hist2004
08-18-2004, 11:10 AM
Doing it right in the Persian Gulf War highlighted what went wrong in the air war over North Vietnam.
By Col. Jacksel M. Broughton, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)
Those of us who had the honor of serving in Southeast Asia can claim a pretty high level of expertise about the use of military air power, specifically about how to send that air power downtown, to the heart of the enemy's resources, where it counts. But often we were not given the chance. We know how to waste air power, because we saw it wasted in Vietnam, especially during Rolling Thunder, the air campaign from February 1965 through March 1968 that was theoretically launched to interdict North Vietnam's capability to wage war in the South. Years later, we were glad to see air power used properly during Desert Storm.
Effective Use Of Airpower
It can be said with certainty that had we properly used the airborne resources at our disposal in the first few weeks after the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964, or in the early stages of Rolling Thunder, when the North's defenses were weak or nonexistent, we could have dramatically changed the course of that war. Our losses down south could have been a minuscule fraction of what they were.
Certainly a few weeks of concentrated air attack would not have destroyed the North's ground forces, but it would have been very easy to destroy the 94 targets that represented not only the North's capability but also the North's national pride. Ho Chi Minh had seen the results of Allied air actions in Europe and in Korea, and would have been prone to settle for the half loaf he already had. But instead of seeing his Thai Nguyen steel mill and his Viet Tri power plant flattened and his Haiphong harbor sealed within days, he saw an indecisive war of fatal oversupervision, personally and tightly controlled by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. "Gradualism" was their buzzword, and one of Lyndon Johnson's favorite sayings was, "Those boys can't hit an outhouse without my permission."
Near Victory
There were three air wars in Southeast Asia. The first, in the mid-1960s, lasted for three years and two months and included 72 pauses and 17 cease-fires. The North quickly figured out how to deal with the bombing attacks during this period; they moved fuel, missiles, and MiG fighters into the village backyards, then ringed the villages with guns and SAMs (surface-to-air-missiles).
We still almost won, despite the throttling restrictions and the multiple layers of overlapping headquarters that were the conduits of the no-win philosophy. The only action agencies physically hitting Hanoi and the far north were the U.S. Air Force F-105 and F-4 fighter wings and the U.S. Navy carrier strike forces, and they almost pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
John Colvin, consul general at the British mission in Hanoi, who saw it firsthand, concluded in 1967 that "the country and the people were close to collapse which, for the first time, no amount of excited exhortation could correct...failing Chinese intervention, the major war was over."
Unheeded Counsel
But observations such as Colvin's and proposals put forth by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) went unheeded. In a typical exchange, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, briefing officials on the flow of rifles from the North, begged for permission to enter the prohibited circle around Hanoi and strike row upon row of trucks and barges that intelligence knew were preparing to move large quantities of rifles south. McNamara curtly refused the request and silenced the admiral, saying a rifle was a rifle and he did not care if it was up north or down south. The faultiness of that logic becomes apparent when one contrasts the situations of an American rifleman, who had to fight for his life to eliminate one rifle, with an American fighter pilot, who could eliminate thousands of rifles at once by hitting the "pickle button" on his stick at the right spot on a dive-bomb run.
The actions of McNamara and Johnson in the fall of 1967 are among the most shocking of the entire war. McNamara returned from a visit to Saigon on October 25 and briefed Johnson that, much to his surprise, the air war against Hanoi was going very well. Then, without explanation, on November 7 he sent Johnson a memo for signature stating that while we might someday reach the "cross-over point," where we killed more of them than they killed of us, we had better plan on not winning. Johnson signed the memo in agreement, and every single loss we took after that date represents a tragic waste and betrayal by Johnson and McNamara.
Shortly after that, Johnson stopped all attacks on the North, and Rolling Thunder was over. According to John Colvin, "Victory -- by September 1967 in American hands -- was not so much thrown away as shunned with prim, averted eyes....Nor could a war be won by men familiar with computers and academic theory but not with the battlefield or the ageless facts of Southeast Asia."
Air War Succeeds At Last
The second air war, which got going in 1969, was a void that lasted three years and two months. We hurled myriad tons of explosives on dirt trails, re-establishing the fact that dirt does not burn very well. Since we were no longer going "downtown," the North moved large numbers of guns and SAMs into positions along the trails we persisted in flogging. Casualties remained high in the ground war down south, and in the air we lost lots of expensive and irreplaceable aircraft, whose pilots were either blown to smithereens or left to suffer and wonder in the Hanoi Hilton.
