[applause] good morning everyone. I would like to welcome you to the National Defense university. I was a senior in high school when nixon did the great linebacker bombing offensive of christmas 1972. Not much better, only slightly. Today i want to talk with you guys about the air wars in vietnam. Given that i was not there, most of you guys were, if i am wrong, please shout out a correction. We have the air boards on vietnam because it is plural. There is no single airport in southeast asia. There are a multiplicity of air wars, disorganized, uncoordinated, not related to one another. No one single guy in charge. Of course, that is part of the problem. What im going to do is talk about the various air wars that existed there. , 8the way, all of them million tons of bombs in southeast asia. That is roughly five times the amount of bombs dropped by all allied air forces in world war ii. Im going to speak mostly about the air war over the north. The reason im going to do that is because that was the air war that the air force, the navy, and the president of the United States emphasized the most. First im going to take a look at the end country air wars, those fought inside the border of south vietnam. You have no less than 6 simultaneous air wars going on inside the border of south vietnam. First of all, the air war conducted all over the south. That is the largest air war conducted by United States army. Is a vast leage of helicopters. 000 helicopters will serve in the south. 5000 of them will be shut down. 2,200 air crew members that were pilots will be killed. War extends for the entire vietnam conflict. You have the marine air war, conducted primarily here, south of the demilitarized zone. There you have marine helicopters and also fixed wing aircraft. The third air war over the south the navys air war, conducted dixiearrier stationa n and station in the South China Sea and also in the gulf of tonkin. A6s,ve your a4s, primarily fixed wing aircraft conducting that operation. In addition you have your air forces fighter war over the south, controlled by air force headquarters in saigon. Compass it air compass it composite air forces in thailand as well. Werear, f4s,g that f100s, f5s, that sort of thing. That is not to be confused with the air force bomber war over the south. That is conducted by air force thailand and also in anderson air base, guam. Where they will flight 12 hour intermission consisting of 2000 miles. Those bombers will participate in a massive air campaign known as arlight over the south arclight over the south, dropping quite a number of bombs. They will be controlled by, because they are part of the nuclear triad, the joint chiefs of staff out of air force base in omaha, nebraska. Beimately control will transferred to a civic command. Then finally it will be transferred to the military consistent assistance commander, your army 4 star general in vietnam, general westmoreland. Note they are never given control to the air force commander who would desperately like to have the b52s so that he could coordinate what is done with the fighters and bombers together. No unity in command for the air force. And last, and perhaps least, you Vietnamese Air force flying throughout the south. Those 6 air wars will drop 4 millions tons of bombs on the country of our ally. Way to win the best socalled hearts and minds. That is a quick overview of the incountry air war over the south. What about the outcountry air war, those outside the borders of vietnam . Laos, cambodia, and the north . Laos is the first air war that begins for the u. S. In combat operations. Lyndon johnson authorizes the bombing of laos in 1964 in operation barrel roll. Laos forces near the northeast. In the spring of 1965, you have Operation Steel tiger attacking the highways and byways of the ho chi minh trail. You have roughly 80,000 north the enemys troops along these highways. They will be bringing equipment down from North Vietnam to laos, to the south. They will be under heavy attack. Have Operation Commando hunt. Steel tiger and therell barrel roll will go away under the next and administration. Tons of bombs dropped on the ho chi minh trail. All total, 3 millions tons of bombs dropped. You have as well the bombing of cambodia. This is a secret air war from 1969 to 1970, where we will drop, in comparative terms, a patients of a pittance of bombs, under 26,000 bombs. That would be on 126,000 bombs. The operation is codenamed menu and it has four facet. Andkfast, lunch, dinner, snack. Nixon keeps the bombing secret because technically laos is a mutual nation is a neutral nation. Nixon does not want to announce he is bombing these areas because he has just been elected president as a peace candidate, and here is he expanding the war. Two sets of books are kept on the bombing of cambodia. Last but not least is the air war against North Vietnam. That is conducted by Navy Fighters stationed here in the tonkin gulf. Air force fighters largely from thailand based in the south and also a small number of air force b52s. Lyndon johnsons air war against the north is named operation Rolling Thunder. Where does that come from . You guys have probably some the sung the hymn, how