To:Jim Bishop who started this subject
From: oakmount
Friday, Sep 14, 2001 12:06 AM
View Replies (2) | Respond to of 91932
i hope like hell i'm wrong ...
i just hope we remember how we won the american revolution . it was , in ways , that are not that diffrent than those that the ones we have
been recently subjected to. yall know me and know exactly which side i'm on , but the simalarities are the same ( as the revolution ) . when we
battled the british , didnt we " hide " in bushes . this was a big no no back then . hidding from your opponent was viewed as "cowardly". thats
probably the only way we could have won the war . we called it stategy . i just hope that this is a small group that WE can handle with no
problem , and certainly no loss of life for those that are fighting for our freedom . does anyone else feel my concern . i'm just saying back in
the revolution , we " cheated " to win . do yall think they 're doing the same . is this one of those what comes around goes around deals ? i hope
not , i hope we nip it in the bud and show our superior power . go america ,find away to beat'em , and if thay need me i'll be there . any thoughts
?
To:oakmount who wrote (91892)
From: Michael E. Baldino
Friday, Sep 14, 2001 12:39 PM
View Replies (2) | Respond to of 91932
"i just hope we remember how we won the american revolution"
I hope we remember how we won world war 2 ----
After all, some have refrenced this to pearl harbor...
Time to take the Enola Gay out of moth balls.
lvrj.com
minresco.com
-------------------------------
Excerpts from a long interview with Col. David Hackworth
U.S. Army, South Vietnam ...
pbs.org
Q: What do you think the Vietcong learned from Mao Tse-tung?
Hackworth: I think the major thing was how a poor man fights a rich man... how a war can be
fought employing ancient rules first developed by Sansu -- the need for patience, the need for
political motivation, the need to fight a war of economy and how to employ all the rules of
warfare.
Q: What lessons should the Americans have learned from the French defeat?
Hackworth: Well, I think the major lesson they should have learned was that that war didn't
involve the security of France, and the security of the United States wasn't at issue either.
On a tactical level, they didn't have an objective. The Americans should have studied the lessons
of the French very closely and taken something from them. A correspondent once asked General
Westmoreland, the American commanding general and architect of the war, what he thought of
how the French fought the war and was he studying the lessons of the French? He said, "Why should I study the lessons of the
French? They haven't won a war since Napoleon." This was the American attitude of total arrogance.
We didn't learn from the past. We didn't learn from our own experience by going back to when we beat Britain in 1776. At that
time the British had argued that we didn't fight in formations such as theirs, a big block formation; we didn't meet them in the
open and we fought like the Indians, behind trees, using concealment and cover and so on. And a couple of hundred years later we
had the British mentality towards fighting and we had forgotten the very lessons that we had taught the British.
<snip>
Q: Why didn't firepower work?
Hackworth: Well, what firepower did -- using pursuit aircraft, fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, artillery mortar and so on --
what it did was it galvanized the opponent. It put steel in their back.
They could see themselves being struck by a giant and they had no way, no recourse, to strike back. It... as it did historically with
the British during World War II... it put fire in their belly. It was absolutely the worst thing we could do in Vietnam. It gave them
a tonic to fight harder
<snip>
[Note: See my post # 91931]
Q: Wasn't it possible to block up the tunnels, or gas them or blow them up?
Hackworth: We tried everything possible to destroy the tunnels, including having small soldiers, called "tunnel rats," go down
and try to clear them. But they were so cleverly done, you could never find where the actual end was. There would be a dead-end
with a hidden door going down to the next level. I'm sure that if enough creativity and effort had gone into it then, yes, they
could've closed them up but, again, the top generals were not concerned.
An anecdote: a cave expert came to me between tours in Vietnam in my office in the Pentagon. He said, "Look, I can help you win
the war. I can tell you where the caves are, because this is something I've studied all my life..." I took him to my boss, a Vietnam
veteran, who was very excited about it. We took him to our general and he didn't want to know about it. Who wants to waste
money sending this guy over there and having him examine tunnels and caves? What's he gonna tell us? Again, it was the
mentality that firepower will win this war. These great outpourings of American industrial strength will win this war. This
arrogance didn't allow us to get beyond a blinkered, military mind-set.
Q: But these tunnels were militarily significant, weren't they?
Hackworth: They were a running sore, from the beginning to the end, and they were a very powerful ally of the Vietcong.
<snip>
Q: What was the military strategy of the war?
Hackworth: Westmoreland's idea was to destroy the enemy's large battle formations as in World War II. When you've worn the
enemy down, you've won on the field of battle. That tells you that we simply didn't understand the nature of the war, because the
guerilla was not going to fight in that way. The guerrilla's manner of fighting was to hit and run, so he could be alive to fight
another day. He wasn't into these huge, stand-up battles.
The big operations required a great number of resources, a great amount of logistics, a great amount of aircraft, and a great
amount of artillery fire.
