Clausewitz and Summers on Vietnam:

A Contemporary Analysis of On Strategy

Captain Matthew Collins, USMC

“The purpose of this analysis was… to prepare today’s senior Army officers to meet the challenges that will face our country in the future.[1]”

 -  COL Harry Summers

 “To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.[2]"

- Hegel

On Strategy has been called “the most trenchant single postmortem to date of our defeat in Vietnam[3]”.  Since its publication in 1982, it has become one of the most influential analyses of the war in Vietnam and a primer of sorts for the formal study of strategy. It began as a study for the Army’s Command and General Staff College by then LtCol Harry Summers and remains on the US Marine Corps professional reading list.  The book bills itself as a critical Clausewitzian study of the conflict and has become a pedagogic tool for teaching the principles of war and introducing new students of strategy to Clausewitz.  But Clausewitz is an elusive ally whose ideas often cut both ways.  Some might say that the book was an exercise in quoting Clausewitz to make a Jomnian argument. In order to understand the strategic problems that led to the only clear cut defeat in American history, the question for the contemporary student of strategy  becomes, how faithful is On Strategy to Clausewitz’s ideas and, by extension, how relevant is On Strategy to today?

The Approach

On Strategy is loosely structured around the US Army’s Principles of War, a Jomnian expression of army doctrine. The first section, The Environment, deals with the underlying political situation that brought about and influenced the execution of the war. The second, the Engagement, deals with the militaries’ actual conduct of the war. This structure choice, while elegant, is troublesome.  In some ways, Summers invokes Clausewitz to back into a Jomnian argument. By structuring his arguments around the immutable principles of a field manual published in 1962 and the prevailing Cold War dogma with selected quotes from the most respected strategic thinker of the modern era, Summers’ analysis weds itself to doctrine of that day, without questioning the merits of that doctrine.  This reinforces both the potentially flawed doctrine of the day and an uncritical approach to the study of Clausewitz. The danger of this approach is that his argument then becomes pedagogic. As the book became more popular, it became a textbook for the study of strategy, reinforcing both that doctrine as well as Summers’ potentially flawed analysis of the war. By accepting the strategic situation of that day as a general truth and not a specific response to a discrete set of strategic circumstances, the danger becomes that the doctrine that failed becomes the doctrine that is followed later. The overall undercurrent of Summers’ argument is that the problem with the war was not that the principles were wrong , but that the principles were not followed. But for analysis to be critical, principles must flow from observations, not the other way around. That is the Hegelian ideal that Clausewitz was striving for.

Summers’ use of Clausewitz presents a different series of problems. As always, the danger of invoking Clausewitz in any analysis is the inherent nature of the dialectic approach. By presenting, at length, the thesis and antithesis of his argument, Clausewitz can be twisted to support any assertion the author chooses. As we shall see, the selective application of Clausewitz undercuts not only Summers’ ideas but muddles Clausewitz’s as well. 

The Environment

On Strategy begins with a discussion of the underlying political factors that created and complicated the war. This is Summers’ attempt to apply Clausewitz’s analytical framework to the Vietnam war. The three critical elements of this framework are the question of the Clausewitz’s “remarkable trinity,” “national will,” and the underlying primacy of the political element in war. He rightfully gives credit to the North Vietnamese government and army’s masterful understanding of the interaction of the people, the government and the army. Despite losing every major engagement with American forces and suffering horrendous loses, the North Vietnamese managed to maintain enough national will to continue the war. This could be attributed to harsh, repressive nature of the communist regime, but this is only part of the answer. The key to the North Vietnamese government’s ability to sustain the national will was its understanding of the situation and its ability to frame the justification for the war in its terms. They were the sole national independence movement and with the help of the US, they successfully portrayed the Americans as the latest colonial power kept that as the central theme of their political message. Their stated aims were reunification, self-determination, and the end of foreign influence and these aims were consistent from the first round of peace talks in 1965 until the US withdrawal in 1975. This clear-cut political message was in sharp contrast to the American justification.  The emergent, reluctant superpower attempted to justify the war in the context of the Cold War and the Domino Theory as well as falling back on Wilsonian ideas of self-determination. But this self-determination only applied to Catholic, Jeffersonian democrats, like the Diem regime. By the end of the war, neither the people of Vietnam nor America were convinced.

Summers spends the bulk of one chapter discussing the domestic political landscape as a source of friction in the war.  He introduces this chapter with a short introduction to Clausewitz’s concept of friction. This egregious example of quotation without context stretches Clausewitz’s semantic description of the battlefield into the world of domestic politics in a way the Prussian never intended. Domestic concerns, like those voiced by the anti-war movement and the press, have always affected the conduct of foreign policy, especially in democratic societies. Summers may rail against Johnson’s Great Society programs, but he never makes a convincing case that more money, troops or time would have had any demonstrable effect on the outcome of the war. As one contemporary author has asserted[4], Western thinker’s cultural acceptance of internal criticism, dissent and debate, have been a source of military strength more often than not.