great thou art. The idea that the thunder will ultimately roll from the dnc north until it threatens the cities of hanoi and others. Richard nixons campaigned against the north is codenamed linebacker. Why . Well, nixon loved football, he played in college. Linebacker is a response to the North Vietnamese easter offensive in march 1972. What is the key player on a Football Team that will play defense . Nixon says it is the linebacker. So his operations are going to be called linebacker 1 and 2. It all takes place in 1972. Million bombs dropped on North Vietnam to the course of 19651972. Because so much has been made about the ability of the air war to win the war, im going to focus the remainder of my remarks on that aspect of the conflict. Thesisgive you my briefly, which is in three parts. Here is the first. Bombing is not a good idea in all types of war. Duh. A water is wet. Strategic bombing in a conflict like vietnam is likely to hurt the nation doing the bombing more than it hurts the enemy. I will go further than that. In the vietnam conflict, especially operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing there actually helps the enemy while it hurts us. How could that be . Well, ho chi minh knows we have strict political restrictions, rules of engagement. We are not going to kill many people with the bombing because its so tightly constrained. Yet on occasion we do kill p eople. Look, the americans are trying to kill you and bolster Popular Support for the North Vietnam effort. Hoause we are bombing, uncle can go to china and say im being bombed by the americans. He can go to moscow and say the same thing, and he will play off the chinese against the russians to get Additional Support for his war effort. 19651968, theom gdp of North Vietnam increases each year of operation Rolling Thunder. We bombed them, and the gdp goes up. 1966, and study in d one dollars cause worth of damage to vietnam cost american taxpayer nearly nine dollars. Not exactly costeffective. That 3. 5 year air campaign resulted in the shoot down of 912 navy and fixed wing the corresponding loss of air crews on most occasions. Not exactly a costeffective air campaign. What was intended. The guys at the top, Lyndon Johnson and his key advisers. You have to ask what was the fundamental premise of operation Rolling Thunder . This is johnson during one of his famous tuesday lunch sessions. Most of thee decisionmaking was made for operation Rolling Thunder. Mcnamara,ean rusk, rostow. Walt until 1967 you have no regular at theseattendee tuesday lunches. Then the chairman of the joint chiefs started attending. Until then it was total civilian control determining where were going to bomb and how effective it is going to be. The fundamental premise that that the have is primary enemy in the south indigenous guerrillas cannot andt without support direction from the North Vietnamese. These guys are not stupid. Army of a communist 300,000 men. 50,000 are nva and the remainder of the vietcong. S field johnson will achieve his desired political objective of an independent stable noncommunist south vietnam. Bombing and its cheap. Risk a greato number of american men. Spigot. Can be like a or tightknitse it depending on the reaction of the american public. It will tak take away from the Great Society programs that Lyndon Johnson supports. What about the soviets . Are abouts like they to intervene, you can stop the bombing. You can control it. The fundamental premise that these guys had regarding isration Rolling Thunder fundamentally flawed. Here is the reason why. And several hundred thousand of his friends. One day a month. I talked my students at the National War College and they say we have seen rambo and chuck norris and platoon. They fought all the time in hollywood. Actuality, onen day a month. If you take every american combat patrol that go out on socalled search and destroy missions during the two peak , 1967 and 1968, how many made contact with the enemy . 1 . If you add in the numbers of our many . Mese allies, how 1 10 of 1 . They control the vertical and the horizontal. They fight when they think they can achieve success and they get away when they can get away. Years of the greatest american losses in the war. In 1967 we lose 10,000 men. In 1968 we lose 15,000 men. Die from boobytraps and minds. Es. Has a horribly familiar ring to it. South need 34the tons of supply a day. That doesnt count food because they are getting food from inside the south. Mostly ammunition and medicine. 