Moshe Dayan, who was the chief-of-staff of the Israeli army, came to Vietnam and I interviewed him right after he had spent
two weeks with an American rifle company of about 100 men. He said that in one battle, with a North Vietnamese force of a
couple of hundred men, they fired more artillery -- over 25,000 rounds -- than he'd fired in a whole campaign. That was the
American way of fighting a war.
It was also terribly expensive. Each round was $100. If you fire 10,000 rounds, you've probably gone through a million dollars in
one 15-minute fight, and you've killed seven enemy. When you look at it from a cost basis, we were paying an enormous amount to
kill the enemy and we couldn't sustain that kind of momentum and that kind of expenditure for a long time. It was a failed tactic
that should never have been used. We should have used the same rules that Mao was teaching, that Sansu taught before him -- to
break up in small elements and fight fire with fire.
Q: Had you been in charge, how would you have done things differently?
Hackworth: During my second year in Vietnam, I commanded a battalion made up of conscripts down in the Delta. It was a
battalion with very bad leadership. It had sustained 600 casualties in the six months before I took over. Morale was low. They
called themselves the "Heartbreak Battalion."
Within thirty days, they turned around. We didn't fight in these huge formations. We fought like the guerillas. We broke up and
fought in small units of five or seven people. We fought at night. We stole the night from the enemy. We ambushed. We didn't
march in large formations and expect to meet an opponent marching in a large formation. We fought him using his very tactics,
his very skills. We tore a page out of Mao's book. The proof of the pudding was, six months later, that battalion had lost only 25
American soldiers. It had killed over twenty-six hundred enemy soldiers, and there were no Vietcong in its area of operation.
Those soldiers proudly called themselves the "Hard Core Battalion," and they were hardcore, but they were simple draftees who
didn't want to be there!
<snip>
Q: Was the April 1975 victory a victory for a people's style of war?
Hackworth: I think that the victory in Vietnam introduced a new phase of warfare where low-intensity conflict can eventually
win. As we look around the world, it's won in other places, most recently in Somalia. Again, the Americans tried to win with
firepower, yet they failed.
America spent $166 billion in Vietnam, they lost 360,000 American lives, and 4 million Vietnamese lives. War is so costly in
terms of firepower, munitions, the cost of maintaining a modern army and large-scale operations, that no one can afford it today.
So warfare is reverting back to the kind of low-intensity conflict that we saw in Vietnam.
Q: What does the concept of a "people's war" mean to you?
Hackworth: It's the same thing that my forefathers employed in 1776. We wanted independence and were willing to pay with our
lives. All people want to be free, and if they have that anger inside them, and the ability to arm themselves, and somebody comes
along and says, "Hey! I'm your leader and I'm going to show you how to do this!" then the guy who is trying to suppress them is in
trouble.
<snip>
Q: Can parallels be drawn between Afghanistan and Vietnam... between the Vietcong war against the Americans and the
Mujaheddin war against the Soviets?
Hackworth: Absolutely. There's no question that there are sharp parallels between the Afghan war and the war in Vietnam. The
fighters there were freedom fighters, they were trying to rid themselves of Communism, they were supported by an outside
country, this time the USA who poured billions of dollars into that war. They again tried to win by using an enormous amount of
firepower, conventional tactics against the 'search and destroy' operation, a high degree of technology -- all the mistakes that
the Soviets made in Afghanistan, the Americans made in Vietnam and the French made in Indo-China. No one looked back on the
lessons learned.
Q: Did the Soviets learn anything from America's experience in Vietnam?
Hackworth: From my analyses of the war, I'd say very little. They tried to win the war by using firepower, by bombing them back
to the Stone Age through the use of American-provided Stinger missiles, and by mounting machine-guns in high mountains and
firing down on aircraft. They made the price so heavy for the Soviets, in terms of cost, that they blinked first and got out. Again,
they used an incredible number of mines and booby-traps, creating a great number of Soviet casualties . The Soviet units that did
well there were special units led by people who understood that form of warfare. But their conventional infantry was exactly the
same as the American conventional infantry in Vietnam, or the French conventional infantry in Indo-China.
Q: Why did the Soviets fail to learn from the American and French mistakes?
Hackworth: I think it is a military mind-set. We don't go back and look at the past, we're in such a hurry to get to where we're
going. There's a certain amount of military arrogance. The older I get, the more I realize how we never study the past and try to
learn from it, we just stumble along and make the same mistakes. We're doomed to do that until people wake up. And with the
military mind, I'm not certain that we'll ever wake up.
Q: Is there anything about guerrilla warfare which is new to this century?
Hackworth: Well, a number of things are new -- the amount of firepower that the insurgent employs and uses, the use of mines
and booby-traps, the ability to communicate via electronic communications. One of the problems that's always hampered the
guerilla is getting the word out. In the days of old it was done by messengers, which took days and hours. Today a general has
very sharp communications. Out in Somalia, General Adid had little portable radios to talk to his soldiers, very low frequency.
The American CIA's intercept devices are all high frequency - they couldn't listen to what the man was saying! And the Americans
got whipped. They didn't learn a thing.
<snip>
[The whole interview is a worthwhile read, especially now, IMO.] |
