War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam

By Thomas C. Thayer and Gregory Daddis

In 1985 Thomas C. Thayer’s War Without Fronts offered a wealth of data and analysis on U.S. military operations in the Vietnam War and provided a fresh and provocative take on the infamous conflict. When first published, reviewers agreed it was an invaluable text; Vietnam War historians still cite Thayer in modern studies. Long out-of-print, this new edition should facilitate the ongoing conversation about how the American war in Vietnam continues to serve as a comparison for more recent U.S. overseas military campaigns. Thomas Thayer worked as a systems analyst for the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the late 1960s and early 1970s, compiling data to better understand the war and find trends that might help improve U.S. civil and military operations. His work thus offers an insider’s view of American military strategy during the Vietnam War and of how military operations affected the Vietnamese people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781612519135

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Introduction

When War Without Fronts was published in November 1985, it met with a warm reception. Westview Press, a small publishing house concentrating on special studies in military affairs, advertised its latest offering as a unique source of information about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Reviewers tended to agree. William Louthan of Ohio Wesleyan University thought the book went well beyond the military trends in the conflict, providing fresh, often provocative, accounts of such critical dimensions as war damage, civilian casualties, and refugee flow. Converse College professor Joe Dunn was equally impressed. Dunn believed the book’s author, Thomas C. Thayer, had performed a major service in distilling the analytical trends of the war. It is one of the most interesting and valuable works on the Vietnam War published in recent years, Dunn trumpeted.¹

By the early 2000s, however, War Without Fronts had become nearly impossible to obtain, a contribution cited often by historians of the Vietnam War but largely inaccessible to general readers. Likely, the relatively small Westview Press, aimed at a professional audience steeped in security studies, failed to generate much excitement among the broader public. Or perhaps Thayer’s prodigious use of tables and figures seemed forbidding to those seeking lucidity from such a complicated political-military conflict. A systems analysis approach to war, relying heavily on statistics, can be imposing, even dubious. And some potential readers no doubt argued that the war in Vietnam could never be charted so neatly by a computer-based model. Certainly, many senior military commanders of the era thought along such lines.

Despite public appeal not matching professional interest—and the skepticism from uniformed officers—War Without Fronts deserves our attention thirty years after its initial publication. Thayer provides a window into the world of systems analysts trying to make sense of one of the United States’ most complex wars in the twentieth century. Within the charts and tables is a search for meaning, an attempt to explain why America lost its first overseas war. Moreover, Thayer exemplifies a generation of defense analysts offering decision-makers advice on alternatives, feasibility, and effectiveness of military and civil operations. As Charles Hitch, a former RAND analyst and one of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s whiz kids, suggested, a systematic examination of broad alternatives was "useful to buttress our feeble minds with some external assistance.² Here, in short, was a way to reinforce individual judgment when it came to planning for and executing war. Thus, War Without Fronts can be viewed as an amalgam of social science techniques with a historically minded methodology for evaluating evidence from a conflict which, by the mid-1980s, was now more than a decade old.

Without question, Thayer proved uniquely suited for an analytical review of the Vietnam War. Born in 1936, he grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father was a renowned geologist, and attended Stanford University before enrolling in the international affairs graduate study program at Princeton. A master’s degree in business administration from George Washington University rounded out his impressive academic curriculum vitae. In 1958, Thayer began his federal career as an executive trainee in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). By the early 1960s, he had landed in Saigon, part of a larger team of researchers and analysts supporting the burgeoning American advisory effort in South Vietnam. (In 1961, the United States already was committing $225 million annually to the Saigon regime.)³ Thayer performed admirably, not only gaining practical experience in the field but honing his management skills as program head for the operations research and development field unit of OSD’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. From Vietnam, Thayer returned to Washington. There he directed the Southeast Asia division of systems analysis in the defense department, compiling reports that would ultimately serve as the basis for this book.⁴

