U.S. Military Global Expansion

American intervention in Vietnam sneaked up on most of us. We woke up one morning in 1964 and found ourselves at war. Our peers were being pulled from their jobs, their schools, their families and sent there by tens of thousands each month to “protect democracy.” Over 2.5 million were to go; over 55 thousand never returned. In those early years many of us supported the war, apathetically if not vocally. America had again become involved in a tragic but necessary war—a war we regretted, but knew must occur if freedom was to be protected.

Awareness came more quickly for some of us than others—our level of awareness depending upon the facts at our disposal and the integration of those facts into a whole. As our knowledge grew, we became increasingly opposed to the conflict. We became aware that North Vietnam was not invading the South: the 17th parallel was only the temporary military demarcation line of the 1954 Geneva accords and not the international boundary separating North and South Vietnam. We became aware that the protection of freedom could not possibly be proper rationale for our involvement: the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations all supported military dictators who either refused to let elections occur or allowed them only within the context of organized massive fraud weighted in favor of the incumbent regime. We became aware that our government deliberately lied about the reason and goal of American presence: the Pentagon Papers definitively exposed this deception and falsification. We became aware that morality and high regard for human life played no role in the American intervention: the My Lai massacre destroyed our naiveté about the innocence of America’s involvement and the automated air war convinced us that the U.S. military had become an unchecked and inhuman monster Realization of facts such as these led us to total opposition.

Although active American involvement in Vietnam is at least temporarily over, the urgency of awareness was never greater and cannot be overstated. More Vietnams in the near future are more than just the Pentagon strategist’s pipe dream. On the same day the peace truce was signed in Paris, the New York Times carried an article on the U.S. military in the aftermath of Vietnam. After talking with many civilian and military officials, NYT reported the following:

The United States armed forces face a host of strategic psychological, material and political problems in the post war period. Among the most difficult, according to senior military and civilian officials at the Defense Department, are strategic decisions on the ‘next war’—where it might be fought, against whom and with what weapons.
(NYT, 27 January 1973, p.11).

Thus contrary to official dictums that we are embarking upon “a generation of peace,” we are in fact preparing for another generation of war.

The relationship between Vietnam and “next war” strategies can perhaps best be seen in the context of conflicting military strategies subsequent to 1952. The Eisenhower-Dulles strategy of nuclear deterrence dominated the early and middle fifties. Nuclear deterrence (also known as massive retaliation) had the purpose of averting a general world war and assumed that the threat of nuclear reprisal was sufficient to ward off an attack on the United States or any of its allies. In the late fifties support for nuclear deterrence began to wane and it eventually met death in the Kennedy Administration, where counterinsurgency became the dominant military strategy. Counterinsurgency (also known as counterrevolution and flexible response) recognized the importance of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to World War III, but also realized wars of national liberation (known as subversive insurgency) as a significant and independent threat to Western economic growth and security—a force which could not he intimidated by the threat of nuclear reprisal. Counterinsurgency became the American military strategy toward these unintimidated Third World revolutionary forces.

In his excellent study, War without End, Michael Klare documents the four major components to counterinsurgency as it was developed under the Kennedy Administration.

The first component is “rapid deployment.” From their reading of Mao and Che, President Kennedy and Defense Secretary MacNamara knew that time was a crucial ingredient in revolutionary war strategy. Thus a necessary element of counterinsurgency is the capability of rapid American troops at the first sign of insurgent uprising.

The second component is “the electronic battlefield.” Kennedy and his advisors also knew that guerrilla struggles are ultimately won or lost on the ground. As an alternative to the continual interjection of the enormous numbers of American infantrymen needed to combat guerrilla warfare, the Administration opted for the application of American technology to the problem of detecting guerrilla sanctuaries and warning against guerrilla attacks. The result was the development of new surveillance devices, infiltration alarms and battlefield computers.

The third component of counterinsurgency is “the mercenary apparatus.” Use of American troops to defend a regime isolated from the masses would inevitably legitimate the arguments of the insurgent movement. Furthermore, no matter how many technological innovations were incorporated into the American military apparatus, participation in a series of drawn-out counterguerrilla campaigns would cause a severe manpower drain on the United States and arouse strong opposition at home. To reduce direct American involvement in such conflicts, Kennedy determined to mobilize local (mercenary) armies for counterinsurgency efforts in their own and neighboring countries. Also, by employing native troops, he hoped to limit the manpower drain on the United States. Obviously, Richard Nixon’s policy of “vietnamization” was not the innovation of a secret peace plan. Rather, it was the practical outworking of an aspect of counterinsurgency which he accepted with little modification.

The fourth component is “social systems engineering.” Ultimately a revolutionary movement will win, not because of its military prowess, but because of the superiority of its political position and it stability to meet the collective needs of the masses of people. To counter this disadvantage, counterinsurgent strategy would develop a program of psychological warfare, rural development and economic assistance to alleviate outstanding social ills.

Vietnam provided almost ideal conditions for testing counterinsurgency. In 1963, General Maxwell Taylor (Kennedy’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and long-time opponent of nuclear deterrence) told a House of Representatives appropriations committee that in Vietnam,

We have a going laboratory where we see subversive insurgency, the Ho Chi Minh doctrine, being applied in all its forms. This has been a challenge not just for the armed services, but for several of the agencies of government, as many of them as are involved in one way or another in South Vietnam. On the military side, however, we have recognized the importance of the area as a laboratory.