The third air war took shape gradually over one year, with the real action confined to the month of December, 1972. Johnson and McNamara were history, and the new president said to go get 'em. Strategic air was pulled off the bombing of jungle trails, and the BUFFs (big ugly fat fellows, i.e., B-52s) got to do what strategic bombers were built to do, bomb strategic enemy installations on the ground. The Air Force and Navy tactical aircraft did the things they were built to do, among which was hammering the defenses. We took the kid gloves off and punched their lights out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Vietnamese quit and called for peace talks, and we finally accomplished, in one month, what we could have done in two weeks had we done it seven years earlier.
Comparing Two Wars
Since the Gulf War and the war in Southeast Asia were two very different encounters, with different rules and different results, there are pitfalls in comparing the two. It is still worthwhile, at least in the case of the air war, to examine some of the distinct variations that contributed to the dissimilar outcomes. The first glaring difference is the manner in which the two wars started.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident started with a South Vietnamese commando raid against the North's patrol base at Loc Chao. The U.S. destroyer Maddox was steaming off the Vietnamese coast, and the destroyer Turner Joy and the carrier Ticonderoga were close by. The day after the commando raid, the North launched three patrol boats and fired ineffectual torpedoes at Maddox. Fighters from Ticonderoga sank one of the patrol boats and heavily damaged the other two.
Tonkin Boost For Johnson
President Johnson, deeply involved in his re-election campaign, paused only long enough to consult briefly with the Departments of State and Defense. Nothing happened other than an upgrading in some military alert postures and a State Department warning. This lack of action seemed to substantiate presidential challenger Barry Goldwater's charge that Johnson was soft on communism, and suddenly the Johnson forces felt a strong requirement for something with which to counter that charge.
Two nights later, Maddox and Turner Joy were steaming together when they erroneously reported a torpedo attack. In panic, the destroyers sent uncoded flash messages to Washington, reporting an engagement that did not in fact happen. The senior naval commander on scene quickly denied those reports and gave a skeptical appraisal of the performance of detection personnel and equipment. There were no visual sightings from the air or on the surface, and he requested a complete re-evaluation, but his request was denied. The on-scene military commander's advice was ignored; the decision came quickly, from the top, and we were in what Washington thought would be a short war, but already a war without stated goals, purposes or allies. In the Harris poll on the presidential race the following week, Johnson's rating shot up 14 points.
Hands Untied In Gulf War
Conversely, when the Persian Gulf pot boiled, the United States immediately urged U.N. involvement, resulting in the coalition of nations that stood against Iraq and the world's fourth largest army. The goal was simple and clearly stated over an extended period of time prior to hostilities. The United Nations mandate explicitly advised Iraq to abandon its thrust to occupy and control Kuwait, or face coordinated military action. When Iraq, with full knowledge of the consequences, flaunted its "power" to most of the rest of the world, the coalition struck decisively early in 1991 and was quickly victorious.
Leadership credibility was never in doubt during Desert Storm, as it had been in Southeast Asia, where leadership credibility seldom existed. The heads of state within the coalition were firm, united and determined from day one of the operation. President George Bush, aware of the doubts left over from Vietnam, spoke clearly, saying, "Never again will our forces be sent out to do a job with one hand tied behind their back." The trust and confidence that field commanders must have to be successful was returned to those commanders; the results speak for themselves.
Credibility Gap
Compare that mutual trust, respect and credibility with the situation at Bien Hoa in November 1964, when the Viet Cong mortared the air base, killing and wounding Americans and destroying aircraft. The White House had announced to the world that we would strike back if any such thing occurred, so the military was primed for some real action.
The JCS plan called for increasing security in the South and turning the B-52s and the tactical fighters loose on the North. We were to hit the airfields, the major fuel dumps, transportation complexes and other military and industrial targets. But it was election eve in the States, and the administration professed concern about Chinese reaction should America do what it had said it would do. The president, ignoring the JCS and Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, decided to make absolutely no retaliatory move. Our leadership credibility vanished and everyone, especially the North Vietnamese, knew it.
Was Johnson's and McNamara's fear of the "China Card" valid? Absolutely not. The Vietnamese and Chinese have hated each other for 2,000 years, and the reluctant Chinese cooperation in the North's air defense program was nothing more than a face-saving ploy in the ongoing Sino-Soviet ideological struggle. There was no similarity between the Vietnamese situation and the Korean situation of 1950, when our forces were on the banks of the Yalu River, with General Douglas MacArthur threatening to enter China. In Vietnam our ground troops were 400 miles from China and never even threatened to enter North Vietnam, much less China. If the Chinese had entered the war, it would have caused dramatic changes in international relationships, and in any case our air power would have chewed them up as they moved south. Also, in 1967, China's internal problems with the so-called Cultural Revolution, as well as the political infighting with the Soviets, had the Chinese government on the verge of collapse.