The systems analysis office perhaps best exemplified the priorities of John F. Kennedy’s new secretary of defense. During World War II, McNamara served in the Statistical Control Office of the U.S. Army Air Forces, evaluating the effectiveness of bombing runs in support of Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s strategic air campaign in the Pacific theater. After the war, the Harvard Business School alumnus brought his analytical talents to the Ford Motor Company, becoming in late 1960 the first president not a member of the Ford family. At the Pentagon, McNamara’s commitment to analytical techniques supporting decision-making produced clear results—and a good deal of controversy. One critic called Kennedy’s defense secretary a ‘human IBM machine’ who cares more for computerized statistical logic than for human judgments.⁵ Yet McNamara and his team remained convinced a managerial revolution made sense for a Pentagon mired in bureaucratic confusion. His management innovations were designed to correct what he saw as a lack of rational foundation for military force planning within the larger policy process.⁶ This incorporation of rationality into the McNamara Pentagon forced systems analysis onto the center stage of defense planning. To his team of whiz kids, the ambiguity and complexity of the global environment made such an approach not just attractive but unavoidable. As Alain C. Enthoven, one of McNamara’s assistant secretaries, recalled, systems analysis was the best way to undertake a reasoned approach to highly complicated problems of choice in a context characterized by much uncertainty.⁷

Senior military leaders, however, proved far less enthusiastic. Not only did many of them find McNamara’s style abrasive, but they questioned the veracity of a military planning process that seemingly devalued human judgment. Decisions about war were more art than science, they argued. Thus even Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had benefited from McNamara’s World War II analysis, charged that excessive quantification and computerized hocus pocus resulted in a jargon that tends to becloud understanding.⁸ Gen. William C. Westmoreland, head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) from 1964 to 1968, charged after the war that McNamara’s systems analysts constantly sought to alter strategy and tactics with naïve, gratuitous advice.⁹ If Westmoreland was unfair in his critique—the Systems Analysis Office never attempted to change U.S. military strategy—he nonetheless exemplified a deeper reticence within the senior military ranks over quantitative methods. War was never so exact an instrument as to be devised and evaluated by a computer. Moreover, critics worried that the rationalistic economic approach had adversely affected organizational culture. As one U.S. Army colonel lamented, Instead of being experts in the application of military force to achieve the political ends of the United States, we became neophyte political scientists and systems analysts. But despite the grumbling of uniformed leaders, both President Kennedy and President Johnson turned increasingly to McNamara and his civilian aides for military advice.¹⁰

The outcry from senior officers was tempered somewhat by the acceptance of systems analysis from the armed forces’ middle and lower ranks. In January 1963, Enthoven published a primer on the topic in the U.S. Army professional journal Military Review. He suggested that the job of the analyst is to bring his findings about alternative postures, their costs, and their effectiveness to the legally constituted decision makers, who in turn will make judgments and suggest revisions of criteria.¹¹ In the following years mid-level officers entered the debate, publishing their own findings in Military Review that largely defended Enthoven’s approach. One lieutenant colonel, writing in mid-1965, found abundant evidence for the relationship between strategy and systems analysis. That spring the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks held a symposium on operations research in which students and faculty came away with a far better understanding of why Army officers need to have a working knowledge of systems analysis.¹² Two years later, one colonel offered an ardent defense of quantitative methods in the army. Human judgment cannot be displaced by systems analysis or other similar techniques, the officer argued, but human judgment needs something to expand its efficient selection and review of alternatives. Systems analysis methods can help perform this function.¹³ In short, here was a way to enhance a commander’s understanding of the war he was fighting.

By early 1967, Thayer was fully immersed in this search for understanding. Starting in January, the defense department began publishing a monthly periodical titled the Southeast Asia Analysis Report. Thayer’s division compiled these comprehensive studies. The monthly report was an experimental attempt to improve the quality of analysis on Southeast Asian problems and sought to increase the audience for interesting analytical work.¹⁴ Few topics seemed outside the purview of Thayer’s team. They assessed enemy losses and how well the allies were making battlefield contact with North Vietnamese units and local insurgent groups. They calculated the input of personnel into the enemy’s ranks via infiltration routes across South Vietnam’s borders. And they evaluated the speed at which pacification programs were making progress in the villages and hamlets across South Vietnam. What Thayer distilled through these reports, and what became an essential conclusion in War Without Fronts, was the fragmented nature of a war unfolding across 44 provinces, 260 districts, and roughly 11,000 hamlets. Thayer’s team hoped to make sense of MACV’s massive data collection effort aimed at evaluating the myriad social, economic, political, and military programs supporting the larger goal of an independent, stable, and noncommunist South Vietnam. The Southeast Asia Analysis Reports thus were attempts to find meaning in the numbers flowing from Saigon.¹⁵

