Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume III, Vietnam, January–August 1963

4. Memorandum for the Record by the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (Hilsman)¹

Saigon, January 2, 1963 .

Conversation with Major General Edward L. Rowny

Ed Rowny is a Major General here on a special mission to provide new weapons and techniques for use in South Vietnam over and above the MAP program. This is a result of the fact that Rowny was the Executive Secretary of the Howze Board, which made a study of modern techniques of conventional war and mobility last year. He was scheduled to take command of a division in Korea as the youngest division Commander in the Army, but was switched to South Vietnam because of his unique background and experience.

I have known Rowny for some 15 years—first when he and I were graduate students together at Yale studying international politics. He is a most unusual Army officer in that he has had advance training in the political side of the equation and this training has taken root in a sophisticated and excellent mind. His judgments from the situation, therefore, are ones to which I would give great weight.

Rowny is optimistic, but with considerable reservations.

One of the greatest troubles he feels is CINCPAC. CINCPAC is still trying to run the war even in practical detail. Many of the plans and operations that are conceived out here in Saigon are still vetoed in CINCPAC. Many of the operations that they launch here are conceived of in CINCPAC. Operation Sunrise,² of course, is a prize example of this.

CINCPAC screens the messages, according to Rowny, that Harkins sends and forwards to Washington only those that he and CINCPAC deem appropriate. Rowny says that on one occasion Felt called Harkins down for infoing the JCS without Felt’s advance permission.

Felt also exercises a very tight personal control over requests for equipment. For example, Rowny will recommend to Harkins the introduction from Department of Army sources rather than MAP, of some new weapon or technique or some such. If Harkins decides that it will contribute to the war in Vietnam, the Department of the Army will then honor the request. But CINCPAC must also concur and CINCPAC has not concurred on a very high percentage of the requests. Rowny feels that his operation is about fifteen percent effective, the rest of the time and energy going into attempting to persuade CINCPAC.

Rowny has been on some 20 operations. He describes the typical one as follows. The troops are scheduled to move at a certain hour in the morning. Usually there is a considerable delay waiting for a previous air strike. The air strike is then made on a village at which the Viet Cong is reported to be ensconced. The helicopters then move out, the troops are landed outside the village and they start forward. After a little while there is a flurry on the right and someone drags a peasant out of a rice paddy where he had been hiding. The peasant is bound and taken prisoner as a “suspected Viet Cong.” They then proceed up the road towards the village. Some time later another flurry appears on the left and a man runs towards the jungle. He is shot and killed and marked down as a Viet Cong since he ran.

They then proceed to the village which is deserted except for an old man or perhaps an addlepated girl—an Ophelia and [as?] Rowny describes her. Under interrogation the senile old man or addled girl points toward some spot in the jungle, or some cellar or something. The troops go there and drag out a man who is hiding who is then bound and captured as a “suspected VC.” The operation has now reached noon. Everyone sits down, cooks their rice and meal. Patrols are sent out and around finding nothing and then an hour or so later the helicopters come to pick the troops up and take them back to their regular billets.

We discussed why [there are] such elaborate operations, which are preceded by bombing, warning the VC and proceeding so slowly as to give the VC ample time to escape. Rowny puts it down to two things. One, reluctance on the part of the ARVN really to engage in a battle. As he says, they do not really want to tangle with the enemy, they want to be completely safe and not have any really serious fight. The second reason is Diem’s attitude towards “defeats.” Diem’s cold propaganda line, as we well know, is that there must never be a defeat even a small one, but only one long series of victories. (For example where the GVN was pleased with my speech given in Chicago,³ they did not want USIA which had distributed 2000 copies in English to translate it into Vietnamese because it admitted that there were some dark spots in the picture and that there was some reason to be cautious about one’s optimism.) Rowny told of the story where one of the much better commanders, more aggressive commanders, took a group out, killing three Viet Cong officers and 60 regular Viet Cong troops capturing their weapons in a stiff battle in which the ARVN lost one officer and several men. Diem was furious at this “defeat”; to lose an officer is a defeat in his eyes. This pressure for only victories and only total victories at that, leads to excessive caution on the part of the ARVN, in Rowny’s opinion.

The fact remains that the extended jungle patrolling extended in time and⁴ of being done. The reliance is on air power, on sweeps, on strikes, and so on.

The one encouraging note in the military picture is that some of these operations are of the “clear and hold variety.” That is the troops go out at least a site north of Viet Cong if they do not, or only rarely, seize them or surround them and the province chiefs and what civic action teams are available, then put in strategic villages providing the hold part of the clear and hold.⁵ The encouraging thing is that there are some of these operations among the sweep operations and, of course, this does extend the area of effective government control to the extent that the strategic villages built are themselves effective. Here again we will need to learn more about this .…⁶ eyes and equipment and in a more responsive MAP program responsive to Vietnamese true needs but he did not think that Harkins was a man who was going to exercise a great deal of initiative. Harkins apparently does not like a bureaucratic fight and wishes to avoid it if possible. For example, he makes no protest when Felt moves squads around on the map generally feeling that if it will make Felt happy, okay. He feels that Harkins is a good officer and competent, but not an imaginative and driving, highly motivated or creative officer.