Another domestic criticism of Summers levels against the Johnson administration is the question of the declaration of war. Summer’s fixation on the failure of the Johnson administration to seek a declaration of war confuses correlation with causality. Despite his idealistic musings, in a modern democracy, a declaration of war is just a piece of paper. It is one of several expressions of public will. Elections, media coverage and organized movements, like the anti-war movement, are also expressions of public will. A war declaration is also one formal expression of congressional will. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the defense budget are also expressions of congressional will. Public will drives public action, and congressional will drives congressional action. Ideally, the decision to go to war is made when the executive, the legislature and public are all in agreement.  The reality is that those bodies do not always act as a monolith. That is why the Roman Senate appointed their generals and left them to their wars, stepping in only when necessary. That is also why Clausewitz’s flexible analytical framework has been such a durable method of understanding the dynamics of these different actors. In any political system, the polity, government and military all represent different shades of the national will. How each individual system resolves those problems is a question left for political scientists. To invoke Clausewitz’s concept of friction in this circumstance does not do justice to the totality of the Prussian’s ideas.

Furthermore, the Johnson administration can hardly be faulted for its failure to mobilize the national will in Vietnam.[5] It is one thing to say that Johnson did a poor job convincing the public of the necessity of the war, but to say that the war was a poor decision is another thing entirely. Juxtaposing both ideas confuses two valid issues. A war declaration in 1965 would have done nothing to increase domestic support for the war and would have been irrelevant to the domestic debate about the war after the Tet offensive of 1968.

The totality of Summers’ arguments about the national will do little to contribute to our understanding of that or any war. By saying that war cannot be fought in cold blood, implies that America can fight only one kind of war, hemming in future leaders options in the foreign policy area. As we shall see, this lingering “all or nothing” mindset would have far reaching consequences in international relations.

The Engagement

Summers analysis of the military strategy in Vietnam is clearly the strongest part of his argument.  He rightfully points out how the US military was unable to translate it tactical victories into a strategic effect. The only questionable element of this section is his focus on the war as a conventional conflict and the North Vietnamese as a conventional military threat. The question of conventional war verses counterinsurgency deserves consideration. When Clausewitz wrote On War, he decided to frame the context of his study on war between nation-states.  His decision to avoid the topic from popular war or people’s war was probably because of the considerable semantic problems with defining its nature.  These semantic problems continue today as contemporary thinkers on the subject continue to change the terminology and grapple with proper doctrinal definitions.  The US Naval Academy’s current class on Low Intensity Conflict borrows from US Special Operations Command doctrinal definition of guerrilla warfare which is not the same as the US Military Academy’s Stability and Support Operations class.  Of course, both classes use the same textbook. It appears the academic world has made little progress in the formal study of war between anything but competing nation-states.

The question of the conventional or unconventional nature of the war is the central question in the analysis of the war. Summers’ main critic, Andrew Krepenivich, saw the war as a failure of the army to adapt to the unconventional situation it was presented with. Both authors point out the army’s institutional aversion to counter-insurgency. Summers dismisses the subject. “The Vietnam war was in the final analysis a conventional war best understood in terms of conventional military strategy[6]” The Kennedy administration’s focus on counter-insurgency was a distraction from the more important preparation and conduct of the conventional war. Krepenich notes how the army paid lip service to counter-insurgency and consistently focused on the quantifiable measures of military effectiveness; namely, body counts. The fault in Summers argument is only approaching the problem from the American perspective.  While the American war in Vietnam began in 1965, the Vietnamese war for national independence had been fought since the departure of the Japanese after World War II. The war ended in 1975, with North Vietnam launching a conventional invasion and tanks rolling through the streets of Saigon.  That North Vietnam was incapable of launching this invasion in 1965 does not prove that it was an entirely conventional war. Had the US been able to create an effective government in South Vietnam and the US military been able to create an effective military in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), in the sixties, as Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had tried to, the conventional war that North Vietnam won in early seventies would have ended differently. While it could be argued that the nation-building side of that argument might not be an appropriate mission for the US military, the preparation and conduct of war is its exclusive duty. After fifteen years of US military training, the failure of the ARVN to prevent those tanks from driving through Saigon cannot be blamed on anyone but the ARVN and the US military.

In the end, Clausewitz was correct.  War is a clash of wills. The communist regime of North Vietnam wanted the US out more than the US wanted to stay. The inability of half a million US troops with billions of dollars and ten years to alter that will shows the war was fundamentally a military failure. It could be argued that the political decision to enter the war was flawed or the political leaders of the day did not do enough to energize the national will, but neither is the purview of the military. The only national will the US military needed to concern itself with was that of the Vietnamese.

