Westmoreland versus Abrams, a study in Mission Command

"When all is said and done, it is really the commander’s coup d’oeil, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship."
—Carl von Clausewitz
as quoted in Joint Publication 3-0

In 1962 the Army’s Field Manual for Operations stated that “modern warfare demands prompt action, decentralization, and a high degree of individual initiative.”[1] Over the decades since that publication, the Army’s doctrine has gone through numerous iterations of defining command and control and battle command. Catch phrases like “centralized planning, decentralized execution” or notions of empowering subordinates are not that far removed from the doctrine of the 1960s that formed the guiding principles in Vietnam. In 2003 the Army introduced into the doctrinal lexicon “Mission Command” with the publication of Field Manual 6-0, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, then TRADOC Commander, clarified that “mission command illuminates the leader’s responsibility to understand, visualize, decide, direct, lead and assess.”[2] Mission Command, as defined in the Army’s latest version of FM 6-0, has six fundamental principles: building cohesive teams through mutual trust, creating shared understanding, providing a clear commander’s intent, exercising disciplined initiative, using mission orders, and accepting prudent risk.[3] This paper will examine Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s strategy of “Search and Destroy” and contrast it with Gen. Creighton Abrams’ strategy of “Vietnamization” through the lens of three of the fundamental principles of Mission Command.

According to FM 6-0 a fundamental principle of Mission Command is creating shared understanding. FM 6-0 states that this shared understanding between commanders and their staffs at every level and among unified partners is a defining challenge. It must include a common understanding of the operational environment, the purpose of the operation, its inherent problems and the methods of solving those problems.[4] In the early stages of the conflict in Vietnam Westmoreland devised a strategy of attrition that came to be known as Search and Destroy. The key objective of this strategy, as George C. Herring points out in his book, America’s Longest War, was to seek out and eliminate National Liberation Front (NLF) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces operating in South Vietnam.[5] Lewis Sorley in his book, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, indicates that Westmoreland had internalized President Johnson’s strategy of putting “pressure on the enemy which would transmit a message to the leadership in Hanoi—that they could not win.”[6] However, Westmoreland’s vision of that national strategy was more succinct. “Our purpose was to defeat the enemy and pacify the country, and the country couldn’t be pacified until the enemy was defeated.”[7] This may have been a sound strategy in the early years of America’s entrance in the war, as Herring states that “the infusion of American forces staved off what had appeared in 1965 to be certain defeat” of South Vietnamese forces.[8] However, as the war progressed it became more apparent that Search and Destroy was heavy on defeat and light on pacify. This seems to have led to a lack of shared understanding on how best to prosecute the war. Westmoreland’s immediate superior, Adm. U. S. Grant Sharp, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, expressed a different vision for meeting the national strategy in a September 1965 cable to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Wheeler, “this is a counterinsurgency war… the primary object is to restore security to the population.”[9] Similarly, at least one of Westmoreland’s subordinates, Gen. Bruce Palmer, Commander of II Field Force, stated in 1967, “it became forcibly obvious to me that we could not achieve our objectives fighting the way we were. I confided my doubts to General Westmoreland, who really didn’t want to talk about it.”[10] Even Gen. DePuy, Westmoreland’s deputy and principle architect of the Search and Destroy strategy, came to the admission that “we ended up with no operational plan that had the slightest chance of ending the war favorably.”[11] If Westmoreland initially had a shared understanding of Search and Destroy, he appears to have been unable to maintain that shared understanding throughout his tenure in command.

Where Westmoreland’s Search and Destroy waned in shared understanding, Abrams strategy of Vietnamization had wide acceptance by the time that he was able to implement it. The president, the service chiefs, key subordinate leaders, and, perhaps most importantly, the American people, were eager to move the war in a more productive manner following the Tet offensive in January 1968. Abrams was in the perfect position to implement Vietnamization with broad shared understanding and acceptance, particularly after serving as Westmoreland’s deputy commander in 1967 and 1968 and observing Lt. Gen. Lewis Walt’s III Marine Amphibious Force in the I Corps area where the Marines were already pursuing a strategy of pacification.[12] Sorley in his book, Thunderbolt, indicates that President Nixon grasped Abrams strategy and readily adopted it at the national level when he stated:

"Our principal objectives shifted to protecting the South Vietnamese at the village level, reestablishing the local political process, and winning the loyalty of the peasants by involving them in the government and providing them with economic opportunity. General Creighton Abrams had initiated this shift in strategy when he took command of our forces in Vietnam in 1968."[13]

Herring suggests that Abrams may not have initially bought into the concept of Vietnamization when stating, “Abrams criticized Vietnamization as ‘slow surrender’ and repeatedly protested the size and pace of U.S. troop withdrawals.” Even if Abrams was not keen on troop withdrawals, he readily implemented a “strategy that integrated combat operations more closely with pacification” and modernized and built up the South Vietnamese armed forces.[14] Shared understanding of this strategy had dramatic and immediate effects, as “almost overnight the South Vietnamese Army had become one of the largest and best-equipped in the world.”[15]

Another fundamental principle of Mission Command is building cohesive teams through mutual trust. A key element of this principle is building and earning the trust of coalition partners and with central leaders within the population.[16] Put more succinctly, “team building is essential to multinational operations.”[17] A key facet of President Johnson’s national strategy in Vietnam was to create international legitimacy by building a coalition force of allies. The “many flags” campaign had moderate success. Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and Nationalist China all provided troops of varying levels, but even at their peak coalition forces amounted to less than fifteen percent of the total force.[18] While Westmoreland was evidently able to maintain this coalition, the percent of allied forces continued to wane throughout the war. By 1967 allies were “talking more about what they had done in the past than about what they would do in the future.”[19] Westmoreland appeared to be even more challenged in building a cohesive team with the South Vietnamese forces. His Search and Destroy strategy took on the semblance of an Americanization of the war. Herring credits Westmoreland with pulling off a “logistical miracle” by “constructing virtually overnight the facilities to handle huge numbers of U.S. troops and enormous volumes of equipment.”[20] However, Westmoreland apparently cared little, nor paid much attention to building a cohesive team with the South Vietnamese Army. According to Herring, Westmoreland continued to call for more American forces “because he doubted the battle-worthiness of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)” and “the ARVN was largely shunted aside, relegated to lesser operations and population control.”[21] This was viewed by the ARVN officers as demeaning and left them with a sense of inferiority.

