In many ways my desire to understand the US failure in Vietnam has been a long difficult road. No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War by Gregory Daddis answers many long held questions.
After digesting so many resources in books, documentaries and listening to interviews with veterans, politicians and social leaders during the long duration of the war.
I believe No Sure Victory reveals strong indicators regarding our failure in Vietnam. The focus is the failure of MACV to gather and process data against an established set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) over the long duration of this war.
Daddis documents McNamara’s injection of data gathering (metrics) when LBJ increased America’s commitment to South Vietnam. McNamara’s experience as one of The Wiz Kids seemed to set the stage in his role as Secretary of Defense. Yet our enemy was determined and battle tested. America was fighting a larger, strategic cold war with an emerging China and the established Soviet Union in both Europe and Asia.
Daddis sheds light throughout No Sure Victory not only on the lack of White House direction but how MACV leadership could not adapt to fighting a war of counterinsurgency. The impact of this television war confused the government, media and our country. At the same time Daddis points to key failures in not understanding the full affect of the French Indo-China war regarding counterinsurgency. This lack of understanding established a crippling third leg the US consistently fought to balance against the cold war political spectrum.
Even within MACV, the military’s yearly rotation of officers contributed heavily to the failed implementation of measurable, actionable statistics McNamara benefitted from while in the Air Force in bombing Germany. No junior officer wanted to rock the boat and limit career opportunities. New support staff at MACV had to reinvent data reporting almost every year while the war strategy itself was also changing. Many reports were obsolete in the field which further frustrated commanders in battle.
No Sure Victory leads us to believe MACV could never fully recognize in fighting a war without fronts that “data” could not be weighed equally from the Central Highlands, the Mekong Delta or Saigon. I believe it was driven from Johnson to Nixon and implemented between Westmoreland and Abrams. They were more accustomed to fighting successful campaigns based upon World War II.
The shocking impact of Project 100,000 provided a fait accompli to our mission in Vietnam. It has strong lingering ties to the cultural backdrop of American military efforts portrayed in cinema, with Platoon and Casualties of War coming immediately to mind. Clearly this policy set back momentum in the battlefield when the GVN and America really needed it the most.
Daddis accurately addressed stated views by military commanders that the character of American soldiers who fought in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley and Operation Junction City were dramatically altered by the drug counter culture of the late 1960s. The most damning impact was fragging of senior officers.
Daddis did not reveal MACV‘s data gathering measures regarding US aid in economic and social programs. That data must be available. It would be interesting to see how that data could be quantified along with the full measure of US military expenditures in Southeast Asia. And yet although not addressed in No Sure Victory, the corrupt instability of multiple short-lived governments in Saigon undermined all efforts to combat VC activities in the south.
Data gathering ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara appears in it’s infancy. At the same time, Daddis reveals how our military establishment actually viewed data collection as a threat:
As President Johnson made the fateful decision to send ground combat troops to South Vietnam, the new MACV commander barely tampered with the command’s abundant metrics for progress and effectiveness. Staff officers, in fact, appended more reports to an already cluttered system. Though Westmoreland developed a strategic concept addressing the problems of both pacification and enemy attack, MACV failed to integrate the measurement reporting system into its decision-making processes. Perhaps most noteworthy in this first year of troop commitments, measuring the effectiveness of programs to fulfill Westmoreland’s strategy attracted little staff attention. Rather, commanders and staffs worried about how certain units executed an innovative organizational concept built around new technologies. Measuring the effectiveness of air mobility superseded measuring MACV’s overall operational and strategic progress. Institutional pressures to test these modern technologies and operational concepts dominated army thinking and established a dangerous precedent for the future conduct of the war and how it was measured.
pg. 64
Daddis does not put on kid gloves when addressing how officers in the field objected to reporting multiple data points. They viewed McNamara’s requirements to be overwhelming to their day to day combat roles. Change at every level is hard.
McNamara brought his management science operations to the military from his roles during World War II and the Ford Motor Company to coordinate all the operational and logistical information required to manage war in Vietnam. Can’t fit a round hole into a square peg.
The closing chapter is well written and brings together our failures in Vietnam, how we are still learning and re-implementing them in today’s war on terror.