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Type of Academic Paper – Dissertation Chapter
Academic Subject – Politics
Word Count – 10826 words
Attrition warfare represents the strategy of gradually eroding the ability and willpower of the troops to continue executing their mission as a deadly weapon. General William C. Westmoreland integrated the strategy of attrition in Vietnam in 1964 to win the war in South Vietnam. However, the general did not undertake the attrition strategy independently due to being influenced by the civilian decision-makers and government officials. However, the most profound influence was from then-president Lyndon B. Johnson and defense secretary Robert McNamara. The intelligence agencies also consulted with the joint chiefs of staff before providing approval for the attrition strategy to Westmoreland. This indicated the influence of government oversight and decisions regarding work conduct. The attrition strategy was prioritized by the US government based on its Cold War lessons regarding containment policy for preventing the propagation of communism in Southeast Asia. This was done through the extension of support to South Vietnam for beginning the Viet Cong in North Vietnam. Declassified documents from the Pentagon reveal the attrition strategy as a major political decision at that time instead of a full-scale invasion to avoid any direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union or China. This matches with the rational actor model as the US government undertook the role of a rational actor for acting against the eminent threat of communism expansion in Asia while identifying measurable success measures for rationalizing its continued involvement in Vietnam.
The general before the implementation of the attrition, focused on an offensive strategy in the southern portion of South Vietnam between 1966 and 1967 before transitioning further towards the north. The period was within 6 months from November 1966 and May 1967 which led to the execution of pacification operations by the South Vietnamese soldiers. This included the focus on the pacification of the rural population across the country to convince them to participate in the war and extend support to the South Vietnamese government. The government’s decision-making behind attrition included using superior military technology and training to its advantage for focusing on body count as a metric of success according to the conventional military doctrine. President Lyndon B. Johnson, advised by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, were among the principal forces behind the development of this strategy. They were advised by military commanders such as General William Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who favored traditional approaches such as enemy body counts to measure progress. Internal arguments, NSC briefings, and secret memos were the forums where intelligence estimates and combat reports underscored the perceived need for a technology-based, attritional approach. Hence, justifying the rationale for focusing on estimating the tangible progress of the attrition war compared to direct counterinsurgency.
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy made some critical decisions during the tenure of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as he was in favor of increasing US involvement in the Vietnam War. Bundy’s function was fulfilled by a series of classified memoranda and policy briefs that underlined the employment of U.S. military power to fight a war of attrition. In these, Bundy was cautious to specify that although the Viet Cong did not engage in any conventional war, the effect of sustained military pressure over a long period could eventually drain their will and capacity to resist. Bundy’s counsel put attrition on a pragmatic imperative in the context of the limitations of counterinsurgency, which he believed would be less likely to deliver decisive results unless the United States exerted itself with its full force. By situating the doctrine of attrition within the larger strategic priorities of escalation and containment, Bundy assisted in shaping the policy of the administration. His arguments gave both the political cover and the rationale for increasing troop deployments and the use of body count as a measure of success. Bundy’s strategic advice was able to successfully institutionalize attrition as the dominant operational paradigm, shaping influential decision-makers and putting U.S. policy on the trajectory toward a gradual, casualty-based strategy in Vietnam. This can be related to the appeasement-aggression model derived from World War II as the strategy of increasing involvement in Vietnam was not only to contain communism but also to gather support from the South Vietnamese region. McGeorge Bundy, however, focused on the commitment of thousands of ground troops and the continued bombing of North Vietnam to reduce the spread of communism in Asia. Also, the fundamental failure of the doctrine was evident in Vietnam due to highly ambiguous objectives that were not achievable considering the political and social reality of the country. The doctrine emphasizes the knowledge regarding what victory looks like but it was missing in Vietnam. The risk and benefit analysis was also not up to the mark in Vietnam as there was not enough focus on the expression of diplomatic and political solutions.
In Afghanistan, however, the warfare began with a similar approach under the larger title of the “War on Terror,” focusing on the destruction of Taliban forces controllling Afghanistan at that time. The US intelligence accused the Taliban of harboring the al-Qaeda leaders. However, David F. Helvey, the acting assistant secretary of defense explained the reduction of the threat of terrorism from Afghanistan on US soil over the past 20 years while addressing the House Armed Services Committee. This led to the withdrawal of the US troops from the country on the 20th anniversary of the attack leading to the death of 2,977 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania along with leaving 6,000 people injured. David F. Helvey’s research on terrorism attrition in Afghanistan predisposed U.S. government policymakers to the use of attrition in Afghanistan. As terrorist threats diminished, military commanders like General Stanley McChrystal and policymakers like defense officials turned to attrition as a realistic alternative to extended counterinsurgency. By focusing on the neutralization of high-value targets like Taliban commanders, U.S. policymakers aimed to degrade the insurgency while minimizing U.S. casualties and promoting long-term stability in the region. Helvey’s research was in line with the broader shift in tactical priorities during the Obama administration.
In the second session of the hearing of the Committee on Foreign Affairs House of Representatives, it was established that the attrition strategy employed by the US military despite not being entirely successful was capable of weakening the Global network of Al-Qaeda and preventing any further attacks on the homeland. However, the US intelligence has been unable to build a resilient Afghan army and police leading to the lack of improvement of the security situation in the country. The representative expressed the challenging situation regarding the infectiveness of the conflict strategy due to a lack of coordination and the misuse of funds. The failure of counterattacks in Afghanistan led to no progress regarding terrorist activities and slowing down the production of drugs led to the use of attrition strategy.