34 tons a day. How much would that be . If you take seven to a half ton you could get 35 tons. I dont care how much bombing you do with North Vietnam. You can do what Ronald Reagan 1966,e wants to do in vomit into a large parking lot. You can do that. But you cannot stop seven truckloads of supplies from getting in on a daily basis. Laoswill come in through or cambodia or boats coming off the coast. Vietnam did not need the support provided by the North Vietnamese. I would also say they did not need the direction provided by the north. Why do most of the economy fight . Despise the regime in saigon. Ky, all paragons of virtue right . Completely out of touch with the populace. And they are catholic in a primarily buddhist country. They fight is they cannot tolerate the saigon regime. You may be wondering why do we americans support such a regime. They are not communist. They are a lot of bad things but they are not communist. Evil wem is the great perceive at that point in time. If you were to get one book from the vc perspective on the war, get a viacom memoir. Etcong memoir. Was thevation he had occupation of the country by the United States and the corrupt saigon regime. They tried to reeducate the viacom. Nva. D no love lost for the once they take over in 1975, they will go to reeducation camps. The bombing in Rolling Thunder did not suit the character of the war that was then occurring. Heres the second part. Evaluating Rolling Thunder. If Lyndon Johnsons political controls on the bombing had been removed your american air commanders would have done it the same way. Exception. Y they wouldve done it in six weeks instead of three and a half years. Difference. Made no a great constraint on the bombing that america does in vietnam is air force doctrine. If you destroy the Industrial Centers of an enemy, you will achieve victory. Force generalir whats lemay when he wrote we should do is bomb North Vietnam into the stone age. Not that lemay was one to shy from city bombing. Away the Technological Capabilities of the north had to wage modern war and we will prevail. Lemay is not stupid and neither are americas clinical leaders. Political leaders. North vietnam is a ready a few breaks away from being in the stone age. It gets most of its hardware from the soviet union. Factory, onecement steel mill and seven electrical power plants. The american mentality is they dont want to lose this nascent industrial capability that they have. So we can hold hostage. We can threaten it. We can make uncle ho back down. And missileers force had just made the soviet in octoberd down 1962 during the cuban missile crisis. Youre talking about ho chi minh. The president himself referred y ass a ragged fourthrate pissant country. Extreme. In the if you look at the messages that theseent you will find air commanders say it is not exactly the way we would like to. O it with all this gradualism but given the enemy that we face in order to be enough to do the job. I had the honor of interviewing mid1980sack in the. The former secretary of state told me that the greatest mistake he ever made was underestimating the tenacity of the North Vietnamese and the vietcong. This attitude of the commanders had goes away quickly. Of 1965 they are pushing hard for attacks on transportation, oil, industry. We end up destroying all of that. There is no victory. What do your air commanders do . They come up with a very arbitrary way to determine the success of the air war over the north. Is this. Count. The number flown on a daily basis over North Vietnam. In the spring of 1966 the air force and the navy get together and they divide the airspace into seven bombing zones known as route packs. Here they are laid out. The navy gets for. Ur. The air force get the remainder. The navy gets the big city of haiphong and the air force gets the big city of hanoi. So what happens is you get a competition that develops between the navy and the air force to determine who can fly the most sorties over North Vietnam on a given day. Attend his daily standup briefing in the morning, you would ask to see two slides that showed flying activity from the previous day. Titled s slide was orties by the navy and the other was sorties by the air force. The second one didnt have a higher total than the first one, heads rolled. Heres a bridge that we tried to bomb. 700 missions against this bridge. Never put it down. Me that he hadld he had theular day mission of attacking that bridge. He looks under the wings. He goes to his crew chief and says you forgot to put bombs on my airplane. The crew chief looks at his clipboard and says we are having bombs for your aircraft. Are havingays we bombs. The pilot is running in the tower. He says what is my mission for today . Are you aware that there are no bombs on my aircraft . He looks at him and says yes. What i supposed to do . Said,ked at me and them. Hfe i fired my 20 millimeter cannon all up and down the expanse of the bridge. It was a firing a bb gun at a wrought iron fence. Navy sortie total went up by one that day. Their are three great controls you have on air campaign. One of them is operational. An ami defenses that sort of thing. Political controls and goodness knows that Rolling Thunder had those. But you can have military controls as well. Co can of the three wreck an air campaign. 