No Military In "Lunch Bunch"
McNamara and Johnson never once called for a National Intelligence Estimate of the situation, nor was there any daily monitoring of China to determine the likelihood of large-scale intervention. While the president and the secretary were certainly aware of it at the time, the public learned much later that the Chinese had been seeking -- through secret diplomacy -- accommodation and improved relations with America in hopes of offsetting their problems with the Soviet Union. The China Card was a farce.
Any discussion of targets in the North should address two questions: Who selected the targets and what was the philosophy behind target selection? Our targets in Southeast Asia were selected by the Oval Office "Lunch Bunch." Each Tuesday President Johnson held a luncheon at the White House to decide what targets were to be authorized, the number of sorties that could be flown and, in many instances, even the tactics to be used by the pilots. The group always included the secretaries of state and defense and the presidential press secretary. It usually included one or more congressional figures or Washington bureaucrats. No military man, not even the chairman of the JCS, was present at any of those luncheons until late 1967.
Policy Of Gradualism
Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, the senior commander of the entire Pacific operation, prepared a proposal for the conduct of the war. He said that six primary systems in the North should be promptly and decisively destroyed by coordinated air attacks so that the North could not support the ground war in the South. Those systems, represented by 94 specific targets, were the electrical networks, the limited industries with war-making capabilities, the transportation net, the air bases and training centers, the petroleum, oil and lubricant facilities, and the constantly improving Soviet- and Chinese-sponsored air defense network. His proposals were processed through the JCS, but were repeatedly rejected by the Lunch Bunch. Rather than attack and destroy those systems, the decision makers seemed to be determined to save them from harm or, at worst, toy with them. They stuck with "gradualism," which simply means don't hurt the enemy too much, then back off and see if they're ready to quit.
About 80 percent of the North's war materiel moved along two rail lines that ran south from China and converged in Hanoi, while about 80 percent of the materiel used to bolster the North's economy was shipped into the port of Haiphong. Except for specific sidings and roundhouses, the railroads were single-track lines, capable of one-way traffic only. So, you say, that system should be pretty easy to shut down. Just go to the switching yards in downtown Hanoi where all the railroad tracks converge, bomb those concentrated facilities and eliminate the railroad traffic. Then go to Haiphong and mine the harbors and blow up the docks and throttle the seaborne traffic.
Anticipating this military mindset, Secretary McNamara drew a 10-mile circle around Hanoi and a five-mile circle around Haiphong, and said nobody, but nobody, goes in there.
North Vietnamese Response
The North sensed McNamara's overconcern for collateral civilian casualties and responded in two ways. First they moved as much military equipment as they could into populated areas. In the case of anti-aircraft guns, some of the favorite sites were spots they knew were off-limits to our pilots, such as the center of villages, dikes that controlled flooding along the Red River delta, and the roofs of hospitals. Then they increased their propaganda about civilian casualties, and McNamara responded by adding a 30-mile restricted circle around the Hanoi prohibited circle and a 15-mile restricted circle around the Haiphong prohibited circle. Nobody was allowed inside the restricted circles without McNamara's personal permission. Then, just to be sure that we did not overshoot a turn and offend the Chinese mountain people to the north, he created a 30-mile-deep restricted buffer zone all the way across the Vietnam-China border. This made a convenient sanctuary for MiGs to duck into if we got on their tails, and it was also a comfortable place for marshaling supply trains and truck convoys.
North Vietnam leaders constantly increased their defenses, relying on outside Communist help, until they had the most formidable anti-air defense in the history of aerial warfare. They became very sharp in coordinating their defenses against our attacks, and the closer we got to downtown Hanoi, the tougher they were. Our challenge was to make it through the defensive web, get the target and beat the web back out. The web contained small arms, 37mm and 57mm guns, 80mm to 100-plus-mm radar-controlled guns, SAMs and MiGs. Each faction covered specific areas and altitudes, so one or more segments of the defenses were on us all the time. The only counter to those defenses was that one flight of four aircraft, out of a typical strike effort of 28 aircraft, would be designated to suppress flak in the immediate vicinity of the target, and we usually had a Wild Weasel flight of four that specialized in rooting out and destroying SAM sites. The flak busters and the Weasels often did good work, but there were so many defenses that it was very seldom you got a free ride in or out.