The US military strategies in Afghanistan have come under the scanner of policymakers and strategic analysts due to the lack of long-term effectiveness. SIGAR and the Brookings Institution along with the former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates highlighted concerns regarding the focus of the US on strategic short-term victories using military forces instead of working towards long-term and sustainable political solutions. This was mainly responsible for the resurgence of The Taliban in Afghanistan leading to the complete failure of the US-established democratic government. However, despite the lessons from Vietnam, the US military inducted an attrition approach in Afghanistan depending upon the contemporary security concerns and the existing policy framework. The attrition strategy was not implemented on a full scale in Afghanistan as it included inputs from both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies. However, the intensification and prominence of the attrition strategy became clear only when increasing resilience and tactical display of The Taliban became prominent as they used the difficult terrain to hide and carry out attacks. This is when the decision was taken to use air strikes and drones to neutralize the enemy. The attrition strategy in Afghanistan was shaped by the lessons learnt from the Vietnam encounters indicating institutional memory and political considerations. Collaboration among various government agencies including civilian decision-makers, the FBI, and the Pentagon was important in Afghanistan for shaping the overall military strategy and its decisions.
Importance of Understanding Decision-Making Rationales
The strategic interest of the US leading to its engagement in the Vietnam War was to maintain its military dominance as a Pacific superpower. Historians and analysts like George Herring and Frederick Logevall, through their publications, analyzed the US foreign relations and Vietnam war-related strategic decisions. Through “A People and a Nation” Logevall established the context of the presence of the US armed forces in Vietnam as a measure of improving its strategic dominance in the Asia Pacific region after World War 2. Herring, through “America’s Longest War” also broadened the understanding of the US involvement in Vietnam due to establishing strong diplomatic ties in South Vietnam and across the entire continent. The Domino theory establishes the immediate political and ideological concerns of the US in Vietnam. In Vietnam, top central government officials such as President Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made key decisions to follow an attrition strategy. Bundy and McNamara defined policy by framing the war within the context of Cold War needs and the Domino Theory, arguing that a prolonged military campaign, measured in terms of body counts was needed to stem the tide of communism in Southeast Asia. Their counsel, supported by military leaders such as General William Westmoreland, was supported in NSC meetings and strategic memos, where a focus was on quantifiable military success. This process of decision-making corresponds to Graham Allison’s Rational Actor and Bureaucratic Politics models. In these models, decisions are institutional bargaining and deliberate cost-benefit analysis within hierarchical environments. The continuity of these institutional models in Vietnam is a reason why similar strategies were later employed in Afghanistan, despite past failure. In Afghanistan, decision-makers once more leaned towards a strategy of attrition—through technology, precision bombing, and drone attacks—to gain measurable success despite the strategy failing to properly deal with the integration of the insurgents among local people.
The perception of Soviet domination motivated the US to invade Vietnam and Afghanistan to balance the power dynamics. The decision-making behind the Vietnam invasion was based on the ideology of the lack of Soviet intervention or direct concentration in the country which ultimately succeeded. However, there was a fear related to the Chinese response.
Graham Allison’s Bureaucratic Politics and Organizational Process models fit the research objectives of this dissertation squarely, as they are critical analytical frameworks for understanding the interaction between institutional arrangements and dynamics of decision-making in the Vietnam and Afghanistan Wars. The bureaucratic model focuses on the analysis of the decisions influenced by competition among governments and their susceptibility to institutional pressure. General William Westmoreland, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) Commander, was a believer in an attrition policy. His recommendations were argued in National Security Council (NSC) meetings by senior civilian administrators like President Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Johnson, weighing Cold War necessities against electoral politics, wrestled with Westmoreland’s strategy. Bundy and McNamara, powerful policy influencers, insisted on quantitative evidence like enemy body counts, thereby supporting escalation. Their contentious debates, chronicled in NSC briefs and classified memos, illustrate how military advice was relentlessly questioned and honed by civilian questioning.
The competitive priorities and policies regarding the military revision and credibility of the Cold War along with political stability in the domestic environment were significant in the promotion of escalation in the conflict. Even in Afghanistan, the bureaucratic politics model came into force due to conflicting competition between military commanders and civilian officials. This included the perspectives of General Stanley McChrystal, General David Petraeus along with Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. The process model, on the contrary, expresses the dependence of the decisions on the already existing military doctrines leading to the adoption of similar strategies by the US forces influenced by the bureaucratic routines. Institutional bargaining and integrated processes were found to be highly influential across both the Vietnam and Afghanistan conflicts indicating the influence of various factors. Thus, the attrition strategy in Vietnam propagated by William Westmoreland and Robert McNamara included stereotyped concepts of success measurement, including the number of enemies neutralized despite its inefficiency. In Vietnam, the attrition strategy was flawed, as acknowledged by Westmoreland. The general intended to drain the manpower of the North Vietnamese army but this extent of human cost and lack of clarity of the military strategy came to light in the subsequent congressional hearings. Additionally, President Johnson also acknowledged the loss of blood and US treasure in the pursuit of war in Vietnam which drew sharp domestic criticism and opposition.
In Afghanistan, through institutional inertia and the strategic conceptualization of the ‘War on Terror’ under the George W. Bush administration, the attrition approach persisted despite the Taliban insurgency’s decentralization. Leaders like Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice pursued force control, which this study posited as an organizational culture-based decision rather than an adaptively applied counterinsurgency strategy. However, the US forces failed to establish permanent control over the region due to being unable to counter the guerilla tactics used by the Taliban making it extremely difficult for the troops to apply conventional warfare. The counterinsurgency focusses of the US forces also increased the overall duration and span of engagement with the Taliban leading to the need for establishing an attrition warfare strategy. This was also evident given the domestic opposition due to resources in Afghanistan and the lack of willingness of the US decision-makers regarding the loss of American lives by accepting high casualties. The bureaucratic tendencies in the civilian leadership and US military resulted in the partial adoption of the attrition warfare strategy in Afghanistan. This was due to the experience in Vietnam and the unprecedented rise of terrorism threats influencing strategic changes in the military based on the prevalent institutional structures.
