THE STRATEGY AND TACTICS OF PEACE IN VIET NAM
ALL the old questions were asked--but in new ways that invited honest answers, fresh opinions, dissenting views. The questioning began at field level two months ago, funneled steadily upward and inward to commanders and moved from there to the corridors of Washington. It constituted one of the most intensive policy reviews ever conducted inside the Federal Government, and the subject, of course, was Viet Nam. Last week the results reached the desk of the man who ordered the inquiry, Richard Nixon, who must ultimately weigh the choices and choose his course for extricating the nation from the longest war in its history. The timing was right, for at week's end Nixon flew off to California to continue the questioning in person. Meeting him there in a Pacific beach house at San Clemente were Ambassador to Saigon Ellsworth Bunker and the deputy U.S. commander in Viet Nam, General Andrew Goodpaster. Accompanying the President was his chief foreign affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, who boarded Air Force One carrying the thick black notebooks of analysis that hold Nixon's emerging Viet Nam policy.
To many, it seemed high time for the President to begin articulating his position. On the battlefields, U.S. commanders continue to fight the war more or less on the scale and scope laid down by Johnson in his last months in office. Around the conference table in Paris, Nixon's new negotiating team, led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, gives every impression of men still awaiting their instructions. The Communists fight on too, drawing fresh U.S. headlines daily through the fourth week of their post-Tet 1969 offensive. The blunt aim of their attacks seems to be to kill
Americans, despite occasional shellings of South Vietnamese cities, and they are succeeding. For the third week in a row, more than 350 U.S. servicemen died in action, nearly twice the weekly rate that had prevailed before the offensive. Some time this week the 33,630th American is likely to fall in Viet Nam, exceeding the U.S. battle losses in the Korean War.
The foremost question is how soon the U.S. might begin to disengage from the war by bringing home at least some American forces. The need to do this is great because, without some sign that the U.S. can turn over more of the fighting to the South Vietnamese, the American nation may simply not be prepared to continue the Viet Nam war effort long enough to reach a satisfactory settlement in Paris. When Defense Secretary Melvin Laird arrived in Viet Nam on a fact-finding tour, he suggested that it might be possible to bring some 50,000 soldiers home this year. Last week, his tour completed, Laird reported in Washington that at present this did not seem possible after all. It was unwelcome news, allayed only by the near certainty that, in fact, Laird's disavowal was more tactical than factual. His statement was not meant to preclude the possibility of troop withdrawals later this year, but simply to preserve a bargaining position in Paris. Why should the U.S. unilaterally announce a cut in its forces, asks the Nixon Administration, without trying to get something in return from Hanoi? In the context of the current Communist offensive, Laird's statement also served to warn Hanoi that the new Administration was not about to be panicked out of Viet Nam.
Essential Reliability
The Administration was believed to be working through secret channels to negotiate troop withdrawals--and drafting detailed plans with the Saigon government on the logistics of a reduction. On the diplomatic front, secret talks between the U.S. and North Viet Nam aimed at scaling down the level of fighting have almost certainly begun in Paris and other points, despite Administration disclaimers. President Nixon's decision not to resume bombing North Viet Nam in retaliation for the current offensive by the Communists represents an important policy decision not to turn the clock back in Viet Nam, even though the South Vietnamese government is urging the bombing of Hanoi and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker has added his weight to their plea.
Nixon feels that he must retain "the ability to make 20 moves or more at the same time," as one top adviser puts it --and make them largely in secrecy. He must maintain the pressure on the battlefield, but not so intensely that Hanoi breaks off the peace talks in Paris. He must continue preparing the South Vietnamese to assume more responsibility, but not undercut them by bargaining with the North behind their backs. He must allow the Saigon government to negotiate as an equal partner, but not permit it to exhaust U.S. public patience by foot dragging. In all this, an essential element is the reliability of the South Vietnamese government and the man who runs it, President Nguyen Van Thieu.