If systems analysis became Thayer’s preferred tool for facilitating decision-making in a complex war, his fervor was not shared among senior military leaders as the conflict progressed. According to Enthoven, the systems analysis office was frequently criticized for slowing down the decision-making process unnecessarily . . . and stifling innovation.¹⁶ Moreover, the reports appeared to many officers a forceful, if somewhat indirect, criticism of American strategy in Vietnam. At the behest of the U.S. Air Force, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle G. Wheeler sought to limit the reports’ distribution to the defense secretary’s staff. These attempts at censure, however, intimated a level of influence that Thayer’s team never realized. As one analyst maintained, the Office of Systems Analysis had almost no role in Vietnam, either on the question of baseline forces or Vietnam augmentation forces. . . . They were not a central part in any way of policy-making in the war.¹⁷

This lack of influence surely frustrated Thayer, for he was convinced his systematic approach had revealed patterns to make sense of a war in which everyone was groping for understanding.¹⁸ This uncertainty should not surprise. More than any other war in the twentieth century, Americans faced in Vietnam a conflict in which the political struggle mattered just as much, if not more, than the military one. Critics then and later would disparage the U.S. Army, and William Westmoreland in particular, for not appreciating the war’s political aspects, but new scholarship suggests uniformed leaders clearly recognized that the war was more than just a matter of killing the enemy. Westmoreland spoke often of the need to secure the population, to be employed on pacification and revolutionary development missions while at the same time carrying the fight to the enemy’s main force units.¹⁹ The outlines of this political-military war, however, became engulfed in a sea of data gathered to evaluate progress. (Thayer would later complain that quantification became a huge effort, but analysis remained a trivial one.) Thus, by mid-1967, MACV’s monthly measurement of progress briefing, in slide form, came to more than seventy transparencies. If Westmoreland was concerned only about killing the enemy and counting bodies, one might question why his commanders and staff officers were engaged in a massive data collection effort tracking innumerable wartime indices far removed from the tactical battlefield.²⁰

Thayer surely disapproved of American military strategy inside South Vietnam, yet a careful reading of War Without Fronts suggests the widely used term attrition failed to convey the full scope of what both Westmoreland and his successor, Creighton Abrams, were hoping to achieve. At the end of the 1966 Honolulu Conference, for example, Westmoreland received a list of six strategic objectives from McNamara—among them increasing the population living in secured areas, enlarging the pacified population, ensuring political and population centers were under government control, and attriting enemy forces at a rate as high as their capacity to put men in the field.²¹ While Thayer argued Westmoreland placed too much emphasis on this final objective, the analyst’s holistic approach to evaluation sheds light onto the comprehensive nature of American strategy in Vietnam. If Thayer questioned the efficacy of search-and-destroy tactics aimed at attrition, he still exposed the challenges Westmoreland and Abrams faced in dealing with the South Vietnamese economy, training local militia forces, and assessing pacification efforts. Like Thayer, Westmoreland grappled with the problems of evaluating progress, not just in attriting the enemy, but also in achieving the nonmilitary aims laid out at the Honolulu Conference.²²

