Progress Assignment #1 – Intelligence Failure Study: Vietnam War

First Option: Unfortunately, the U.S. Intelligence Community does not always get it right.
One of the best ways to learn and improve is from intelligence failures. Pick and analyze one.
Examples include (but are not limited to) strategic threat assessments of the Chinese impact
on the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, the conflict in Somalia that led to a Blackhawk
going down, the attacks of 9/11, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the ascendance of ISIS.
Describe and explain what the intelligence community got wrong and why. What adjustments
were made from the lessons learned?
___________________________________________
Samuel A. Adams, an analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assigned to the

Special Assistant for Vietnamese Affairs (SAVA) best laid out the intelligence failures that led

to the United States (U.S.) retreat and ultimate defeat in Southern Vietnam. These failures

were a lack of foresight, a neglect of fundamentals, and an absence of a clear central direction

(strategic objective). (Adams, 1969)

Failures

Firstly, deployments of troops in the Vietnam theater were planned based on the ratio

of enemy troops proportional to Allied detachments. Due to intelligence tampering by

General William C. Westmoreland and other officers, reports of the number of troops were

reduced far in excess to their actual, presumed, operational capabilities, which convinced the

U.S. government not to send more troops or call for any further operations in the region.

(Ahern, 2009) This failure to grasp the scope of the enemy's Order of Battle (OB), their

capabilities, numbers, and losses incurred meant that any intelligence reports gleaned proved

fruitless due to faulty accounting techniques and falsification of documents by the Military

Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV).

Secondly, the intelligence communities (IC) lack of cohesive intelligence on the

capabilities and disposition of foreign military, covert/clandestine, and economic capabilities

during the Vietnam War has meant there was scarcely any means of properly analyzing their

strengths and weaknesses as an organizational unit. This underestimation has meant the
enemy was allowed to better control the status of its losses, their true numbers, and would

eventually allow them to launch an effective and successful Tet Offensive against Allied

forces, due to the intelligence imbalance that U.S. forces encountered in the conflict that

hindered effective deployments of troops.

The IC was not solely to blame for the lack of cohesive intelligence collection efforts

in the region; the Saigon regime particularly had many organizations dedicated to intelligence

that competed with one another and had no desire to share inter-agency information in the

interests of their nation. This issue could not be fully rectified with U.S. efforts because

American agencies and military units ran isolated operations with little coordination, which

made any liaison efforts incoherent when attempting to foster closer efforts between the

Vietnamese intelligence organizations. (Allen, 1991) Particularly, due to the American lack of

coherent and comprehensive development among its agencies, it could not effectively create a

strategic intelligence plan for the region nor establish a developmental guide to ensure the

Vietnamese would be able to operate on their own when the eventual withdrawal of American

infrastructure would ensue. An example of a lack of coordinated behavior between the

various agencies and the Vietnam government is the optimistic reports provided by Secretary

of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who stated that the Saigon government controlled a number

of countryside hamlets within the past month of the conflict in 1964, something that was not

mentioned or noted within CIA reports. It would later be discovered that the reason for this

statement came because the Saigon government had split the hamlets in half and thus,

statistically, had twice as many hamlets as it had previously. (Hiam and Powers, 2014)

Third, a lack of imagination and forward thinking was another reason that there was

an intelligence failure in Vietnam. The IC could not determine the enemies’ intentions during

the conflict as they consistently misrepresented, or lacked, information on the North

Vietnamese military disposition and capabilities. This lack of verifiable intelligence meant
that U.S. forces could not effectively counter any offensives as they did not, and could not,

predict the adversaries’ scope of capabilities.

While the U.S. policymakers and the IC lacked sufficient intelligence to fully

determine the intentions behind the VCs military objectives, it could be extrapolated well

enough that many of the strategic goals the rebellious movement made were ideologically

based in nature as they were staunch nationalists. (Hiam and Powers, 2014) Furthermore,

based on the accounts and records of the French occupation of the region preceding the

conflict the U.S. was embroiled in, the IC was able to understand to some extent what the

organizational make-up of the VC forces would be, even if they did not know their numerical

disposition or current state of affairs.

