US Troops Left Vietnam Over 50 Years Ago - Key Questions Must Be Asked Today Regarding Military Interventions

 

"THE HILL" By Bill Rivers

"Are we as a people — all 330 million or so of us, with all our divergent opinions, economic needs and aspirations, and beliefs about America’s role in the world — willing to resource the military arm of a fight commensurate with our political objectives?

If we are not, then the political objectives must be scaled back. This requires something more than just appetite-control; it requires statesmanship — both in dealings in foreign capitals and in committee hearing rooms at home."

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"America’s two decades of involvement wouldn’t officially end until 20 months later, when the last civilian advisors from the most powerful country on earth were airlifted from the roof of their embassy in Saigon, literally chased out of the country by communists.

Numbers alone fail to capture the war’s true cost to the United States. Still, we must look: 1 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars; 150,000 wounded; more than 58,000 Americans killed.

Fast forward now to the present era, and the U.S.-Vietnam relationship is dramatically different. Vietnam was America’s 10th largest goods trading partner in 2020. According to the Department of Commerce, that same year, U.S. goods exports to Vietnam were nearly $10 billion, up 270 percent from the a decade prior. Today, Vietnam is a top ten market for U.S. food and agricultural products.

On the security front, in stark contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam now seeks to bring America into southeast Asia — to counterbalance China. One salient example among many: In 2018, Vietnam issued an unprecedented invitation to U.S. aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to make a port visit to Cam Ranh Bay — the first since the war ended in 1975.

And while the partnership between Hanoi and Washington has endured several recent missteps, that any partnership exists at all would have been unimaginable to the men fighting in the cities, jungles, and rice paddies 50 years ago.

Viewing the sacrifices of those men through the lens of today’s near-complete reversal of the strategic situation, perhaps it is only natural to ask now, five decades later, a hard question: “Was the war worth it?”

The answer depends on how we read history.

Two general camps can be described.

For the first camp, the answer is a clear “no.” While honoring the service of those who fought and died in Vietnam, the key lesson, they argue, is to remember how the dominos didn’t fall after U.S. military forces left in 1973. All of Southeast Asia didn’t turn communist. Decision-makers in the U.S. national security firmament should have given more than short shrift to inconvenient reports that contradicted calls for American involvement, like, for example, the 1964 National Board of Estimates report commissioned by the CIA, which concluded Domino Theory was flawed; “a continuation of the spread of Communism in the area would not be inexorable” should Vietnam fall.

For the first camp, the primary rationale for engagement was proved false. For them, the war was terrible mistake.

The second camp holds that while deeply painful and divisive, the war nevertheless bought strategic time for countries across Asia, newly emergent from colonialism, to develop the institutions and civil society they lacked and so avoid falling to communism.

For this camp, the dominoes stayed standing precisely because America sacrificed so many of her sons in Vietnam. America drew the fire, demanding resources and attention from regional communists and their Soviet backers. Those other nations were able to develop free economies which eventually became markets for American farmers and manufacturers. They also developed more or less open democratic societies with whom the United States could work on the international scene to ensure more favorable conditions for American interests. The primary rationale for fighting in Vietnam was to signal western resolve, both to friends and foes alike.

This camp answers that the war was indeed worth it — and believes that millions of free people across Asia would agree.

Which camp is right?

In philosophy, counter-factual hypotheticals hold no truth value — they are neither right nor wrong. If this holds for both politics and war, then, because the dominoes didn’t fall, we must ask different questions.

Here are three questions that national security deciders, from the E-Ring of the Pentagon to the West Wing of the White House, should consider as they assess the complicated international security landscape 50 years after American soldiers departed Vietnam:

First, are we as a people — all 330 million or so of us, with all our divergent opinions, economic needs and aspirations, and beliefs about America’s role in the world — willing to resource the military arm of a fight commensurate with our political objectives?

If we are not, then the political objectives must be scaled back. This requires something more than just appetite-control; it requires statesmanship — both in dealings in foreign capitals and in committee hearing rooms at home. Americans are still capable of this. They must remember it — and act accordingly.

Second, what consequences will foreign action have at home?

The war may have bought time for Asian countries to develop institutions and grow societal connective tissue, but it cost a rising generation of Americans their trust in their nation’s institutions and tore painfully at their social fabric. Amid the cultural chaos of the 1960s — including racial strife, assassinations, and bitterly contentious elections — the war deepened a divide, opening fault-lines within families, something I explore in my novel of the Vietnam War era “Last Summer Boys.”

On the economic front, it has been argued the billions spent on the war drove the inflation of the 1970s — which carried tectonic consequences all its own.

Walking by history’s lamp-light, today’s decision-makers must assess the impact of foreign intervention on the home-front. One area especially worth considering amid the current recruitment crisis is the impact on attitudes towards America’s military itself.

A the third and final question: How can we be worthy of the sacrifice?