Fortunately, the U.S. can finally count on a reasonably secure and stable government in Saigon. For that, and for the first tentative signs that it is preparing its people for the day when they will have to shoulder the burden of their war, the U.S. in large part can thank Thieu, the solitary, sometimes enigmatic but increasingly forceful President of South Viet Nam. In the 17 months he has held office, Thieu has constructed the strongest government in South Viet Nam since the days of Ngo Dinh Diem, whose overthrow he helped to plan. Amid the ceaseless intrigues of Saigon politics, he has persuaded some former rivals to join his government and, more important, has given South Viet Nam's fledgling institutions a measure of legality. That gives hope for the future, and makes the government virtually coup-proof for the present. No Saigon politician--not even the anti-Communist opponents of Thieu's government--wants to go back to the bad old days of revolving governments.
Prognosis of Progress
Beyond Thieu and his government, the situation depends on other factors: the military performance by both the U.S. and the South Vietnamese army, the pace of pacification, the strength and morale of the enemy. "Progress" in Viet Nam is a relative and fragile thing at best. But within limits, a prognosis of progress seems more valid than at any time since the U.S. arrived.
The history of the war is all too painfully graven in false optimism. Again and again, U.S. hopes have been raised by officials armed with gleaming statistics and pollyanna rhetoric. First the U.S. "turned the corner" in Viet Nam; then there was "light at the end of the tunnel," "the enemy was on the run," and the attrition rates, the kill ratios, and all the other jargon of victory rolled on and on. Since they have been proved wrong so often in the past, U.S. experts are careful not to parade their latest positive assessments; indeed, they almost tend to conceal them. But those currently in charge of the war in the field are convinced that "the curve is up" at last.
For each good sign, there can still be found another, less hopeful indicator. The imponderables that have always bedeviled the U.S. in Viet Nam are still imponderables. As a result, every assessment of the war is self-contradictory. Still, after more than seven years of coping with Communist guerrillas, with the Oriental maze of Saigon politics, and with an endless pacification effort, the U.S. has finally reached at least some firm ground. That is not to say that the war is about to be won. No one, in fact, even talks about "winning" it any longer. "Winning," of course, has always had a special meaning in Viet Nam: not outright conquest of North Viet Nam, but merely wearing the Communist armies down until they could no longer wage any effective resistance. From its top commanders on down, the U.S. is firmly convinced that even this kind of military victory--given the current level of U.S. troop investment and any reasonable time limit--is unattainable. But things are perhaps going somewhat better for the allied cause than ever before--or than most outsiders realize.
Progress on the battlefield can be properly understood only in the context of last year's Tet offensive, when the Communists unleashed some 200,000 assault troops against major cities and towns across South Viet Nam. Like most periods of genuine trauma, Tet produced effects that lasted long after the healing process had begun. Within two months, Lyndon Johnson ordered a partial bombing halt, opened the way to peace talks and promised not to campaign for his own reelection. Shortly thereafter, he appointed General Creighton Abrams the new commander in chief in Viet Nam and began to give top priority to making the ARVN an armed force of self-sufficiency. The U.S. was clearly looking harder than ever before for an honorable end to the war, and Saigon finally realized, as Ellsworth Bunker puts it, "that the American commitment was not open-ended." The galvanism of Tet, in short, was to destroy many U.S. illusions, put limits on the U.S. commitment, and necessarily hasten South Viet Nam's plans for going on its own.
For the Communists, Tet had proved expensive. During a few weeks of heavy fighting, they lost some 36,000 troops killed--about one-sixth of their entire forces. But they had also won a clear-cut psychological victory, demonstrating their ability to attack almost anywhere in Viet Nam at will and shattering all the optimistic assessments of war in the minds of the U.S. public. Moved by both pain and pride, Communist leaders had to decide whether to follow up the strike or retrench. They chose to remain on the offensive--at first in a continued effort to take the beleaguered Marine outpost at Khe Sanh, and later in two further general offensives against towns and cities. Beginning in September, Communist troops retreated in large numbers to their sanctuaries deep in jungle areas. Their motivation is still a matter of some guesswork. September and October were a period of intense behind-the-scenes negotiations leading to the full bombing halt "agreement" of October 31, and the Communists may have withdrawn as their concession in the Paris bargaining.