The North knew where we could and could not go, so they moved most of their guns and SAMs into villages along the routes we were forced to follow. The worst example was the 70-mile-long northeast rail line from the Chinese border to Hanoi. The northern 30 miles were inside the border restricted zone, and the southern 30 miles were in the Hanoi restricted circle. On the 10-mile stretch in the middle, there was an average of one anti-aircraft gun every 48 feet. We were directed to put a couple of flights in there every morning and every afternoon, at the same time. There was never anything there but the guns and some old boxcars we shot up a year before, but a lot of guys and aircraft never made it back from that part of the North. If you put your bombs on that single-line track, the best you could expect was a big plume of sand and some breaks in the tracks. Before you got back to the coast, part of the 300,000-man road, bridge and rail repair crew that North Vietnam maintained would be piecing the tracks back together to accommodate the evening rail traffic.
Lessons Learned
Between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, both the Navy and the Air Force concentrated on improving the combat capabilities of their aircraft and on implementing amazingly realistic combat training. One conclusion, reached well before Desert Storm, was that you need the freedom to fly varying strike profiles that approach the target high, low, or whatever is most practical. You cannot do that if you are a slave of the defenses, as our leaders forced us to be over the North. The only way to get that freedom is to make control of the defenses a number one priority and expend a reasonable portion of mission resources on the defenses right from the start. The requirement to suppress enemy defenses was one of the driving factors in developing stealth aircraft capable of penetrating and destroying defenses so that the strike forces could do their job.
Technology advances played a big part in making the Gulf air war victory decisive. The aircraft were vastly improved, especially the cockpits and associated control systems tailored to make the pilot's combat job easier. We used to have to accomplish four separate switch actions in the cockpit to go from bombing configuration to the configuration we needed to fire at a MiG with the cannon or a Sidewinder missile. That was tough to do when the MiGs were attacking you while you were pulling up off the target. Now that task takes the jab of one finger at a switch on the control stick. The pilot seldom needs to look down in the cockpit in the newer fighters, since the outputs of all the computer-assisted systems are projected onto a heads-up display on the windscreen in front of him. Given those improvements, along with better weather forecasting and better target intelligence through satellite technology, Desert Storm pilots were in the center of an efficiently focused environment.
Over Hanoi, we had to look down the enemy gun barrels to get dumb iron bombs on the target. Over Baghdad, there were long-range standoff missiles that precluded pilot exposure on many targets. There were also "smart bombs" with guidance-control systems that allowed pilots to release their bombs at greater ranges from the target, while reducing their average bomb miss distance to 1 percent of ours. Would you believe a 5-foot average error?
Further Differences
In the Gulf War, the battlefield commander and his staff picked the targets based on stated goals of inflicting maximum damage and successfully and rapidly concluding the war. There were no crippling restrictions or sanctuaries. The technology advances allowed 24-hour-a-day operations, and the air commander and his staff assigned specific missions and coordinated mass strikes around the clock. The operational unit commanders and their pilots accomplished the detailed planning for their particular units and flew the missions.
Both Navy and Air Force fighter pilots who went downtown in North Vietnam yearned to put a load of bombs into Hanoi's air defense center, but they were not allowed into that part of town. When F-117 stealth fighters went to downtown Baghdad, they put their bombs right down the ventilator shaft of Iraq's air defense center on the first strike, then showed it to the world on television.
Doing It Right
We were not allowed to strike MiG fighter facilities or to shoot MiGs on the ground. Every time I led our F-105 wing down Thud Ridge toward Hanoi, I watched the MiGs taxi into position on the runway at Phuc Yen. They would wait patiently for us to pass, then take off to attack us from the rear. Their patience was due to the fact that they knew I was forbidden to shoot at them until they were airborne and also forbidden to drop my bombs on their airfield or its defenses. In Desert Storm, the F-15s and F-16s kept the MiGs on the ground, and the F-111s sought them out in their revetments -- and again showed us on television how they blew up the revetments and the MiGs.
We could not attack a SAM site in the North unless it was operational, which meant that it was firing missiles at us. One can only assume that McNamara did not want to hurt the Soviet technicians who were setting up and checking out the equipment at the SAM sites. SAMs got a lot smarter and had a lot more range by the time they got to Iraq, but our Wild Weasel SAM killers were better equipped and better armed than when they first appeared in the 1960s. Since the airborne warning and control system (AWACS) was a vital part of the Gulf air war, and since the vulnerability of the AWACS aircraft dictated that the improved, longer-range SAMs could not be tolerated, the air commander found out where the SAM sites were before the shooting started. Once the shooting began, the Weasels went straight for them and blew them away.
As in Vietnam, the military knew how to do it right, and this time the civilian leadership allowed them to do it. Unlike President Johnson, President Bush belonged to the "Don't screw around" school of military strategy.
