Remembering LBJ’s Vietnam War Operation Rolling Thunder

The Costly Failure of Gradualist “Powderpuff” Air Warfare

American involvement in Vietnam remained largely advisory until late 1964. By June of that year, President Lyndon Johnson realized that North Vietnam was infiltrating regular army units into South Vietnam with five times the fire power of the South Vietnamese Army units.⁴⁵ Following attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in the Tonkin Gulf in August 1964, Johnson allowed U.S. Navy aircraft to retaliate against North Vietnamese patrol boat installations.

On October 30, 1964, a Viet Cong attack on Bien Hoa Air Base destroyed six U.S. B-57 bombers and killed five American servicemen. Perhaps because the attack occurred on the eve of the 1964 presidential election, Johnson decided against any retaliation. Aside from domestic political considerations, Johnson wanted to demonstrate restraint to our European allies and the Soviet Union and show his willingness to settle differences by negotiation. Johnson’s decision was against the strong advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the Ambassador to Saigon, retired general Maxwell Taylor, and Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command (CINPAC).

The JCS proposed a non-nuclear, twenty-four- to thirty-six-hour, intense B-52 and fighter-bomber attack on North Vietnam and major transportation targets in Laos. The North Vietnamese targets included all major fuel storage facilities and military airfields around Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong. In addition, the port of Haiphong was to be mined. This was to be followed immediately by strikes against industrial facilities and other airfields, military installations, and important transportation centers. Such an attack would have had a crippling effect on North Vietnam’s ability to wage a war against South Vietnam. Vetoing this JCS plan over their strong protest, Johnson established a pattern of ignoring experienced military advice.

At the time, North Vietnamese air defenses were extremely weak. They had no jets, only a few limited airfields, fewer than twenty radars, and a mere handful of obsolete antiaircraft guns. In contrast, by mid-1967, the Soviets had supplied the North Vietnamese with a more formidable air defense system than U.S. bombers encountered over Germany in 1944. 

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong responded to Johnson’s restraint with increased infiltration and escalated numbers and intensity of attacks.  Convinced that South Vietnam’s survival was seriously threatened, Johnson allowed Admiral Sharp to initiate Operation “Flaming Dart, ”  This was very restricted and allowed the U.S. Navy and South Vietnamese Air Force to attack military targets within 15 miles north of the South Vietnamese border and DMZ. Thereafter, Johnson decided upon a slowly escalating “sustained” bombing of North Vietnam under an operation named by Washington as “Rolling Thunder.” 

The Rolling Thunder operation was initiated on March 2, 1965, and lasted for three and a half years, but it could hardly be called “sustained.” Johnson insisted on 16 bombing halts, hoping the North Vietnamese would negotiate peace. The North Vietnamese consistently took advantage of the breaks in bombing to intensify the shipment of men, arms, and supplies into South Vietnam and to beef up their air defenses. Furthermore, the escalation was quite slow and gave the North Vietnamese a generous opportunity to build their ground forces and air defenses before they were seriously threatened. Bombing was also very restricted geographically. At first. bombing was only allowed in the very southern part of North Vietnam, whereas the vast majority of really important targets were around Hanoi and Haiphong in the northeast. The types of targets were also highly restricted. Amazingly, U.S. aircraft were not allowed to fire on a surface-to-air-missile (SAM) site unless it had first fired on them. 

This theory of warfare—variously called “graded escalation,” “gradual escalation,” “the doctrine of gradualism,” or sometimes just “the slow squeeze”—was the brainchild of Harvard academics, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was its foremost ranking advocate. Lyndon Johnson became its most faithful and powerful executive disciple. 

However bright the strategy of graded escalation might have seemed to Harvard whiz kids and game theorists; it went against the accumulated military wisdom of centuries.

The JCS, Admiral Sharp, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department Intelligence Agency, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk all strongly opposed it.  The JCS and the intelligence agencies continued to advocate quick and decisive action against North Vietnam, including bombing critical military, air, naval, transportation, industrial, and fuel storage targets in all parts of North Vietnam, especially those near Hanoi and Haiphong.  This plan was rejected four times by Johnson and McNamara. It was finally accepted in 1972 by President Richard Nixon. The JCS, which had six major confrontations with McNamara, advocated  the conventional military wisdom of hitting an enemy as hard and fast as you can to maximize his costs and minimize your own risks and costs.

