SETUP: What the Air Force Did in Vietnam and Why

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SETUP

WHAT THE AIR FORCE DID IN VIETNAM AND WHY

BY

EARL H. TILFORD, JR.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

Illustrations 7

Foreword 9

About the Author 12

Preface 13

Chapter 1—In the Time of Atomic Plenty 18

Chapter 2—Situations of a Lesser Magnitude 48

Chapter 3—Rolling Thunder and the Diffusion of Heat 78

Chapter 4—However Frustrated We Are 133

Chapter 5—It Was a Loser 168

Chapter 6—Completing the Setup 207

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 223

DEDICATION

To Grace

for giving me faith

Illustrations

B-29s

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay

B-36

B-52

F-105 Thunderchief

F-105s in Joint Maneuvers

Secretary of the Air Force Eugene M. Zuckert

XB-70

President John F. Kennedy with Gen. Curtis E. LeMay

F-4 Phantom

Joint Chiefs of Staff

T-28

B-26

A-l Skyraider

F-100

F-104

B-58 Hustler

XB-70

Hanoi Petroleum Storage Site

North Vietnamese Antiaircraft Artillery Site

North Vietnamese Surface-to-Air Missile Site

F-105 Thunderchief

F-4 Phantom

Interdiction Strike on a River Bridge in North Vietnam

Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown 136

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara

Gen. William W. Momyer

Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans, Jr.

Army Mechanized Infantry on Patrol

Air Strike in the Republic of Vietnam

B-52 Releases Bombs during Linebacker

F-4 Equipped with Air-to-Air Missiles

MiG-21

B-52 Crews on Guam

B-52 Taking Off on Bombing Mission in Southeast Asia

Foreword

The United States Air Force of the 1990s faces perhaps the single greatest challenge to its institutional Weltanschauung since it became an independent service in 1947. The specter of a hostile, expansionist Soviet Union—which, for the last 45 years, has justified the maintenance of a large strategic air force overwhelmingly oriented to the western European theater—is fading fast with no similarly immense threat on the immediate horizon to take its place. As a result, the USAF, perhaps more than any other U.S. military service, faces the prospect of losing the foundation upon which it has based its entire institutional identity and even its very existence.

Strategic bombing is not mere doctrine to the USAF; it is its lifeblood and provides its entire raison d’être. Strategic bombing is as central to the identity of the Air Force as the New Testament is to the Catholic Church. Without the Gospels there would be no pope; and without strategic bombing there would be no Air Force. The theology of strategic bombing has influenced every aspect of the Air Force’s development since well before World War II. This system of belief too often has led the keepers of the USAF’s institutional memory to dismiss as aberrant, peripheral, and irrelevant anything that fell outside the narrow confines of its strategic concepts. The USAF’s uncritical approach to its own past has enabled it to declare strategic bombing decisive where it was not (Europe, 1943-45); to claim victory where there was none (Vietnam, 1972); and to neglect those air operations that, indeed, proved indispensable and potentially decisive (tactical air campaigns in the European and Pacific theaters during World War II and in Korea during 1950 and 1951). This inability of the USAF to assess realistically the lessons and implications of its wartime experiences—failures along with successes—not only keeps it from facing the more difficult and sometimes painful implications of the Vietnam experience, but in the long run enervates all Air Force doctrine, strategic as well as tactical.

Outside the context of traditional Air Force concepts and hidebound-institutional assumptions, Dr. Earl H. Tilford provides in this volume the sort of critical self-appraisal of USAF strategy in Vietnam that has been too long in coming. Uniformed Air Force historians, while relatively prolific generally have demonstrated a distressing lack of skepticism; as a result, their efforts too often lack the critical analysis necessary to challenge unhealthy myths and to derive meaningful lessons from past operational experience. The Air Force has never produced a body of internal critics comparable to those Army officers who, through the late 1970s and 1980s, often risked their military careers to challenge prevailing ground force strategies in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Dr. Tilford, along with a small but growing number of his former USAF colleagues, has begun the belated process of questioning the underlying assumptions of the USAF’s strategy in Southeast Asia.