Regards,
Hist2004
By Col. Jacksel M. Broughton, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)
Those of us who had the honor of serving in Southeast Asia can claim a pretty high level of expertise about the use of military air power, specifically about how to send that air power downtown, to the heart of the enemy's resources, where it counts. But often we were not given the chance. We know how to waste air power, because we saw it wasted in Vietnam, especially during Rolling Thunder, the air campaign from February 1965 through March 1968 that was theoretically launched to interdict North Vietnam's capability to wage war in the South. Years later, we were glad to see air power used properly during Desert Storm.
Effective Use Of Airpower
It can be said with certainty that had we properly used the airborne resources at our disposal in the first few weeks after the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964, or in the early stages of Rolling Thunder, when the North's defenses were weak or nonexistent, we could have dramatically changed the course of that war. Our losses down south could have been a minuscule fraction of what they were.
Certainly a few weeks of concentrated air attack would not have destroyed the North's ground forces, but it would have been very easy to destroy the 94 targets that represented not only the North's capability but also the North's national pride. Ho Chi Minh had seen the results of Allied air actions in Europe and in Korea, and would have been prone to settle for the half loaf he already had. But instead of seeing his Thai Nguyen steel mill and his Viet Tri power plant flattened and his Haiphong harbor sealed within days, he saw an indecisive war of fatal oversupervision, personally and tightly controlled by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. "Gradualism" was their buzzword, and one of Lyndon Johnson's favorite sayings was, "Those boys can't hit an outhouse without my permission."
Near Victory
There were three air wars in Southeast Asia. The first, in the mid-1960s, lasted for three years and two months and included 72 pauses and 17 cease-fires. The North quickly figured out how to deal with the bombing attacks during this period; they moved fuel, missiles, and MiG fighters into the village backyards, then ringed the villages with guns and SAMs (surface-to-air-missiles).
We still almost won, despite the throttling restrictions and the multiple layers of overlapping headquarters that were the conduits of the no-win philosophy. The only action agencies physically hitting Hanoi and the far north were the U.S. Air Force F-105 and F-4 fighter wings and the U.S. Navy carrier strike forces, and they almost pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
John Colvin, consul general at the British mission in Hanoi, who saw it firsthand, concluded in 1967 that "the country and the people were close to collapse which, for the first time, no amount of excited exhortation could correct...failing Chinese intervention, the major war was over."
Unheeded Counsel
But observations such as Colvin's and proposals put forth by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) went unheeded. In a typical exchange, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, briefing officials on the flow of rifles from the North, begged for permission to enter the prohibited circle around Hanoi and strike row upon row of trucks and barges that intelligence knew were preparing to move large quantities of rifles south. McNamara curtly refused the request and silenced the admiral, saying a rifle was a rifle and he did not care if it was up north or down south. The faultiness of that logic becomes apparent when one contrasts the situations of an American rifleman, who had to fight for his life to eliminate one rifle, with an American fighter pilot, who could eliminate thousands of rifles at once by hitting the "pickle button" on his stick at the right spot on a dive-bomb run.
The actions of McNamara and Johnson in the fall of 1967 are among the most shocking of the entire war. McNamara returned from a visit to Saigon on October 25 and briefed Johnson that, much to his surprise, the air war against Hanoi was going very well. Then, without explanation, on November 7 he sent Johnson a memo for signature stating that while we might someday reach the "cross-over point," where we killed more of them than they killed of us, we had better plan on not winning. Johnson signed the memo in agreement, and every single loss we took after that date represents a tragic waste and betrayal by Johnson and McNamara.
Shortly after that, Johnson stopped all attacks on the North, and Rolling Thunder was over. According to John Colvin, "Victory -- by September 1967 in American hands -- was not so much thrown away as shunned with prim, averted eyes....Nor could a war be won by men familiar with computers and academic theory but not with the battlefield or the ageless facts of Southeast Asia."
Air War Succeeds At Last
The second air war, which got going in 1969, was a void that lasted three years and two months. We hurled myriad tons of explosives on dirt trails, re-establishing the fact that dirt does not burn very well. Since we were no longer going "downtown," the North moved large numbers of guns and SAMs into positions along the trails we persisted in flogging. Casualties remained high in the ground war down south, and in the air we lost lots of expensive and irreplaceable aircraft, whose pilots were either blown to smithereens or left to suffer and wonder in the Hanoi Hilton.
