<text id=00he1800><title>Retaliation And Rolling Thunder: Introduction</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Retaliation And Rolling Thunder: Introduction</hdr><body>
<p>"Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token US armed forces in Indochina would be a serious diversion of limited US capabilities. The principal sources of Viet Minh military supply lie outside Indochina."
</p>
<p>Those two sentences, part of a 1954 study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accurately summarized the war in Vietnam between the French and the Viet Minh. As it was true in 1954, so was it true later. In fact, the truth of those two sentences is so basic, and the implications of ignoring that truth so serious, that one wonders, at this time, how and why the United States' involvement in the war ever came about.
</p>
<p>It's glib to say that President John F. Kennedy's Camelot and Premier Nikita Khrushchev's Communism couldn't co-exist, but there is truth in that statement. Under Kennedy, the first escalation of effort occurred, and the basic policies of his administration were inherited and expanded upon by the succession of later Presidents. But predecessor administrations were not blameless. Truman's open support of the French position determined the course of subsequent American policy, and Eisenhower's support of the Diem administration while trying to hurt Ho Chi Minh's government were initial steps on the long road that Kennedy followed and signposted for his successors.
</p>
<p>For the professional soldiers, sailors and airmen called upon to manage the war, it was to be a continuing frustration. There was no defined objective for the US involvement. There were rules of engagement that severely restricted operations. There were directives, orders, teletypes and visitors from Washington, all taking precedence over the usual prerogatives of a field commander to run the war from the scene of the action.
</p>
<p>With no goal, and with no way of measuring the progress toward a goal, it is hardly any wonder that the war degenerated into a conflict whose purpose seemed to be the production of favorable, cost-effective statistics: so many dead Viet Cong in the South, so many bridges destroyed in the North, so many trucks left burning on the Ho Chi Minh trail, so many pounds of rice and rounds of ammunition captured in bivouac areas overrun by so many US troops.
</p>
<p>There was another basic truth about the war in Vietnam that was never broadly recognized or understood, and it needs to be stated here: ideology cannot be destroyed by killing its adherents.
