Beating Goliath Read online

  Mack began his assessment by observing that the combination of the West’s record of military success in the third world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Allied experience in World Wars I and II “served to reinforce and rigidify the pervasive notion that superiority in military capability (conventionally defined) will mean victory in war.”2 Yet the notion that military and technological superiority was a reliable guide to the outcome of wars offered no explanation for post-1945 European losses in wars in the third world or the outcome of the Vietnam War. Power obviously meant more, perhaps much more, than simple capability.

  In his examination of the wars of decolonization, Mack observed that “although the metropolitan powers did not win militarily, neither were they defeated militarily.” Indeed,

  The military defeat of the metropolis [great-power homeland] itself was impossible since the insurgents lacked an invasion capability. In every case, success for the insurgents arose not from a military victory on the ground—though military success may have been a contributory cause—but rather from the progressive attrition of their opponents’ political capability to wage war. In such asymmetric conflicts, insurgents may gain political victory from a situation of military stalemate or even defeat.3

  Mack went on to observe that in both the French-Indochina War and the American war in Vietnam the outcome was decided by not by a conclusive military victory on the Communist side but rather by a collapse of political will on the anti-Communist side. “If the external power’s ‘will’ to continue the struggle is destroyed, then its military capability—no matter how powerful—is totally irrelevant.” Indeed, “in certain types of conflict, conventional military superiority is not merely useless, but actually may be counter-productive.”4 Mack noted that even in cases where “military victory over the insurgents is unambiguous—as in General Massu’s destruction of the FLN infrastructure in the notorious Battle of Algiers—this is still no sure guide to the outcome of the conflict. Despite the fact that the FLN never regained the initiative, the French abandoned their struggle within four years.”5

  In Mack’s view, post-1945 successful rebellions against European colonial rule as well as the Vietnamese struggle against the United States all had one thing in common: the materially weaker insurgent was more politically determined to win because it had much more riding on the outcome of war than did the stronger external power, for whom the stakes were lower. In such cases

  the relationship between the belligerents is asymmetric. The insurgents can pose no direct threat to the survival of the external power because … they lack an invasion capability. On the other hand, the metropolitan power poses not simply the threat of invasion, but the reality of occupation. This fact is so obvious that its implications have been ignored. It means, crudely speaking, that for the insurgents the war is “total,” while for the external power it is necessarily “limited.” Full mobilization of the total military resources of the external power is simply not politically possible…. Not only is full mobilization impossible politically, it is not thought to be in the least necessary. The asymmetry in conventional military capability is so great and the confidence that military might will prevail is so pervasive that expectation of victory is one of the hallmarks of the initial endeavor.6

  Superior strength of commitment thus compensates for military inferiority. Because the outcome of the war can never be as important to the outside power as it is to the indigenous insurgents who have staked their very existence on victory, the weaker side fights harder, displaying a willingness to incur blood losses that would be unacceptable to the stronger side. The stronger side employs but a fraction of its power, whereas the weaker side uses all of its available power, thus reducing the actual disparity of power in the theater of operations. Because the struggle is a limited war for the stronger side and a total war for the weaker side, the stronger side has lower political tolerance of blood and treasure losses.

  The signers of the Declaration of Independence risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in what became a contest with an imperial giant for which North America was (after 1778) a secondary theater of operations in a much larger war between European powers. For the American rebel leadership, defeat meant the hangman’s noose. For British commanders in North America, it meant reassignment to another command or a return to the comforts and pleasures of London society. In his definitive assessment of the American War of Independence from the British perspective, Piers Mackesy observes the contrast between the timidity of British generalship and that of the Americans:

  At the very top of the [British command] there was petrification. While the American commanders were products of a revolutionary situation in which timid men did not rise, learning the trade of war as they practiced it, with everything to lose by defeat and everything to gain by victory, [British generals] Howe and Clinton were members of a stable political community who had arrived and could not be shaken from their perch. They had only to play the game safely to draw their emoluments and retain their position. Their fertility of invention was spent in devising reasons for inaction.7

  The tables were reversed in Vietnam. There, the United States attempted to suppress a revolution against foreign domination mounted by an enemy waging a total war against a stronger power, a power for which the outcome of that war could never be remotely as important as it was to the insurgents. The United States could and did wreak enormous destruction in Vietnam, but nothing that happened in Vietnam could or did threaten core overseas U.S. security interests, much less the survival of the United States.8 It did not help that the United States had little material interest in Indochina or that the official rationales proffered for intervention and subsequently staying the course were abstractions—containing Communism, maintaining the credibility of U.S. commitments worldwide, achieving peace with honor. Thus, whereas the Vietnamese Communists invested all their energy and available resources in waging war, U.S. annual defense spending during the war averaged only 7.5 percent of its gross national product and included other large military commitments in Europe and Northeast Asia.9 Far more important to President Lyndon Johnson than securing South Vietnam was securing the enactment of his expensive Great Society program of social reform. Indeed, after he left the White House he bemoaned the resource competition between “that bitch of the war on the other side of the world” and “the woman I really loved—the Great Society.”10

