Summary: Fifty-three years ago this week American troops fought their first major battle in Vietnam. The lessons both sides learned set the course of the war. We know whose analysis proved more accurate. Worse, the WOT proves that we’ve forgotten whatever we learned from Vietnam, despite the price in money and blood we paid for them. But we can still learn.
On 14 November 1965 the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) flew to the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam, initiating the first major battle between the North Vietnamese and American armies. This marked our transition from advisers to direct combatants. There were two battles. One at Landing Zone X-Ray, where Americans under the command of Lt. Colonel Harold G. Moore (Lt. General, US Army, deceased) withstood fantastic odds – inflicted absurdly disproportionate casualties (with the aid of airpower and artillery), and withdrew. One at Landing Zone Albany, where Lt. Colonel Robert McDade made a series of basic mistakes that led to his unit being mauled.
Fifty years later we again have lessons from battles fought by our military in a distant land. Again all sides devise plans for the future. Lest we forgot, Ia Drang holds powerful lessons for us today.
The quotes in this post come from one of the great works about the Vietnam War: We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: Ia Drang – The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
What happened at Ia Drang?
Ia Drang tested the new concept of air assault, in which helicopters inserted troops to a distant battlefield, then supplied and extracted them. During that four day “test” 234 American men died, “more Americans than were killed in any regiment, North or South, at the Battle of Gettysburg, and far more than were killed in combat in the entire Persian Gulf War.” Both sides drew optimistic conclusions from the result.
We believed that our combination of innovative technology and tactics could achieve the victory that eluded France. We saw Ia Drang as a tactical success that validated our new methods, and so we expanded the war. We absurdly believed the victory resulted from our technology, not the valor and skill of our troops.
“In Saigon, the American commander in Vietnam, Gen William C. Westmoreland, and his principal deputy, Gen William DePuy, looked at the statistics of the 34-day Ia Drang campaign … and saw a kill ratio of 12 North Vietnamese to one American. What that said …was that they could bleed the enemy to death over the long haul, with a strategy of attrition.”
North Vietnam’s leaders drew the opposite conclusions.
“In Hanoi, President Ho Chi Ming and his lieutenants considered the outcome in the Ia Drang and were serenely confident. Their peasant soldiers had withstood the terrible high-tech firestorm delivered against them by a superpower and had at least fought the Americas to a draw. By their yardstick, a draw against such a powerful opponent was the equivalent of a victory. In time, they were certain, the patience and perseverance that had worn down the French colonialists would also wear down the Americans.”
Also, North Vietnam’s leaders believed that US commanders would more often be like McDade than Moore. The next decade proved that they were correct. General Võ Nguyên Giáp understand the significance of this battle, and that the war would evolved as he had explained in 1950 to the political commissars of the 316th Division (then discussing France, but eventually true of America as well — in Vietnam as well as our post-9/11 wars)…
“The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war.”
— From Bernard Fall’s Street without joy: Indochina at war, 1946-54
(1961).
A lessons for today about war
The closing quote in We were Soldiers Once gives the bottom line.
“Finally – even though it took ten years, cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans, and inflicted humiliating defeat on a nation that never before had lost a war – some of us learned that Clausewitz had it right 150 years earlier when he wrote these words:
“‘War plans cover every aspect of a war, and weave them all into a single operation that must have a single, ultimate objective in which all particular aims are reconciled. No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so – without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose, the latter its operational objective. {The opening of Chapter 2, Book 8 in On War.}”
Unfortunately “some of us” did not include our senior military leaders, as shown by our poorly conducted wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. Or perhaps this lesson did not stick in America’s collective memory. This is yet more evidence of our inability or unwillingness to learn from experience. No amount of national wealth and power can overcome such a weakness.
That is our failure, not that of those who fight in our wars. Let us honor the men who fought in Ia Drang so long ago – and in the too many vain wars since – and learn to do better in the future.
A deleted scene from the film We Were Soldiers Once
Another lesson from Ia Drang – about leadership
Good leadership can allow a team to withstand and sometimes triumph over almost impossible challenges. Building organizations that recruit, train, motivate, and retain such leaders is one of our most important national challenges. But we are doing the opposite, as our sclerotic institutions become bureaucratic – with leaders whose eyes are closed and concerns are with politics and personal goals rather than the institution’s performance.
We are the people responsible for this. When we no longer tolerate America’s decline into senescence, then reform becomes possible.
For more information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about the Vietnam War, and especially these…
-
- Presidential decision-making about Vietnam and Afghanistan: “You have 3 choices, sir”.
- Another echo in Afghanistan of the Vietnam War. Will we hear it, and learn?
- How the Iraq and Vietnam wars are mirror images of each other.
- Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template.
- Myths about the Vietnam War laid the foundation for our Forever War.
- Stark evidence from our past about our inability to learn today.
- How the ghosts of Vietnam haunt the War on Terror.
For more about the battle of Ia Drang, see the book and the film
We Were Soldiers Once … and Young: Ia Drang – The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
The film (I highly recommend it): We Were Soldiers