The continued losses of US troops without any clear indication of victory led to the transformation of the strategic policies while shifting towards the attritional approach for focusing on quantitative measure of progress with the attrition strategy. This was mostly used by President Lyndon to speak to the public and civilian officials to demonstrate war progress. Also, internal policy debates and technological superiority followed in the US military for increasing air strikes and the use of chemicals to reduce the enemy’s strength. This, however, led to introspection by Robert McNamara, questioning the sustainability and justification of the attrition strategy leading to a settlement approach. In this context, the CIA was responsible for executing the Phoenix program for anti-infrastructure operations by the police and regional forces in Vietnam. This included a force of 6000 individuals and 500 additional US advisors making a major portion of the regular operations. However, some changes were introduced in the program as the CIA inducted the military assistant command in Vietnam to allocate more personnel by July 1969.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. used aircraft and special operations forces to liquidate the Taliban base and Al-Qaeda infrastructures. While initially, counter-insurgency operations dominated strategy, after achieving some success, nation-building initiatives such as the formation of a central government of the country and the subsequent reconstruction took place. Nevertheless, it was not possible to apply them throughout Afghanistan due to the decentralized tribal structure as well as firmly rooted socio-cultural support for religious fanaticism. Further, the lack of achieving local support and tackling systematic corruption was a problem that left a Taliban vacuum. In both Afghanistan and Vietnam, the attrition strategy included a careful assortment of decisions by the policymakers without the same being and necessity on the battlefield. The prevalence of institutional commitments and assessment of the conflicts remained vital in both cases for shaping battlefield policies.
In the context of Afghanistan, attrition strategies were primarily used for executing the intrusion and neutralizing the enemy targets without any political link, unlike Vietnam. Early to the success of insurgency in Afghanistan, the civil war between the Taliban and their supporters along with the rest of the country’s population was propagated leading to longstanding conflict with no solution. Attrition was used in Afghanistan despite its failure in Vietnam as the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney focused on counterterrorism and avenging the September 11 attacks. This was chosen as a strategy different from the nation-building approach used in Vietnam as rapid strikes were implemented in the enemy territory using specially trained personnel and conducting airstrikes for precision impact with the least engagement on the ground.
The George W Bush administration identified the Afghanistan intervention as a crucial component of eradicating the al-Qaeda terrorist network as a military strategy for gradually eliminating enemy forces and neutralizing enemy targets. In this regard, it was almost impossible to defeat the Taliban due to their low-cost insurgency and high level of proficiency derived from a nationalist and religious perspective. Even the attempts made by the US to target the insurgents before the Taliban had failed, undermining the credibility and power of the American forces against the radicalized Islamist movement. Apart from that, the US armed forces and intelligence could never segregate and identify the Taliban separately from the local population as they were deeply embedded and ingrained in the local population. The US Department of Defense in Afghanistan decided to invest in clearing operations at a large scale having negative ramifications due to increasing resistance and insurgent recruitment in Afghanistan. SIGAR reports indicate the US government’s decision to establish the Afghan Reconstruction Trust fund in 2002 with a dedicated allocation of USD 10 billion for investment projects and a recurrent cost window. However, the report indicated the cross-cutting issue of corruption regarding the inflow of aid and the lack of action by the Afghan government to improve its economic and military position.
Deobandi madrasas played an important role in the indoctrination of the young Afghan man to fight against the Americans who were attributed as infidels. The Afghan Government and the population encountered enormous friction due to the continual emphasis on attrition warfare by the US military leading to air strikes and civilian casualties. Attrition techniques were repeated by the US government to the consideration of the reality of the battlefield considering the Al-Qaeda and Taliban hiding among the common people and then highly difficult terrains. Hence the decision-making strategy included focusing on high-precision strikes through targeted raids and drone strikes for countering the stronghold of the Taliban insurgency. The attrition strategy was taken by keeping in mind the prolonged engagement with the terrorists while relating to the institutional structure of the US Department of Defense. The remote attrition strategy in the country was justified due to the availability of high position and sophisticated drones for conducting air strikes and executing surveillance across the region rather than risking a large number of ground troops. The exploitation of the civilian populations by the Taliban in Afghanistan also influenced the decision of the US policymakers as they avoided conventional warfare to reduce collateral damage. In this aspect, it was unsure if the approach provided any military advantage. However, this came at a very heavy political cost without achieving any significant military gain. Despite this, the US government doubled upon the attrition welfare approach leading to an increment of 330% casualties after 2016 in the final year of the conflict.
The social and political environment in Afghanistan has been influenced by its historical tribal traditions, especially across its cities Kandahar and Kabul. However, the political narrative in the country has been heavily influenced by internal power struggles and foreign invasions across decades. The US invasion and counterinsurgency in the country was initiated in 2001 and lasted for 20 years leaving a profound impact on the overall social and political structure of the country. The intelligence agencies also supported the perspective including the Department of Defense for utilizing the American technological advantage and superior firepower for suppressing the insurgents. Although the US intelligence and military facilitated the establishment of a stable national government in the country, it ended up empowering the Taliban and provided grounds for insurgency. Considering the social environment, Afghanistan mostly has a tribal population with local support and no affiliations with the national government. The decentralized population in the country creates an environment of fear and a lack of consensus regarding political ideologies. In Afghanistan, religious identity is a crucial component of the overall cultural fabric, and the religious leaders and mullahs hold significant power and authority in the society. This had been a highly challenging factor for the Afghan government in the supervision of the US forces to establish direct control of the nation. However, despite applying the attrition strategy at the latest stages, the US Army was unable to bear the cost of human life and resource expenditure. The decision was taken as an accounted terrorism initiative with the approval of the National Security Council for conducting targeted air strikes and ground operations. The decision was also taken due to the evaluation of the effectiveness of political negotiations and discussions due to the highly fragmented situation of Afghan politics and the limited capacity of its government to execute authority.
