Going to War in 1965 with the Army You Have
When a soldier asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Dec. 8, 2004, why his unit had not deployed to Iraq with more armor, Rumsfeld replied: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” The secretary’s response was characterized in the press as flippant and insensitive, but four decades earlier his comment would have been right on the mark as the first U.S. Army combat forces went into Vietnam during a massive American buildup in 1965, beginning with the March deployment of a Marine brigade.
The Army’s follow-on wave of three brigades and the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) experienced serious personnel shortfalls, equipment shortages and training deficiencies. It was an army that neither policymakers nor soldiers wanted, but it was the army the United States had at the time.
As 1964 wound down, U.S. officials were confronted with a deteriorating military and political situation in Vietnam. Incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat campaigning on a pledge not to send American boys “to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” walloped Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, carrying 44 states and amassing 61 percent of the popular vote. Notwithstanding his campaign rhetoric, Johnson was determined not to be the president who “lost Vietnam.” He remembered how conservative foes castigated Harry Truman in 1949 for “losing China” when Mao Zedong’s communists overwhelmed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces. Johnson couldn’t afford a similar loss on his watch.
After his January 1965 inauguration Johnson dispatched national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to Saigon to confer with U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and the top military leader there, Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, to examine political and military options to ensure that South Vietnam would not collapse.
During Bundy’s visit Viet Cong commandos attacked the U.S. base at Pleiku in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands on Feb. 7, 1965, killing nine
