No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War

354 Pages·2011·2.86 MB·English

by  Gregory A. Daddis

No Sure Victory
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No Sure Victory
MEASURING U.S. ARMY EFFECTIVENESS AND PROGRESS
IN THE VIETNAM WAR
Gregory A. Daddis

1
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Copyright © 2011 by Gregory A. Daddis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daddis, Gregory A., 1967–
No sure victory : measuring U.S. Army eff ectiveness and progress in the Vietnam War / Gregory A. Daddis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-974687-3 (acid-free paper) 1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—United States 2. United States. Army—Evaluation.
3. United States. Army—History—Vietnam War, 1961–1975. I. Title.
DS558.2.D34 2011
959.704′3420973—dc22 2010027311
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my father, Robert G. Daddis
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Maps xv
Introduction 3
1. Of Questions Not Asked: Measuring Eff ectiveness in the Counterinsurgency Era 1 9
2. Measurements Without Objectives: America Goes to War in Southeast Asia 39
3. An “Unprecedented Victory”: Th e Problem of Defi ning Success 6 3
4. Metrics in the Year of American Firepower 87
5. “We Are Winning Slowly but Steadily” 109
6. Th e Year of Tet: Victory, Defeat, or Stalemate? 133
7. “A Time for Testing” 157
8. Soldiers’ Interlude: Th e Symptoms of Withdrawal 181
9. Staggering to the Finish 201
Conclusion 223
Notes 237
Bibliography 303
Illustration Credits 327
Index 329
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Acknowledgments
in 2005, the command group of the Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I) asked
West Point’s Department of History to compose vignettes on past counterinsur-
gencies that might inform current U.S. military operations in Iraq. As part of the
project, a colleague and I draft ed two short essays, one on the French-Indochina
War, another on the American war in Vietnam. Our department head collected the
ten or so papers and dispatched them to Baghdad. Weeks later, a Special Forces
group commander, recently arrived in Iraq for his second combat tour in as many
years, responded to our work by asking for any useful information on measuring
progress in a counterinsurgency environment. I thought it unusual at fi rst that a
senior offi cer was struggling to delineate metrics aft er having so recently served in
Iraq. I found quickly, however, that the inquiry proved much more complex than I
fi rst had assumed. As I conducted research on how the U.S. Army in Vietnam dealt
with such a problem, the more sympathetic I became to the group commander’s
query.
Four years later, I had the privilege of serving as the command historian for MNC-
I. In the interim I continued working on the historical question of how a conven-
tional army measured its progress and eff ectiveness in an unconventional
environment. From my perspective as both a historian and a professional offi cer, this
underemphasized aspect of the Vietnam War seemed to anticipate facets of warfare
in the early twenty-fi rst century. In Iraq, I saw fi rsthand the diffi culties commanders
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