THE NUMBERS WAR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000707160117-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 12, 2010
• Sequence Number: 117
• Publication Date: October 22, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ON PAGE___ - - 22 October 1964
NEWS MEDIA
The Numbers War
Westmoreland's case starts with those who counted.
The soldiers in the field sometimes called
them "ghosts": an unseen enemy that plant-
ed booby traps and mines, melting into the
jungle at night and metamorphosing at
sunup into the ubiquitous peasants in the
fields. They were old men, women and teen-
age boys, innumerable-until they were
killed, when they could be listed in the body
counts compiled daily in Saigon, and their
corpses subtracted from the roster of enemy
Vietnam was a war without
fronts, in which conventional
measures of success-salients
opened, ground captured-
had no meaning; territory was
friendly as long as Americans
were standing on it. By 1966, it
had become a war of attrition,
in which the only hope for vic-
tory was to kill enemy soldiers
faster than they could be re-
placed. And so the official esti-
mates of enemy organization
and troop strength, the "order
of battle," which in previous
wars was just an intelligence, tool, emerged with the body
count as the most important
measure of the success of the
American mission and a crucial
factor in influencing American
public opinion about the war.
As long as the enemy was seen
to be of manageable size, it. was
thought that the war could be
won with no additional com-
mitment of U.S. troops.
Rcvisions: But by early 1967,
Z
the American consensus over
the enemy order of battle was
beginning to crumble. At West-
moreland's MACV (Military
o Assistance Command, Viet-
The Tet offensive: The turning point for public opinion nam) Saigon headquarters, the
t
strength in the first war in history in which
one side used a computer to tell if it was
winning or losing. But not even a computer
can count ghosts.
If Westmoreland Y. CBS, Inc., is to turn
on the facts of the Vietnam War, the jury
will have to pay close attention, for the
facts are as maddeningly elusive as the un-
counted enemy itself. At the heart of the
dispute between the general and the net-
work is an older dispute between rival intel-
ligence services about the strength of the
forces opposing Saigon in 1967 and early
1968, just before the fateful Tet offensive. It
is a confusing dispute, marked by seemingly
arbitrary definitions and esoteric bookkeep-
ing. Were the combined enemy forces no
more than 300,000, as military intelligence
claimed? Or were they almost twice as nu-
merous, as the CIA suspected? Perhaps
more important, which version did West-
moreland believe-and which did he con-
vey to Washington? Ultimately, the truth
may not be knowable, given the nature of
the war, but that does not relieve the jury of
the burden of making up its mind.
es
monthly intelligence estima
had enemy strength fluctuating slightly
around the number 295,000. But at CIA
headquarters back home in Langley, Va.,
analysts using essentially the same raw data
had come to believe that the true figure was
far higher, perhaps as much as 593,000. The
CIA's sharp upward revision, which even-
tually persuaded some key officers on West-
moreland's own staff, including his chief of
intelligence, Brig. Gen. Joseph A. McChris-
tian, touched off a bitter debate between the
two intelligence services. It was to be re-
solved in MACV's favor, but not before
Westmoreland apparently gave several col-
leagues the clear impression that, having
assured President Johnson that the war was
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going well, he wanted to avoid
y -.~rabarrassing disclosure
.he enemy was more ca-
pable of resistance than any-
one had realized. These were
the people who provided CBS
with the foundation of the
challenged documentary.
The debate was in part
between differing philoso-
phies of intelligence gather-
ing: between the military-
intelligence forces, who tra-
ditionally have given the
greatest weight to "hard"
information derived from
reconnaissance and commu-
nications intercepts, and the
civilian analysts of the CIA,
who are equally at home with
such "soft" data as captured
Westmoreland, U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in 1968: Ghosts
documents and defectors. Military intelli-
gence was designed to deal with an enemy
organized along traditional lines, in West-
ern-st yle hierarchies of uniformed platoons
and batallions. But, with the exception of
the North Vietnamese regulars, the enemy
did not conform to the model. In its month-
ly order-of-battle summaries, then, the U.S.
command divided the enemy forces into
four categories: combat troops, which in-
cluded the regulars of the North Vietnam-
ese Army and organized Viet Cong units;
administrative and support troops; political
cadres, and "irregulars," a group that in-
cluded roving guerrilla fighters and the vil-
lage-based, part-time soldiers of the "self-
defense forces." The numbers varied within
a narrow range in the spring and summer of
1967: between roughly 110,000 and 121,000
for the combat troops (the actual figures
were not rounded off); around 25,000 sup-
port troops; 40,000 political cadres, and a
total for irregular forces of exactly 112,760
each month from March to July.
