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5 THE
UNDERTAKER'S TALLY, Part 1 Donald Rumsfeld's sharp
elbows By Roger Morris
Vietnam soon would prove, however,
a craven ethos and command mediocrity in a
military - whose business, as Korea savagely
reminded everyone, is sometimes to fight wars -
would be catastrophic.
Within the system,
there were predictable if vain attempts to hide
the approaching disgrace. When, in 1970, a
war-college study of "professionalism" in Vietnam
was done with implications (as a
pair
of reviewing experts described it) "devastating to
the officer corps", the Joint Chiefs of Staff
quickly classified and suppressed the findings.
Yet none of the inner withering was a secret, or
even arcane knowledge, in government. Before,
during and after Rumsfeld's first regime at the
Pentagon, congressional hearings, journalism and
memoirs exposed the reality for what it was; while
nationally noted, amply documented books, often
written by veteran officers or based on their
testimony, appeared under titles that spoke
eloquently of the disaster still to come:
Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army,
Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine,
Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and
Decay of the United States Military: The Death
of the Army.
Vietnam nearly made the
figurative death literal. Ironically, there had
been a portent of the debacle ahead in Southeast
Asia (and of Iraq and Afghanistan 30 years later,
for that matter) in a book discussed in Washington
to the point of fad just as Rumsfeld began his
political career in the early 1960s.
General Maxwell Taylor was a handsome,
much-decorated World War II airborne hero, a
Missouri country boy who became a reputed military
intellectual, albeit given to the pandemic
provincialism yet gall typical of postwar US
officialdom, whose nation's new world power so
outstripped its knowledge of the planet. The
general could thus unabashedly extol the shah's
repressive Iranian troops as among the "armies of
freedom", and instruct a West Point class on the
eve of Vietnam that they were entering a world in
which "the ascendancy of American arms and
American military concepts is accepted as [a]
matter of course".
More grandly, Taylor
proposed to correct the errors of the key
strategic doctrine of the Eisenhower presidency,
the policy of "massive retaliation" in which
America's overwhelming nuclear superiority - its
bombers ringing the USSR and China, some within
minutes of their targets - was to deter any move
by Soviet or Chinese forces across the Cold War's
post-Korea established boundaries. That strategy
might keep the Red Armies in their kennels, Taylor
argued, but it was hardly a response to campaigns
waged by proxy communists on the periphery in the
Third World.
To meet that threat - and,
not incidentally, to rescue his beloved US Army
from the mission and budget predations of the
nuclear-armed US Air Force throughout the 1950s -
Taylor proposed a new orthodoxy of "limited wars",
adding to nuclear deterrence a "strategy of
flexible response". He defined his breakthrough in
a celebrated book, Uncertain Trumpet, as
"the need for a capability to react across the
entire spectrum of possible challenge for coping
with anything from general atomic war to
infiltration and aggressions".
On whether
the United States could practically, or should
politically, as a matter of national interest cope
"with anything", the confident paratrooper Taylor
wisely did not elaborate. His point, after all,
was at heart a bigger, better army with bigger,
better budgets. Properly selected "limited wars",
with newly created forces chafing to be used,
would presumably take care of themselves. But
Taylor at least did warn that it would be
necessary "to deter or win quickly", dictating an
overwhelming application of men and weaponry and a
victory so swift and decisive that everyone,
including the defeated enemy, would accept it.
"Otherwise," he noted ominously in a passage the
general as well as his admirers later tended to
overlook, "the limited war which we cannot win
quickly may result in our piecemeal attrition."
Minus this gloomy caveat, Taylor's theme
enjoyed swift vogue in the early 1960s - with both
Republicans and Democrats eager to engage what
were seen as ubiquitous Russians and native
communists scavenging post-colonial turmoil in the
Third World. Among them were right-wingers like
Rumsfeld, impatient with the aged caution of the
Eisenhowers and Hallecks in their own party, and
among the Democrats, president John F Kennedy
himself. He promptly made Taylor a ranking adviser
on Southeast Asia and other matters. Crippled by
careerism, the US military thus readied itself to
fight in reassuring theory what in Vietnamese
reality would be Maxwell Taylor's oxymoronic
nightmare - a limited war of attrition.
That war, of course, had its men of
courage and integrity. More than ever, though,
they were the exceptions to the prevailing system,
and few of them made it as intact survivors to
highest rank in the 21st century. The machinery
that in peacetime routinely ground out rhapsodic
officer efficiency reports instantly applied the
same practiced reflexes to the surreal paperwork
of Saigon and its offshore aircraft-carrier
groups, fattening Vietcong body counts,
bombing-damage assessments, and accounts of South
Vietnamese client efficacy that seemed to prove
victory ever on the way. When intelligence reports
discovered awkward enemy strength and resilience
or detected unwanted signs of another losing war,
they were simply falsified, destroyed, or buried.
The massively beribboned chests of
commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan three decades
later, many of whom had been junior officers in
Southeast Asia, would be unintended reminders of
how much the Vietnam fraud fed on even the old
honor of citations. Like a debased currency,
ribbons for courage or exceptional service lost
value as they accumulated, with awards snidely
known as "gongs" and oak-leaf clusters as "rat
turds". Once-respected air medals (800,000 of
them) were handed out for almost any non-combat
flight in that helicopter-swarming war, or even
for hauling holiday frozen turkeys snugly behind
the lines.
