It neither forced any kind of diplomatic solution, nor did it sufficiently interrupt North Vietnam's aid to the South. This essay will show how the Johnson Administration's flawed approach to bombing in North Vietnam led to the failure of Operation Rolling Thunder. This is important because it reveals the limitations of conventional forms of warfare and highlights the importance of pursuing a strategy free of conflicting political and military goals.
The operation failed because, out of an over-riding fear of provoking the USSR and China into a confrontation, and in a gross underestimation of Hanoi's determination, the Johnson administration insisted upon a bombing policy of gradual and limited pressure, which proved to be a backwards approach to fighting an interdiction campaign and an ineffective strategy against an externally supported and strong-willed adversary in Hanoi that simply refused to yield to bombs.
The United States' first concerted effort at bombing North Vietnam, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder, represented a considerable break from previous U.S. bombing policy in Vietnam. From August, 1964, until March of the following year, the U.S. had pursued a strategy of “tit for tat” measured bombing responses to specific revolutionary military action,1 hoping to send a message to the guerrillas in the south and to Hanoi that their behaviour would not be tolerated.
By February, however, the White House had decided that, in light of continued enemy pressure, these reprisal missions were not sufficient. Opinion was virtually unanimous in the Johnson administration that sustained bombing of the North was necessary. As early as January, 1965, U.S. policy-makers believed that, if South Vietnam were to be preserved, air strikes were imminently required.2
The State Department's Aggression from the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam's Campaign to Conquer South Viet-Nam, released the following month, called for strikes against the North as an obligatory response to Northern aggression.3 It also indicated that U.S. bombing of the North would be “the least risky and least costly option” in terms of American lives, and might also win the support of influential advocates of air power in congress.4
The National Liberation Front's (nlf) attack on Pleiku on February 7th, which killed eight Americans, served as sufficient context for the release of President Lyndon Johnson's February 13th Presidential Directive calling for “a program of measured and limited air action” against “selected military targets” in North Vietnam.5 More recently, the historical community has accepted the Pleiku Incident as a pretext for Rolling Thunder, and not a reason per se: Larry Addington, Professor Emeritus of History at the Citadel, wrote in 2000 that the President “needed a provocation for justifying the unloading of rolling thunder against North Vietnam” and that the attack on Pleiku served in this role.6 Regardless of motivation, however, a clear change in bombing policy was evident. The series of attacks that began on March 2nd against North Vietnam were the first strikes7 taken to pursue this new policy, “not tied to any specific action”8 by the North Vietnamese.
Advocates of Rolling Thunder hoped that it would affect the North Vietnamese war effort in two ways. First, it was designed to persuade Hanoi to cease its support for a revolution in the South and head towards a diplomatic compromise. Second, Rolling Thunder aimed to block the southward flow of supplies with a conventional interdiction campaign. However, by the close of the campaign, neither of these objectives had been met.
The key assumptions behind the campaign's crucial political objectives in the North lay in the Johnson administration's belief that North Vietnam was vulnerable to air power and that there had to be “some point at which the drv [Democratic Republic of Vietnam, i.e. North Vietnam] policy-makers would break.”
9 National Security Advisor Walt Rostow explained that since Ho Chi Minh had an industrial complex to protect, he was “no longer, as he had been when fighting the French more than a decade earlier, a guerrilla fighter with nothing to lose.”
10 However, in stark contrast to this assertion, a committee headed by one of Rostow's own deputies concluded that economically-oriented bombing of the North would necessarily fail, because economic growth was not the regime's priority.
11 The committee insisted that bombing could not weaken such a regime, and might even strengthen it. In a serious underestimation of the North Vietnamese leadership's desire for reunification with the South, Rostow chose to ignore this study.
Similar feats of underestimation were rampant in the Johnson administration and throughout America. Spencer Tucker, Professor of Military History at the Virginia Military Institute, observed in 1999 that throughout the course of the war American leaders “consistently underestimated the determination”12 of their North Vietnamese counterparts. Naval historian John Sherwood explained in 2004 that American policy-makers failed to understand North Vietnamese “leaders' long time horizons and their high tolerance for losses.”13 Prominent military authors of the early Vietnam era, however, failed to grasp this. In May 1965, John Greene wrote an article in Air Force Magazine, explaining:
