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In Vietnam, US soldiers fragged COs who got on their bad side. That helped end the war
THE MOST neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers’ revolt–the mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. It is a great reality check in an era when the U.S. touts itself as an invincible nation. For this reason, the soldiers’ revolt has been written out of official history. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement whose activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free Vietnam–described once by President Johnson as a “raggedy-**** little fourth-rate country”–from U.S. domination. The legacy of the soldiers’ revolt and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam–despite more recent U.S. victories over Iraq and Serbia–casts a pall on the Pentagon. They still fear the political backlash that might come if U.S. ground forces sustain heavy casualties in a future war.Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. Conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by…the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.
Armed Forces Journal, June 19711
From 1964 to 1973, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 27 million men came of draft age. A majority of them were not drafted due to college, professional, medical or National Guard deferments. Only 40 percent were drafted and saw military service. A small minority, 2.5 million men (about 10 percent of those eligible for the draft), were sent to Vietnam.3The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves.
Vice President Richard M. Nixon, April 16, 19542
The officer corps was drawn from the 7 percent of troops who were college graduates, or the 13 percent who had one to three years of college. College was to officer as high school was to enlisted man. The officer corps was middle class in composition and managerial in outlook. Ruling-class military families were heavily represented in its higher ranks.13Let the military run the show.
Senator Barry Goldwater12
The political and military position of the U.S. was hopeless from the moment it entered the war. The U.S. was fighting to protect capitalism and empire. The Vietnamese were fighting to reunify their country and break free of foreign control. The American-controlled government of South Vietnam was the political representative of the landlord class, which took 40 to 60 percent of the peasants’ crop as rent. In National Liberation Front (NLF)-controlled territory, rents were lowered to 10 percent, creating enormous peasant support for the Communist insurgency.25We know we can’t win a ground war in Asia.
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on “Face the Nation” (CBS-TV), May 3, 197024
The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War and the start of open, active soldiers’ rebellion. At the end of January 1968, on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the NLF sent 100,000 troops into Saigon and 36 provincial capitals to lead a struggle for the cities. The Tet Offensive was not militarily successful, because of the savagery of the U.S. counterattack. In Saigon alone, American bombs killed 14,000 civilians. The city of Ben Tre became emblematic of the U.S. effort when the major who retook it announced that “to save the city, we had to destroy it.”We have known for some time that this offensive was planned by the enemy…The ability to do what they have done has been anticipated, prepared for, and met…The stated purposes of the general uprising have failed…I do not believe that they will achieve a psychological victory.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, February 2, 196836
The refusal of an order to advance into combat is an act of mutiny. In time of war, it is the gravest crime in the military code, punishable by death. In Vietnam, mutiny was rampant, the power to punish withered and discipline collapsed as search and destroy was revoked from below.If an officer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier, the power did not exist to get it executed. In that you have one of the sure signs of a genuine popular revolution. With the falling away of their disciplinary power, the political bankruptcy of the staff of officers was laid bare.
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution39
The murder of American officers by their troops was an openly proclaimed goal in Vietnam. As one GI newspaper demanded, “Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam, and kill your commanding officer.”55 And they did. A new slang term arose to celebrate the execution of officers: fragging. The word came from the fragmentation grenade, which was the weapon of choice because the evidence was destroyed in the act.56The moral condition of the army was hopeless. You might describe it by saying the army as an army no longer existed. Defeats, retreats, and the rottenness of the ruling group had utterly undermined the troops.
Leon Trotsky,History of the Russian Revolution54
Mutiny and fraggings expressed the anger and bitterness that combat soldiers felt at being used as bait to kill Communists. It forced the troops to reassess who was the real enemy. Many began to conclude that the enemy was the lifers or the rulers in the U.S.–that it was the capitalist class and not, as they had once believed, the NLF.The army was incurably sick…so far as making war was concerned, it did not exist. Nobody believed in the success of the war, the officers as little as the soldiers. Nobody wanted to fight any more, neither the army nor the people.”
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution 70
Some officers joined, or led their men, in the unofficial cease-fire from below. A U.S. army colonel claimed:That ‘search-and-evade’ has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation’s recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that Communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted–not without foundation in fact–that American defectors are in the VC ranks.82
Search and avoid, mutiny and fraggings were a brilliant success. Two years into the soldiers’ upsurge, in 1970, the number of U.S. combat deaths were down by more than 70 percent (to 3,946) from the 1968 high of more than 14,000. The revolt of the soldiers in order to survive and not to allow themselves to be victims could only succeed by a struggle prepared to use any means necessary to achieve peace from below.84I had influence over an entire province. I put my men to work helping with the harvest. They put up buildings. Once the NVA understood what I was doing, they eased up. I’m talking to you about a de facto truce, you understand. The war stopped in most of the province. It’s the kind of history that doesn’t get recorded. Few people even know it happened, and no one will ever admit that it happened.83
It is a maxim of revolutionary politics that for revolution to be successful, some part of the army must go over to the revolutionary forces. For that to occur, the revolutionary movement must be strong enough to give confidence to soldiers that it can protect them from the consequences of breaking military discipline.It is a manifest fact that the disorganization of armies and a total relaxation of discipline has been both precondition and consequence of all successful revolutions hitherto.”
Engels to Marx, September 26, 185185
MAY 22, 2022 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
There should be no surprise that the summit meeting of the leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) hosted by Russia at the Kremlin on May 16 fell short of articulating against the “collective West” over the Ukraine conflict. The same pattern as in the 2008 Russo-Georgian war is repeating. Russia is not dictating policies and is going along with the consensus opinion. The contrast with the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation couldn’t be sharper.
The president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said at the summit in Moscow, “It is absolutely clear that without united pushback from the CSTO allies and other integration associations in the post-Soviet space, the collective West will ratchet up its pressure.” But President Vladimir Putin was the only other speaker to echo what Lukashenko said. Putin dilated on the NATO’s expansion strategy and its implications. But the remarks by the CSTO leaders from Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — and Armenia show that they weren’t impressed. None of them even referred publicly to the Ukraine war as a topic of urgent concern for the CSTO.
Without doubt, Washington has taken careful note. The Biden Administration singled out Kazakhstan as a special invitee to the ministerial meeting on global food security at the UN Headquarters in New York on May 18. Secretary of State Antony Blinken invited Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi to Washington for a bilateral on May 20.
The US has always prioritised Kazakhstan as a key partner in the Central Asian region. In retrospect, the uprising in January in Kazakhstan made no difference to Washington’s assessment. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s consolidation of power in Astana — ironically, with the help of CSTO forces led by Russia — seems to work splendidly for the US.
As Washington sees it, President Tokayev, formerly a career diplomat himself, has potential to transform Kazakhstan as a “swing state.” Thus, it estimates that Europe and the US can help the Kazakhs break free from the ties of history and move toward a freer, more independent future, which is bound to have a domino effect on the Central Asian region as a whole in due course.
In his welcoming remarks at the meeting with Tileuberdi at the state department on Friday, Blinken said all the right things and came straight to the point — “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” which would have “profound impacts” in Central Asia in the areas of food, energy, trade, etc. The readout of the meeting said Blinken “confirmed our commitment to minimising the impact on allies and partners, including Kazakhstan, from the sanctions imposed on Russia.”
This assurance virtually rules out secondary sanctions and will come as a matter of great relief to Kazakhstan. In fact, the primary outlet for Kazakh fossil fuels has been a pipeline to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Although Kazakhstan has the world’s twelfth-largest proven oil reserves and is fourteenth for gas, profiting from those resources has proven difficult because it is landlocked, making it cumbersome to bring the fuel to market and difficult to transport exploration and extraction infrastructure to the sites in the first place. Also, Russian irredentism has the potential to disrupt Kazakh energy export routes. (Three years back, Russia forced an end to Kazakh oil and coal shipments to Ukraine, which transit Russian territory by rail.)