  Key Vietnam War players in the Johnson administration grasped neither the disparity in interests and will that separated the United States and the Vietnamese Communists nor its consequences. They could find no reason for the enemy’s tenacity and staying power. In 1965, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam (and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Maxwell Taylor marveled, “The ability of the Vietcong continuously to rebuild their units and make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. We still find no plausible explanation for the continued strength of the Vietcong…. [They] have the recuperative power of the phoenix [and] an amazing ability to maintain morale.”11 A year later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara remarked to an acquaintance, “I never thought [the war] would go like this. I didn’t think these people had the capacity to fight this way. If I had thought they could take this punishment and fight this well, could enjoy fighting like this, I would have thought differently at the start.”12 Secretary of State Dean Rusk later confessed, “Hanoi’s persistence was incredible. I don’t understand it, even to this day.”13 Even Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam (1964–68), conceded that the U.S. leadership “underestimated the toughness of the Vietnamese.”14

  Nothing testifies more to the disparity in willingness to sacrifice in the Vietnam War than the difference in casualty tolerance. The United States withdrew from Vietnam after suffering 58,000 dead—a miniscule fraction of its total population of about 194 million (in 1965) and only 2 percent of the total of 2.85 million U.S. military personnel who served in Southea
st Asia during the Vietnam War. In contrast were the “total war” losses of the Vietnamese Communists. In April 1995 the government in Hanoi announced that Communist forces during the “American period” of the Vietnam War had sustained a loss of 1.1 million dead, a figure that presumably included the Communists’ 300,000 missing in action. (Hanoi also estimated 2 million civilian dead.)15 The military dead represented 5.5 percent of the Communist population base during the Vietnam War of 20 million (16 million in North Vietnam and 4 million in those areas of South Vietnam effectively controlled by the Communists). No other major belligerent in a twentieth-century war sustained such a high military death toll proportional to its population.16 (French military dead in World War I amounted to 3.4 percent of France’s total population.17) Another way of putting the 5.5 percent loss in perspective: it would equal about 16.5 million dead from the current U.S. population of almost 300 million. (The 600,000 dead in the American Civil War, by far the deadliest of all of America’s wars, represented but 1.9 percent of the nation’s 1860 population of 31 million.)18 Richard K. Betts has commented on the effects of the “fundamental asymmetry of national interests” at stake in Vietnam:

  The Vietnamese Communists were fighting for their country as well as their principles, while the Americans had only principles at stake—and as the antiwar case became steadily more persuasive, even those principles were discredited. The only possibility for decisive victory for the United States lay in the complete obliteration of North Vietnam, an alternative unthinkably barbaric, unimaginably dangerous and pointless. Hanoi bent but never broke because it preferred endless war to defeat; Washington bent and finally did break because the public preferred defeat to endless war.19

  Reinforcing U.S. blindness to the fact and implications of the Vietnam Communists’ commitment to total war were an ignorance of Vietnamese history and culture and an arrogant confidence in American ability to determine the future of South Vietnam. Surely, a Pentagon that had defeated Germany and Japan and that had saved South Korea from the Chinese Communist menace would prevail over an Asian peasant insurgency. And surely, there was nothing to learn from France’s defeat in Indochina: when was the last time the French had won a war?

  The United States also had an inferior strategy. Indeed, superior political will—a greater commitment to the fight—would not, alone, seem sufficient to defeat a stronger enemy. Having a significant edge in resolve cannot overcome a strategy that pits insurgent military weakness against the bigger enemy’s military strengths. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster from which the Vietcong never recovered because Communist forces came out in the open and tried to take and hold fixed positions, thereby exposing themselves to crushing U.S. firepower. (The Taliban made the same mistake in Afghanistan thirty-three years later.) Tough is one thing. Tough and stupid is quite another.

  But Tet was exceptional. What was not exceptional was the American military command’s persistent pursuit of an attritional, firepower-based “search-and-destroy” strategy that simultaneously generated a steady flow of recruits for the Communist side and fanned hostility to the South Vietnamese regime the Americans were fighting to save. Gen. William C. Westmoreland never comprehended the political consequences of his strategy because he saw the Vietnam War as a military contest, not a political struggle. Even militarily, attrition was doomed to failure against an enemy who could and did withdraw from combat when it suited him to do so. A strategy of attrition guaranteed a military stalemate, which in turn guaranteed attrition of American political will.

