Kaufmann’s ideas about limited war had had substantial impact on Enthoven, Nitze, Harry Rowen and—through them—Robert McNamara. The cumulative effect of the missile gap’s sudden demise, the events of the Berlin and Cuban crises and, finally, Glenn Kent’s damage-limiting studies may have put a damper on the idea that strategic nuclear war could be rationally controlled. But the disillusionment cast no dark spell on the underlying faith in the supreme powers of rational analysis, the casual ease of executing and managing “options,” the controllability of other “instruments” of force. And as enthusiasm shifted from the theoretical calculus of nuclear war to a real-life “limited war” in Southeast Asia, the style of thought that had shaped the philosophy of counterforce/no-cities was given a chance to go out in the field and show what it could do.
23
VIETNAM: STALEMATE
IN HIS BOOK On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn wrote that American security must henceforth depend upon “a willingness to incur casualties in limited wars just to improve our bargaining position moderately.” In the 1960s, that limited war was Vietnam.
When John Kennedy came into the White House in 1961 and scuttled massive retaliation as the nation’s defense policy, it was a liberating experience for those who studied such issues. Massive retaliation, they thought, had imposed rigid shackles on America’s freedom and flexibility. With its banishment, the shackles were smashed. A sort of euphoria set in, the feeling of a mighty eagle freed from its cage, a heady sense of supreme confidence that America could now control the course of events in the Free World, an impatient eagerness to dash out and meet crises head on, to prove the nation’s mettle in a clash of wills and nerve.
Jack Kennedy encouraged these sentiments. He would go anywhere, fight any foe, to preserve freedom. As early as February 1, not two weeks into office, he asked Bob McNamara to examine “means for placing more emphasis on the development of counterguerrilla forces,” and that he do so “promptly.” In April, Kennedy appointed Maxwell Taylor as his chief adviser on paramilitary activities. The same month, he instructed McNamara to devise counterinsurgency plans that could apply to the strife in Vietnam. In January 1962, he formed a Special Group on Counter-Insurgency, with Max Taylor and Kennedy’s brother, the Attorney General, Robert, spearheading the effort with—especially in Bobby’s case—extraordinary enthusiasm.
In August 1961, Walt Rostow, director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, wrote nonchalantly of installing some troops to defend the Mekong Delta area, while indigenous South Vietnamese troops carried out “the panhandle mop-up operations.” If we needed to do more, Rostow—who helped the Eighth Air Force select strategic-bombing targets during World War II—noted that we could “increase pressure directly against North Vietnam” through air strikes in an “interdiction operation [that] would be susceptible to flexible control at all times to meet a changing military and political situation.” We might even want to introduce more ground forces so that “we could make [their] withdrawal a bargaining counter in a Vietnamese settlement,” Rostow wrote to Kennedy in October 1961. The presence of such a force would also “make it clear… that the attempt to destroy the South Vietnamese government by force would not be carried forward to a conclusion without risking an escalation of the fight.”
Upon returning from a mission to South Vietnam, Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s chief adviser on paramilitary activities, made the same point: “Nothing is more calculated to sober the enemy and to discourage escalation in the face of the limited initiatives proposed here than the knowledge that the United States has prepared itself soundly to deal with aggression in Southeast Asia at any level.”
In March 1965, the U.S. commenced a bombing campaign against North Vietnam called “Rolling Thunder.” By traditional military standards, it was a bizarre campaign. Targets were initially selected not so much for their military value as for their political and psychological significance. The idea—as spelled out to President Johnson by McGeorge Bundy in May 1964, when plans were first being made for the bombing—was that the U.S. would “use selected and carefully graduated military force against North Vietnam.” Air strikes “would be very carefully designed to have more deterrent than destructive impact,” just as deployments of troops on the ground were intended to “maximize their deterrent impact and their menace.” As Maxwell Taylor put it in a phrase that Robert McNamara felt expressed the view shared by most of those inside the Pentagon engaged in Vietnam planning, it was important not to “kill the hostage” by destroying the critical assets inside the “Hanoi donut.”
By early 1965, McNamara’s Vietnam strategy was essentially a conventional-war version of the counterforce/no-cities theory—using force as an instrument of coercion, withholding a larger force that could kill the hostage of the enemy’s cities if he didn’t back down.
The sharp parallel between Vietnam planning and the no-cities strategy was no accident. First, although McNamara had by this time rejected the strategy as a guideline for policy on nuclear weapons or nuclear war, he still viewed it as a rational approach to the use of lesser force. Second, the counterforce/no-cities briefing that Kaufmann gave to McNamara in February 1961 had originally grown out of Kaufmann’s earlier thinking on “limited war” at Princeton in 1955–1956. All the elements of Vietnam could be foreseen, in retrospect, in his essays from that period: limited war as “partial or token tests of strengths,” most likely in Asia; force as “a counter in the bargaining process”; the need for “precise, discriminating, and discreet methods of destruction”; the need to “manage” the war by sending “messages” to induce the opponent “to accept limitations of geography, weapons, and possibly time”; aiming not for a victory—whose prospect might compel the opponent to escalate (or, in the case of Vietnam, might bring in the Soviets or the Chinese)—but for “a stalemate,” which was “desirable” and also likely as long as we could persuade the opponent that “the costs of fighting to him outweighed the costs to the United States, and consequently that the advantages of terminating the conflict were greater than the advantages of continuing it.” All these principles lay at the heart of the Administration’s early Vietnam strategy.
Kaufmann himself had practically nothing to do directly with Vietnam planning, nor did the Office of Systems Analysis. However, one of Kaufmann’s former colleagues from the RAND Corporation did have an important if indirect influence, a professor of political economy at Harvard named Thomas C. Schelling. He had started professional life as a trade negotiator in international conferences dealing with U.S. foreign aid. From those experiences, he learned a great deal about the art of bargaining—especially the lesson that a good bargaining position often entails the inability to withdraw, the deliberate establishment of an obligation to fulfill promises and threats. This is what executive branches of government do in tariff negotiations when they plead that Congress has tied their hands, what union negotiators do in threatening strikes when they plead that the rank and file won’t take the contract as proposed. Schelling elaborated these ideas in a highly influential 1960 book called The Strategy of Conflict, focusing on war as a case study. He saw war, essentially, as a particularly violent form of bargaining. There were “enlightening similarities between, say, maneuvering in limited war and jockeying in a traffic jam, deterring the Russians and deterring one’s own children… between the modern balance of terror and the ancient institution of hostages,” he wrote.