This was due to the absence of any substantial progress in the domain and the propagation of anti-war sentiment both in Afghanistan and on domestic soil. Even President Barack Obama was highly critical of the attrition strategy of the US troops in Afghanistan. This was due to the escalation of cost and loss of American lives. This subsequently led to the decision of General David Petreaus regarding the use of a strategic approach towards counterinsurgency beyond the conventional military force. The general could only achieve moderate to little success with the COIN strategy in Afghanistan compared to Iraq. The role of the US forces against the Taliban in Afghanistan was not decisive despite being successful in Iraq because it had a flawed perspective of what the US military could accomplish. The general was unsuccessful in Afghanistan due to not accounting for the differences in its context compared to Iraq. This is due to the public support for the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and the resilience of the local people. The COIN strategy also failed due to the presence of safe havens for the Taliban leaders across the borders and the incompetence of the central government in Kabul. The COIN advocates in the country also make the wrong decision regarding the assumption of the possibility of winning the military conflict by changing the military tactics or establishing a new commander. This was a lesson for General Petreaus as he assured then-President Barack Obama that they could successfully train and hand over the national security responsibility of Afghanistan to the Afghan National Army within 18 months.
This led to the evaluation of the fault lines and drawbacks of the US strategy in the country through the subsequent congressional hearings revealing the true cost of the war and the lack of justification for the same resulting in the identification of a clear exit strategy. Despite the public reactions and internal criticisms regarding the lack of sustainability of long-term attritional warfare, the military and political leaders were interested in the use of tangible gains as a reference point. The US military ended up repeating the failures of Vietnam in Afghanistan due to being unable to establish a legal or political solution for handling the Taliban while failing to hold them accountable for their war crimes.
The US military strategy propagated by General Westmoreland particularly focused on attrition for defeating the communists in Vietnam due to its alignment with the American ideology and military doctrine. General William Westmoreland was not alone in choosing the strategy of attrition. Top civilian government officials, President Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, backed and approved the move. These officials, spurred by the Cold War and the Domino Theory, endorsed attrition as a means of providing quantifiable measures of progress against communist forces in memoranda on classified policy and in National Security Council meetings. Their endorsement ensured Westmoreland’s recommendations were in coordination with superior U.S. strategic objectives, maintaining military doctrine consistent with civilian control.
The conflict in Vietnam was a situational context that provided scope for self-determination for the inhabitants of Vietnam including the villagers after being subjected to French colonialism. Despite this, the South Vietnam government having the complete support of the United States encountered heavy struggles regarding establishing its legitimacy among the public due to high levels of corruption.
In comparison, the war against terrorism in Afghanistan was not as successful for the US due to being unable to gain local support despite spending billions of dollars. Due to the Taliban establishing themselves as the defender of religion and social traditions including Islamic values, the US was perceived to be hostile by the Afghan locals. The Afghans already had a negative and retaliatory experience against foreign forces like the British and the Soviet Union. The essence of nationalist ideology in Afghanistan was not adequately measured by the CIA and the US military leading to loss of control over the territory with futile efforts towards the implementation of military solutions without understanding the social concerns. The US intelligence was not able to analyze the depth of religion and its significance for the Afghan people and society. Hence it was established that the cultural aspects and social norms were largely ignored by the US through its insurgency and attrition-based approach in the country.
Asymmetrical warfare and strategic objectives
In Vietnam, the strategic objective of the US was to exhaust the military resources of the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong. In comparison, the strategy in Afghanistan was to weaken the operational capabilities of The Taliban and Al-Qaeda with the attrition strategy. This was to improve the stability of the Afghan Government and reduce the terrorist activities in the surrounding regions providing safe passages for the terrorists. The strategy in Vietnam was to reduce the sustainability of the opposition forces and reduce its resistance capabilities. However asymmetrical welfare had inflicted major damage on the US forces in both Vietnam and Afghanistan due to encountering guerrilla warfare and lack of trust from the locals. However, the conflicts and both countries had been prolonged due to the lack of capability of achieving significant milestones while only using attrition as a strategy for outlasting the enemy forces. Herein, the CIA reports were sometimes in conflict with the military assessments due to depicting the start ground reality of fighting the enemy which was hidden within the wider local population, making it difficult to segregate and target.
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President Johnson was the main figure in the Vietnam War following the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin where the US warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The president then subsequently gained war-making powers due to the passing of resolution by the Congress and he had the authority to increase military presence in the area. Nixon as the 37th President of the US also made a significant address to the nation regarding the war in Vietnam by highlighting the right of the American people to know the truth about the foreign policy of the country specifically involving war and peace. The president made important announcements regarding various questions about the involvement of American Vietnam in the first place and the changes brought by his administration compared to the previous administration. The president declared that the war had extended for 4 years, and 31,000 Americans were killed while more than 540,000 Americans were positioned in Vietnam at the moment. The president also declared the schedule overrun regarding training the South Vietnam soldiers due to the lack of progress regarding a comprehensive peace proposal which was ultimately causing a concerning division within the country. In his address, Nixon mentioned that Kennedy was the first President to send more than 16000 military personnel as combat advisors in Vietnam after which President Johnson sent combat forces into the country.