Of course, conceiving strategy was not the same as implementing it. As American leaders strove to convince Hanoi that victory was impossible, U.S. soldiers and their South Vietnamese allies rarely held the initiative on the battlefield. A systems analysis study of firefights during 1966 found the enemy could control his losses within a wide range and thus keep them below a level that was unacceptable or unsustainable. Enemy losses mounted only when he chose to fight, and, by and large, he chose to fight only at times and places favorable to him. (Still, it is important to note that the allies conducted far more small-unit operations than large ones.)²³ Making matters worse for American strategists, the fragmented nature of the war made comprehensive planning difficult. Former U.S. ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor quipped there was not one Vietnam war, but forty-four—one for each province. Yet Southeast Asia expert Bernard Fall thought even this characterization was too reductive. As Fall wrote in late 1965, the fact remains that there are many kinds of war that are being fought in Viet-Nam, often in one and the same place.²⁴ In such an environment, reliable quantitative analysis often proved beyond reach. Thayer’s own study went far in explaining when and where combat occurred, but the implications of fighting and, perhaps more importantly, the rationale behind it, often eluded American observers, both in uniform and out.²⁵

Part of the assessment problem facing both commanders like Westmoreland and analysts like Thayer centered on vague definitional standards. If, at the Honolulu Conference, McNamara charged MACV’s commander with increasing the population living in secure areas by 10 percent, what did secure really mean? If the allies controlled a hamlet by day but its people fell under the influence of the National Liberation Front at night, was the hamlet truly secure? Similar questions pertained to the word control. Bernard Fall maintained that as early as 1953, the French criteria of ‘control’ had no real meaning when it came to giving a factual picture of who owned what (or whom) throughout the Vietnamese countryside inside the French battleline, much less outside.²⁶ Arguably little had changed by the time of the American war. In fact, military operations to keep enemy main force units at bay often generated a refugee problem that undermined the larger pacification effort, a contradiction in effort well annotated by Thayer. Such problems clearly concerned both MACV commanders, yet contemporary systems analysts found it near impossible to evaluate whether rural peasants moved into areas under government control voluntarily or involuntarily. Furthermore, the back and forth of population movement complicated hamlet evaluation studies. As former RAND analyst David Elliott has rightly noted, It became more and more difficult to maintain a line of separation between revolutionary-controlled and Saigon-controlled areas.²⁷

If Abrams confronted similar definitional problems as Westmoreland—Thayer saw few if any changes in U.S. military strategy before Vietnamization took hold under the Nixon administration—the increasing emphasis placed on pacification in 1967 further highlighted the challenges to accurate systems analysis. The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) proved a case in point. Implemented in early 1967, the monthly report assessed pacification on a hamlet-by-hamlet basis. Indicators gauged progress on hamlet security, medical services, education, and public works. Yet assessing pacification—the process of establishing or reestablishing effective local self-government within the political framework of the legitimate central government—remained tricky. As one correspondent noted, the meaning of pacification depends on who’s telling it.²⁸ HES reports often relied on the perceptions of American advisers out of step with the opaque village life of South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces. Evaluations thus depended on local province or district chiefs for information. Moreover, the HES could not account for why rural peasants might be cooperating with the insurgents. Did peasants believe in the National Liberation Front cause or fear its retribution? And, as Thayer intimated, could any evaluation system suggest whether or not the allies had achieved a proper balance of resources being directed to offensive military operations and pacification?²⁹

Unsurprisingly, MACV commanders labored mightily with the problem of resource allocation as soon as U.S. ground combat troops began arriving in South Vietnam during the spring and summer of 1965. In truth, this conundrum never diminished. Both Westmoreland and Abrams sought ways to maximize the comparative strengths of the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies and assign missions best suited to each army’s talents. Thus, U.S. combat units concentrated on keeping enemy main forces away from population centers while South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) troops implemented pacification programs. The division of labor, however, hardly was so precise. Americans constantly harangued their allies for laziness, corrupt behavior, and a lack of commitment to the war, all the while trying to train them for an immensely complex mission.³⁰ Thayer’s analysis, though, suggested the Americans had failed in properly examining cost effectiveness. To him, territorial forces—in essence, local militia—were relatively inexpensive yet took the brunt of the fighting. The implications were clear. Had the U.S. command allocated more resources to local forces, the insurgency might have been defeated.³¹