Decorations were heaped so
bountifully on generals along with lesser staff
officers that valor in such numbers, wrote one
combat veteran, was "incomprehensible". To
Vietnam's "grunts", as they related again and
again, the war was too often fought with their
officers 600 meters up in the comparative safety
of "eye in the sky" command helicopters rather
than with their "ass in the grass" with their
troops.
Casualty figures were telling. In
more than a decade of fighting, with more than
58,000 American dead, only four generals and eight
colonels fell in combat. Commissioned rank was a
guarantee of survival as for no other modern
military at war (save perhaps in Iraq and
Afghanistan in figures yet to come, but where we
know high-ranking officers were seldom at the
front). "The officer corps simply did not die in
sufficient numbers or in the presence of their men
often enough," concluded two postwar analysts of
the army's resulting "crisis".
With the
corruption of standards came an inevitable loss of
morale. To soldiers of honor at every level, the
ignorance, self-protection and widespread
opportunism of so many superiors made Vietnam what
one colonel called "the dark ages in the army's
history". Through the ranks, unprecedented, ran
the unchecked contagion of disintegration -
refusal of orders amounting to mutiny; desertions
in the tens of thousands; a drug epidemic and race
riots; uncounted, unaccountable atrocities; and
not least the assassination of commissioned and
non-commissioned officers by their own men.
The US military's internecine murder
acquired its own ugly Vietnam name, "fragging".
Among the officer corps, according to a
war-college appraisal, there had been "a clear
loss of military ethic", not to be explained
simply by a largely citizen-soldier,
draft-dependent army. Altogether, another study
concluded still more clinically and bluntly, the
Armed Forces in Vietnam bordered on "an
undisciplined, ineffective, almost anomic mass",
its commanders high and low manifesting "severe
pathologies".
Added to the war's vast
profiteering and waste, all this spurred an exodus
of disillusioned military professionals
(unprecedented and unmatched until the Iraq war),
depriving the services of most of their most
promising young leaders. It also produced by
1975-76 an unparalleled outpouring of public and
internal criticism with often shocking revelations
by officers, enlisted men, and other knowledgeable
observers in and out of government.
The
Great Evasion Yet atop the Pentagon at the
immediate postwar height of the now furious,
anguished outcry - what an admiral witnessing it
called a "real rebellion of the heart" - Rumsfeld
took no meaningful part in the airing or
soul-searching; nor did he take control of, or
cleanse, the pestilent contract and accounting
scandals. What he did was effectively ignore,
dismiss, or on occasion repress and even punish
critics and whistle-blowers.
Typically -
yet another grim foreshadowing of Iraq with its
Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan with its Baghram prison
in cavernous structures at the old Afghan and
Soviet air base - when new congressional questions
began to be asked about the involvement of the US
military as well as the CIA in the Saigon regime's
infamous "Tiger Cage" torture camps in South
Vietnam, an issue that surfaced well before his
tenure at the Pentagon but which arose anew in
1975-76 after fresh revelations of US-aided
torture and assassinations, Rumsfeld led the Ford
administration in blocking damaging disclosures
until the issue eventually trailed off. It was one
more plot of buried history - along with a seedy
CIA front, the Office of Public Safety, implicated
in advising and abetting the secret-police
"renditions" and torture practices of client
regimes worldwide until its quiet disbanding by
Congress in 1975 - with echoes into the 21st
century.
Officially, the crumbling of
discipline and performance in Vietnam would be
blamed not on the US military's long-festering
venality and incompetence, but on the ready
scapegoats of anti-war agitation and the larger
social turbulence of the 1960s, a perfect fit with
Rumsfeld-Cheney demonology. To the relief of the
Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense scoffed at,
or swiftly suppressed, any institutional
self-examination; yet the counterattack on critics
was vicious. "Over-long in battle and emotionally
unbalanced" was the way one Pentagon-kept military
columnist smeared an officer of legendary heroism
who publicly deplored service careerism.
As the United States gladly celebrated its
Bicentennial under Gerald Ford's calming, anodyne
post-Watergate presidency, the tide of
self-awareness in the Pentagon was "allowed to
recede", as a later study recorded, and officers
"whose careers were deeply rooted in the polices
and practices [of the war] finally prevailed". The
latter included leaders of the 1991 Gulf War and
2003 Iraq debacle, most famously Colin Powell, who
as a mid-grade careerist was personally involved
in a whitewash of the My Lai massacre.
When a superintendent of West Point was
earlier removed for his implication in the My Lai
cover-up, he bade farewell to a dining hall full
of sympathetic cadets with the old adage of
General Joe Stillwell, "Don't let the bastards
grind you down." Who the superintendent's
"bastards" were, the new secretary of defense and
his unreconstructed high command had no doubt in
1975-76.
In the siege mentality of
Rumsfeld's post-Vietnam Pentagon, the besieging
force was never a blindly misjudged nationalism,
an intrepid insurgency, corrupt, untenable
clients, or persistent myopia, folly,
self-delusion, and ultimate self-betrayal of US
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