Paradoxically, Kazakhstan’s liberator comes from Beijing. Kazakhstan now supplies oil to China via pipeline and there is a parallel gas line that transits Turkmen exports through Kazakh territory. Whereas the conventional wisdom was that a China-Central Asia pipeline connection would be prohibitive cost-wise due to the vast distances involved, China has made the strategic investments along with Kazakh oil company KazMunaiGas, and the result is that the China National Petroleum Corporation has become Central Asia’s main energy player, overtaking Russia’s Gazprom.
The geopolitical implications of Kazakhstan’s multi-vector policies are self-evident. Unsurprisingly, the Western majors have invested heavily in Kazakh oilfields too. Suffice to say, Washington senses that Kazakhstan’s current transition from the rule of former President Nurusultan Nazarbayev will likely fortify its independent foreign policy for years to come.
While Washington’s engagement of the Central Asian region used to be episodic in the past, in a marked departure, the Biden Administration has shown the determination to pay sustained attention. This coincides with the sharp deterioration of US-Russia relations during the past year. The state department readout on Friday stated pointedly that “Secretary Blinken and Foreign Minister Tileuberdi plan to stay in close contact.”
The CSTO summit in Moscow last Monday, timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Collective Security Treaty and the 20th anniversary of the organisation, conveys a powerful signal that the allies of Russia and Belarus are taking a neutral stance vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine. They are neither supportive of Moscow nor opposed to it.
However, this is not to be construed as a reflection of the character of the Russia-Kazakhstan strategic partnership. Putin has long known and worked with Tokayev, who before becoming president in 2019 served as chair of the Senate with earlier stints as prime minister and foreign minister. That said, looking back, Russia had its own compelling reasons to help Tokayev overcome the January uprising in Kazakhstan. To be sure, the presence of the CSTO troops was a game changer for Tokayev who was able to consolidate his grip on power and stabilise the situation, which in turn re-established his own position as president.
However, as a result of it, Tokayev does not owe any “debt” to Moscow and indeed there has been no major shift in Kazakhstan’s internal or external politics in Russia’s favour, either. Five months later, we can clearly see that Kazakhstan does not support the war in Ukraine.
Kazakhstan has ruled out any diplomatic recognition of the two breakaway republics in Donbass region. But Kazakhstan has also so far consistently abstained from international votes, such as those in the United Nations, voting neither for nor against measures directed at Russia. Nonetheless, on the other hand, Kazakhstan also maintains that it will follow the principles and norms of the UN when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict. It is a delicate trapeze act which Tokayev skilfully handles.
The outcome of the CSTO meeting has come as a disappointment to Chinese experts who expected the leaders who gathered in Moscow “to deliver a consistent message to the West which has been sowing discord between Moscow and other CSTO members,” as a commentary in Global Times put it.
The commentary noted: “Chinese analysts said Monday’s summit was of great significance to Russia and the bloc amid the Ukraine crisis and multiple emerging internal challenges on security and economy… On the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Central Asian countries did not fully support Russia or criticize Russia like Western countries.”
There's no way Ukrainian positions can withstand this kind of firepower. This one MLRS position can deliver 200 rocket artillery to blanket an area in less than 60 seconds.
View: https://twitter.com/spriteer_774400/status/1529396825140211712
While flashy, the real firepower is the 152mm howitzers and similar. Rocket batteries move and shoot fast and far, but they are expensive to fire and the rocket delivers a relatively small payload.
While flashy, the real firepower is the 152mm howitzers and similar. Rocket batteries move and shoot fast and far, but they are expensive to fire and the rocket delivers a relatively small payload.
Russian rationale and use for rocket artillery
View: https://twitter.com/snekotron/status/1529469338264260609
View: https://twitter.com/snekotron/status/1529470456012611590
Being clueless on all of this, I’ve found the back-and-forths to be really interesting!I'm not intending to make you wrong. I was just presenting my view, informed by the little military training I have, that the core Russian firepower is heavy artillery. Rockets do have their place, that is true.