NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
South Vietnam should be accompanied by air strikes against the North sufficiently heavy and damaging to really hurt the North. If the U.S. were to combine combat operations in the South with air strikes of any kind in the North, the attacks on the North should be heavy and do great damage. Without expressly saying so, his point seems to have been that the air war against the North should not be an attempt to persuade, but an effort to compel. He said that he had already reported that:
The strikes to date have not caused a change in the North Vietnamese policy of directing Viet Cong insurgency, infiltrating cadres and supplying materials. If anything, the strikes to date have hardened their attitude.
Although the memo as a whole conveys Mr. McCone's serious doubt that the ground operations in the South would in any event serve their purpose, he clearly advocated bombing more heavily if we decided to engage in ground operations. Unless they were supported by really strong actions against North Vietnam, he felt such ground operations would be doomed to failure:
I believe our proposed track offers great danger of simply encouraging Chinese Communists and Soviet support of the DRV and VC cause if for no other reason than the risk for both will be minimum. I envision that the reaction of the NVN and the Chinese Communists will be to deliberately, carefully, and probably gradually, build up the Viet Cong capabilities by covert infiltration of North Vietnamese and, possibly, Chinese cadres and thus bring an ever increasing pressure on our forces. In effect, we will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves.
McCone argued that if we were going to change the mission of the U.S. ground forces we also needed to change the ground rules of the strikes against North Vietnam, and he concluded:
If we are unwilling to take this kind of a decision now, we must not take the actions concerning the mission of our ground forces for the reasons I have mentioned above. 145/
McCone's views notwithstanding, U.S. policy was promptly and sharply reoriented in the direction of greater military involvement with a proportionate de-emphasis of the direct counterinsurgency efforts. It is not fully clear to this writer exactly how and why this rapid re-orientation occurred. On 7 April the President made his famous Johns Hopkins speech in which he publicly committed the United States more than ever before to the defense of South Vietnam, but also committed himself to engage in