Irregulars: These irregular forces were
the ghosts, and they were the chief focus of
the debate. Back in August 1966, CIA ana-
lyst Sam Adams had received at his desk in
Langley a captured document, a reportfrom
Viet Cong headquarters in Binh Dinh prov-
ince claiming to have enrolled some 50,000
irregulars. He looked up Binh Dinh in the
order-of-battle reports and found that
Army Intelligence had listed enemy
strength at 4,500. "My God," Adams re-
called thinking, when he first told the tale in
a Harper's magazine article in 1975, "that's
not even a tenth of what the VC say."
Adams continued to gather evidence of
enough missing Viet Cong and to pass it
along within the agency. In November
of 1966, George Carver, a top CIA offi-
cial, alerted presidential assistant Robert
Komer that the irregular forces might
have been undercounted by as many as
200,000 men. All that winter and spring,
cables flew back and forth between Saigon
and Washington; at a conference in Hawaii
in February, Adams laid out his theory to
the MACV brass. including McChristian.
masses of Americans to op-
pose the fighting.
The resolution of the num-
bers dilemma was hammered
out in a series of top-secret
meetings under the rubric
"Special National Intelli-
gence Estimate." It was de-
cided to drop the self-defense
forces entirely from the or-
der-of-battle reports and
count only guerrillas. Their
number was put at 70,000 to
90,000; with some other ad-
justments, the total came out
just about where it had been
all along, around 300,000.
Military analysts had con-
8 tended that the barely
trained, minimally armed
self-defense forces posed lit-
In May the CIA officially notified Defense tle offensive threat to the American troops.
Secretary Robert McNamara of its higher Key CIA analysts argued that with their
estimate, at about the same time that the land mines and booby traps they were
figures finally reached Westmoreland, ap- costing large numbers of American casual-
parently for the first time, in the form of ties. It is a legitimate point to disagree
briefings by McChristian and other offi- about, except perhaps for one thing: since
cers. It was at one of these briefings that irregulars were still tallied in body counts,
Westmoreland, according to one of the in- and counted when they defected or were l.
numerable disputed assertions in the docu- captured, to take them out of the order
mentary, was reported to have uttered the of battle meant that future calculations of
damning questions: "What am I going to enemy strength-and measurements of
tell the press? What am I going to tell the military progress-would be increasing-
Congress? What am I going to tell the ly skewed.
president?" Indeed, the questions were Raids: The real question in all of this is
growing sharper. Approval for the war was how it might have affected the battle of
waning, Johnson's support in Congress Tet, which began with simultaneous attacks
had thinned, and in October the March on across the country, included commando
the Pentagon would bring out the first raids on the American Embassy compound
UNCOUNTED AND UNEXPECTED
Infiltrating troops won a political victory at Tet
in Saigon and 36 of 44 provincial capitals,
and raged for five days. After months of
enemy infiltration into Vietnam from the
Ho Chi Minh Trail-the infiltration rate
was also a subject of dispute-there were
signs of an impending communist attack
around the time of the Vietnamese New
IP- 9 I Year's holiday, although no one anticipated
an action of such magnitude. CBS asserted
that if the true size of the enemy forces
had been known, American troops might
have been better prepared. But Westmore-
land has always maintained that Tet was
one of America's greatest military victories;
the North Vietnamese, who may have had
hopes of capturing a major city and spark-
ing a general uprising, achieved neither,
and in the end retreated with what are
now generally conceded to be enormous
casualties.
Tet was the beginning of the end for
Americans in Vietnam: the televised sight of
commandos inside the American Em-
bassy-not such a common occurrence 16
years ago-helped mobilize public opinion
against what seemed like an increasingly
futile war. If anything, the real damage
done by Tet-the political damage-was
made worse by the overly optimistic predic-
tions that had come before it.
JERRY ADLER with NICHOLAS M. HORROCK
Q in Washington
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