Attacking with a "Dynamic Defense"

IN the spring of 1970, just 18 months after Lyndon Johnson announced a U.S. "bombing halt," more than 500 American warplanes swarmed into North Viet Nam for a series of attacks that continued for four days. Since then the large-scale "reinforced protective reaction strike" has become both a favorite Nixon Administration euphemism and a key element in its Viet Nam withdrawal strategy. Also known as "dynamic defense," a phrase coined by British Strategist Basil Liddell Hart in 1935, that strategy has come to mean the covering of the gradual U.S. pullout on the ground with an open-ended threat to use airpower any time, anywhere in Indochina.

A Signal. Last week, for five straight days, U.S. fighter-bombers, directed from a command center at Udorn airbase in Thailand, braved poor weather and wicked antiaircraft fire to fly hundreds of sorties against missile sites, airfields, supply depots, staging areas, and other targets in North Viet Nam's southern panhandle. It was by far the longest and roughest of the more than 100 strikes, large and small, that American aircraft carried out on the North in 1971. With a tight news embargo temporarily in effect in Washington and Saigon, the few emerging details of the operation came from Hanoi, which angrily charged that "the insane Americans have attacked many populated areas" in Thanh Hoa, Nghe An and Quang Binh provinces. The North Vietnamese claimed to have shot down 19 American planes; the U.S. owned up to only four downed aircraft.

What, in fact, were the attacks all about? In part, they reflected concern about a recent and rapid military buildup by the North Vietnamese. U.S. air operations over the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos had been severely cramped by a formidable North Vietnamese air defense effort (TIME, Jan. 3). In Laos and Cambodia, government troops were already reeling in the face of an unusually early and vigorous dry-season offensive by the enemy. U.S. military men in Saigon expect that offensive to spread to South Viet Nam, perhaps when Tet arrives next month.

Even so, it seemed that Richard Nixon had more than just dynamic defense in mind. With the President's Feb. 21 departure for China rapidly approaching, the attacks would reassure Washington's Indochina allies that they would not be sold out at the Peking summit. It was also hoped that the raids might counter any plans on Hanoi's part to bollix the summit. The White House reasoned that North Viet Nam's current offensive might have been designed to impress the Chinese with the fact that Hanoi will not sit still for any concessions to the U.S., no matter what bargain Nixon might try to strike in Peking.

Administration aides describe the bombings as a "signal" to Hanoi. The signal--the word carries less-than-reassuring echoes of Lyndon Johnson's days--is meant to make it clear that the U.S. will not tolerate any creeping escalation of the war by Hanoi while the American withdrawal continues. The new get-tough stance in Indochina follows a similar hardening by the U.S. in Paris. Last month Ambassador William J. Porter, the new U.S. chief negotiator, began a boycott of the negotiating table by bluntly telling a visibly surprised Hanoi representative, Xuan Thuy, that "you obviously need more time to develop a constructive approach here." Last week, when the air attacks got under way, both sides frostily agreed to continue the boycott.

The "bombing halt" notwithstanding, it would be perfectly defensible for the U.S. to strike military targets in North Viet Nam in order to head off trouble for South Viet Nam, Laos or Cambodia--or even the Peking summit. But that was not how the Administration explained the matter. In Washington last week, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said that the raids were "primarily for the protection of American service personnel." In fact, there is no conclusive evidence that the 158,000 G.I.s still in Viet Nam are in any immediate peril, though the North Vietnamese retain the potential to do serious harm as the withdrawal continues.

Laird tried to have it both ways, however. He insisted that "the South Vietnamese can handle the situation in South Viet Nam." If so, then Laird's rationale for the bombing seems all the more questionable, especially in light of an announcement by the U.S. command in Saigon that in the week preceding the air strikes there had been only one American combat death--the lowest weekly casualty total since March 1965.

Wholesale Basis. In justifying the bombing, Laird said that the North Vietnamese had violated the "understanding" negotiated by L.B.J. at the time of the 1968 bombing halt. Clark Clifford, who was Johnson's Defense Secretary in 1968, last week told TIME'S John Mulliken that the "understanding" could by no means be considered a formal agreement; though the North Vietnamese did honor its terms for a while, they never responded to the American conditions other than to "take note" of them.

The "terms" called for the North Vietnamese to begin talking seriously in Paris, to cease shelling South Viet Nam's cities, to stop infiltrating into South Viet Nam through the Demilitarized Zone, and to refrain from firing on unarmed American reconnaissance planes flying over the North. But while Hanoi no longer observes the terms, Clifford charged that it is "absurd for the U.S. to pretend that there could still be an understanding when the Nixon Administration has violated it on a wholesale basis."

Painless Way. Whether it is based on fact or not, the Nixon Administration has found the "understanding" useful. The supposed agreement has afforded the White House a politically painless way of gradually erasing what it regards as an unwise, unilateral promise to lay off North Viet Nam. Since 1969, when the White House began citing the understanding to justify quick, small-scale strikes on North Vietnamese antiaircraft sites that had fired at U.S. reconnaissance planes, the "protective reaction" franchise has been steadily broadened. By now, it has been stretched to the point where it can be invoked in almost any circumstance. The President has said that if Hanoi should develop any "capacity to increase the level of fighting in South Viet Nam, then I will order the bombing of military sites in North Viet Nam." That, as far as the Administration is concerned, seems to be the only understanding that matters.

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