanded in response to the American escalation, though the leaders of both countries placed limits on this assistance. While both Moscow and Beijing were content to ‘bleed’ the United States, they were also concerned that the United States might escalate the fighting to such an extent that it could result in a regional or potentially a global conflict. Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
Ilya V. Gaduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996)
George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003)
For discussion of this point, see Bernard Fall, Vietnam Witness: 1953–1966 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), p. 343
Brian Michael Jenkins cited in Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 178.
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Michaels, J. (2014). Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unspoken Paradox of Large-Scale Expeditionary COIN. In: Gventer, C.W., Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (eds) The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336941_4
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