Abrams' New Tactics
Whether or not such a political factor was involved, the troops obviously needed to rest, regroup and refit. South Vietnamese recruits were getting harder to find, forcing the Communists to fill Viet Cong units with up to 80% North Vietnamese soldiers. Buried supplies needed replenishing. Since at least some of this overhauling process was going on, General Abrams scoffed at the "lull" that settled over Viet Nam for the last part of the year. "It is a period of feverish activity on the enemy's part," he said. "So it's got to be a period of feverish activity for us." It was--and critics of U.S. toughness now argue that the decision to continue to push hard on the ground during the Communist stand-down invited retaliation, which finally came in the current Communist offensive.
Under the direction of Abrams, the U.S. has evolved a potent mix of tactics for keeping Communist troops consistently off balance. The most vital ingredient in the mix is maneuverability --specifically the knack of dividing or multiplying with nearly the same speed as guerrilla troops. "We work in small patrols because that's how the enemy moves--in groups of four and five," says Abrams. "When he fights in squad size, we now fight in squad size. When he cuts to half squad, so do we." Since the Communists have always been able to dart in and out of privileged sanctuaries in North Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos, mobility has been a prime objective of every U.S. commander. But between the vast, multi-division-sized "search-and-destroy" missions of General William Westmoreland and the sting-ray "spoiler" raids that Abrams has specialized in, there is all the difference of a zone defense and a full-court press. Abrams, a tank man with a deserved reputation as a "fighting general," is obviously willing to wage war man for man, if necessary.
As a result, U.S. fighting men are more active than ever in Viet Nam. In northernmost I Corps, men of the 101st Airborne Division constantly patrol infiltration routes to Hue, cleaning out caches of food and arms and pushing Communist base camps, mile by mile, out of easy striking distance. To screen the vital western route that leads to the capital from Laos and Cambodia, Abrams moved the 1st Air Cavalry Division (Airmobile) out of the north and into III Corps. From 40 semipermanent base camps--called landing zones--the reinforced division has placed a Communist-infested border area the size of New Jersey under overlapping artillery range, and prowls through it relentlessly in small groups. In the Delta, long a Communist stronghold, the 9th Infantry brigade has developed a whole repertory of "night-raider" tactics utilizing every thing from giant spotlights to tree-borne sniper teams.
Followed individually, few of these actions produce any spectacular battles.
But they are calculated to cripple the Communist fighting man's whole style.
They strike at his political base in the countryside (the "infrastructure"), his staging bases, his buried supplies. In hun dreds of patrol actions, for instance, the allies last year unearthed 2,270 tons of Communist ammunition -- more than three times the total for the previous year. Abrams' dragnet tactics are partly responsible for this, as is a bounty of up to $10,000, paid to any Vietnamese who pinpoints a cache for the allies.
A Sobering Crow
For their part, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Communist troops were still confident of their ability to strike. While Viet Nam five weeks ago uneasily celebrated Tet, the main holiday of the year, Communist troops filtered stealth ily out of their sanctuaries toward major targets throughout the country. When the Buddhist Year of the Rooster was still only six days old, they were ready to sound their own sobering crow: a co ordinated offensive against practically every population and military center in South Viet Nam. Significantly, they chose to attack most often with long-range firepower, indicating that their numbers did not permit direct assault, and nearly all the major attacks were aimed at U.S. bases and outposts. Still, in the nationwide scope of the offensive and in the casualties they have been able to inflict on U.S. troops (1,140 dead after three weeks), the Communists proved that they can still threaten nearly any point in the country.