A final failure was the lack of foreign agents and IC operatives on the ground who

managed to infiltrate the enemy organization. This problem was exasperated by the fact that

many operatives sent to Vietnam did not speak the language and allied South Vietnamese

forces had an imperfect understanding of the motives and capabilities of their adversarial

countrymen. Furthermore, active operations were not run until the mid-1960s, which was

almost 10 years after the initial conflict had started.

It is of note that during this time, Vietnam was not officially a theater upon which the

government ‘declared war’ upon, which would have meant that intelligence agency assets

would have fallen under the leadership of the leading military commander of the conflict.

Instead, MACV and the CIA often competed over "turf,” which meant similar reports were

created between the organizations, creating contradictory assessments on the state of the

field, and leaving policymakers questioning what the true state of affairs were for the region.
Adjustments to Intelligence Policy

While these failures were not just intelligence in nature but also ones in which

conflicting reports often contradicted the war effort in Vietnam and the state of the

government in Saigon, there certainly were lessons learned. The IC has determined to send

'scouts’ in regions they believe a crisis is forming; this gives ample time to collect

intelligence before any military or political intervention into the region and gives agencies

time to infiltrate organizations to collect the necessary intelligence needed for policymakers.

(Allen, 1991) In addition to operatives being sent to the region, military advisors and

embassy attachés will perform their own assessments on a few parameters, such as:

 The aims, strategy, and strength of the opposition.

 Strengths and weaknesses of the threatened government and their intelligence

services.

 Whether local government authority can exert legitimate power on behalf of

its population.

 Likelihood of the government to embrace human rights norms and a rule of

law.

 Determine the level of corruption that exists within the government and

military, as well as the populations views on these forces.

These parameters are essential for policymakers to determine whether an effective

security program can be established and if action can be permitted within the emerging crisis.

Since the war, the CIA has been able to bring its intelligence directly to U.S. policy decisions

and its programs, while lending its own considerable knowledge of foreign affairs to

assessing the viability of operational policies. In a manner of speaking, the foreign

leaders.

In conclusion, in furtherance of adapted intelligence operations after the war, a far

more comprehensive human intelligence (HUMINT) network and counterintelligence effort

were instituted to ensure communication and operational security remained free from enemy

agents. The politicization of the intelligence agencies and their operations was reduced by

creating a closer, almost symbiotic, relationship between the intelligence staff and

policymakers to reduce the friction between the two federal bodies. Thorough reasoning is

practiced more stringently when presenting reports to provide verifiability to an analysis, a

fundamental practice that the IC had used for decades but was suspiciously absent during the

Vietnam conflict with disastrous consequences, and finally, operatives are trained to

thoroughly study their host country's norms, customs, and history before reaching it in order

to have a depth of expertise to better communicate with the locals and glean intent when

collecting intelligence.

The Vietnam War was plagued with poor decisions by the intelligence community and

other government bodies, from policymakers pursuing political agendas to a non-existent

amount of preparation for a counterinsurgency campaign against the VC, which required a

thorough intelligence network and cross-agency cooperation. Agencies competing for their

turf and acting against the best interests of the nation further exasperated the issues the U.S.

and the Saigon administration would face until the end of the war, with Allied forces being

slow to react or entirely unaware of the enemies’ movements until the Tet Offensive in 1968.
Sources:
Adams, Samuel A. 1969. “Intelligence Failures in Vietnam: Suggestions for Reform.” Central
Intelligence Agency. January 24, 1969.
[Link]
Ahern, Thomas L. Jr., and Donald P. Gregg. 2009. “Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and
Counterinsurgency.” University Press of Kentucky. December 18, 2009.
[Link]
docid=cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_905209719&context=PC&vid=01APUS_INST:0
1APUS&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Primo
%20Central&tab=Everything&query=any,contains,Vietnam
%20War,AND&query=any,contains,intelligence,AND&mode=advanced&offset=0
Allen, George W. 1991. “Intelligence in Small Wars. “Central Intelligence Agency. 2020.
[Link]
[Link]
Hiam, C. Michael, and Thomas Powers. 2014. “Monument to Deceit: Sam Adams and the
Vietnam Intelligence Wars.” ForeEdge from University Press of New England. March
14, 2014. [Link]
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