  In explaining the phenomenon of Goliaths losing to Davids, Andrew Mack did not assign much importance to strategy, at least the stronger side’s strategy. He believed that

  the process of political attrition of the metropolitan power’s capability to wage war is not the consequence of errors of generalship, though these may well occur. Rather, it is a function of the structure of the conflict, of the nature of the conflictual relationship between the belligerents. Where the war is perceived [by the metropolitan power] as “limited”—because the opponent is “weak” and can pose no direct threat—the prosecution of the war does not take automatic primacy over other goals pursued by factions within the government, or bureaucracies or other groups pursuing interests which compete for state resources. In a situation of total war, the prosecution of the war does take automatic primacy over all other goals. Controversies over “guns or butter” are not only conceivable in a Vietnam-type conflict, but inevitable. In a total war situation they would be inconceivable; guns would get automatic priority.20

  On the other hand, Mack regarded the weaker side’s strategy choice as crucial to prospects for insurgent success. The metropolitan power could not be vanquished militarily, but it could be defeated politically. Wearing down the stronger side’s weaker political will dictated a Maoist strategy of protracted irregular warfare that combined political mobilization of the indigenous population and the insurgents’ imposition of a “steady accumulation of ‘costs’ on their opponents.”21 Just such a strategy had delivered insurgent victories in China in 1949, Indochina in 1954, and Vietnam in 1975—the year that Mack published his analysis. Mack concluded his assessment with a warning:

  Governments which become committed to such wars for whatever reason should realize that, over time, the costs of the war will inevitably generate widespread opposition at home. The causes of dissent lie beyond the control of the political elite; they lie in the structure of the conflict itself—in the type of war being pursued and in the asymmetries which form its distinctive character. Anti-war movements, on the other hand, have tended to underestimate their political effectiveness. They have failed to realize that where the external power has been forced to withdraw, it has been as a consequence of internal dissent.22

  Mack’s postulation of a built-in asymmetry of interest and attendant willingness to sacrifice in wars between governments and insurgents is a major insight into the phenomenon of defeated Goliaths. Differentials in stakes, motivation, and pain tolerance can and have more than offset material weakness. His analysis, however, has an air of structural determination about it because it suggests that governments are doomed to defeat in wars with foreign insurgent enemies because of inherent imbalances in political will between the stronger and weaker sides. In fact, in irregular as in regular conflicts, the materially stronger side prevails more often than not. Wealth, numbers, and firepower count—as the Germans discovered in two world wars and as most insurgencies have discovered throughout history from Roman times. Steven Peter Rosen, in his survey of 39 wars from 1848 through 1945, found that the materially stronger side won 80 percent of the time. Rosen, who published his findings in 1972, examined two theories of war power, “one emphasizing the importance of [material] strength in producing victory, the other emphasizing willingness to suffer. Reliance on force,” he observed, “is characteristic of conventional forces, such as those of the United States, whereas reliance on superior cost-tolerance,” best measured as “losses of life … relative to population size … is typical of guerrilla forces such as the Viet Cong.”23 It is the insurgents’ greater strength of interest in the fight and attendant willingness to sacrifice that defeats the stronger side.

  The very essence of the doctrine of guerrilla struggle is that it is a form of struggle designed to combat a materially stronger opponent; the basic idea is that the regime has the guns, but the guerrillas have the hearts of the people. The guerrilla’s superiority is not his ability to harm, but in his greater willingness to be harmed. Ho Chi Minh formulated this in a classic way with his familiar prediction that “In the end, the Americans will have killed ten of us for every American soldier who died, but it is they who will tire first.”24

  The problem is, argues Rosen, based on his survey data, “that while superior cost-tolerance may occasionally give the advantage to the weaker party, having less strength but more cost-tolerance more often results in defeat.”25

  Rosen’s argument seems intuitive. St
rength matters. It is always better to be stronger than it is to be weaker. All armed entities, be they states, insurgencies, gangs, or otherwise, seek strength because strength protects, confers security choices, and works—not always, but most of the time. Guerrilla warfare is hardly the preferred choice of the weaker side; on the contrary, it is dictated by weakness. Observes British strategist Colin Gray, “In irregular warfare a relatively materially resource-rich regular force is pitted against a resource-challenged foe. Of necessity, the latter must operate by stealth, and has to avoid open combat except under conditions of its own choice.”26 Mao himself rejected guerrilla warfare as the means to decisive victory; it was but a preparatory stage to gaining the ability to conduct operations from superior strength—final-phase, conventional military operations.

  It is perhaps no coincidence that Mack’s analysis makes no reference to examples of metropolitan-government military and political defeats of foreign insurgencies such as Great Britain’s defeat of the Indian Mutiny (1857), the Boers in South Africa (1899–1902), and the Malayan Races Liberation Army in Malaya (1948–60); Spain’s defeat of the Rif rebellion in Spanish Morocco (1921–26); and the U.S. defeat of the Aguinaldo rebellion in the Philippines (1899–1901) and the Sandino insurrection in Nicaragua (1926–33). These and other cases suggest that factors other than political will are at work. Even the strongest will, if hitched to a bad strategy or denied minimum material resources, can be defeated. Perhaps no twentieth-century leader possessed a stronger political will than Adolf Hitler, but he could not will closure of the fatal gap between his unlimited territorial ambitions in Europe and the means at his disposal to fulfill them. Nor could he will immunity from such gross strategic errors of judgment as taking on Russia before finishing off Britain and gratuitously declaring war on the United States in 1941. Post-Bismarckian German statecraft and war planning displayed a persistent willingness to sacrifice strategy on the altar of operational considerations. The result was strategic defeat in both world wars. Will is indispensable to success in war but so too is sound strategy.