Moreover, in zones of traditionally heavy infiltration, they presented convincing evidence that they were indeed attempting to move in large ground forces--though they still did not commit all of some 22 regiments pulled out of northernmost I Corps last fall (see map, p. 27). To counter that most alarming of threats, the allies last week mounted two large-scale counteroffensives, virtually the first of such major sweeps of the Abrams era. West of Saigon, some 10,000 troops from three U.S. divisions, using tanks and armored vehicles, swept through sections of the huge, French-owned Michelin rubber plantation in an effort to rout some 7,500 Communist soldiers. Only 40 miles from the capital, the overgrown, colonial-era plantation was being used as a staging ground for what the allies feared would be an assault on Saigon. In I Corps, the 3rd Marine Division completed their eight-week-old sweep through the A Shau Valley, long a Communist-infested staging shelter. From the forested slopes of this valley pour a steady stream of Communist troops bound either for the imperial capital of Hue or for Danang, the nation's second largest city, whose outskirts were penetrated during the current offensive and which has been shelled repeatedly. Despite some damage and the sharp increase in U.S. casualty figures, however, the 1969 offensive has so far not disrupted South Viet Nam as a country--thanks largely, no doubt, to Abrams' interdiction tactics.
As with the Tet attack of 1968, the current Communist offensive has served to underscore the urgency of building a strong government in Saigon. There is almost no way for the U.S. to disengage completely from the war until it can be turned over to a durable South Vietnamese government commanding trained and equipped troops, able to handle the indigenous Viet Cong who remain after all the North Vietnamese soldiers return home.
The Best Are Few
Just how good is the army of South Viet Nam (ARVN) at present? It is in slightly better shape than it was a year ago. With its training program under the direct supervision of U.S. military experts, the necessary skills and equipment are becoming available. Nearly all 821,000 South Vietnamese in uniform have received some training in counterinsurgency warfare, and the entire regular army has been equipped with M-16 rifles. The latter step was particularly important, since the World War II-vintage M-l rifles that had been in use literally kept the army off balance: the joke was half true that the kick of the heavy rifles threw many of the small South Vietnamese two paces back for every shot they fired. Know-how and firepower, however, cannot replace spirit. The best ARVN units certainly do not lack spirit--but the best are relatively few. ARVN's desertion is down, but each month, some 13,000 South Vietnamese still go over the hill. Not all are AWOL by U.S. standards, however; often they merely go home to re-enlist in units stationed nearer their families. The unreadiness of ARVN was, of course, the ostensible reason proffered by Secretary Laird for retreating, publicly at least, on any U.S. troop withdrawals this year.
He had, unfortunately, some reason for taking that position. Thieu has managed to make the selection and promotion of ARVN officers considerably more democratic than it had been in the past, and a select group of colonels attending the first classes in Saigon's plush new National Defense College has begun to explore highly sophisticated defense scenarios. But many of the training programs take so long to complete that they have still not affected the army's real performance. Pilot training, for example, takes fully two years, half of it English-language instruction. Men in the ranks are woefully underpaid (a private's salary: $25 a month) and must serve for the duration rather than any specific term. When U.S. advisers set about beefing up the South Vietnamese military, they were confident that the result would be substantial increases in ARVN battle contacts with the Communists--meaning that the South Vietnamese would seek out and fight the Communists more aggressively. Some of this has occurred, but only in roughly the same proportion as simple manpower expansion.
Ultimately, the ARVN's performance and that of the government are inseparable. The government rules the country (as best it can) largely through the army; the army in turn depends on the morale and confidence the government can create among the people. The ARVN, like the U.S., must look for leadership to the short (5 ft. 5 in.), graying former career general who has been fighting the Communists since he joined the French army in 1947. President Nguyen Van Thieu's generally unspectacular rise through the military ranks--as well as an equally pedestrian campaign for the presidency--has left many in doubt of Thieu's skill and style as a politician.