The most important person in the Afghanistan war was the American President George W. Bush. After the 9/11 attacks, the President addressed the nation highlighting the significant attack on American Freedom and Way of Life. The president highlighted that the terrorist attacks all the shaking the foundations of the biggest buildings were unable to touch the foundation of America and the Steel of American resolve. The president claimed the resolve of America and its allies to establish fees and security in the world and to win the war against terrorism in Afghanistan. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was a key figure who was informed of surrendering along with other al-Queda leaders hiding in Afghanistan, which was refused, leading to the US implementation of a war plan. Osama bin Laden was a key figure in the conflict due to being the founder of Al-Qaeda and leading the terrorist attacks against the United States and its Western allies with the 9/11 attacks in New York City and the Pentagon. Laden continued to evade the US military despite coming close on several occasions before being finally killed in 2001 in Pakistan.
Despite being a military and economic superpower beating the imperial Japanese and the Nazis, the US forces could not adapt to the conflict in Vietnam as its commanders focused on their perceptions regarding the conflict rather than understanding the ground reality. The US Army focused on the utilization of attrition strategy with firepower and superior technology against conventional warfare and guerrilla tactics in the country. However, its troops, despite fighting well and honorably with technology and firepower, could not thrive over the enemy due to the flaw in the strategy and absence of tactical input. The absence of a clearly defined and coherent plan of action was the main factor that led to disconnecting within the US forces due to making isolated attempts to fight the counterinsurgency war.
In Afghanistan, another major milestone was President George W. Bush’s decision to surge troop levels in that country in 2007. This decision relied on a military solution as a politically optimal approach while Vietnam showed its inefficiency. Bush’s emphasis on the counterinsurgency strategy included winning the hearts of the common civilians with social infrastructure development projects, healthcare assistance, and strengthening the national security forces. The US decision-making strategy during the tenure included the construction of more than 13000 miles of roads in Afghanistan and more than 2000 schools by 2010. Additional efforts were also made in the domain of healthcare assistance to reduce infant mortality rates and establish mobile clinics in rural regions. In Vietnam, the US had also established a social infrastructure development program through the Hamlet initiative for the fortification of the villages along with extending healthcare support through dedicated campaigns. Afghanistan’s centric strategy included the expenses amounting to billions of dollars for improving the training and infrastructure of the Afghan national army and police forces. Similar efforts were also extended during the Vietnam War for the fortification of the South Vietnamese army.
The absence of undertaking a population-centric counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan also created challenges regarding meeting the expectations of various proponents at the local level. The nation-building efforts in Afghanistan required the utilization of both military and non-military activities to appease the highly reactive and indigenous socio-political systems. The application of the COIN strategy is heavily debated by the critics, opposition, and the media regarding its functioning in the particular Afghan environment as it ended a lot of difficulty and radicalism. This demonstrates the lack of consideration on behalf of the US government regarding understanding the very social fabric of the Afghan society and the thought process of the masses. In both Afghanistan and Vietnam, the US military strategists targeted partnerships with the local government. However, they were unsuccessful as the Pentagon declassifications indicate key strategic failures due to being unable to understand the grievances of the locals and lacking any foundational strategy for long-term commitment, marking a major diplomatic failure. Afghanistan was already gripped in an internal civil war due to the fight for political control in the disputed country when the coalition occupation was in progress. During this time the counterinsurgency approach can be related to the civil war theory due to the dynamics of interrelations with various clans and neighborhood bands.
Institutional Frameworks and Their Influence: External and Internal Pressures
Domestic Factors
In Vietnam and Afghanistan, conflict public opinion was rather favorable in the beginning and gradually turned into skepticism. In both cases, initial backing originated from the perception of a moral imperative: the keeping of communism inside Vietnam and the elimination of terrorism in Afghanistan. However, as the wars progressed through their duration and the mounting deaths, public opinion changed considerably. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a fateful event for Vietnam; despite the military failure of the Viet Cong, it was a morale blow that eroded people’s faith in the stated American progress because the American leadership systematically lied on the general sentiment of progress while visibly upended by the riots on the ground. National Security Advisor Walt Rostow wanted the US progress during the offensive but there was a major public backlash after CBS reports on the nature of the war being unwinnable. Johnson considered public opinion, leading to refraining from seeking re-election in 1968. Similarly, in Afghanistan, failure to win clear victories despite massive spending on the military meant that over time, people lost confidence in their government’s approach as polls started showing declining levels of trust in the Afghan strategy by the late 2000s. Herein, Defense Secretary Robert Gates highlighted the public skepticism due to the war as costs escalated and causalities increased.
In Vietnam there was powerful gruesome uncensored footage of the war being shown every night in the American homes; this served to fuel anti-war campaigns and ratchet pressure on the Johnson administration. The My Lai Massacre as well as the publication of officials’ secrets known as the Pentagon Papers led to a further decline of trust, showing the sharp contrast between the words and deeds. They not only challenged the premises upon which the government felt compelled to remain involved but also inflated the political consequences of sustaining an attrition strategy. This created anti-war sentiment as inferred from Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers (1971), also exposing government efforts to underreport the existing ground realities and resource wastage. Afghanistan witnessed a change in media after the onset of the round-the-clock news and social networking sites where immediate coverage of military operations and their impact was possible. On the contrary, the media assumed a vital role during the conflicts in both countries by increasing awareness about the same among Americans. This not only brought in transparency regarding how the taxpayer money was being used but also established important public opinions and created pressure on the government to retreat in due time. General Stanley McChrystal was highly critical of the administration regarding the decisions about the Afghanistan war in the Rolling Stone interview (2010). However, President Obama dismissed the general, highlighting the influence of the media in strategic political leadership decisions.
