With all the renewed talk about the possible use of air power in Syria, it may be worthwhile to revisit some words of wisdom from Admiral Thomas Moorer:
The American experience in Vietnam was earmarked by a strategy of gradualism decided upon at the highest levels — committing our forces piecemeal with initial employment at low intensity and subsequently increasing the tempo in a slow and deliberate fashion. Under this strategy, bombing in the North was restricted as to type and location of targets and level of attacking forces. This gradual application of airpower, with frequent bombing halts over the course of time, was intended to give the enemy pause and motivate him into seeking a political settlement of the war. Instead, gradualism actually granted the enemy time to shore up his air defenses, disperse his military targets, and mobilize his labor force for logistical repair and movement. From a military point of view, gradualism violated the principles of mass and surprise which airpower has employed historically to attain its maximum effectiveness.
John McCain, of course, saw this firsthand, writing that “when President Johnson ordered an end to Rolling Thunder in 1968, the campaign was judged to have had no measurable impact on the enemy. Most of the pilots flying the missions believed that our targets were virtually worthless. We had long believed that our attacks, more often than not limited to trucks, trains, and barges, were not just failing to break the enemy’s resolve but actually having the opposite effect by boosting Vietnam’s confidence that it could withstand the full measure of American airpower. In all candor, we thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots who didn’t have the least notion of what it took to win the war. I found no evidence in postwar studies of the Johnson administration’s political and military decision-making during the war that caused me to revise that harsh judgment.”
Point being: If you want results, you have to hit hard.
When air power is used to its potential, it produces results. Nixon understood this. When the North Vietnamese tested him, he told Henry Kissinger, “We have the power to destroy [North Vietnam’s] war making capacity. The only question is whether we have the will to use that power. What distinguishes me from Johnson is that I have the will in spades.”
Events proved this.
“The most impossible sessions I had with Le Duc Tho were after they had, after the North Vietnamese had taken Quang Tri we had a meeting in May, 1972, which we had negotiated to arrange for months,” Kissinger recalled in 1982:
Then we, Nixon ordered the bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of the harbors. We resumed negotiations. Le Duc Tho was much easier to deal with and made many more concessions after that then he had made in the years before that. Similarly with the Christmas bombing, in the session before we broke up the talks he was impossible. At his absolute obnoxious worst. Then there was the Christmas bombing. When we met again they were the easiest negotiations [since October 8] when the first breakthrough came. That happens to be a fact.
The American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam saw the effect the “Christmas bombings” had on their communist captors. Former POW and Medal of Honor winner Jim Stockdale wrote:
The bombers kept coming, and we kept cheering. Guards who were normally enraged by loud talk, guards who normally thrust their bayoneted rifles through the bars and screamed at us if we dared shout during air raids, could be seen silently cowering in the lee of the prison walls, their faces ashen in the light reflected from the fiery skies above. … For the North Vietnamese to see that … was a message in itself — proof that all that separated Hanoi from doomsday was American forbearance, an American national order to keep the bombs out on the hard military targets. We prisoners knew this was the end of North Vietnamese resistance, and the North Vietnamese knew it, too.
Within weeks, the North Vietnamese had caved in to American demands for a peace settlement.
The Paris Peace Treaty fell apart only later, thanks to the leftist Democratic congress cutting off assistance to South Vietnam. And, as one North Vietnamese defector explained, “when Nixon stepped down because of Watergate we knew we would win.”