1972. S air war in i was a cadet at the air force academy and i was told that if we had done it the way nixon did b52s we couldve in 1972. Doubt on thi thing they were pilots, they know. It made sense to me. Then i got in and started doing research. Actually 11 days of next ands bombing. Nixons bombing. Linebacker one actually went about six months. It is six months worth of bombing, not just 11 days. I will say this. The targets hit during the linebacker campaigns were almost exactly the same ones hit during operation Rolling Thunder. If i had done as soon as i became president we wouldve ended the war then. He believed that as well. Oft is not true because three factors. Things that were present in 1972 that were not in 1965. The character of the war. 1968 you have the tet offensive. The North Vietnamese rise up and they fight a quick conventional war trying to take control of the saigon government. We annihilate them. 1968, that the economy is pretty vietcong is pretty much eliminated. Until 1972 toes come back and fight again. Assault, conventional 120,000 men with more than 200 tanks and huge 130 millimeter artillery. It is like the german blitzkrieg of world war ii both no air support. They now need fast logistical resupply. You cannot refuel a fleet of bottles oning water bicycles coming down the ho chi minh trail. That is not going to work. Ou need trucks and trains those make wonderful targets for air power. As well as the bridges they must go across. Now they have precision guided munitions. In the first week of linebacker ,ne we will drop the bridge down it goes. It is a very different character of war in 1972 than it had been in the time of Rolling Thunder. A second factor. Diplomacy. Nobody else could have gone to china. Nobody is going to accuse him of loving communism. Nixon watches what the chinese and russians are doing. In 1969 they wage a savage border war along the front in mongolia. By 1971 they have one million nukes staringd by each other down. Nixon says i think i can take advantage of this situation. In february 1972 he goes to beijing. In may 1972 he goes to moscow. He gives china the promise of diplomatic recognition. At that time china is not even part of the u. N. The russiansgives the promise of american brain. The russians had a disastrous harvest. And he signs the strategic arms limitation treaty. The price for doing this. Vietnam. Nd in he gets that from both the chinese and the soviets. What is Richard Nixon fighting for . Lyndon johnson fort for a stable noncommunist south vietnam. Nexen is fighting for what he calls peace with honor. A euphemism for america getting the heck out of vietnam with its pows and not having the south all in the immediate aftermath. In nixons own words, we were fighting for a decent interval percent vietnam. Ist political objective infinitely easier to achieve with any form of military power and what Lyndon Johnson was after. Force willstates air focus on those 11 days at the end of the war and say hey the North Vietnamese signed the peace accord less than a month later. Vindicated what our doctrine said. Advancementtinued of precision guided munitions, now the new Strategic Bomber in the form of a drone. Not only have air force officers have thehis but so too last four president s of the United States including the current one. That is an argument for a different day. What did air power in vietnam show . You have got to be able to determine the kind of war the enemy is fighting. The nature of the enemy. Youve got to know the nature of the combat environment. The nature ofknow the political objectives and whether airpower will match up with that. Those conditions rarely occurred in vietnam. [applause] [applause] monday on cspans landmark cases. We will look at the case on one of the most divisive issues to come before the supreme court, abortion. In versus wade was decided january 1973. It is a case that is controversial and is constantly under scrutiny. There is a question whether it ever will cease to be under scrutiny. Wanting to terminate an unwanted , Norma Mccorvey agreed to be the plaintiff in 1970 case. Anonymous,she remain the lawsuit listed her as jane roe. The defendant was Dallas CountyDistrict Attorney henry wade. The pregnant woman had gone to several physicians seeking an abortion. She was refused care because of the texas law. She filed suit on behalf of herself and all those women who have in the past as at the present time would seek termination of a pregnancy. We would discuss the court withion and its impact melissaorsythe and murray. That is live monday night at 9 00 eastern time. Order your copy of the landmark cases companion book. Next week is authors week on the washington journal. A featured Nonfiction Author each day. Smith, former Missouri State senator. John whitehead, author of battlefield america, the war on the american people. On is the guest on wednesday, author of how the , exclusion ands exploitation and the threat to democracy. , to talk about , the minorityics party in the house of representatives. , discusses his book last act, the final years and emerging legacy of Ronald Reagan. Be sure to watch washington up next on American History tv. Author and historian shauna debine discusses her book, learning from the wounded the civil war and the rise of american medical science. She argues that medicine in the United States wasnt a kuwaited and unprepared for the civil war but during the war developed new practices and standards for the care of wounded and coping with diseases. This event is about 35 minutes. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] on behalf of the 2013 Tom Watson Brown committee and the ex imself, thad brown officio, we are pleaseded to report that out of 60 books submitted this year, no