Thieu the Politician
Yet behind what one ambassador to Saigon calls his "Boy Scout" mien lurks a first-rate political mind. For one thing, Thieu is the only general among those who helped to oust the Diem regime to have survived in power. No less an accomplishment was his success in drafting the dashing Nguyen Cao Ky as his running mate, and then skillfully outflanking Ky's bid for power after the election. Thieu has also enlisted the services of another rival, Moderate Presidential Candidate Tran Van Huong, as Premier. In all this, Thieu has emerged as a politician with a certain amount of Oriental style. "Those around him say he is extremely crafty, which in Saigon is a high form of praise," says one observer. "He remains very still in the midst of a situation, and he allows it to develop until it suits him to act."
In the business of running the government, Thieu has also had to start with the most basic object--survival. Among the top aims of the 1968 Tet offensive, after all, was the overthrow of the U.S. "puppet" government in Saigon. The Communists made no headway whatever in provoking civil disorder, and that aim was notably absent in the current offensive. But because of that presumed vulnerability, Thieu has spent more than a little effort in simply assuring the nation that he is alive and well in Saigon.
Moreover, the national government that Thieu inherited after his election was anything but national, and hardly a government at all. National politics has traditionally begun and ended within the confines of Saigon, showing little concern with roots in the countryside. Ministers and military administrators tended to run their departments in the same way--and were certainly not encouraged to venture far from home during the blurry succession of military-backed strongmen who held power before Thieu. As a result, there was simply no chain of command that Thieu could rely on. Instead, he found a government of intensely jealous fiefdoms, whose bosses would pass on orders only if they suited their purpose.
Almost his first move as President was to establish an agency with the somewhat pompous name of "the Office of Experts." It consisted of a group of highly trained technocrats (average age: 34) assigned to find ways of breathing efficiency into the government. Despite considerable effort, they have not succeeded in getting rid of the mountainous red tape that hampers government administration. Moreover, one of the root problems in South Viet Nam's government--corruption--is so pervasive that neither stern warnings nor the outright firing of half the 44 province chiefs and 91 district chiefs has made more than a dent, though the new men are generally admitted to be improvements. But to the extent that Thieu can finally expect his most urgent orders to be followed, he has managed to organize a functioning government. Says Tran Quoc Buu, head of the Vietnamese Labor Confederation: "A year ago, South Viet Nam was many states within the state. A local military commander could make any policy he wanted to. But that has changed--there has been an improvement in the national discipline."
In Need of Unity
Above all, Thieu's government has begun to develop a sense of realism about the future. His concern with pacification, superficial as the program is in some senses, represents an admission that hamlet dwellers are a source of political strength, and that their loyalty could turn the tide in the event of a ceasefire. Thieu often voices the standard South Vietnamese argument against giving the National Liberation Front a political status, pointing out that Communism is synonymous with violence in Viet Nam. In fact, however, he has reached the inevitable conclusion that his government must some day learn to deal with native Communists, whatever they are called, as a minority body politic. "I believe that if 15 million nationalists cannot handle a couple hundred thousand Communists, then there's something wrong," Thieu has said. "The time is coming when we can take more bacteria into our system."
Yet whether Thieu--or anyone else in authority--can possibly prepare for that time with appropriate urgency is another matter. Thieu has been able to take only elementary steps toward building a government that will soon be able to stand on its own. The President has proved overzealous, if anything, in silencing his critics. Last week the government ordered the closing of a newspaper that had objected to the prison sentence of a Buddhist monk, Thich Thien Minh. Perhaps his most signal failing has been an unwillingness to get out and organize a true national front. Nothing less than that is needed to implant real government roots throughout the countryside, and to bury Saigon's blithering proliferation of political parties (which currently number more than 80) forever. Far and away, South Viet Nam's most necessary future asset is national unity, for without that, in the final, acid test of political loyalties, all of Thieu's skill in management and streamlining will count for little.