Over nearly 20 years, what began with a few hundred “military advisors” under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy swelled into a bitter contest that would see more than 2.5 million American service members deployed in-country over the course of America’s involvement in the conflict.

Honoring the courage and sacrifice of America’s Vietnam War veterans means being better leaders for the young men and women serving today. And this means being exceptionally careful about committing America’s warriors to a fight.

The world is a far, far better place when Americans hold the preponderance of hard power. It is better still if their leaders use it only in gravest need, after sober analysis of their people’s true national interest. Because, when lawfully ordered, America’s men and women in uniform will unleash devastating power against the country’s enemies. And they will do so at enormous personal sacrifice.   

This is the most important question of all, and the true test of whether America gets Vietnam right. It may be 50 years late.

Better late than never."

US troops left Vietnam 50 years ago: Here are 3 key questions defense leaders must ask today

Bill Rivers served as speechwriter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis from 2017-19. He is a fellow at the Yorktown Institute and the author of “Last Summer Boys,” an Amazon Kindle #1 bestseller in historical fiction.

How the US Military Became Walmart

“FOREIGN POLICY”  By Rosa Brooks

“Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military.

Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.

Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves: As we face novel security threats from novel quarters — emanating from nonstate terrorist networks, from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.

Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military.

More is at stake than most of us realize. Recall Shakespeare’s Henry V:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage… 

In war, we expect warriors to act in ways that would be immoral and illegal in peacetime. But when the boundaries around war and the military expand and blur, we lose our ability to determine which actions should be praised and which should be condemned.

For precisely this reason, humans have sought throughout history to draw sharp lines between war and peace — and between the role of the warrior and the role of the civilian. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies maintained that wars should be formally declared, take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations. In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, from war drums and war sorcery to war paint and complex initiation rites for warriors.

Like a thousand other human tribes before us, we modern Americans also engage in elaborate rituals to distinguish between warriors and civilians: Our soldiers shear off their hair, display special symbols on their chests, engage in carefully choreographed drill ceremonies, and name their weapons for fearsome spirits and totem animals (the Hornet, the Black Hawk, the Reaper). And despite the changes ushered in by the 9/11 attacks, most of us view war as a distinct and separate sphere, one that shouldn’t intrude into our everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games. Likewise, we relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we simultaneously lionize and ignore. War, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs and the military an institution that can be easily, if tautologically, defined by its specialized, war-related functions.

But in a world rife with transnational terrorist networks, cyberwarriors, and disruptive nonstate actors, this is no longer true. Our traditional categories — war and peace, military and civilian — are becoming almost useless.

In a cyberwar or a war on terrorism, there can be no boundaries in time or space: We can’t point to the battlefield on a map or articulate circumstances in which such a war might end. We’re no longer sure what counts as a weapon, either: A hijacked passenger plane? A line of computer code? We can’t even define the enemy: Though the United States has been dropping bombs in Syria for almost two years, for instance, no one seems sure if our enemy is a terrorist organization, an insurgent group, a loose-knit collection of individuals, a Russian or Iranian proxy army, or perhaps just chaos itself.

We’ve also lost any coherent basis for distinguishing between combatants and civilians: Is a Chinese hacker a combatant? What about a financier for Somalia’s al-Shabab, or a Pakistani teen who shares extremist propaganda on Facebook, or a Russian engineer paid by the Islamic State to maintain captured Syrian oil fields?

When there’s a war, the law of war applies, and states and their agents have great latitude in using lethal force and other forms of coercion. Peacetime law is the opposite, emphasizing individual rights, due process, and accountability.

When we lose the ability to draw clear, consistent distinctions between war and not-war, we lose any principled basis for making the most vital decisions a democracy can make: Which matters, if any, should be beyond the scope of judicial review? When can a government have “secret laws”? When can the state monitor its citizens’ phone calls and email? Who can be imprisoned and with what degree, if any, of due process? Where, when, and against whom can lethal force be used? Should we consider U.S. drone strikes in Yemen or Libya the lawful wartime targeting of enemy combatants or nothing more than simple murder?

When we heedlessly expand what we label “war,” we also lose our ability to make sound decisions about which tasks we should assign to the military and which should be left to civilians.

Today, American military personnel operate in nearly every country on Earth — and do nearly every job on the planet. They launch raids and agricultural reform projects, plan airstrikes and small-business development initiatives, train parliamentarians and produce TV soap operas. They patrol for pirates, vaccinate cows, monitor global email communications, and design programs to prevent human trafficking.

Many years ago, when I was in law school, I applied for a management consulting job at McKinsey & Co. During one of the interviews, I was given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”

“Roll over and die,” I said immediately.

The interviewer’s pursed lips suggested that this was the wrong answer, and no doubt a plucky mom-and-pop operation wouldn’t go down without a fight: They’d look for a niche, appeal to neighborhood sentiment, or maybe get artisanal and start serving hand-roasted chicory soy lattes. But we all know the odds would be against them: When Walmart shows up, the writing is on the wall.

Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small mom-and-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign-policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever-more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform as the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.

It’s fashionable to despise Walmart — for its cheap, tawdry goods, for its sheer vastness and mindless ubiquity, and for the human pain we suspect lies at the heart of the enterprise. Most of the time, we prefer not to see it and use zoning laws to exile its big-box stores to the commercial hinterlands away from the center of town. But as much as we resent Walmart, most of us would be hard-pressed to live without it.

As the U.S. military struggles to define its role and mission, it evokes similarly contradictory emotions in the civilian population. Civilian government officials want a military that costs less but provides more, a military that stays deferentially out of strategy discussions but remains eternally available to ride to the rescue. We want a military that will prosecute our ever-expanding wars but never ask us to face the difficult moral and legal questions created by the eroding boundaries between war and peace.

We want a military that can solve every global problem but is content to remain safely quarantined on isolated bases, separated from the rest of us by barbed wire fences, anachronistic rituals, and acres of cultural misunderstanding. Indeed, even as the boundaries around war have blurred and the military’s activities have expanded, the U.S. military itself — as a human institution — has grown more and more sharply delineated from the broader society it is charged with protecting, leaving fewer and fewer civilians with the knowledge or confidence to raise questions about how we define war or how the military operates.

It’s not too late to change all this.

No divine power proclaimed that calling something “war” should free us from the constraints of morality or common sense or that only certain tasks should be the proper province of those wearing uniforms. We came up with the concepts, definitions, laws, and institutions that now trap and confound us — and they’re no more eternal than the rituals and categories used by any of the human tribes that have gone before us.

We don’t have to accept a world full of boundary-less wars that can never end, in which the military has lost any coherent sense of purpose or limits. If the moral and legal ambiguity of U.S.-targeted killings bothers us, or we worry about government secrecy or indefinite detention, we can mandate new checks and balances that transcend the traditional distinctions between war and peace. If we don’t like the simultaneous isolation and Walmartization of our military, we can change the way we recruit, train, deploy, and treat those who serve, change the way we define the military’s role, and reinvigorate our civilian foreign-policy institutions.

After all, few generals actually want to preside over the military’s remorseless Walmartization: They too fear that, in the end, the nation’s over-reliance on an expanding military risks destroying not only the civilian competition but the military itself. They worry that the armed services, under constant pressure to be all things to all people, could eventually find themselves able to offer little of enduring value to anyone.

Ultimately, they fear that the U.S. military could come to resemble a Walmart on the day after a Black Friday sale: stripped almost bare by a society both greedy for what it can provide and resentful of its dominance, with nothing left behind but demoralized employees and some shoddy mass-produced items strewn haphazardly around the aisles.”

How the Pentagon Became Walmart

I Asked ChatGPT ITS OPINON ON AI MODELS LIKE ITSELF.

The answer, was stated objectively that it considers Large Language Models (LLM's) effective tools, but not capable of human intellect. (Click Image To Enlarge)

 

Retirement – Personal Invention and Re-Invention

If one aspires to simply maintain one’s material life style, retain responsibility for those close to us and relax as objectives, that is one form of retirement – call it maintenance.

Many cannot undertake a maintenance retirement due to challenges such as the economic events of recent years, family responsibilities involving their children, or aging parents. They must continue to generate an income but must adjust to advancing age and find new ways to generate revenue.

I hear from many individuals who seek to go into business for themselves on-line or in the home as a way to supplement their retirement.

Given reasonably good health and a responsibility-free environment, most find retirement rather boring after a time and seek continued professional growth. In fact it has been espoused that such a lethargic existence can be hazardous to our health.

Balance is the key – Balancing age with wisdom, lifestyle with responsibility and available means; a new professional endeavor, volunteer work, recreation, the arts, – that which gives meaning to continued existence.

If the need to generate revenue is a prominent factor, care must be taken in assessing risk to health and fortune by investing too much in effort or treasure. That is where the balance comes in.

We have heard 40 is the new 30, but yet I think “old” seems to always stay the same distance for me. At 25 I thought 50 was old, at 35 I thought 60 was old, now that I am approaching 80 years of age, 95 is old.

I know true age is more a matter of mind. I took a fall on the ice in front of the Middle School and 2 dozen 5th graders. The fall didn’t hurt nearly as much as the laughter and the subsequent whispers this year, “There goes that old guy again, do you think he might fall?”

I took a nap out in the wildlife refuge in a beautiful stand of aromatic pines. When I awoke I found two huge turkey buzzards staring at me intently from their perch nearby. I had known I was getting older but had not realized I had reached the carrion stage.

I reported a pollution spill in the Vermilion River and the Minneapolis paper picked up the story. A reader commented on the web site that the Minnesota pollution control program had now been relegated to an “Old Guy” in the vets home.

I feel fine about getting old. It’s how I am perceived by others that bothers me.

We will all retire in some form. We have no choice. What we invent or re-invent along the way to make the most of it is our personal challenge.

Ken Larson