Such counterfactuals, however, undervalued the social hierarchy embedded in South Vietnamese culture. The regional and popular forces (RF/PF) recruited almost exclusively from the lower classes of society. The ramifications were far-reaching. As James William Gibson rightly notes, Peasants were not important to upper-class ARVN officers; no economic rewards were given for cooperating with RF/PF. Thus there was no incentive to risk casualties and spend military resources by helping the local militias, either in the recruiting process or when they were attacked in their villages.³² In addition, the ideological aspects of the South Vietnamese military performance proved difficult to evaluate from a quantitative standpoint. How, for example, could an American analyst gauge the willingness of ARVN commanders or local militia soldiers to sacrifice their livelihood (if not lives) for an uncertain, even illegitimate, government in Saigon? Thayer importantly tracked the number of desertions—both within the South Vietnamese armed forces and the enemy camp—but the reasons behind these unauthorized absences often fell beyond the scope of systems analysis.³³

If military morale and attitudes were difficult to ascertain, the position of the civilian population proved even more obscure for many Americans. Thayer’s work was among the first American-centered analyses to consider the role of Vietnamese popular attitudes on the course and conduct of the war. Tellingly, he committed an entire chapter to scrutinizing the people’s state of mind. Such investigation surely was fraught with imprecision. As David Elliott has argued, Both political loyalty and political behavior in a high-risk, volatile, and constantly changing environment are very difficult to measure.³⁴ No less so for American advisers and analysts who were compiling data on the Vietnamese population’s hopes, aspirations, [and] concerns. Still, Thayer’s team, and the military assistance command in Vietnam, recognized that both Hanoi and Saigon were battling over the loyalties of the people. Surveys inquired about one’s dedication to the insurgency movement, who was winning the war, and who should be blamed for damage to one’s village or hamlet. In a war not just among the people but for them, analysts like Thayer recognized the importance of popular attitudes and sought ways to evaluate trends that might provide clues for how well the war was progressing.³⁵

Of course, any evaluation of war also requires an assessment of the enemy. War is by nature a reciprocal act and Vietnam proved no different. Yet the nature of the enemy, both in Hanoi and within the southern insurgency, too often remained a mystery. Thayer and his team certainly did their best. The defense department sponsored studies on Vietcong motivation and morale, intelligence officers interviewed hundreds of prisoners and defectors, and analysts scrutinized the tempo of communist activity. If Thayer misinterpreted Hanoi’s strategy as rigidly following a Maoist model—new scholarship suggests Politburo members were far more flexible in their approach—he still found patterns of military activity that exposed the geographic outlines for how the war was unfolding inside South Vietnam.³⁶ Given the thousands of small engagements between combatants, here was no small task. Of course, all Americans in Vietnam, commanders and analysts alike, grappled with the limitations of systems-based assessments. As one military historian has argued, an enemy’s independent will is not entirely governed by the means at his disposal.³⁷ Surely, both North Vietnamese regulars and southern insurgents fought against odds favoring the materially rich Americans. But an enemy’s will oftentimes eludes precise measurement. Thayer might not have been able to assess the internal workings of the revolutionary movement and its North Vietnamese sponsors, but his analysis suggested that despite years of American effort, that movement only had been debilitated, not defeated.

Perhaps this explains why Thayer’s conclusions were so pessimistic. It was no coincidence that Thayer liberally quoted Sir Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert who leveled harsh criticisms against the American approach in Vietnam. Thompson found Americans an impatient and aggressive lot, in total a group who failed to understand the true nature of the war and thus had been strategically outmaneuvered by the enemy.³⁸ Or perhaps Thayer’s own frustrations seeped through into his findings, for despite polite interest by the MACV staff, none of his office’s conclusions were acted upon during the war. (Enthoven later questioned whether a greater role played by the systems analysis office could have helped the U.S. military performance.)³⁹ It seems plausible, though unlikely, that Thayer’s own health affected his outlook. He had suffered from multiple sclerosis for a full twenty years—his family continues to believe exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam was a cause—before his death and by the end was confined to a scooter.