Operation Rolling Thunder kicked off on March 2, 1965, by sending several squadrons of USAF and Navy aircraft to bomb two minor targets just north of the DMZ. Then Johnson delayed two weeks before allowing another strike. General Taylor, a retired former Chairman of the JCS,  sent a blistering rebuke to McNamara for risking aircrews and expensive aircraft in such a paltry and timid action. 

From the beginning of Rolling Thunder to late 1967, all the planning for air strikes was done at a Tuesday luncheon in Washington. Those attending were Johnson, McNamara, Secretary of State Rusk, Presidential Assistant Walt Rostow, and Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, a former Harvard faculty member and mathematical game theorist. Initially, Presidential Press Secretary Bill Moyers attended some meetings.  No military or naval officer was included in the planning, not even the Chairman of the JCS, until late 1967. The targets, the dates, the hour, the number and type of aircraft, the bomb loads, and many of the tactics were specified in Washington and passed through each intermediate headquarters to the USAF squadrons and Navy carriers affected. Thus, Johnson super-centralized even tactical decisions and micromanaged the air war.

On one occasion Johnson bragged, “I won’t let those Air Force Generals bomb the smallest outhouse without checking with me.” On another occasion he said, “I spent ten hours a day worrying about all this, picking the targets one by one, making sure we didn’t go over the limits.” 

Johnson and McNamara were surprised and disappointed that their gradual escalation of the air war failed to bring Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table. No senior military commander or advisor was at all surprised. Senior military and intelligence officers were relentless in their  objections. Admiral Sharp called it the  “powder-puff” air warfare doctrine.  In his 1978 book, Strategy for Defeat, Admiral Sharp stated, “This fateful decision contributed to our ultimate loss of South Vietnam as much as any other single action we took during our involvement.” Sharp has also stated that the U. S. could have won the war in early 1965, when North Vietnamese air defenses were minimal, if we had used our enormous air power advantage aggressively rather than pursuing the misguided strategy of gradual escalation. 

Air Force General William Momyer, 7^th Air Force Commander, summarized the frustration of USAF aircrews flying over North Vietnam and Laos perfectly: “To wait until he (the enemy) has disseminated his supplies among thousands of trucks, sampans, rafts, and bicycles and then to send out multimillion dollar aircraft after these individual vehicles—this is how to maximize our costs, not his.”

The buildup of North Vietnam’s air defenses dramatically illustrates the terrible folly of the Johnson-McNamara graduated escalation doctrine of air warfare. At the beginning of 1965, North Vietnam had no SAMs, few radars, and only a handful of obsolete anti-aircraft guns. By late July, the Soviet Union had begun a rapid buildup of North Vietnamese air defenses. By the end of Operation Rolling Thunder three and a half years later, North Vietnam had 250 SAM sites and had fired more than 5,000 SAM missiles, bringing down 101 U.S. aircraft. 

Navy pilots spotted 111 SAM missiles loaded on railcars near Hanoi, but McNamara’s rules of engagement prohibited bombing close to Hanoi, and the Navy’s request to destroy them was denied. As one Navy pilot remarked, they would later have “to fight all 111 of them one at a time.” The North Vietnamese and Soviets also took substantial advantage of the U.S. policy of prohibiting or restricting bombing in many areas around Hanoi and Haiphong. SAMs located in prohibited areas were able to engage U.S. aircraft as much as seventeen miles outside the area prohibited to U.S. bombing, thus firing on U.S. aircraft with impunity. 

In addition, most of the logistical systems supporting the North Vietnamese Army were within thirty miles of Hanoi and could not be attacked. By the end of 1966, over seventy MiGs challenged the USAF and Navy in the air over North Vietnam. Yet their airfields were prohibited strike areas, and USAF and Navy planes were not allowed to attack a MiG until it had taken off. North Vietnam had sixteen MiG-17 and Mig-21 aces!

      North Vietnamese jet fighter aircraft had grown to over 100 by 1968.   