The third air war took shape gradually over one year, with the real action confined to the month of December, 1972. Johnson and McNamara were history, and the new president said to go get 'em. Strategic air was pulled off the bombing of jungle trails, and the BUFFs (big ugly fat fellows, i.e., B-52s) got to do what strategic bombers were built to do, bomb strategic enemy installations on the ground. The Air Force and Navy tactical aircraft did the things they were built to do, among which was hammering the defenses. We took the kid gloves off and punched their lights out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Vietnamese quit and called for peace talks, and we finally accomplished, in one month, what we could have done in two weeks had we done it seven years earlier.
Comparing Two Wars
Since the Gulf War and the war in Southeast Asia were two very different encounters, with different rules and different results, there are pitfalls in comparing the two. It is still worthwhile, at least in the case of the air war, to examine some of the distinct variations that contributed to the dissimilar outcomes. The first glaring difference is the manner in which the two wars started.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident started with a South Vietnamese commando raid against the North's patrol base at Loc Chao. The U.S. destroyer Maddox was steaming off the Vietnamese coast, and the destroyer Turner Joy and the carrier Ticonderoga were close by. The day after the commando raid, the North launched three patrol boats and fired ineffectual torpedoes at Maddox. Fighters from Ticonderoga sank one of the patrol boats and heavily damaged the other two.
Tonkin Boost For Johnson
President Johnson, deeply involved in his re-election campaign, paused only long enough to consult briefly with the Departments of State and Defense. Nothing happened other than an upgrading in some military alert postures and a State Department warning. This lack of action seemed to substantiate presidential challenger Barry Goldwater's charge that Johnson was soft on communism, and suddenly the Johnson forces felt a strong requirement for something with which to counter that charge.
Two nights later, Maddox and Turner Joy were steaming together when they erroneously reported a torpedo attack. In panic, the destroyers sent uncoded flash messages to Washington, reporting an engagement that did not in fact happen. The senior naval commander on scene quickly denied those reports and gave a skeptical appraisal of the performance of detection personnel and equipment. There were no visual sightings from the air or on the surface, and he requested a complete re-evaluation, but his request was denied. The on-scene military commander's advice was ignored; the decision came quickly, from the top, and we were in what Washington thought would be a short war, but already a war without stated goals, purposes or allies. In the Harris poll on the presidential race the following week, Johnson's rating shot up 14 points.
Hands Untied In Gulf War
Conversely, when the Persian Gulf pot boiled, the United States immediately urged U.N. involvement, resulting in the coalition of nations that stood against Iraq and the world's fourth largest army. The goal was simple and clearly stated over an extended period of time prior to hostilities. The United Nations mandate explicitly advised Iraq to abandon its thrust to occupy and control Kuwait, or face coordinated military action. When Iraq, with full knowledge of the consequences, flaunted its "power" to most of the rest of the world, the coalition struck decisively early in 1991 and was quickly victorious.
Leadership credibility was never in doubt during Desert Storm, as it had been in Southeast Asia, where leadership credibility seldom existed. The heads of state within the coalition were firm, united and determined from day one of the operation. President George Bush, aware of the doubts left over from Vietnam, spoke clearly, saying, "Never again will our forces be sent out to do a job with one hand tied behind their back." The trust and confidence that field commanders must have to be successful was returned to those commanders; the results speak for themselves.
Credibility Gap
Compare that mutual trust, respect and credibility with the situation at Bien Hoa in November 1964, when the Viet Cong mortared the air base, killing and wounding Americans and destroying aircraft. The White House had announced to the world that we would strike back if any such thing occurred, so the military was primed for some real action.
The JCS plan called for increasing security in the South and turning the B-52s and the tactical fighters loose on the North. We were to hit the airfields, the major fuel dumps, transportation complexes and other military and industrial targets. But it was election eve in the States, and the administration professed concern about Chinese reaction should America do what it had said it would do. The president, ignoring the JCS and Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, decided to make absolutely no retaliatory move. Our leadership credibility vanished and everyone, especially the North Vietnamese, knew it.
Was Johnson's and McNamara's fear of the "China Card" valid? Absolutely not. The Vietnamese and Chinese have hated each other for 2,000 years, and the reluctant Chinese cooperation in the North's air defense program was nothing more than a face-saving ploy in the ongoing Sino-Soviet ideological struggle. There was no similarity between the Vietnamese situation and the Korean situation of 1950, when our forces were on the banks of the Yalu River, with General Douglas MacArthur threatening to enter China. In Vietnam our ground troops were 400 miles from China and never even threatened to enter North Vietnam, much less China. If the Chinese had entered the war, it would have caused dramatic changes in international relationships, and in any case our air power would have chewed them up as they moved south. Also, in 1967, China's internal problems with the so-called Cultural Revolution, as well as the political infighting with the Soviets, had the Chinese government on the verge of collapse.
