Korea, Vietnam, and the fallacy of rehearsal (Commies are always an appropriate subject on May Day):
In reading about the Korean War and the Vietnam/Second Indochina Wars, I've come up with a major problem in terms of identifying one as a rehearsal for the other. I've seen this thesis in the works of Max Hastings, Alexander Bevins, and other writers who claimed that in 1950-3 the USA encountered most of the same patterns that occurred in the Vietnam era, with much Orientalist pablum about how Asians rely solely on crude, merciless force and bowing to it.
This analysis doesn't convince me, though not for the reasons that would seem to be the case. First, in looking at Korea, the KPA attacked with T-34s, heavy artillery, and and all the requirements of a major, modern, conventional war. Kim Il Sung was soundly thrashed for this, too, and conducted this war in a very poor fashion. He repeatedly threw his men and armor into direct, frontal, headlong attacks that wound up annihilating the conventional power of the KPA at Pusan. That he won initial battles against the USA was due to very poor tactical handling thanks to MacArthur and the phenomenon of a bunch of Albert Sidney Johnston types who acted well below their actual responsibilities but got turned into major heroes for that stupidity. Korea in phase I is a classic example of how a relatively weaker force can defeat a relatively stronger one if that army, which always had mobility and firepower advantages, is used very poorly.
In Phase II, the KPA's conventional collapse leads to the expected result of a major US-UN advance.......and then with China building up, repeatedly warning about attacking if the UN advances to the Yalu and offering alternative proposals to stay out of the war, Dugout Doug advances to the Yalu, gets walloped badly due to another major tactical bungling and gets thrown past Seoul, which fell to its third army in less than a year. Ridgway employs major force for the first time in a way that actually works, and Korea settled into the later pattern of negotiation on the negotiating table and on the battlefield simultaneously. The Iran-Iraq type pattern of an underarmed force relying on manpower against a force far more reliant on firepower in primarily stagnant fighting that the stronger force is desperate to get out of characterized the rest of Korea.
The thing is Vietnam was a completely different animal. In that war the Viet Cong and NVA both fought what I call Marshal Tito War: they blended both regular and irregular warfare at various times. In direct contrast to the dismal records of Osan, Taegu, the smashing attack of Mao's armies in 1950 against the divided UN force, the US Army and allies actually did very well tactically. In fact there's a perfectly forthright argument that the USA was never defeated by the North Vietnamese regulars or Viet Cong irregulars in the entire course of the war, as the military cause of defeat was simpler than that: Hanoi had an irresistible logistical advantage of a twofold nature: 1) like the USSR in WWII all its tools of war came from outside North Vietnam. This meant the USA could never stop the flow of weaponry without risking a major war with the PRC or the USSR, thanks to Cold War America's idiotic misunderstanding of just how factionalized Communism really was, the USA was invariably likely to have done this in just such a way to get the USSR and PRC on the same side against them even as they fought about everything else. 2) The Ho Chih Minh trail and the other means the VC and NVA had of continuing to supply their troops were never effectively disrupted by the USA's tactical victories and strategic bombing campaigns. US successes, while invariably present at a tactical level never brought an unambiguous strategic success.
In Vietnam, however, the USA was fighting a force primarily (with the exception of Tet) reliant on the methods of irregular warfare, meaning its mastery of conventional war of armies methodology was of no real use or effect for it. Korea was a war of conventional armies, where the deciding element was that one relied on firepower the other for all its struggles in this regard never found a counter to. Vietnam was a case of being asked to accomplish the militarily impossible, defeating an unstoppable logistically speaking irregular war with the methods of a regular war, while the reliance on a local dictator doesn't really mean anything in terms of the actual triumph or failure of the US side. What was different in this regard in Korea was that Syngman Rhee was always taken seriously, if derisively, where the Saigon leadership never even got derision aimed at it, merely contempt, and was always treated as spectators to a US war with Vietnamese nationalist-communists on Vietnamese soil. Militarily speaking the ROK never did well against a serious Communist force so there wasn't anything to choose from in terms of ROK or ARVN in that sense in both wars. Thus it could be argued instead of being a rehearsal for Vietnam, Korea was its inversion: a conventional war of both the mobile and the trench variety, fought in a harsh, mountainous, while Vietnam was an irregular war fought in a harsh, jungle terrain. In Korea the US Army did badly at first and well later on when it didn't have to move very far or fight too far forward, in Vietnam fighting was never the problem, it was the non-fighting aspect of war that was the problem.
