WHO RUNS THE WAR IN VIET NAM?

NEVER before has America been so puzzled about a war effort. In no other conflict, from the Revolution through the Mexican War to Korea, has the dichotomy of decision between military and political considerations been so painfully evident. American soldiers and civilians, politicians and public, find it increasingly difficult to accept the grindingly slow pace of the war, the continual second-guessing by critics and outsiders who argue that it should never have been undertaken in the first place, and that it is being badly prosecuted. Last week, with the broadening of the target list in North Viet Nam to permit strikes a scant ten miles from China, the outcries reached a new pitch.

The antiwar voices were the most strident. Ohio's Democratic Senator Stephen Young cried out against the "spectacle" of an American admiral, CINCPAC Commander Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who is the military overseer of the Viet Nam war, asking for more effective bombing in the North. Other politicians, ranging from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to Republican Presidential Hopeful Charles Percy, pointed up the threat of Chinese and/or Russian involvement in the war as a result of the wider bombing. For the hawks, House Republican Leader Gerald Ford took an opposite position: "Why are we pulling our punches?"

Also symptomatic of the public pressure on Viet Nam policy was the response of the parents of a Navy corpsman killed at Con Thien, near the bloodily contested Demilitarized Zone. Returning a letter of condolence sent them by President Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Lester Laning of Muskegon, Mich., wrote: "We cannot in good conscience accept your letter of sympathy because we believe that you, as President of this great country, are in part responsible for the death of our son because of your refusal to permit our airmen to bomb strategic targets in North Viet Nam." The doubt was reinforced by former President Dwight Eisenhower. "If you are going to fight a war," said Ike last week, "I believe in winning it. You should get everything you can and use it just as fast as you can and get it over with. What do politicians know about fighting a war?"

Moderation & Policy

The thing that irritates and perplexes Americans is the political caution inherent in a limited war. "It is not civilian control that the intelligent military man objects to," said the army general who ran the World War II Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, in 1959. "It is the constant interference with the operations necessary to accomplish the missions assigned. The wise housekeeper stays out of the kitchen when the cook is preparing dinner." The grand philosopher of warfare, Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, approached the question from quite a different perspective. "The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be unreasonable," he wrote, "for policy has created the war; policy is the intelligent faculty, war only the instrument. The subordination of the military point of view to the political is, therefore, the only thing which is possible." Between these two views of war arises the American dilemma of today: Who should be running the war, and to what ends?

In keeping with the American political system, the war as was true in all preceding conflicts--is being run on the strategical and diplomatic level by elected or appointed civilians, on the tactical level by military professionals. Because of the complexity inherent in a war of limited purpose, the civilian, political control of Viet Nam is that much more intense. The American generals in Viet Nam have civilians looking over their shoulders at all times; General William Westmoreland confers at least twice a week with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, presents the White House with tactical and strategic plans worked out for as much as six months ahead. The details of those plans are digested every Tuesday in a quiet second-floor dining room of the White House, where the President, his Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State discuss the efforts and exigencies of some 500,000 American troops in Viet Nam. They talk about everything from the breechblock of the M-16 (prone to jam) to the accessibility of fresh eggs for artillerymen on the DMZ. Mostly they talk strategy and political ramifications. Thanks to instant communication by satellite, President Johnson can, if need be, keep in direct touch--through existing chains of command--with both Ambassador Bunker and General Westmoreland. The President boasts that he has satellite-relayed strike photos of North Vietnamese targets within minutes of their emergence from the developing fluids. "Hell," he says, "F.D.R. would have waited a week" for similar results. That speed, of course, makes it all the more tempting for the President and his key advisers, most notably Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to run the war at every level, down to platoon and squad actions.

The Controlling Factors

Thus far, Johnson and his aides have resisted that temptation more often than they have succumbed to it. The ground war in South Viet Nam, up to and including the call for massive air strikes by B-52 heavy bombers that fly all the way from Guam, is largely in the hands of Westmoreland and his generals. Westmoreland has had to clear with Washington such operations as thrusts into the DMZ, the shelling of North Viet Nam, the movement of U.S. troops into the precarious and populous Mekong Delta. It is in moves of that sort, and primarily in the air war over North Viet Nam, that Johnson takes close command. He has made final decisions on some 300 targets in North Viet Nam.

On the recent target authorizations near China, Johnson was more meticulous than ever. He did not want the planes to come in on their bombing runs headed toward Chinese territory. So close were the targets that in a matter of seconds the supersonic jets could have crossed into China. The President finally accepted the tactic of having the planes come in parallel to the border--but only after he was convinced that they would thereby run the least risk from antiaircraft fire. The main concern, however, was with the broader implications. "A bomb near the Chinese border," says the President, "had better have civil authority on it."

For those who feel that the President is pursuing a "no-win" policy, the Administration points out that total victory is not the aim of this war. While there are highly placed military men who privately complain about the restrictions under which the war is being fought, some of the strongest supporters of Lyndon Johnson's gradual approach to the war are the generals and admirals themselves. In the four years of the U.S. Civil War, Abraham Lincoln ran through seven commanding generals; William Childs Westmoreland, after three years, is only the second American commander in Viet Nam.

Yet Lyndon Johnson would be the first to recognize how different the political v. military balance is in this war. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman worried about such grand maneuvers as the march to the sea, the invasion of France and the evacuation from Changjin Reservoir. Truman, in his decision not to bomb Red China, came the closest to exercising civilian authority in a framework of limited war. Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, worried about whether he should allow the Air Force to bomb a power plant in Hanoi that stood a scant li miles from Ho Chi Minh's home. Ultimately, he did. It is such concern with minutiae that best illustrates the key fact about Viet Nam: it is a war in which the political factors exert more control than they did in any war in U.S. history.

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