In both wars, internal political pressures, especially the electoral cycles, played a big part in determining the strategies that were employed. Johnson himself was personally committed to the war because the American commitment to Vietnam made him afraid of being seen as weak on communism – an issue that could politically damage his domestically popular Great Society programs to combat poverty in the United States. However, Johnson, the then president of the US focused on the containment of the problem at the domestic level with dedicated policy initiatives and addressed to the media in the domains of healthcare through Medicare and education through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The president in parallel to the war ensured equal focus on the betterment of the American people with revolutionary welfare initiatives like the Food Stamp Program, the development of housing infrastructure, and the establishment of employment opportunities for the youth. Despite the commitment of the administration towards domestic welfare, the important considerations included the geopolitical balance in the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. They also included solutions to social and economic issues at the domestic level. The electoral cycles were responsible for shaping the leadership strategy and decisions in Afghanistan. Military progress was earmarked as an important cornerstone of public confidence by President George W. Bush during the re-election campaign in 2004. Afterwards, General David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates influenced the decisions of President Obama for a troop surge in Afghanistan for temporary escalation to establish the grounds for long-term withdrawal. However, Obama’s decision changed subsequently, focusing on winding down the war as the 2012 election approached. The decision was significant for the formal US withdrawal plan from Afghanistan which was finally drafted in 2014.
Public opinion, together with media and political pressures provided feedback for the government in both cases and greatly influenced the US approach to the two conflicts. The opposition actively spoke against the government decisions in both Vietnam and Afghanistan interesting the narrative regarding the policy choices. Senator J. William Fulbright was at the forefront of the Vietnam hearing and was highly critical of the resources and overall effort of the government on the war. Criticisms from the media and the opposition leader Barbara Lee indicated that the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan worsened social frustrations and political unrest. She encouraged leaders to seek improvement in people’s lives and save American lives otherwise lost in an outside war. These dynamics raised problems for the government in noting and averting tendencies that would hamper more organic and enduring evolutionary solutions and fall back on attrition as a politically feasible model. Still, as the wars continued this approach gradually offended domestic audiences, weakened the institutions of power, and exposed the military-strategic dysfunction between military goal-setting, on the one side, and public expectations, on the other.
Vietnam represents the domino theory as the policymakers in the United States saw the power of insurgents being brought by Soviet and Chinese ideologies across Asia. This ideological framing thus brought about tactics intended to wear down the enemy to achieve high levels of attrition on the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. However, this approach failed to consider the ability of communism-driven forces to regroup and seriously count on ideological motivation and local inhabitants’ consolidation. Also, the US armed forces were not prepared for the retaliation from North Vietnam and its capability to throw enormous numbers of lives into the mouth of the US war machine. However, the president continued to brief the media about the warfare policies including regulatory approaches in the event of naval attacks by the North Vietnamese. Finally, the attrition strategy failed, and the impact was underlined by the inability of the US forces to disconnect the insurgents from the social and political networks of the civilian population, which indicated that the war was significantly a political problem and not a military one.
Lyndon B. Johnson decided to escalate the Vietnam War subsequently due to being influenced by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president intending to avoid any kind of political fallout due to the further propagation of communism in Vietnam often took the suggestions of the military advisors. However, they mostly favored large-scale troop deployments as a strategic approach. Also, the organizational culture of the Pentagon acknowledged and approved conventional warfare. This further advocated and entrenched attrition as the predominant strategy of warfare in Vietnam. However, there were contradictory and dissenting voices against attrition by Undersecretary of State George Ball as he was quick to identify the limitations of the method and warned of its futility.
On the other hand, the War on Terror in Afghanistan was defined in the context of a unipolar world, in which U.S. power dominated the global political system, and fighting against transnational terrorism was the key principle of international relations. After the 9/11 incident, the US had the West’s legal justification for the invasion of Afghanistan as a way of eliminating al-Qaeda and dismantling the support structures for the Taliban. In Afghanistan, war-related decisions were made under Presidents Bush and Obama. The decisions were shaped by internal debates within the National Security Council (NSC) and the Department of Defense. In this context, the decisions of President Bush were influenced by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The secretary of defense prioritized a rapid military response after the 9/11 attacks. However, the internal reviews of the Afghanistan strategy in 2009 under Obama led to the identification of some divisions. The COIN strategy was suggested by General Stanley McChrystal, however, Vice President Joe Biden opposed prolonged engagement. This led to the final military strategy for taking a cautious and limited strategy. However, the internal tensions are indicative of the differences in bureaucratic interests while different political calculations and personal leadership styles were at play which led to the shaping of key wartime decisions.
The Domino Theory, which was a cornerstone of the Cold War geopolitics, deeply impacted the United States’ foreign policy in Vietnam by painting the war as a critical struggle for freedom against communism. This theory presupposed that the fall of one country in Southeast Asia to communism was to encourage neighboring countries to follow suit in similar ideological shifts developed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, this theory received significant support within subsequent U.S. policy-making circles that devoted significant resources to forestall Vietnam becoming a domino for communism. By gaining the approval of this concept, there was the ideological backdrop for escalating the armed engagement and the embrace of an industrialist strategy to defeat the North Vietnamese movement and the Viet Cong.