Tilford—a retired Air Force officer and a widely respected historian in his own right—is not squeamish about demolishing the myths that abound concerning the air war in Southeast Asia. He is forthright in challenging both the USAF’s strategic tunnel vision and the cherished misconceptions of many civilian historians whose criticisms of the air war in Vietnam are long on politics and short on facts. The integrity of Dr. Tilford’s research, his knowledge of air power theory and technology, and his expertise as a historian all contribute to a high quality effort that proves, among other things, that neither the Air Force nor its civilian critics have yet secured a monopoly on truth.

In his analysis of the air war against North Vietnam, Tilford presents one overwhelming lesson: that USAF strategic bombing doctrine is ethnocentric and Eurocentric, and is conceived utterly without regard to important cultural and political variations among potential adversaries. This lesson, more than any other, is one that today’s Air Force must learn if it is to establish any relevance in a post-cold war world in which the global, superpower war for which it has planned almost exclusively since 1945 becomes an evermore remote possibility. Whatever the Air Force’s operational role in the twenty-first century turns out to be, it seems likely that an air technocracy geared toward fighting a general war against a modern, industrialized major power will become even less relevant than it proved to be in Korea and Vietnam. At the very least, the Air Force of the future will do well to heed Dr. Tilford’s other major conclusion that because war is more than sortie generation and getting ordnance on targets, statistics are a poor substitute for strategy.

Military organizations have accepted the value of official history ever since the elder Helmuth von Moltke invented the genre in the 1870s. Too often, however, the effort to highlight successes and rationalize, or worse yet, expunge failures overshadows the value of official history as an organ of self-evaluation and improvement. While it is perhaps going too far to suggest that military historians should study only failures, a more balanced treatment of operational shortcomings from within the military services would be a refreshing and ultimately beneficial change.

Official histories with such an orientation would have a much greater impact on the mainstream of military history because they would be more difficult to dismiss as public relations rather than scholarship.

Official military history was born as a learning exercise, and in this book Dr. Tilford has returned to those roots. He proceeds from the assumption that it is more important to understand what went wrong in Vietnam and why, than it is to manipulate the record and paint failure as victory. At the very least, Tilford’s work joins earlier studies—most notably, Mark Clodfelter’s The Limits of Air Power and Barry Watts’s The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctrine in what many students of air power hope is the new Air Force history: honest appraisals of the historical record, free from the service biases, conceptual limitations, and strategic dogmatism that have tended to cloud the USAF’s interpretation of its past. The already high quality of the histories that appeared under the imprint of the Office of Air Force History and the Warrior Studies Series can improve only when their historians—uniformed and civilian—feel free to ask, and answer, the difficult questions that the USAF has evaded for the past 40 years. Many within the Air Force will not like what Earl Tilford and his breed have to say, but one can only hope that in the best interests of the institution they will listen anyway.

CAROLINE F. ZIEMKE, PhD

Arlington, Virginia

May 1990

About the Author

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr., is an associate professor of history at Troy State University in Montgomery and visiting professor of military history at the Air Command and Staff College. He earned his BA and MA degrees in history at the University of Alabama and his PhD in American military history at George Washington University. Dr. Tilford retired from the Air Force in 1989 after a career that included tours as an intelligence officer in Thailand and at Headquarters Strategic Air Command. From 1975 to 1979, he was part of a team of military and civilian historians writing the official history of Air Force operations during the Vietnam War. Dr. Tilford taught history at the U.S. Air Force Academy before becoming associate editor and then editor of the Air University Review. He began writing Setup in 1987 during an assignment as a research fellow at the Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education. Dr. Tilford is the author of The United States Air Force Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia, 1961-1975 and more than 20 articles pertaining to the Vietnam War. He teaches courses on the Vietnam War at Troy State University in Montgomery, Auburn University at Montgomery, and the University of Alabama. Dr. Tilford pioneered elective courses on the Vietnam War at the Air Force’s Air War College and the Air Command and Staff College. He has lectured extensively at numerous colleges and universities in the United States and Europe. Dr. Tilford lives in Prattville, Alabama, with his wife, three children, and a cat named Clausewitz.

