How Many More Men?

VIET NAM

From the Middle East, Administration anxieties were shifting back again to Viet Nam--and a profoundly difficult decision facing the President: How many more men must the U.S. send? Defense Secretary Robert McNamara plans to make his own recommendation after a trip to Saigon this week, and General William Westmoreland, who until now has had just about everything he asked for, this time will have to argue hard for every additional soldier. "McNamara," says a Pentagon officer, "is really going out to haggle."

From 23,000 men (in advisory groups) in early 1965, U.S. strength in Viet Nam has built up to 463,000. (There are also 36,000 with the Seventh Fleet and about 30,000 with the Air Force in Thailand.) Another 15,000 troops are now definitely ticketed for Viet Nam before the end of the year.

More Pressure, More Places. Yet Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon are understood to feel that the job will eventually take about 600,000 men. They argue that one more division is needed to work with the Marines in the northern provinces, where the Communist pressure has been heaviest in recent months, and that at least one division is needed in the populous Mekong Delta (there are now only two U.S. brigades there), where the war is more or less stalemated. Another divi sion would come in handy in the central provinces above Saigon. Westmoreland's goal is, as he puts it, "to maintain more pressure on more places."

There is no longer much fear that more U.S. troops would send the fragile South Vietnamese economy into an unmanageable inflationary spiral. Meanwhile the big U.S. construction projects, with their heavy demands on local labor and materials, have been leveling off. Storage facilities and a runway have been completed at Cam Ranh Bay, for example, and new docks have been put into operation along the Saigon River near the capital, ending what was once a serious logistic logjam.

The generals will come up against some weighty counterarguments, however. Many American civilian officials in Saigon believe that many more G.I.s would increase the dependence of the Vietnamese on the Americans. "I am not persuaded that troop levels are the crux of the problem," says one high U.S. official. "I think the big thing we need is a shining example of what life can be like under a proper, representative government." Also, though Hanoi may be approaching the limit of its ability to aid Communist forces in the South, there is still no assurance that it might not, as it has before, match a U.S. buildup by sending in more troops, restoring the status quo ante.

McNamara must also ponder where he would get additional troops, and how much they would cost. While one division could be created before the end of the year from the divisions and brigades still left in the U.S., anything more than that would require higher draft calls or some call-up of Reserves. And while one additional division could operate within the present logistic base in Viet Nam, with only a small (10,000 men) supply detachment of its own, two or three divisions would require a much broader support base--and many more men. Thus, since it would need little new logistic support, one more combat division could be had for 25,000 men. But two would require a whole new logistic base and need 80,000; three would require 120,000. The dollar cost would shoot up; a 1967-68 budget deficit already expected to reach at least $13 billion could easily reach $25 billion.

The final decision will be Lyndon Johnson's. There seems little doubt that he would approve one more division for Viet Nam--a choice that would cause minimal dislocations both in the U.S. and South Viet Nam. Whether to go beyond that is in many ways the toughest decision he has had to make since he committed the U.S. to the original Viet Nam buildup two years ago.

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