Insurgent forces used irregular strategies like guerrilla warfare, surprise attacks, and terrorism to counter the US armed forces’ firepower in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Viet Cong, whose guerrilla fighters were part of the local population, took advantage of this knowledge to launch cheap and effective operations that could not be easily countered by attrition-type warfare. Likewise, the Taliban in Afghanistan relied on the organization of Afghan society along tribal lines and the geographical nature of Afghanistan which did not allow for the efficient execution of large-scale set-piece battles and where the enemy centralized command and control was not efficient. The details of these domains of operations directly contradict some of the fundamental beliefs held by prevailing military strategies. The situation influenced policymaking in the US government organizations due to the shift in COIN strategies as evident in both Vietnam and Afghanistan.
In Vietnam, the American forces transition from the use of dedicated attrition strategies to the social and strategic policy of the Hamlet Program for understanding the requirements and welfare of the civilian population while reducing the influence of the northern communist forces. The program was a failure due to being reported by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Paul Harkins. They also identified the absence of lack of support sabotaging the program and increasing resentment among the villagers. This presented decision choices of either increasing counterinsurgency or following the conventional war strategy. General William Westmoreland, being highly influential selected attrition for reducing enemy numbers for dwindling the enemy forces as he perceived the same as the only viable solution, with the backing of the Chiefs of Staff. This was evident as the general called for the allocation of 200,000 more forces to increase the intensity of the search and destroy missions.
In Afghanistan, the COIN strategy under General David Petreaus was modified due to understanding the lack of effectiveness of conventional warfare in the latest stages of the 2000s. This included the integration of civilian protection mechanisms and internal resonance development through the fortification of the Afghan security forces for increasing local resilience against The Taliban. Command decentralization was also evident across Vietnam for improving the autonomy of the field commanders against unpredictable threats. A similar situation also occurred in Afghanistan due to the establishment of provincial reconstruction teams for monitoring the remote areas of Afghanistan.
A deeper multifaceted socio-political understanding of insurgency is defined by insurgent groups operating in the socio-political environment to represent latent feelings of the local population. Afghanistan likewise proved similar difficulties. Through infiltration among local populations and by capitalizing on anti-central government sentiments, the Taliban was also able to weaken the capacity for stability established by U.S. forces. This impacted the strategic priorities of the US due to a lack of alignment between the political ideology of the conflict and its tactical objectives. The US could not isolate the communists from the rural populations due to which it made futile attempts towards winning the appreciation and hearts of the rural people through the Hamlet programs. Similarly, in Afghanistan, the US government understood the futility of the air strikes due to the interconnectedness of Afghanistan with the local tribal structures.
Many of the insurgent groups afford psychological and strategical tenacity that conventional forces often find very hard to combat. To the same effect, in both conflicts, it was clear the insurgents settled in long-term insurgent strategies with continuous operations despite the losses they incurred. This resilience stemmed from ideology and the organizational structure, which enabled the local autonomy in decision-making and leadership replenishment. The resilience of the insurgents in both the context of Vietnam and Afghanistan against the US indicated some of the influential factors leading to the choice of attrition as a strategy. Military intelligence reports and CIA inputs in Vietnam including the analysis conducted by the Pentagon highlighted the need for attrition during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Quick military victory for the US did not have any possibility leading to the focus on attrition as the limits of its firepower were exposed. The traditional counterinsurgency approach was not enough in Afghanistan due to the decentralized command structure of the Taliban and slow progress due to the high resource demands of the US. Subsequently, the US focused on the elimination of high-value targets instead of conducting large-scale war as a specific and direct attrition strategy for success.
Some situations that occur in asymmetric warfare and insurgency require a rethink of many of the existing principles of military operations. The application of attrition strategies based on the technique of overwhelming force is counterproductive in conflicts where winning the support of local communities and addressing socio-political demands have decisive importance. Thus, the selection of truly adaptive strategies that involve military, political, and cultural is crucial to working with insurgencies effectively. In both cases, it was shown that the U.S. military employed the strategy of attrition showing that there was an institutional culture and strategy that the organization failed to break away from successfully adapting to the new environment of hybrid conflict.
The ‘search and destroy’ missions aimed at neutralizing insurgents, did not understand the nature of the war as political and ideological, ignoring its military aspect. This approach, mainly defined by the tendency to rely on body counts as a key measure of success, was ill-suited for organizations like the Viet Cong, which had a firm base in the rural population of Vietnam. Likewise, depending on the hi-tech and force-driven tactics such as helicopter-borne assaults in Afghanistan, they underrated the Taliban’s capacity to capitalize on geographical strengths and rally tribal groups for opposition.
The strategic frameworks upon which pre-attrition attempts were built were structurally incompatible with the actual contexts. The reliance on body counts and territorial control resembled conventional war abstraction inapplicable in an insurgent context. It was used to mean that while partisan commands set high targets geared toward the killing of the enemy, more often than not, the allied forces would win the battles, only for the enemy to resurface in some other form. Similar to this pattern, attempts to clear the areas controlled by the Taliban through intense operations often excluded apprehension of the group’s ability to consolidate among the civilian populace and resurface at optimal times.
As much as political factors played a role in the failure of strategic approaches, U.S. forces exposed to long counterinsurgency campaigns suffered from psychological effects that hampered the implementation of proper strategies. General William Westmoreland was the most significant proponent of the attrition strategy. His decision and viewpoint included the infection of heavy casualties on the North Vietnamese forces impacting their motivation and willingness to fight due to a demoralizing psychological effect of the losses. The military strategy of the general was highly significant in the overall operations-related approaches of the US Army which was also documented in various records and his communications. The main communications of the general included motivating his forces and establishing strategies for reducing and wearing down the enemy numbers for having a psychological impact. The decision was approved by the US government and the joint chiefs of staff. In this aspect, a Draft Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson indicated General Westmoreland’s comments, “We are fighting a war of attrition.” In that connection, the enemy has been losing between 1500 and 2000 killed-in-action a week, while we and the South Vietnamese have been losing 175 and 250 respectively”. This was highlighted in the meeting regarding future actions in Vietnam.