Preface

The primary mission of Headquarters Seventh/Thirteenth Air Force, located at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, was to coordinate and support Air Force operations over northern Laos. In 1970 and 1971, as a new second lieutenant, I served there as an intelligence briefer. My job was to prepare and deliver the morning intelligence briefing to the commander, a major general.

The headquarters director of intelligence (DI) provided strict ground rules for his briefers to follow. A briefing script had to be prepared and, once approved, adhered to almost exactly. Negative words, like lost, ambushed, retreat, although increasingly appropriate by 1971, were anathema.

By mid-March 1971, South Vietnam’s invasion of Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Operation Lam Son 719, had fallen apart. What was left of an invasion force of over 15,000 soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) crumbled before a concerted North Vietnamese counterattack comprised of more than four divisions. ARVN troops, stalled along Route 9 leading from Khe Sanh to Tchepone, Laos, the transshipment point at the center of the trail, were either surrendering, fading into the jungle, or desperately boarding (and often clinging to) U.S. Army helicopters attempting to ferry them to safety.

One morning it fell to me to brief this debacle to the general. First, at 7:00 A.M., I had to brief the director of intelligence to get his approval for what would be said to the general an hour later. As the briefing developed, I said, Sir, the ARVN is retreating along Route 9 back toward Khe Sanh. The colonel looked up from his copy of the script and said, Tilford, you know better than that. Get another word for ‘retreating.’

As I briefed the general at the eight o’clock briefing, I said, Turning our attention to Operation Lam Son 719...the ARVN is fleeing along Route 9 back toward Khe Sanh.

What do you mean, ‘fleeing’? the general asked.

Sir, as the colonel indicated earlier, this is not a retreat. Retreats have cohesion. Lam Son 719 has turned into a rout. The South Vietnamese who haven’t surrendered are either running off into the jungle or piling into helicopters—even clinging to their skids—to get out of Laos.

The general turned to the director of intelligence, Dan, is that right?

Yessir, that seems to be right.

Then the general turned to another colonel, the Seventh/Thirteenth Air Force director of operations (DO) and ordered, All planes not used to support troops in contact [firefights] in northern Laos are to be turned over to Seventh Air Force [our Southeast Asia headquarters in Saigon] for Lam Son 719.

When the briefing concluded the two colonels followed me back to my office. There they delivered a severe tongue lashing, which, while only one of many I was to get during my 20-year Air Force career, was nonetheless among the most memorable. After the colonels had finished with me and departed, a wiser and more experienced first lieutenant said, You know what you did, don’t you? You took away the DO’s planes. That’s an embarrassment and a big loss of prestige for him. The ARVN be damned, the colonel had been embarrassed.

By 1971 the Vietnam War had been lost long ago. Our involvement no longer had anything to do with stemming the tide of communism or even ensuring the right of the Republic of Vietnam to exist. Without a clearly defined objective, the U.S. military services in Indochina focused on larger institutional issues which might affect them in the post-war years. Power struggles abounded at the highest levels among the White House, Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Department of State and at a lower level among the Air Force, Navy, and Army. Within the Air Force, the Strategic Air Command competed with the Tactical Air Command (TAC), and within TAC the jet mafia with their high-technology fighters competed with the special operations mafia and their propeller-driven gunships and fighter-bombers. What the colonels who chewed me out were concerned with was part of an internal struggle within Air Force units assigned to Southeast Asia revolving around prerogatives reserved for the Seventh Air Force and those designated to the Seventh/Thirteenth Air Force.