No Military In "Lunch Bunch"
McNamara and Johnson never once called for a National Intelligence Estimate of the situation, nor was there any daily monitoring of China to determine the likelihood of large-scale intervention. While the president and the secretary were certainly aware of it at the time, the public learned much later that the Chinese had been seeking -- through secret diplomacy -- accommodation and improved relations with America in hopes of offsetting their problems with the Soviet Union. The China Card was a farce.
Any discussion of targets in the North should address two questions: Who selected the targets and what was the philosophy behind target selection? Our targets in Southeast Asia were selected by the Oval Office "Lunch Bunch." Each Tuesday President Johnson held a luncheon at the White House to decide what targets were to be authorized, the number of sorties that could be flown and, in many instances, even the tactics to be used by the pilots. The group always included the secretaries of state and defense and the presidential press secretary. It usually included one or more congressional figures or Washington bureaucrats. No military man, not even the chairman of the JCS, was present at any of those luncheons until late 1967.
Policy Of Gradualism
Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, the senior commander of the entire Pacific operation, prepared a proposal for the conduct of the war. He said that six primary systems in the North should be promptly and decisively destroyed by coordinated air attacks so that the North could not support the ground war in the South. Those systems, represented by 94 specific targets, were the electrical networks, the limited industries with war-making capabilities, the transportation net, the air bases and training centers, the petroleum, oil and lubricant facilities, and the constantly improving Soviet- and Chinese-sponsored air defense network. His proposals were processed through the JCS, but were repeatedly rejected by the Lunch Bunch. Rather than attack and destroy those systems, the decision makers seemed to be determined to save them from harm or, at worst, toy with them. They stuck with "gradualism," which simply means don't hurt the enemy too much, then back off and see if they're ready to quit.
About 80 percent of the North's war materiel moved along two rail lines that ran south from China and converged in Hanoi, while about 80 percent of the materiel used to bolster the North's economy was shipped into the port of Haiphong. Except for specific sidings and roundhouses, the railroads were single-track lines, capable of one-way traffic only. So, you say, that system should be pretty easy to shut down. Just go to the switching yards in downtown Hanoi where all the railroad tracks converge, bomb those concentrated facilities and eliminate the railroad traffic. Then go to Haiphong and mine the harbors and blow up the docks and throttle the seaborne traffic.
Anticipating this military mindset, Secretary McNamara drew a 10-mile circle around Hanoi and a five-mile circle around Haiphong, and said nobody, but nobody, goes in there.
North Vietnamese Response
The North sensed McNamara's overconcern for collateral civilian casualties and responded in two ways. First they moved as much military equipment as they could into populated areas. In the case of anti-aircraft guns, some of the favorite sites were spots they knew were off-limits to our pilots, such as the center of villages, dikes that controlled flooding along the Red River delta, and the roofs of hospitals. Then they increased their propaganda about civilian casualties, and McNamara responded by adding a 30-mile restricted circle around the Hanoi prohibited circle and a 15-mile restricted circle around the Haiphong prohibited circle. Nobody was allowed inside the restricted circles without McNamara's personal permission. Then, just to be sure that we did not overshoot a turn and offend the Chinese mountain people to the north, he created a 30-mile-deep restricted buffer zone all the way across the Vietnam-China border. This made a convenient sanctuary for MiGs to duck into if we got on their tails, and it was also a comfortable place for marshaling supply trains and truck convoys.
North Vietnam leaders constantly increased their defenses, relying on outside Communist help, until they had the most formidable anti-air defense in the history of aerial warfare. They became very sharp in coordinating their defenses against our attacks, and the closer we got to downtown Hanoi, the tougher they were. Our challenge was to make it through the defensive web, get the target and beat the web back out. The web contained small arms, 37mm and 57mm guns, 80mm to 100-plus-mm radar-controlled guns, SAMs and MiGs. Each faction covered specific areas and altitudes, so one or more segments of the defenses were on us all the time. The only counter to those defenses was that one flight of four aircraft, out of a typical strike effort of 28 aircraft, would be designated to suppress flak in the immediate vicinity of the target, and we usually had a Wild Weasel flight of four that specialized in rooting out and destroying SAM sites. The flak busters and the Weasels often did good work, but there were so many defenses that it was very seldom you got a free ride in or out.
