The Army and Vietnam.

The Army and Vietnam.

The 11 years since Saigon's fall to North Vietnam's forces have allowed our initial rejection of all things Vietnamese (except the refugees) to be replaced by thoughtful searches for the reasons for America's failure there. A younger generation is curious how such a debacle could have occurred, and some of the participants are looking critically at the actions in which they were involved. In particular, Army officers such as General Bruce Palmer and Colonel Harry Summers have analyzed the experience to try to find whether it might have been done differently, or better.

Major Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. has joined this effort* with honesty and diligence. He has focused on the U.S. Army, assessing its ability to meet the challenges posed by our military involvement in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975. To a stunning degree, Krepinevich has found that ability sadly wanting--the result of what can only be called an intelligence gap. This gap did not stem from a lack of information about the enemy, but from a failure to inquire about and adapt to the very plain evidence of the enemy's intentions and techniques.

* The Army and Vietnam. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. Johns Hopkins University Press, $26.50.

Major Krepinevich finds the heart of the problem in what he has named the Army Concept: a focus on conventional war and reliance on high firepower to minimize American casualties. The Army's insistence on this concept caused it to fight in Vietnam the war it wanted to fight rather than meeting the one the enemy actually fought--the people's war. He points out how the U.S. military insisted that the Vietnamese be organized, trained, and armed to fight a Korean-style war, ignoring the kind the Vietnamese communists actually fought against the French, as well as the success the British had in a similar war in Malaya. When the American Army entered the war directly in 1965, it continued its efforts to "find, fix, fight, and finish' the enemy units in best conventional fashion, ignoring the fact that the enemy kept itself difficult to find and broke off contact as soon as possible to resume its penetration of the population and erosion of the local forces to protect them. The major correctly identifies the Tet 1968 attack as the straw that broke the back of American political and popular support of the Army, which led to the American withdrawal and final defeat.

From the Army perspective the account is certainly accurate, and devastating. It does not cover, however, the American civilian and military confidence in the exquisitely calibrated bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem, and the long and ultimately feckless negotiations for a "peace' treaty, all equally flawed. Robert Kennedy once said there was enough blame in Vietnam for all to have a share, so the Army Concept is not alone.

And Major Krepinevich shows little awareness that the Americans did participate in what could have been a winning strategy, but too late. The strategic hamlets of 1961-1962 collapsed with the overthrow of Diem, but an ad hoc organization of American and Vietnamese civilians and soldiers did put together a pacification program from 1968-1972 that actually won the "people's war' in the countryside, while 500,000 American troops were being withdrawn. The Vietnamese army, which finally was given priority of training and equipment under General Creighton Abrams, during the same period fought and stopped the North Vietnamese conventional Easter Offensive of 1972, with massive American air and logistical assistance. Saigon fell in 1975 to a conventional North Vietnamese assault, not to barefoot guerrillas. But the American people, turned off by the failure of the Army Concept earlier, refused the necessary air and logistics help that turned the tide in 1972.

Depressing as this account is, it will be valuable if such a serving officer's review of the Army Concept and its failure in Vietnam can open the minds of new officers and their civilian chiefs to the need to design our strategies to meet the real enemies we may face. The French relied, to their defeat, on the Maginot Line, instead of listening to a young officer, Charles de Gaulle, who called in the 1930s for an "Armee Moderne,' which Hitler's panzers later constituted. The U.S. must not similarly insist on our kind of war, such as in the Strategic Defense Initiative, at the expense of meeting the real challenges we face from poverty and overpopulation, religious fanaticism, and proxy attacks.