The Vietnam War has been over for nearly two decades. Generally, American military professionals have had a difficult time understanding their role in this nation’s most ignominious defeat. The U.S. Air Force has had more difficulty assessing the Vietnam War than the other services. For instance, the U.S. Army has identified problems with leadership, morale in the ranks, and its doctrines in the early 1970s which both compelled and resulted from the defeat in Vietnam. The Air Force, on the other hand, believed (and still believes) it won the war. Ask many airmen about air power in Vietnam, and they will relate the myth of Linebacker Two: how using B-52s over Hanoi and other major cities for 11 days in December 1972 brought the North Vietnamese to their collective knees. The myth of Linebacker Two is reassuring because it reinforces accepted doctrinal precepts and bolsters an institutional commitment to the manned bomber. The myth also perpetuates misunderstanding and, because it is widely accepted and believed by airmen, prevents the Air Force from gaining the valuable insights that an objective study of the Vietnam War could provide.

The Vietnam War, as Thomas C. Thayer states in his book War without Fronts, was primarily an air war, at least in terms of resource allocation. More than half of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Vietnam War went to support Air Force, Army, and Navy aerial operations. The Air Force built up its forces the fastest of any service, reaching near peak strength by mid-1966, and then remained in Southeast Asia longer than any other service, not closing down its Thailand-based headquarters until January 1976. The United States dropped eight million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1962 and 1973—the Air Force accounting for nearly 80 percent of those bombs. Total U.S. aircraft losses, fixed wing and helicopter, came to 8,588. The Air Force lost 2,257 aircraft and more than 2,700 Air Force men died while hundreds of airmen endured torture in captivity. For all that expenditure of treasure, firepower, and lives, air power, while occasionally pivotal, was never decisive in the Vietnam War.

The Air Force flew into Vietnam on the wings of a doctrine devised to fight industrial powers like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. That North Vietnam was a preindustrial agricultural society which was simply not susceptible to strategic bombing is only part of the reason that air power failed. This book explains additional factors leading to the setup which not only resulted in a failure for air power, but also contributed to the fall of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to Communist forces in 1975. The reasons behind this failure are important and relevant to the present and future.

Nearly half a century has passed since American air power was used effectively to win a war. Indeed, some pundits revel in pointing out that the United States has not won a war since it acquired an independent Air Force. Korea and Vietnam were more than unhappy exceptions to the true course of strategic air power doctrine developed in the 1930s and advanced during and immediately after World War II. These limited wars are indicative of the kinds of conflicts the United States likely will fight in the future. For that reason, airmen need to open their eyes and minds to the unpleasant realities of the limited applicability of strategic bombing. Airmen ought to ask difficult questions about the Vietnam War and about the doctrinal foundations rooted so firmly in the prophesies of strategic bombing which form the basis of an independent Air Force. Not to do so virtually assures that others outside the air power community will ask these questions and their answers are likely to be unpalatable for enthusiasts of the strategic air offensive.

The central thesis that I develop in Setup is that the failure of American air power in the Vietnam War cannot be blamed entirely on politicians who tied our hands, a pernicious and wayward press, or the antiwar movement. Air Force leaders, especially the air commanders in Saigon, Honolulu, and Washington between 1964 and 1972, share much of the blame. In the final analysis, they could not—indeed, did not—develop a strategy appropriate to the war at hand. In fact, they failed to articulate any coherent strategy at all. In Vietnam the Air Force fell victim to its own brief history and to the unswerving commitment of its leadership to the dubious doctrine of strategic bombing.