Your thoughts?
This analysis doesn't convince me, though not for the reasons that would seem to be the case. First, in looking at Korea, the KPA attacked with T-34s, heavy artillery, and and all the requirements of a major, modern, conventional war. Kim Il Sung was soundly thrashed for this, too, and conducted this war in a very poor fashion. He repeatedly threw his men and armor into direct, frontal, headlong attacks that wound up annihilating the conventional power of the KPA at Pusan. That he won initial battles against the USA was due to very poor tactical handling thanks to MacArthur and the phenomenon of a bunch of Albert Sidney Johnston types who acted well below their actual responsibilities but got turned into major heroes for that stupidity. Korea in phase I is a classic example of how a relatively weaker force can defeat a relatively stronger one if that army, which always had mobility and firepower advantages, is used very poorly.
In Phase II, the KPA's conventional collapse leads to the expected result of a major US-UN advance.......and then with China building up, repeatedly warning about attacking if the UN advances to the Yalu and offering alternative proposals to stay out of the war, Dugout Doug advances to the Yalu, gets walloped badly due to another major tactical bungling and gets thrown past Seoul, which fell to its third army in less than a year. Ridgway employs major force for the first time in a way that actually works, and Korea settled into the later pattern of negotiation on the negotiating table and on the battlefield simultaneously. The Iran-Iraq type pattern of an underarmed force relying on manpower against a force far more reliant on firepower in primarily stagnant fighting that the stronger force is desperate to get out of characterized the rest of Korea.
The thing is Vietnam was a completely different animal. In that war the Viet Cong and NVA both fought what I call Marshal Tito War: they blended both regular and irregular warfare at various times. In direct contrast to the dismal records of Osan, Taegu, the smashing attack of Mao's armies in 1950 against the divided UN force, the US Army and allies actually did very well tactically. In fact there's a perfectly forthright argument that the USA was never defeated by the North Vietnamese regulars or Viet Cong irregulars in the entire course of the war, as the military cause of defeat was simpler than that: Hanoi had an irresistible logistical advantage of a twofold nature: 1) like the USSR in WWII all its tools of war came from outside North Vietnam. This meant the USA could never stop the flow of weaponry without risking a major war with the PRC or the USSR, thanks to Cold War America's idiotic misunderstanding of just how factionalized Communism really was, the USA was invariably likely to have done this in just such a way to get the USSR and PRC on the same side against them even as they fought about everything else. 2) The Ho Chih Minh trail and the other means the VC and NVA had of continuing to supply their troops were never effectively disrupted by the USA's tactical victories and strategic bombing campaigns. US successes, while invariably present at a tactical level never brought an unambiguous strategic success.
In Vietnam, however, the USA was fighting a force primarily (with the exception of Tet) reliant on the methods of irregular warfare, meaning its mastery of conventional war of armies methodology was of no real use or effect for it. Korea was a war of conventional armies, where the deciding element was that one relied on firepower the other for all its struggles in this regard never found a counter to. Vietnam was a case of being asked to accomplish the militarily impossible, defeating an unstoppable logistically speaking irregular war with the methods of a regular war, while the reliance on a local dictator doesn't really mean anything in terms of the actual triumph or failure of the US side. What was different in this regard in Korea was that Syngman Rhee was always taken seriously, if derisively, where the Saigon leadership never even got derision aimed at it, merely contempt, and was always treated as spectators to a US war with Vietnamese nationalist-communists on Vietnamese soil. Militarily speaking the ROK never did well against a serious Communist force so there wasn't anything to choose from in terms of ROK or ARVN in that sense in both wars. Thus it could be argued instead of being a rehearsal for Vietnam, Korea was its inversion: a conventional war of both the mobile and the trench variety, fought in a harsh, mountainous, while Vietnam was an irregular war fought in a harsh, jungle terrain. In Korea the US Army did badly at first and well later on when it didn't have to move very far or fight too far forward, in Vietnam fighting was never the problem, it was the non-fighting aspect of war that was the problem.
Your thoughts?