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On Yankee Station by John Nichols & Barrett Tillman Naval Air war Vietnam SoftCo
On Yankee Station by John B Nichols and Barrett Tillman
THe Naval air war over Vietnam
Soft Cover
179 pages
Copyright 1987 First Cluejacket printing
CONTENTS
Forewordxi
Introduction xv
1 Background to Doctrine1
2 Rules of Engagement15
3 Morale: The Only War We Had33
4 The Surface Threat: AAA and SAMs49
5 The Airborne Threat: MiGs67
6 ECM: The Electron War87
7 Strike Warfare, CV Style99
8 Pilot Down: Search and Rescue, Escape and Evasion117
9 What If?131
10 Recommendations139
Appendix A Vietnam Air War Chronology151
Appendix B Combat Sorties and Aircraft Losses 163
Appendix C Overall Air-to-Air Combat Results 167
Appendix D Vietnam Carrier Deployments171
Notes173
Index177
FOREWORD
When they wrote this book in the 1980s, John Nichols and Barrett Tillman sought to record some of the valuable lessons and insights from the naval air war over Vietnam as aids to the institutional memory of the United States Navy. They managed the task so well that the Naval Institute is publishing a new edition of this classic for a new generation of naval aviation professionals. And for the fossils who missed this book the first time around.
As I reread this book preparatory to writing this foreword, I was amazed at how much the U.S. Navy has changed in the quarter-century that has passed since the fall of Saigon. The Navy is essentially half the size it was then, 314 ships and shrinking. Aircraft carriers no longer have long-range, all-weather attack capability. With the retirement of the ES-3 in 1999, the air wings lost their only airborne electronic surveillance capability. In-flight refueling is limited to the capabilities of the S-3s, due to retire in 2008. In the 1991 Gulf War Air Force tanker support was required to give carrier bombers the range to be effective, an ominous peek at the future, one suspects.
Without the ability to operate independently and project power inland, the aircraft carrier will become as obsolete as the Dreadnought.
And that's okay, because the world has changed so much that we probably won't need naval aviation ever again. After all, since communism collapsed in the Soviet Union in 1991 the former soviet republics have become model democracies prospering under the rule of law. I have no doubt that in the new millennium religious fanatics, political terrorists, rogue third-world dictators and narco-criminals will get real jobs and shop at Wal-Mart. A growing communist China and a nuclear India will never be threats to world peace. The two Koreas will kiss and make up. The Palestinians and Israelis will bury the hatchet and live happily ever after. Peace will guide the planet, love will find a way.
The length and scope of the Vietnam War made it a national disaster. The stupendous casualty lists made it a national tragedy. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara were pretty much run-of-the-mill incompetents, the kind that float to the top in peacetime political ponds. Johnson was a backslapping cloakroom politician who had spent his life bringing home the bacon for his constituentsMcNamara was an automobile industry executive. Neither was qualified to run a difficult war, and neither was willing to allow military professionals the discretion to make military decisions. Indeed, in the four shooting scrapes since Vietnam, only in the 1991 Gulf War were politicians willing to allow the military to make war in a way that minimized the loss of American life and maximized America's military advantage, and even then the politicians were afraid to allow the total military defeat of Iraq. Rules of engagement have become endemic.
This is not the forum to analyze why this phenomena existed then or exists today, but it is a forum to comment upon it. In Vietnam the political leadership adopted rules of engagement that ensured that America could not win the war. Even Secretary McNamara realized this fact as he repeatedly rejected the advice of the military leadership. On one occasion he testified to a Senate committee that "total bombing would violate America's limited aims in the war."
Target lists were micromanaged by defense department civilians and bloated staffs, whole areas of the enemy state were off-limits for American airpower, entire classes of strategic and tactical targets were not to be touched, repeated strikes at the same targets were not authorized, invasion of the north was out of the question, the harbors could not be mined, the airports could not be attacked, the list goes on and on.
The Stennis committee hit the nail on the head in its report of 31 August 1967, when it said, " ... we believe we also found the roots of the persistent deterioration of public confidence in our air power because the plain facts, as they unfolded in testimony, demonstrated clearly that civilian authority consistently overruled the unanimous recommendations of the military commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a systematic, timely and hard-hitting integrated air campaign against vital North Vietnam targets. Instead, for policy reasons, we have employed military aviation in a carefully controlled, restricted and graduated build-up of bombing pressure which discounted the professional judgment of our best military experts and substituted civilian judgment in the details of target selection and the timing of strikes. We shackled the true potential of air power and permitted the build-up of what has become the world's most formidable air defenses." And, incidentally, killed a lot of American airmen.
Under the leadership of Johnson and McNamara, the Vietnam experience became an insoluble, bloody conundrum. How does one fight hard enough to force the other side to bow to America's political will, but not hard enough to "win"? Is such a thing possible? Indeed, if war is the imposition of one nation's political will upon another by violent means, what in the world is a "limited aim"? In politics words are often used to create political dynamics, not describe objective reality. Politicians tend to forget that while political dynamics cause armed combatants to take the field, objective reality kills and maims them.
Students of military history know that wartime military leadership is an extraordinarily complex human endeavor. Military leaders at all levels owe a duty to their troops to use them wisely, to not squander their lives. Leaders at all levels owe a duty to their superiors to obey orders, to allow their superiors to lead. In the American armed forces everyone obeys the nation's elected leaders, who answer to the voters for failure of success.
Advising obtuse elected officials and obeying unwise decisions is a thankless, difficult duty, and occasionally leads to tragic, incomprehensible results. That certainly happened in Vietnam, where a great many things went horribly wrong. The problem was not the patriotism and valor of the men who fought; they were human material as good as any generation that ever wore an American uniform. The problem was the way those men were employed.
As you read this book, reflect on the fact that not a single flag officer who served during the Vietnam era ever resigned in protest of military policies that the senior admirals and generals knew could lead only to defeat, that they knew would squander lives and treasure entrusted to them for no just purpose. They were sent on fools' errands, and they went willingly. The uniformed bureaucrats explained, they temporized, they apologized, they blamed the politicians and the system, they ordered men to futile deaths, and they never resigned. Not a single one.
Perhaps I am a cynic, but I have seen enough of politics to expect no great things from politicians. I expect more from senior military leaders. We didn't get more in Vietnam, and that, to my mind, was the greatest tragedy of all.
Stephen Coonts
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