Failure to throttle the import of conventional antiaircraft guns at their source resulted in far more U.S. aircraft casualties. While the North Vietnamese possessed only a few obsolete antiaircraft guns at the beginning of 1965, by the end of 1968. they had deployed 5,795 antiaircraft guns, many of them radar-controlled. About 68 percent of U.S. aircraft losses in Vietnam were due to conventional antiaircraft fire. U.S. aircraft losses rose accordingly. 

Moreover, failure to pursue an air war necessitated a build-up of ground forces. In April 1965, when McNamara announced that the U.S. would concentrate on stopping the NVA and Viet Cong guerillas (VC) on the ground in South Vietnam rather than substantially accelerating air warfare against North Vietnam, there were not much more than 25,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. By early 1967, we had more than 400,000 there. By the end of 1967, over 16,000 U.S. personnel had been killed in action.

U.S. Army and USMC combat units countered the massive flow of enemy soldiers and weapons into South Vietnam by an aggressive strategy of attrition, which became the primary American ground war strategy. Given McNamara’s substantial restrictions on air warfare in North Vietnam, Johnson’s constant bombing halts, and engagement rules allowing enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, our ground war strategy of aggressive attrition was really the only alternative. It was one which made good use of superior American fire power. By the end of the war Communist forces had suffered between 700,000 and 1,200,000 battle deaths, equal to between three and five percent of the total population of North Vietnam. Yet Communist leaders were willing to sustain such casualties and press on.

While our strategy of attrition was very costly to our enemy, such a strategy always comes with a price tag. By the end of the war, U.S. forces had suffered 47,000 battle deaths. This was not a small price to the American people. The Communist strategic hope, which turned out to be correct, was that growing anti-war sentiment in the U.S. would eventually result in American withdrawal. Their hope was buttressed with well-organized leftist agitation on U.S. college campuses and in key urban areas. In the end, this did, in fact, result in eventual U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam to a heavily armed North Vietnamese Army financed and predominantly equipped by the Soviet Union. 

Another failure of the gradual escalation doctrine of air warfare involved U.S. attempts to destroy North Vietnam’s fuel storage facilities. North Vietnam had no petroleum resources. One hundred percent of its petroleum, oils, and lubricants (POL) had to be imported from the Soviet Union or China. In late June 1966, President Johnson finally relented and allowed U.S. aircraft strikes on POL facilities in North Vietnam, including those near Hanoi and Haiphong. More than 80 percent of storage facilities were destroyed, but by that time POL supplies had been disbursed to underground storage facilities and POL drums disbursed along city streets, which were off limits to U.S. attack. Petroleum tankers, which were prohibited targets, often unloaded POL drums directly on to small barges and boats that transported them to hundreds of concealed locations along inland waterways. The June 1966 damage to Hanoi’s petroleum inventory was severe but too late for maximum effectiveness.

The Johnson Administration also accepted as truth the academic folly based on Soviet and North Vietnamese propaganda that Ho Chi Minh was a paternalistic nationalist open to reasonable peace terms provided they facilitated Communist takeover of South Vietnam. This ignored Ho’s record of deception and murder, including 36,700 assassinations of South Vietnamese village leaders, schoolteachers, and local government officials who opposed Communist indoctrination and takeover. Johnson and McNamara were apparently unfamiliar with the Marxist doctrines that a lie that advances Communism is the truth and that whatever advances Communism is just. Reviewing the history of negotiations with North Korean leaders during the Korean War should have given any U.S. leaders cause to be wary Communist duplicity. Ho consistently took maximum military advantage of Johnson’s bombing halts and hopes for negotiations.

Rolling Thunder gradualism resulted in 922 U.S. air losses over North Vietnam. This included 398 of 833 of all the F-105s ever built. Over 2,000 U.S. fixed-wing aircraft were lost in the Southeast Asia theater of war, which included North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Rolling Thunder ended when President Johnson ordered a bombing halt on November 2, 1968, a few days before the 1968 Presidential Election.

The North Vietnamese only negotiated in earnest after Nixon’s Operation Linebacker II nearly bombed them into oblivion in December 1972. Sadly, the U.S. Congress threw that victory away and abandoned South Vietnam to a renewed North Vietnamese invasion in December 1974 and early 1975.