Magic Solutions

To effectively deal with terrorists, the U. S. needs to learn and fully perfect unconventional warfare skills. The U. S. lost in Vietnam, Iraq, & Afghanistan due in large part to use of conventional means to fight unconventional conflicts. We train and orient our military and civilian leaders in the primary use of boom-and-bang conventional military tactics to win irregular armed conflicts on unusual battlefields. A course correction is needed.

There is a habit of our leaders to seek magic solutions when they are lacking a known or practiced means to achieve goals required to defeat an enemy using unconventional tactics. When I was an advisor to S. Vietnam’s Country Team, in Saigon, the U. S. Army brass asked for Ambassador F. Nolting and POTUS JFK approval to use military force to confine S. Vietnam’s 620,000 Montagnard tribal population in concentration camps to declare their highland residential areas as a “free fire” zone. When asked for my opinion, I dramatically stated most Montagnard would probably escape such camps and when they did their anger over such treatment would cause them to join communist forces in the highlands. Added to this fact, I said communist forces spent most of their time in large underground facilities prepared to counter U. S. bombing and artillery. Thus, the U. S. would mostly be bombing the jungle and killing wildlife. Subject request was declined because the Army proposal had no obvious or probable merit.

When I was an advisor to POTUS JFK’s Counterinsurgency (COIN) Group, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asked COIN to approve a U. S. Army proposal to construct a double security fence, with mines between, as a barrier to communist infiltration into S. Vietnam. Such fencing was to be along the DMZ, dividing north and south Vietnam and S. Vietnam’s borders of Laos as well as Cambodia. CIA Director, John McCone, a COIN member asked me to respond to this proposal based on my experience in Vietnam in conflict with PAVN (N. Vietnamese communist forces).  My response was that the Viet communist forces were skilled at digging tunnels and large underground facilities to secure their forces against all types of possible attack. Thus, we must assume communist forces would quickly tunnel under such fencing at multiple sites they need for infiltration of forces. Moreover, PAVN forces would probably dig to remove many mines to use against U. S. and ARVN (S. Vietnamese) forces.  POTUS JFK soon rejected the U. S. Army’s obviously flawed fencing proposal.

In Vietnam, as elsewhere, the jungle is neutral.  Our U. S. Army brass did not know how to train our troops to operate in the jungle, so they decided to kill the jungle.  Initially, they sprayed the jungle twice using spray-type aircraft. They first sprayed with 2,4D followed by spraying with 2, 4,5-T. To save time and effort, the USAF elected to mix these two chemicals with no testing for safety for such a mix. The 2,4,5-T was contaminated with highly toxic dioxin that Monsanto refused to remove due to high removal costs. This toxic mix caused great long-term harm to the environment, wildlife, and humans that were exposed to such spray. Spraying was done over large areas of Vietnam’s jungle, around bases we used in Thailand, and in Korea’s DMZ.  Many of our own soldiers have suffered prolonged harm to their health due to exposure to Agent Orange as this chemical was known.

Killing the jungle and wildlife did very little to harm communist forces in S. Vietnam. Underground facilities protected them most of the time and when they moved it was under cover of dark nights, so they were seldom found even without jungle cover. The great harm from Agent Orange was to many of our troops, as noted above and thousands of dioxin-babies with major genetic defects due to one of their parents being exposed to this toxic chemical.

Our review policy for military tactics to be used is badly flawed. As I noted in another article, A COIN-type group is needed to carefully review and consider all proposed policy and tactics before they are employed. Moreover, chemical and biological agents must be evaluated to determine, well in advance, all potential harm. In times of war, magic and poorly considered ad hoc solutions typically cause harmful or damaging situations.  We can do better!!!