Rowny is very high on Nolting and he feels that if CINCPAC were off his back and if he had the authority, that Nolting would be able to manage the war very well indeed, although Rowny added that he, of course, had no real basis for this kind of prediction since he had not seen Nolting in action, but was only giving this as his impression that Nolting would do a good job if given more opportunity and scope.

Rowny feels that what is really saving us out here is the high quality of the sergeants, lieutenants and captains. We discussed the failure on the civilian side to give as much impetus and vigor to what is going on out here as it should do and Rowny said that he had discussed this with Mecklin, the USIA chief, and with Rufus Phillips, the USOM fellow, who seems to be doing such a good job in the USOM part of the strategic hamlet program. Both Phillips and Mecklin pointed out that the civilian agencies simply cannot lay their hands on the high-quality, high-talented younger people that the military can just arbitrarily assign to Vietnam, that the civilian tasks can be better accomplished by the high-quality lieutenants and captains than they could be by the much lower quality civilians that would be the only ones available.

It is interesting that a number of these captains and majors are becoming strong advocates of fewer sweep operations and more civil and political action programs which tends to bear out Mecklin’s and Phillips’ judgments.

Another problem that Rowny discussed was the Air Force vs. Army-Air. The Air Force is very reluctant to provide escort aircraft for helicopter missions. They put “interdiction” on a higher priority than supporting or escorting helicopters and “retaining command of the air” at an even higher priority. There is, of course, no air opposition so it is hard to justify failure to support the helicopters on the grounds of maintaining air superiority. One wonders what they would interdict also, since any movement is by infiltration routes. Apparently what they mean by interdiction is precisely the air strikes on reported VC villages. The Army has gotten around this a little bit by using the Mohawk in an air-support role. The problem here, however, is that CINCPAC has put a restriction on what the Mohawk can carry limiting it only to machine guns rather than the rockets and other equipment that it could carry. To some extent this had had a beneficial effect in that the combination of using the Army Mohawk and its light armament has made the Air Force somewhat more forthcoming in providing some air support for the helicopter operations. The situation, however, seems to be far from satisfactory.

Judging from what Rowny said, Forrestal and I have begun to wonder whether it is wise to approve the requested augmentation in Farmgate.⁷ If for no other reason, a refusal to grant this permission might be good as a disciplinary measure.

Forrestal posed the question to Rowny as to whether it would be impossible to issue instructions to Harkins which in effect kept CINCPAC in the act for supplies,MAP and all of this, administration in other words, but cut CINCPAC out as regards operations, policy decisions, and so on. Rowny said that there was no reason at all that this could not be arranged without ruining the military’s chain of command. He thought it was easily possible and certainly desirable.

The following represents Forrestal’s remembrance of the Rowny conversation. Rowny made three separate points.

The first point was the relationship of CINCPAC to the South Vietnamese operation. Felt runs the South Vietnam operation like a ship. He interferes in details of tactical planning. He denies requests for equipment. Harkins cannot communicate directly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Felt actually directs some tactical operations from Hawaii.

The second major point is that the Air Force is not always providing adequate close aerial support. The Mohawk, for example, is an airplane which could carry a great deal more armaments and provide good close support, but the Air Force does not want tactical aircraft in Army hands. Rowny also feels that there is a tendency to use air power for interdiction rather than for close support.

The third major point that Rowny made was concerned with personnel. The best people are the majors, captains and lieutenants. The poorest people are at the staff level in all of the agencies. The top levels, meaning Harkins, Nolting, and Trueheart, and Mecklin are good. And also Rufus Phillips is excellent. The intermediates are not at all good and Nolting and Trueheart are effective by calling on the captains and majors and by-passing or detouring the top intermediate levels of the military. USOM is no good at all, except for Rufus Phillips. Rowny also feels that there are too many American generals in South Vietnam.

1. Source: Kennedy Library, Hilsman Papers, Country Series—Vietnam. Confidential. Hilsman quotes extensively from this conversation in his memoirs, and describes it as “the most disturbing analysis on the military side” which he received during his trip. (Hilsman, To Move a Nation, pp. 454-455)
2. For documentation on Operation Sunrise, see Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, vol. II, Documents 103ff.
3. For text of this speech, delivered on September 18, 1962, see American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1962, pp. 1109-1117.
4. A marginal notation on the text at this point reads: “(coughs)”, which suggests that the garbled text is due to an inaudible portion of the tape recording upon which this memorandum is based.
5. This confused sentence suggests that the tape recording was again difficult to understand at this point.
6. Ellipsis in the source text. The omission reflects a gap in the source text, which is explained by a note that indicates the memorandum “is being continued on the other side of the tape.”
7. See footnote 3, Document 2.