Technically a Technowar: The Limited Importance of the Technowar Strategy in Tactical Operations During the Vietnam War
An Analysis of The 'Technowar' Strategy in Vietnam
The following is an essay I wrote for a class on Military History I took at Duke University in 2019.
Technically a Technowar: The Limited Importance of the Technowar Strategy in Tactical Operations During the Vietnam War
The Vietnam war is perhaps the most relevant example of the concept of a limited modern war; here the U.S. brought immense organizational, tactical, and most importantly, technological superiority to bear against an enemy widely regarded as inferior in each of these realms. The term “technowar” was thus coined, taken to mean a limited war of attrition based on one’s technological superiority over their enemy (Casey). Whether or not the war in Vietnam can truly be classified as a technowar is a vast and complex question that will not be discussed in this work; rather, this paper will operate off of William Gibson’s claim in his work The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam that the war in Vietnam was in fact a technowar in order to better examine the effects of this type of warfare on the people fighting it. To do so, Michael Herr’s account of the war in his book Dispatches will be utilized to provide first hand accounts from United States service members that demonstrate the effect of the strategy of technowar on these people. According to the reactions of U.S. service members to the vulnerability of U.S. weapons systems, to the lack of tactical effectiveness of these same weapons systems, and to the high number of casualties experienced by a lot of units, the on-the ground impact of the ‘technowar’ strategy was minimal.
Herr describes two primary technological advantages, air power and base superiority, that the United States enjoyed over its Vietnamese enemies. However, these two major advancements are described throughout the work as being extremely vulnerable, evidenced by the fear expressed by many of the men Herr spent time and spoke with throughout the work.
If only one technological innovation were to be associated with the Vietnam era, it would likely be the helicopter; it was at once a new and improved method of troop transport, medevac, and resupply that greatly enhanced the mobility and lethality of troops. Despite its maneuverability, the helicopter remained extremely vulnerable to various types of enemy fires. Of approximately 11,846 helicopters that served in the Vietnam War, about half (5,067) of them were lost (Roush). Herr backs up this statistic with real world evidence: after a campaign in the A Shau Valley, the command was forced to admit that a lot of helicopters had been shot down, but “this was spoken of as an expensive equipment loss”, in keeping with the technowar strategy of technological measures of evaluation of a conflict (Herr 191-192).
However, these statistics had significantly more meaning to the troops (and correspondents) riding in these choppers. Herr himself had a few close calls; once when riding in a chopper, his bird sustained a hit but managed to stay in the air long enough to make it back. Unfortunately, on the way he “passed over three ships shot down close together, two of them completely smashed and the third almost intact, surrounded by the bodies of the crew and the brigade commander” (Herr 256). Incidents like this were merely just another statistic to proponents of the technowar strategy, but to people like Herr it felt as though “choppers fell out of the sky like fat poisoned bird a hundred times a day” (Herr 14). Herr describes the feeling of traveling in a chopper as awful, saying that “It was painful enough just flying “safe” hops between firebases and lz’s; if you were ever on a helicopter that had been hit by ground fire your deep, perpetual chopper anxiety was guaranteed” (Herr 14-15). It is not unreasonable to assume that the complicated strategy of technowar was of little comfort to these men who thought that every time they got on a helicopter that they “must be out of [their] fucking mind[s]” (Herr 14).
A second failure of the trickle down of the technowar strategy was the ineffectiveness of various weapons systems against the Viet Cong. A technowar strategy promises victory to the technologically superior, a promise that was repeatedly broken to the grunts on the ground in Vietnam. This was often a tactical failure; Herr describes one particular example where a North Vietnamese Army sniper nicknamed with the racist name “Luke the Gook” was shooting at Marines in Khe Sanh from a spider hole, and was then fired upon with mortars, recoilless rifles, rockets from gunships, and even napalm, which “galvanized [the ground around the spider hole] clean of every living thing”, yet still the sniper survived and continued to shoot (Herr 125). A similar situation played out again and again throughout the war; Herr gives another example of an area of land that received 120,000,000 pounds of explosives from B-52s over a course of three weeks that soon after was repopulated with crews of North Vietnamese gunners (Herr 146)..
The ineffectiveness of certain military technologies was not only a tactical liability, but also could affect entire theaters. Herr offers a particularly poignant example of this phenomenon on an operational scale: at Khe Sanh, the Marines defending the base had to survive with only minimal air support, as the monsoon season restricted American air support (Herr 100). For as long as this weather lasted, the vast firepower capabilities of U.S. air forces could not be brought to bear against the enemy, effectively forcing the ground troops to fend for themselves. Too often, the amorphous, asymmetrical style of guerrilla warfare employed by the Vietnamese enabled its soldiers to escape even the most devastating of air and ground attacks by U.S. forces. Against this, the technowar strategy had no answer, and grunts on the ground were forced to fight the Vietnamese on their terms.