The North knew where we could and could not go, so they moved most of their guns and SAMs into villages along the routes we were forced to follow. The worst example was the 70-mile-long northeast rail line from the Chinese border to Hanoi. The northern 30 miles were inside the border restricted zone, and the southern 30 miles were in the Hanoi restricted circle. On the 10-mile stretch in the middle, there was an average of one anti-aircraft gun every 48 feet. We were directed to put a couple of flights in there every morning and every afternoon, at the same time. There was never anything there but the guns and some old boxcars we shot up a year before, but a lot of guys and aircraft never made it back from that part of the North. If you put your bombs on that single-line track, the best you could expect was a big plume of sand and some breaks in the tracks. Before you got back to the coast, part of the 300,000-man road, bridge and rail repair crew that North Vietnam maintained would be piecing the tracks back together to accommodate the evening rail traffic.
Lessons Learned
Between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, both the Navy and the Air Force concentrated on improving the combat capabilities of their aircraft and on implementing amazingly realistic combat training. One conclusion, reached well before Desert Storm, was that you need the freedom to fly varying strike profiles that approach the target high, low, or whatever is most practical. You cannot do that if you are a slave of the defenses, as our leaders forced us to be over the North. The only way to get that freedom is to make control of the defenses a number one priority and expend a reasonable portion of mission resources on the defenses right from the start. The requirement to suppress enemy defenses was one of the driving factors in developing stealth aircraft capable of penetrating and destroying defenses so that the strike forces could do their job.
Technology advances played a big part in making the Gulf air war victory decisive. The aircraft were vastly improved, especially the cockpits and associated control systems tailored to make the pilot's combat job easier. We used to have to accomplish four separate switch actions in the cockpit to go from bombing configuration to the configuration we needed to fire at a MiG with the cannon or a Sidewinder missile. That was tough to do when the MiGs were attacking you while you were pulling up off the target. Now that task takes the jab of one finger at a switch on the control stick. The pilot seldom needs to look down in the cockpit in the newer fighters, since the outputs of all the computer-assisted systems are projected onto a heads-up display on the windscreen in front of him. Given those improvements, along with better weather forecasting and better target intelligence through satellite technology, Desert Storm pilots were in the center of an efficiently focused environment.
Over Hanoi, we had to look down the enemy gun barrels to get dumb iron bombs on the target. Over Baghdad, there were long-range standoff missiles that precluded pilot exposure on many targets. There were also "smart bombs" with guidance-control systems that allowed pilots to release their bombs at greater ranges from the target, while reducing their average bomb miss distance to 1 percent of ours. Would you believe a 5-foot average error?
Further Differences
In the Gulf War, the battlefield commander and his staff picked the targets based on stated goals of inflicting maximum damage and successfully and rapidly concluding the war. There were no crippling restrictions or sanctuaries. The technology advances allowed 24-hour-a-day operations, and the air commander and his staff assigned specific missions and coordinated mass strikes around the clock. The operational unit commanders and their pilots accomplished the detailed planning for their particular units and flew the missions.
Both Navy and Air Force fighter pilots who went downtown in North Vietnam yearned to put a load of bombs into Hanoi's air defense center, but they were not allowed into that part of town. When F-117 stealth fighters went to downtown Baghdad, they put their bombs right down the ventilator shaft of Iraq's air defense center on the first strike, then showed it to the world on television.
Doing It Right
We were not allowed to strike MiG fighter facilities or to shoot MiGs on the ground. Every time I led our F-105 wing down Thud Ridge toward Hanoi, I watched the MiGs taxi into position on the runway at Phuc Yen. They would wait patiently for us to pass, then take off to attack us from the rear. Their patience was due to the fact that they knew I was forbidden to shoot at them until they were airborne and also forbidden to drop my bombs on their airfield or its defenses. In Desert Storm, the F-15s and F-16s kept the MiGs on the ground, and the F-111s sought them out in their revetments -- and again showed us on television how they blew up the revetments and the MiGs.
We could not attack a SAM site in the North unless it was operational, which meant that it was firing missiles at us. One can only assume that McNamara did not want to hurt the Soviet technicians who were setting up and checking out the equipment at the SAM sites. SAMs got a lot smarter and had a lot more range by the time they got to Iraq, but our Wild Weasel SAM killers were better equipped and better armed than when they first appeared in the 1960s. Since the airborne warning and control system (AWACS) was a vital part of the Gulf air war, and since the vulnerability of the AWACS aircraft dictated that the improved, longer-range SAMs could not be tolerated, the air commander found out where the SAM sites were before the shooting started. Once the shooting began, the Weasels went straight for them and blew them away.
As in Vietnam, the military knew how to do it right, and this time the civilian leadership allowed them to do it. Unlike President Johnson, President Bush belonged to the "Don't screw around" school of military strategy.
Regards,
Hist2004