By criticizing the political decisions that brought America into the war, Summers’ polemics put a dangerous strain the smooth dynamic of civil-military relations that have lasted much the of American military experience. His conclusions and their pedagogic influence have the potential to hinder not only the teaching of doctrine and conduct of war, but also the formal study and semantic understanding of the nature of war. Summer’s ideal war is Clausewitz in style but Jomini in substance. War is fought by nation-states, with formal declarations of war, using immutable principles with no end save victory. While providing a clear pedagogic lesson, there is a danger that this ideal becomes a dogmatic prescription for how all wars should be fought, instead of a tool for understanding how one war was fought. Clausewitz’s ideal war is a study in semantics. It is a nuanced process for critical study. Critical analysis is a process and neither Clausewitz nor Jomini would ever consider their approaches to the formal study of war the last word on the subject. Despite what a legion of librarians and booksellers may think, Summers’ book is an analysis, not a history.

The Legacy

On Strategy continues to have an effect on American strategic thought. Summers went on to become a celebrated writer and the voice of the Vietnam generation. It was the field grade officers that came of age as company grade officers in Vietnam that led to the defense reforms of the late seventies and early eighties. The influence of the shared Vietnam experience can be seen in the creation of the Air-Land Doctrine as well as the creation of the all-volunteer force.  The book was a form of catharsis to many of those officers. It was a well reasoned and presented piece of history that presented the failure of the army in Vietnam in the context of bumbling politicians, a disloyal press and virulent anti-war movement all in terms of hallowed Jominian principles without any serious strategic soul searching or more rigorous analytical introspection. This allowed these officers to continue the established pattern of technocracy that has characterized the American professional military ethic throughout its history[7].

The clearest expressions of the influence of Vietnam and Summers’ outlook comes from his most distinguished college. Collin Powell, Summers’ classmate at Command and General Staff college, became the guiding force for what became known as the Weinberger doctrine. This doctrine and the Vietnam syndrome, as it became known, would shape the pattern of Cold War military interventions that would follow. America would avoid intervention in anything but clear, conventional conflicts like Panama, Grenada or Iraq. US participation in humanitarian interventions like the Lebanese or Somali civil war would be the exception and would be cut short after any significant action resulting in casualties. After the end of the Cold War, this mindset would linger, causing crippling indecision and risk aversion in Bosnia and reinforcing indifference in ethnic conflicts like Rwanda.   This is not to say that Summer’s ideas influenced the theory and practice of the Weinberger doctrine, only that the two ideas flowed from a common set of experiences. Summers was a soldier who taught soldiers, not a politician.

The Lessons

America is now engaged in three undeclared wars. The first, the Global War on Terror, has no nation-state or regime as its target. It has become a nebulous mix of security assistance to an odious jumble of nations and murky intelligence operations.  Some of these operations have resulted in detentions on questionable legal ground called renditions. In Yemen, the war has also resulted in at least one incident of the ultimate international relations taboo, assassination. The second war, against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, has settled into a long-term peacekeeping and nation building expedition with a hodgepodge of UN, NATO, and NGOs working with, or at least, adjacent to, a US-led coalition.  The third, in Iraq, has become one of the largest counter-insurgencies in American history, fought by a “Coalition of the Willing.” It would appear that the era of the declared war has come to an end.

All these wars have unique justifications.  The global war on terror has been largely an exercise of executive power, with funding and oversight provided by Congress.  There has been little public debate about its justification as much of its activities are benign military assistance missions. While there has been considerable public debate about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, this debate has yet to spill over into the methods with which we acquire those detainees.  While the CIA’s Vietnam era assassination programs like the Phoenix project led to public hearings, several executive orders and sweeping reforms of intelligence oversight and covert action laws, the assassination of a suspected Al Qaeda leader in Yemen was almost universally lauded by the American public and was a public relations coup for the CIA. In Afghanistan, Congress had the option of declaring war against the state of Afghanistan, had the US ever recognized the Taliban as its legitimate government, but that did not prevent them from authorizing and funding that war.  Indeed, the US was even able to convince its NATO allies to assist them, in an interpretation of the NATO treaty that its authors could never have predicted. The war in Iraq, while ostensibly an enforcement of a UN resolution over a decade old was also justified by a congressional resolution. As war on terror and the rise of globalization and the non-state actor in international affairs continues, our justifications for armed conflicts will continue to morph. In this context, On Strategy becomes a more dated and less relevant analysis.

Today, the idea of fighting a declared, morally unambiguous war against a clearly defined nation-state seems like a quaint notion of a bygone era. While we can draw lessons and parallels from the conflict, the pedagogic thrust of the book, following the clearly defined principles of war, detracts from critical study of Vietnam and the study of war in general. Clausewitz’s critical analytical framework remains the most relevant method of studying war, but On Strategy is a poor vessel for teaching it. As the world security situation become more complex, leaders will need the full gambit of critical analytical skills to understand it. We will need to be able to understand and fight our expeditions as well as our crusades. As with Plato’s allegory of the cave, only then, tracing the footsteps of Hegel and Clausewitz, can we understand the true form and shape of war and not just its shadows.

Captain Matthew Collins is an intelligence officer on the Joint Staff's Office of Iraq Analysis and a graduate student at American Military University. He served in MARCENT during Operation Iraqi Freedom and was an advisor to the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces during the Liberian civil war.

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