So how exactly did this strategy of technowar play out? Having described some of the limitations of the technological advantages possessed by the United States, it would be remiss to omit the total number of casualties for each side: 58,220 fatal casualties for the Americans and around 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fatal casualties (“Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics”; Embassy Staff). In other words, it would seem that despite some of the impediments imposed on U.S. forces by their technology, the technowar goal of attrition was reached; almost nineteen North Vietnamese or Viet Cong troops died for every one U.S. service member killed. However, this reality was again not reflected on the ground. General statistics listing the numbers of dead and wounded are woefully insignificant to men like the Marines of the 1-9, who lost an entire platoon to an ambush in one night (Herr 121). According to Herr, Marines (for various reasons) suffered some of the heaviest casualties of the war; a common sentiment among troops was that “the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans” (Herr 101). But the Marines did not hold a monopoly on staggering losses of life; during the battle for the city of Hue the First Cavalry Division and 101st Airborne Division lost the same number of men in five days that the Marines had lost in three weeks of combat (Herr 82).
By and large, Herr depicts U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam as a force of elite and highly capable warriors. However, even they were not always protected by the technowar strategy. There was an especially well fortified Special Forces A camp close to the base of Khe Sanh that one night was brutally overrun by North Vietnamese forces using a combination of light tanks, satchel charges, bangalore torpedoes, tear gas, and even napalm. The results were disastrous: of the 24 Americans and around 400 Vietnamese troops guarding the base, 10-15 Americans and up to 300 Vietnamese forces were killed. Herr later heard that some of the survivors of this massacre had gone insane.
Whether elite Special Forces or regular Marine grunts, no unit was ever truly safe and protected from the enemy. The war of attrition so eagerly professed by the technowar quite likely would have seemed to those U.S. forces on the ground as a war of their own attrition, rather than the enemies. The reactions of these troops to such calamities, to combat, or even to being in theater itself are widely known. Some went mad, such as the Marine who booby-trapped a latrine in his own compound with a grenade, killing one of his fellow servicemen (Herr 58). Such was almost to be expected, Herr explains: “everyone knew grunts who’d gone crazy in the middle of a firefight...on patrol...back at camp...on R&R...during their first month home. Going crazy was built into the tour” (Herr 58). Many used drugs to numb themselves, like the Lurp who took pills by the fistful to be able to do his job, or the soldiers and correspondents like Michael Herr who “always went to sleep stoned” (Herr 5, 33). Many turned to religion or inane superstition, such as the man who carried an oatmeal cookie from his wife throughout his tour as a good luck charm (Herr 56). And some even quit the war effort altogether: “A lot of people found the guts to just call it all off and refuse to ever go out anymore, they turned and submitted to the penalty end of the system or they just split” (Herr 66). For men bombing latrines or carrying around oatmeal cookies as good luck charms, the technological and theoretical superiority of their way of war likely meant little. If Herr’s account of soldiering is generalized across the U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam, it would appear that these men on the ground didn’t get the memo about their technowar strategy of warmaking; they were too busy trying simply to survive and deal with the horrors they encountered along the way.
Operating off of the claim that the Vietnam War was indeed a technowar, it is difficult to determine if this strategy was indeed successful in its implementation. However, thanks to the accounts of people like Michael Herr, it is possible to glean an insight into the actual effect of the technowar strategy on the people on the ground implementing it. It would not be unreasonable then, based on the aforementioned evidence as to the vulnerability of U.S. weapons systems such as the helicopter, the lack of effectiveness of weapons systems such as aerial firepower, and the reactions of men to the mass casualties suffered by a number of units, to assume that the U.S. strategy of technowar had quite a limited impact on these men. While on a strategic and perhaps operational level the strategy may have worked, it is quite clear that for many men fighting in the jungles of Vietnam that this strategy failed spectacularly and not uncommonly. At the end of the day, a number of Marines, Special Forces, soldiers, pilots, correspondents, and a host of others were forced to fight a traditional war and assume the risks (both mental and physical) that come with such a conflict.
Works Cited
Casey, Steven. “America's Love Affair With ‘Technowar.’” History News Network, hnn.us/article/154308.
Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
Herr, Michael. Dispatches. Pan Macmillan, 2015.
Roush, Gary. Helicopter Losses in the Vietnam War. Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, 2018, https://www.vhpa.org/heliloss.pdf.
Staff, Embassy, et al. “The Number of Vietnamese People Died in the Vietnam War.” Vietnam Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, 24 Apr. 2019, vietnamembassy-southafrica.org/the-number-of-vietnamese-people-died-in-the-vietnam-war/.
“Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics.” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.