The failure to recognize the conventional opponents and the constant state of enduring low-intensity conflict utilizing IEDs and ambushes eroded morale and operational productivity. These conditions most of the time resulted in acts of revenge that deepened the social rift between the military and the locals, a situation that added to the various ethical quandaries that the soldiers encountered and, in extension, negated the whole counterinsurgency initiatives.
The successful attempt at popularizing attrition-based strategies in both the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars can be attributed to desperation in the search for results and fundamental miscalculations between strategic goals and achievable ground operations. In these conflicts, tactics like ‘search and destroy’, helicopter-borne operations, and nation-building did not yield the expected results and thus decision-makers resorted to attrition as a quantifiable means to challenge the insurgent forces.
The decision to adopt attrition was driven by the need to provide some sort of advancement as political, security, and public pressures increase. In Vietnam the United States encountered increasing popular dissent and international legitimacy and authority were eroding the home front and abroad as a result of highly visible prior failed initiatives such as the Strategic Hamlet Program. Attrition became politically palatable, with leaders reporting success in terms of the kill ratios or numbers of the enemy killed while these approaches and numbers were alienated from the underlying social-political character of the war. This approach aimed at reducing political liabilities of prolonged participation by regarding the clash as a clear domination of the superior force without considering the specifics of counter-insurgency operations.
Likewise, in Afghanistan, early victories over the Taliban revived insurgency leading to the US leaders adopting a strategy that would make the enemy force visibly melting. Attrition was becoming increasingly the go-to strategy due to mounting discontent within the U.S. military and political circles with the inability to safeguard stability. The desperation stemmed from the absence of clear political goals in addition to mission statements that created the narrative conducive for the War on Terror, and solutions that were based on kinetic activity instead of sociopolitical causes. Bowing to pressure exerted on decision-makers from various corners to hasten and provide quick results, policymakers resorted to using attrition as the last resort even though it has been demonstrated to be inefficacy in asymmetrical conflicts.
One of the main reasons why attrition was critical was the misalignment between the military strategic objectives proclaimed by the U.S. administration and the practical actions taken at the field level. In both conflicts, decision-makers did not address a fundamental paradox of counter-insurgency—stabilization, governance, and winning the population on the one hand and traditional military tactics on the other hand. In Vietnam, this misalignment was seen by the focus on attrition indicators which included the killing of the enemy while discounting the enemy’s capacity to replace his losses and continue the fighting. The conception of the treatment of the war by the US military in terms of measurable successes could not solve the socio-political equation of the Vietnamese rural folks who saw American operations as offending and destructive. In Afghanistan, strategy and tactics were poorly aligned with one another.
The United States has always undertaken an operation-oriented approach towards warfare evident through its application of attrition strategy in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015. This is despite the failure of its military forces in Vietnam using the same strategy between 1964 and 1969. The attrition strategy was used to implement outright military and firepower-oriented solutions along with economic advantage against complex insurgencies. The US decision-making regarding utilizing the process is influenced by its victories in World War 2 against Japan and the Nazis along with the gulf war. Conventional warfare was mostly used by the US as a direct approach in Vietnam but it followed the attrition strategy for depleting the enemy resources and increasing casualties. The US military leaders and commanders in Afghanistan, despite knowing about the debacle of attrition selected the same strategy based on their confidence in their overall military firepower and achieving measurable progress against the informal opposition hidden among the general population.
Hence, the attrition strategy was perceived as the most effective and urgent strategy for attaining the military objectives of gaining tactical victories and reducing enemy numbers by achieving body counts. However, in both cases, the US Administration and military failed to perceive the deep-rooted socio-cultural implications and rival political resurrection by overcoming the initial defeats. This is because the North Vietnamese resistance and the Taliban displayed no signs of defeat despite suffering heavy casualties due to the COIN strategy. This was the case in Afghanistan as the US military without adequately gaining support for the national government and the long-term sustainability of the political scenario focused on the complete dismantling of The Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist networks. In Vietnam, without focusing on establishing the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese Government and addressing the public concerns regarding corruption and nepotism, the military focused on destroying the Viet Cong. Regardless of the failure of the attrition strategy in Vietnam, the US had no choice but to use the strategy again in Afghanistan. This was mainly due to being unable to differentiate the militants from the general population in Afghanistan. The failure of the Taliban to wear uniforms despite relieving the US from the Geneva protections legally, however, they were unable to enforce the same. The US could not fight the war as they preferred due to being unable to segregate the Taliban from the population. Hence, maneuver warfare was not possible as the hearts and minds campaign as initially used in North Vietnam was foreclosed in Afghanistan, leading to the default choice of attrition.
The next chapter (Chapter 5) examines why the United States resorted to attrition in the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars despite its ineffectiveness.” internal institutional culture of the military of USA favored traditional ways of warfare and kept reinforcing the targets that are quantifiable such as the number of bodies counted rather than encouraging effective counter-insurgency tactics. These decisions were made by key commanders like General Wei Dong, General William Westmoreland, and President George W. Bush in Afghanistan as they tended to focus on short-term goals with easily measurable benefits that would suit their political or operational strategy. The chapter also shows how institutional pathways tended to positively correlate with what leaders wanted, generating a feedback loop that excluded other considerations for handling unconventional wars. Such broader culture and political pressures served to confine these managerial decisions more tightly than they otherwise would have been, discouraging the search for better approaches. This analysis therefore emphasizes the need to understand the nature of individual and collective actions in the face of organizational structures and the prevailing socio-political environment in explaining the continuity of ineffective strategies.
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