This book could never have been written without the help and encouragement of many people. I deeply appreciate the support of Col. Dennis M. Drew, director of the Airpower Research Institute (ARI) at the Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Colonel Drew, a former graduate student of mine, paid his teacher the highest compliment by encouraging me to write this book and then providing an assignment in a place where I could work with little distraction. Dr. David MacIsaac, ARI’s director of research, helped me with detailed critiques of the early chapters. After he had pronounced them oscar foxtrot sierra hotel, I knew I could press on. My office mate, Lt.-Col. Frank P. Donnini, in addition to suffering through three years of having copies of Ms magazines left on his desk and other manifestations of my often warped sense of humor, read each chapter twice in an attempt to catch spelling and grammatical errors. I owe a great deal to Dr. Stanley Spangler, ARI’s distinguished visiting professor from 1986 to 1989, for his insights and comments and for educating me in the field of coercive diplomacy. Tom Lobenstein of the Air University Press improved the readability and accuracy of this book through his diligent editing. Marshall Brooks was extremely helpful in providing maps to illustrate this work. Patricia Boyle, Joan Dawson, Mary Moore, Jeni Thares, and Marcia Williams, also of the Press, along with Lula Barnes, Sue Carr, Katie Ladd, and Carolyn Ward, helped put the manuscript in publishable form.

The staff at the Air Force Historical Research Center, also located at Maxwell, was helpful. Senior historian Warren Trest read drafts of the first three chapters and offered suggestions which kept me from straying from my desired thesis. Judy Endicott, Presley Bickerstaff, and James H. Kitchens located documents and responded quickly to my requests for declassification. The staff at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, especially Suzanne K. Forbes, was very helpful in locating documents and suggesting areas for research.

Other friends and colleagues offered critical comments and suggestions. Dr. Anthony Short of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, read the entire manuscript. Dr. Wesley P. Newton, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, offered detailed criticisms at each stage of the manuscript’s development. University of Alabama history professor and friend Dr. Maarten Ultee gave me the benefit of the kind of critique that only a scholar of eighteenth-century French intellectual history can provide. Dr. Jeffrey Record of BDM International and Dr. Caroline Ziemke of the Institute for Defense Analysis read portions of the manuscript, offered critiques, and kept my spirits high. My friend and colleague Lt.-Col. Suzanne B. Gehri, who as a captain introduced the first course on the Vietnam War at the U.S. Air Force Academy, read most of the chapters and encouraged me to stay in the course. Dr. Donald D. Chipman, education advisor at the Squadron Officer School (SOS) at Maxwell AFB, encouraged me to write this book after he had fought for a place for the study of the Vietnam air war in the SOS curriculum. Finally, I owe a great deal to Maj. Mark Clodfelter, an associate professor of history at the Air Force Academy. Mark responded to my often frantic requests for information and advice. He shared ideas as well as facts he had gathered while researching his masterful book The Limits of Air Power (1989).

My family deserves more credit than I could ever pay. My father, a Presbyterian minister, taught me what moral courage was all about when, nearly three decades ago, he took the position that the fatherhood of God implied the brotherhood of mankind. That was a difficult and potentially dangerous stand for a Southerner to take in Alabama in 1962. Without the values passed on to me by Mom and Dad, I do not think that I would have substituted fleeing for retreating and the seeds that bore fruit in this book may never have taken root. My wife, Grace, and my children, Victoria, Michael, and Ellen, have loved me despite myself. This book is dedicated to them in the hope that it will, in some small way, make up for too many missed weekends.

EARL H. TILFORD, JR.

Troy State University in Montgomery Spring 1990

Chapter 1—In the Time of Atomic Plenty

In 1961, on the eve of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Gen. Curtis E. LeMay stated, I think we have been consistent in our concepts since the formation of GHQ [General Headquarters] Air Force in 1935. Our basic doctrine has remained generally unchanged since that time.{1} Three years later, when President Lyndon Johnson asked for a plan to bomb North Vietnam, the Air Force’s response was a list of 94 targets—with airfields to be bombed first, then petroleum manufacturing and storage facilities, followed by the industrial system, and finally the road and transportation network. The Air Force was prepared to fly into Vietnam against guerrilla forces on the wings of the same conventional strategy used in bombing Nazi Germany in 1944. The reasons for this incoherence between the Air Force’s conventional strategy and the unconventional war at hand in Vietnam were many and must be gleaned from the Air Force’s doctrinal and institutional past and from the flush of victory that the first generation of Air Force leaders felt in the post-war period.