A good part of that skill has gone toward building up the program that is nearest to Thieu's heart: the vital pacification effort aimed at creating the sinews of nationhood among the peasants and hamlet dwellers of the countryside. Long known as "the other war," pacification is increasingly part of "the one war," as Abrams calls it. In the largest sense, nearly all allied military operations are now conducted in support of pacification--because the goal is partly military. The usual method, called a "cordon and search," is to widely encircle an unpacified village with U.S. troops, through which South Vietnamese soldiers, police and pacification teams pass to deal directly with the villagers. As the noose is gradually tightened, Viet Cong cadres are often flushed out and captured, thus depriving Communist troops of their indigenous source of aid and comfort.
In theory, of course, pacification is supposed to provide the poorest and least-educated segment of Vietnamese society with much more than just security against Communists. After the soldiers, medical teams and other forms of aid should follow. In practice, however, all too often the men who come to visit village elders are interested in picking up the local Viet Cong representative, running up the national flag --and little else. Those objectives, in fact, became absolutely paramount in the so-called Accelerated Pacification Campaign mounted last fall. The A.P.C. was, in effect, a candid race with time to throw federal control over 1,000 more hamlets before the Paris peace talks yielded a ceasefire. By its own standards, it was highly successful: the government claims that slightly more than 80% of the population now live in pacified areas of "relative security"--and "relative" can still mean a Viet Cong visit in the night. The actual total is probably nearer to 60%. But progress was encouraging enough for Saigon to target a new and perhaps somewhat unrealistic figure by the end of this year: 90%.
The gains, in the words of U.S. Pacification Chief William E. Colby, are fragile. "But if you can keep the enemy out of most of the hamlets most of the time, it's wrong not to try," he maintains. Unfortunately, the priorities in doing so involve establishing strict security, recruiting for a local "popular force" militia and holding a village election--none of which is probably uppermost in the minds of the uprooted, war-weary villagers. Critics point out that there has been no substantial reduction in assassinations, kidnappings and other terror tactics against villagers.
In Bed with the Chief
Beyond that, of course, are much larger questions about the difficulty of trying to engineer another country's security or national unity. One U.S. officer recently described his method of helping to pacify Vietnamese villages as one of "jumping into bed with the district chief"--which pretty well sums up how many Americans come on in the eyes of the peasants. Most of all, dissenters object to the warm breath of the U.S. "presence" in the program. "It is hard to give the illusion of sovereignty," says Rand Corporation Anthropologist Gerald Hickey, who has been in Viet Nam since 1956. "We continue with the naive notion that nation building is saturating the country with American advisers."
Whether that judgment is too harsh or not, the U.S.'s main business at this juncture must be to seek a settlement. There are essentially two approaches open to Nixon that could lead to a measurable disengagement from Viet Nam: a negotiated solution, or a seesaw of unilateral de-escalations, with each side presumably matching the other's withdrawals. The second possibility, involving the notion that the war will decline gradually by degrees of voluntary and informal pullout, is viewed by many U.S. experts as the most probable ending. Provided that the withdrawals were both steady and large enough, this solution would possibly satisfy the largest number of involved parties. For one thing, it would require each side to demonstrate its good faith in a succession of moves, rather than asking it to risk its position on a single bold stroke. For another, it would give U.S. fighting men time to initiate their ARVN replacements with firsthand experience--and keep providing, until the last phase, the most complicated kinds of battlefield assistance, especially air support.
The President's Detractors
Nixon seems reluctant so far to consider a unilateral U.S. scale-down, worrying those who fear that he may lose an opportunity for lowering the level of the killing by insisting on a formal tit-for-tat agreement with Hanoi. Such critics of Nixon's seeming tough stance tend to overlook the fact that the President, after all, has reacted quite mildly to the renewed offensive. Though they may include policymakers within Nixon's inner circle, the President's detractors come from the Johnson Administration, notably former Defense Secretary Clark W. Clifford and Ambassador Averell Harriman. They are believed to view the current Communist offensive as a direct and understandable, if not justified, response to the unabated allied military pressure during the September-to-January lull. They fault the U.S. for failing to match that lull in allied operations. More generally, they argue that, despite Nixon's refusal to resume bombing the North, the U.S. still maintains a relatively hard line in the conduct of the war, and that this is a mistake even as a stopgap. For all its risks, they feel, the unilateral withdrawal of some U.S. troops--or at the very least a stand-down in place in the fighting --is the nation's best hope for ending the war, because it would demonstrate good intentions on the U.S.'s part and at the same time turn the pressure of world opinion on Hanoi to do likewise. On the other hand, no one can be sure that Hanoi actually wants a quick peace --in which case the argument becomes pointless.