Ten years later, in the gloom of military defeat, the Pentagon still views the value of our involvement in terms of experience gained in the techniques of counterinsurgency: “The view of the Pentagon’s outer ring is not entirely bleak . ... In Vietnam, Air Force and Navy Pilots and professional officers and un-commissioned officers of the surface Navy, the Army and The Marine Force all gained valuable operational experience” (NYT, 27 January 1973, p. 11). The evidence is unmistakable: Vietnam was not an accident—the unintentional blunder of a well-meaning giant—now in the past and to be forgotten. American intervention in Vietnam was calculated and intentional and became a testing ground for the military strategy of worldwide counterinsurgency. Although the basic assumptions, goals and components of counterinsurgency remain unchanged, the focus of American armed manpower for the 1970’s appears to have shifted from the Army and Marines to the Navy. As Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt put it.

At present time, it has become increasingly clear that future U.S. military involvement overseas will call first for the high technology, capital-intensive services—air and naval forces—to support the indigenous armies of threatened allies. So, as I understand the Nixon Doctrine, the Navy’s future contribution will be even greater than in the past.

In addition, Tom Engelhardt, editor of Pacific News Service, has recently shown the direction of naval weaponry development.

Zumwalt and other Navy planners have something new in mind for the decades to come. They want to build a “mini-fleet,” a fleet with less fat. While the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet would continue to hold the hammer of nuclear devastation over the Soviet Union or any other enemy, this new fleet could be directed toward the more “limited” goals of the Nixon Doctrine—“projection of power ashore,” “control of the sea lanes” and “overseas presence.” If Zumwalt has his way, the fleet of the future will be truly fleet. It will be a guerrilla navy. Tiny hydrofoil patrol boats armed with anti-ship missiles will patrol coastal waters and shadow foreign vessels. Surface Effects Ships built to large sizes will ride on self-created air bubbles at speeds up to 100 knots. Sea Control Ships, really small aircraft carriers, will cruise the oceans, grouping quickly in trouble spots to launch their V-STOL (vertical-short takeoff and landing) aircraft at land targets. (Chicago Sun-Times, 25 February 1973, sec. 1-A, p. 3).

Rapid deployment would still be an integral part of strategy—only naval power would be utilized more than the infantry.

The moral questions relating to counterinsurgency are clearly focused in a recent statement by Zumwalt:

As the number of our land-based forces deployed overseas declines, we will need to keep some evidence of power in sight. This will at the same time sustain our allies’ confidence in us and demonstrate by our presence both our capability and our determination to protect our commerce and our sources of strategic materials from any interruption.

American foreign policy and military presence is primarily geared toward American economic growth and expansion. Systematic and exploitive influx of outside resources is necessary for the survival of an advanced capitalistic state; and those governments which cooperate with us economically are our “friends” and “allies.” Any attitudes and methods are valid within this framework: racism (mercenary armies—dead Asians are better than dead Americans); indiscriminate murder (devices of the electronic battlefield are incapable of distinguishing civilian and non-human life from military personnel); oppression of human life through support of totalitarian governments which cooperate with us economically (Angola, South Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines); and exploitation of foreign natural resources for a relatively small domestic population. In the context of such moral bankruptcy the urgency of awareness becomes an ethical imperative; keeping informed becomes the only option for the Christian, the necessary base for significant action.

Excellent resources for keeping informed are increasingly available. We highly recommend the following books, groups and publications as continually updated, thorough analyses of the United States military global expansion.

BOOKS

1. War without End: American Planning For Next Vietnams (Vintage Books, Random House, Inc., New York) by Michael T. Klare is an in examination of U.S. military strategy toward the Third World. Counterinsurgency as a worldwide military strategy is accurately and effectively placed in the context of “an American drive to secure control over the economic resources of the non-Communist world.” An excellent research guide and research bibliography are also included.

2. Roots of War (in hardback—Antheneum, New York; and soon in paperback—Penguin, Baltimore) by Richard J. Barnet attempts to go beyond Vietnam to discover the roots of war and to trace those roots through various elements of American society—the state, the economy, the political process and the public. He argues that American “foreign policy is more an expression of our own society than a programmed response to what other nations do” and that the American capitalistic necessity of expansion is the key to that foreign policy.

3. The Simple Art of Murder (NARMIC, 112 S. 16th St., Philadelphia, Pa.) details the technological weaponry of the electronic battlefield—their purposes and their developers. One chapter is devoted to the weapons of the future—ones which promise to make the electronic battlefield of Vietnam look like a playpen.

GROUPS AND PUBLICATIONS

1. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, (9 Sutter St., San Francisco, California 94104) publishes the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and other Asian studies.

2. The African Research Group (P.O. Box 213, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138) publishes a series of research studies on Western colonialism in contemporary Africa.

3. The North American Congress On Latin America (NALCA, Box 226, Berkeley, California 94701) publishes the NACLA Newsletter and studies on U.S. imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere.

4. The National Action-Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC, 160 N. 15^th St. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102) publishes research studies, popular handbooks on the military and organizing literature on antimilitaristic activities.

5. Pacific Studies Center (1963 University Avenue, East Palo Alto, California 94303) publishes the Pacific Research and World Empire Telegram and other studies on imperialism in the Pacific Basin area.

6. The Indochina Resource Center (1322 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036) publishes updated information on American presence in Indochina. This is especially important as explicit intervention decreases and hidden involvement increases in the post-war period.

Joe Roos was an associate editor of the Post American when this article appeared.