Most probably, though, Thayer saw in the numbers patterns that pointed to a better way. Having been imbued with the McNamara dogma of cost effectiveness in defense planning, he must have cringed at the immense amount of American and South Vietnamese resources spent for so little gain. The numbers quite simply did not add up. When a MACV staff officer reported to Abrams in April 1970 that the enemy still retains a viable military and political apparatus throughout the Republic, such findings must have been incredibly disheartening for analysts like Thayer.⁴⁰ How was it possible that two years after the failed Tet offensive in 1968 the enemy still was functioning, albeit at lower levels, among significant portions of the South Vietnamese population? For Thayer, there had to be a better way to achieve U.S. political objectives in Southeast Asia. So if his systems analysis office could not successfully advocate for a more viable approach, Thayer at least could help explain what went wrong a decade after Saigon’s fall.

None of these introductory remarks suggest Thayer was seduced by the efficacy of quantitative analysis. He knew, better than most, the limitations outlined here. The systems analysis office never possessed independent information and invariably relied on MACV for its data. More importantly, any analysis of that data, at very best, could only help explain how the war was unfolding in South Vietnam. It could not, however, fully illuminate why events were happening. As Lt. Gen. Julian Ewell, a staunch advocate of operations analysis, recalled, to analyze a problem one should be able to describe the process in some detail, obtain reliable data inputs, and establish an adequate feedback system.⁴¹ MACV—and, by extension, Thayer’s team—struggled in all three of these areas. Vietnam quite simply was an immensely complicated war that defied easy explication. And in this limited sense, Westmoreland and other senior officers were correct—strategy could not be dictated by data.

Yet War Without Fronts endures because Thayer, realizing the limits of the tools he was employing, approached the Vietnam War in a truly holistic manner. Thayer embraced the complexity. In the process, he evaluated more than just numbers, seeking patterns in combat actions and pacification programs while searching for trends in population attitudes and even hospital admissions. Assessing such a fragmented war—what others would later describe as a mosaic war—Thayer left behind a model for those hoping to gain a truer understanding of modern wars among and for the people.⁴²

Even before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Thayer was formulating his conclusions, which would serve as the foundation for this book. He attended a colloquium on The Military Lessons of the Vietnamese War at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The participants compiled a who’s who list of war managers and advisers from Vietnam—Westmoreland, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sir Robert Thompson, Robert Komer, and Elmo Zumwalt to name but a few. During a forum on monitoring the war and the inherent tension between computers versus art forms, Thayer passionately defended his craft. If we ever have the misfortune to get mixed up in a war without fronts like this again, we had better not just quantify it—we had better analyze it for all its worth. You can’t fully understand—or explain—a war like this unless you do some analysis of the statistics it produces.⁴³

The pages that follow are retained in their original font and style, reproduced word for word and letter for letter from Thayer’s original publication. Quantitative in ethos, the text includes a small number of minor grammatical and spelling errors, a testament to the original submission criteria of Westview Press, which leaned heavily on typeset manuscripts in which the author also acted as editor and proofreader. These aesthetic challenges aside, the pages present nearly two decades’ worth of effort by Thomas Thayer to understand the Vietnam War. His search for understanding surely ended on a pessimistic note but perhaps that is beside the point. What Thayer left behind demonstrates why the pursuit of not just facts but rather of understanding is what’s most important when evaluating a war without front lines.

Gregory A. Daddis

Notes

1.William C. Louthan, review of War Without Fronts, by Thomas C. Thayer, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 493 (September 1987): 181–182. Joe P. Dunn, review of War Without Fronts, by Thomas C. Thayer, Air University Review 37, no. 5 (July–August 1986): 118–119.

2.C. J. Hitch, Analysis for Air Force Decisions, in Analysis for Military Decisions, ed. E. S. Quade (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1966), 20–21.

3.James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1964–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118. On the larger analyst effort in Vietnam, see Mai Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2010).

4.Obituary of Thomas C. Thayer, Washington Post, 4 April 1996.

5.Antoine Bousquet, Cyberneticizing the American war machine: science and computers in the Cold War, Cold War History 8, no. 1 (February 2008): 93. On McNamara’s systems analysis background, see Donald Fisher Harrison, Computers, Electronic Data, and the Vietnam War, Achivaria, no. 26 (Summer 1988): 20. On incorporating new management techniques, see James M. Roherty, Decisions