But disengagements could also come through secret, direct agreement in the Paris peace talks. The only conditions that the U.S. will absolutely insist on there are guarantees that North Vietnamese troops will depart at approximately the same rate as its own, and assurance that the present Saigon government has the facilities to maintain its own security. Hanoi has expressed willingness to negotiatevftn the first condition, but adamantly insists that the U.S. must reach a separate accord with the National Liberation Front on the second--the better to emphasize the Front's legitimacy. At stake is the eventual future of a South Viet Nam without foreign troops--but faced with a sizable number of native Communist insurgents.
One possible solution would be for the Front to forswear violence in return for the privilege of forming a political party that would exert power in South Viet Nam like any other party, to the extent that it wins votes. This arrangement is now discussed as the "Greek solution," since the N.L.F., like the Greek Communist Party following the civil war in 1950, would have to change its name in order to comply with the South Vietnamese constitution. Thieu has spoken derisively of such a proposal, though he has not actually ruled it out. Indeed, there is little doubt that, in one form or another, he must some day accept its principal component: the participation of the N.L.F. in Saigon's political processes. Certainly his own outline for an end to the war--for Hanoi to "acknowledge its aggression against South Viet Nam and accept to end that aggression"--seems an unlikely outcome. The Communists have done too well in the war for that. On the other hand, neither side any longer takes very seriously the idea of an outright coalition government; neither side wants it, and no one can imagine that it would survive longer than a few months.
Within both the unilateral and negotiated routes are hosts of tactical considerations. Probably the most important for Nixon is to decide which is the most conducive to fruitful negotiations; a policy of exerting continuing military pressure or one of inviting de-escalation by example. Despite the strong faith of some critics in the efficacy of voluntary deescalation, the evidence that Hanoi was signaling tacit willingness to lower the level of fighting during the battlefield lull is still far from compelling. The Communists, after all, needed the rest just as urgently for military reasons --and may well have decided to stay in the jungle in order to prepare for another blow that would force Nixon's hand.
Since a big tactical factor in judging the advantages of de-escalation is the U.S. death toll, the Administration ordered a new study of casualty causes. The results have been inconclusive, but if anything, they suggested that most U.S. soldiers are wounded and killed during enemy-initiated actions--and not as a result of their own aggressiveness. Moreover, looking back to the experience of the Panmunjom negotiations in Korea--during which the U.S. command substantially reduced the scale of the war--officials stress that lowering the pressure did not result in an increase in the negotiating pace.
The Limits of Action
Whatever route the President elects, he will soon be confronted with revoking Laird's statement that 1969 is too early to contemplate any U.S. troop reductions. It should not be too difficult for Nixon to manage. By ordering the withdrawal of a relatively modest 15,000 combat troops plus their 25,000 support troops in the latter half of 1969, Nixon could manage to bring home 40,000 men. If nothing else, such a decision would at least buy him a concession from Hanoi (if the withdrawal were negotiated) and certainly, as the South Vietnamese watched the first layer of their U.S. insulation stripped away, a new sense of urgency on the part of Saigon.
Essentially, what is at issue in these debates is tactics, or the specific actions that will lead to the war's end. For all its mounting pressure and potential fury, the most striking thing about the present debate is the agreement by all participants that the war in Viet Nam must be brought to an end well short of any outright allied military victory. Beyond that, there is unanimous acceptance of the conclusion that the U.S. involvement in the war--sooner rather than later--must begin to dwindle. Though he can still choose his own methods, Nixon must operate inside those perimeters, the limits defined by the American people in the tumultuous political year of 1968.
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