Abrams also does not appear to have had great success with building cohesive teams with coalition partners. The allied troop levels peaked in early 1969, as did U.S. troop levels, and dwindled steadily afterward.[22] While this dwindling of allied forces was in full force by the time Abrams took command, it seems that he was unable to rebuild a cohesive coalition. Abrams’s Vietnamization strategy inherently placed more trust in the ARVN and, as has already been stated, dramatically increased and modernized that force. However, the South Vietnamese viewed the term Vietnamization as demeaning and saw this strategy as “a fig leaf to cover U.S. Abandonment.”[23] The eventual fall of Saigon in the absence of U.S. intervention would seem to bear out this view. Neither Westmoreland nor Abrams appear to have effectively built cohesive teams with their multinational partners.

A Commander’s acceptance of prudent risk is another fundamental principle of mission command. The commander accepts risk when he deliberately exposes his forces to potential injury or loss after judging that the likely outcome is worth the cost.[24] Westmoreland’s Search and Destroy strategy was based on attrition of the communist forces at a ratio of ten to one. In other words, he was willing to accept what he viewed as a prudent risk of one U.S. casualty to ten NVA and NLF casualties. Sorley highlights this point when he talks of the casualties during the Ia Drang campaign in the fall of 1965 where the North Vietnamese suffered over 3,500 casualties to just over 300 American killed. “What that [casualty ratio] said to two officers [Westmoreland and DePuy] who had learned their trade in the meat-grinder campaigns in World War II was that they could bleed the enemy to death over the long haul with a strategy of attrition.”[25] Sorley is able to demonstrate how imprudent this risk proved to be by highlighting an exchange between Westmoreland and Senator Fritz Hollings. “Westmoreland told him, ‘We’re killing these people at a ratio of 10 to 1.’ To that Hollings responded, ‘Westy, the American people don’t care about the ten. They care about the one.’”[26] What Westmoreland saw as a prudent risk proved to be unacceptable to the will of the American people.

Abrams accepted prudent risk in his Vietnamization policy by turning over more and more of the burden of prosecuting the war to the ARVN. With the hindsight of more than thirty-five years since the fall of Saigon, this risk may at first seem imprudent. However, in a lecture at the Army Heritage Education Center in October 2011 Lewis Sorley made the case that Abrams departed Vietnam in 1972 having left South Vietnam in the capable hands of a battle tested ARVN army able to adequately defend their nation, and that the eventual fall of Saigon was due to the U.S. failing to intervene in 1975 when North Vietnam violated the Paris peace agreements.[27] Given that historical context it would seem that Abrams’s risk of divesting combat operations to the ARVN was prudent.

The insights gleaned from Westmoreland’s strategy of Search and Destroy and Abrams’s strategy of Vietnamization viewed through the lenses of the fundamental principles of creating shared understanding, building cohesive teams through mutual trust, and accepting prudent risk can give today’s officer a better appreciation of Mission Command. It is useful, and perhaps obligatory, to study not only the historical vignettes of successful uses of mission command, but unsuccessful implementation as well. Westmoreland’s Search and Destroy and Abrams’s Vietnamization provide both successful and unsuccessful examples.

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Endnotes
[1] Kevin C. M. Benson and Gregory H. Penfield, “Observations on Mission Command: Will Our Army Adapt?,” Army Magazine, January 2012, 22.
[2] Martin E. Dempsey, “Mission Command,” Army Magazine, Army Magazine Website
[3] U.S. Department of the Army, Mission Command, Field Manual 6-0 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 13 September 2011), 1-2.
[4] Ibid., 1-3.
[5] George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, (Boston: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2002), 179. Herring points out that the term “Vietcong” was a pejorative coined by the leader of South Vietnam to refer to the National Liberation Front operating in South Vietnam.
[6] Lewis Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Kindle edition, location 1711.
[7] Ibid., location 1715.
[8] George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, (Boston: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2002), 186.
[9] Lewis Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Kindle edition, location 1758.
[10] Ibid., location 1887.
[11] Ibid., location 1880.
[12] Ibid., location 1895-1918.
[13] Lewis Sorley, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times (Washington: Brassey’s, 1992), 255.
[14] George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, (Boston: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2002), 284.
[15] Ibid., 285.
[16] U.S. Department of the Army, Mission Command, Field Manual 6-0 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 13 September 2011), 1-3.
[17] Ibid., B-5.
[18] George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, (Boston: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2002), 180.
[19] Ibid., 181.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., 190.
[22] Ibid., 181.
[23] Ibid., 284.
[24] U.S. Department of the Army, Mission Command, Field Manual 6-0 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 13 September 2011), 1-6.
[25] Lewis Sorley, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Kindle edition, location 1792.
[26] Ibid., location 1798.
[27] Lewis Sorley, Presentation based on: Westmoreland : the general who lost Vietnam, (Lecture held October 19, 2011 in Ridgway Hall, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center).