Air Power Fulfilled

When, on 15 September 1945, Japanese diplomats and military officers signed the articles of surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo harbor, the U.S. Army Air Forces had good reason to be proud of its contributions to the Allied victory in the Second World War. Indeed, the future for American air power looked bright. After two decades of struggle against an Army leadership that insisted on keeping air power in a subordinate role, the air enthusiasts felt vindicated in their beliefs in efficacy of air power. The wedding of the right weapon to the right delivery system—the atomic bomb to the B-29 bomber—made air power a potentially decisive weapon in war.

Those Army Air Forces officers who had longed for independence had propagated the idea that the strategic bombing of Japanese industrial centers and cities had brought about the capitulation of Japan. What they had failed to recognize was that Japan was defeated before the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Years of war—culminating in the interdiction of the Japanese oil line from Southeast Asia and the naval blockade, along with the aerial campaign carried out by the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force—had brought Japan to the verge of surrender by August 1945. The firebombing of Japanese cities and the two atomic bombs had provided the final pushes that forced acknowledgment of defeat by the Japanese leadership.{2} The role that air power had played in the defeat of Japan and Germany was instrumental to the creation of the Air Force as an independent branch of the armed services in 1947. To its enthusiasts, air power had finally proven that it was more than pie-in-the-sky fantasizing.

The Road to a Separate Service

In the two decades before the Second World War, the true believers among these air power enthusiasts had been inspired by the theories of the Italian prophet of air power Giulio Douhet and the crusader of American aviation William (Billy) Mitchell. Like Douhet and Mitchell, these latter-day proponents of air power were convinced that when used independently air power could conclude most wars quickly. Aerial warfare, they argued, had eclipsed all other forms of struggle waged by armies and navies. Indeed, as they asserted, the idea that wars must be won by combat between land armies had become obsolete. In their eyes, the intransigent adherence of the old-line Army generals to this notion of combat was a last-ditch effort to stave off the inevitable rise of strategic air power. With the development of the atomic bomb and a powerful strategic bombing capability, the air power enthusiasts were sure that the air force could lay siege to and then destroy any potential enemy’s war-making industries, thereby denying that nation its very means of living and causing its complete capitulation.{3}

The journey to independence, completed in 1947, had not been an easy one. Before the Great War (World War I), only a few dreamers, like science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, believed that aircraft would ever play a decisive role in warfare. At the end of that war, Douhet, Mitchell, Basil Liddell Hart, Hugh Trenchard, and a few others adopted the dream. For most soldiers and military thinkers, air power was still at best a curiosity and at worst a threat to Army and Navy institutional prerogatives. While the concepts of air power were a source of promise to those disposed to believe in them, in the end Germany and its armed forces had collapsed from exhaustion.{4}

In the aftermath of the First World War, Trenchard, Douhet, and Mitchell were among those offering alternatives to the bloodletting in the trenches. Douhet, in his 1921 book, The Command of the Air, proposed that aerial operations conducted autonomously behind an enemy nation’s lines could cause its will to collapse due to the destruction wreaked on the heartland. Theoretically, when national will collapsed, the army in the field would soon give up. Mitchell Americanized Douhet in two very important ways.

First, Mitchell’s concepts of air power were more tactical than strategic. Certainly he believed in bombing the vital centers—the factories in the heartland of the enemy nation. However, the fabric-covered, wood-framed airplanes of the 1920s hardly inspired confidence for rooting out major industrial cities. Unless those cities happened to be Windsor, Ontario, or Tijuana, Mexico, U.S. planes were not going to get there. On the other hand, if the enemy were to sail a fleet into range of land-based bombers, even the flimsy airplanes of that era could wreak havoc on the ships and at a