Linebacker II Soviet analysis

[MigBuster 2,879]

http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/Patterns-and-Predictability.pdf

 

 

 

A detailed analysis of Linebacker II from Soviet sources apparently - might be of interest to some.

 

 

 

 

Suppose it wants to present some positives to the Soviets - such as trying to count jets that flew back to base damaged as being "shot down"

 

 

One stat I haven't seen in there and the only one that matters is:  

 

Number of targets actually defended by Air Defences = 0

[ignacioc91 101]

Very interesting!!!! I'll print it. Thanks!

[B52STRATO 215]

The report concludes quite rightly the impact of this operation globably. However, it also brings to the same conclusion that many Westerners have come after the war: Linebaker II should have been launched six years earlier and focus on the points of entries destruction to eliminate the logistic before scattering.

[hrc 156]

Linebacker II lasted 11 days. 12 fighter bombers and 16 B-52 were shot down, which on average spells 1 fighter-bomber and 1.5 B-52 lost per day. These are most modest US losses reports.Even those are huge losses, on average bigger than any other air operation of the kind in Vietnam war.

Besides, it was a brutal and unnecessary bombing campaign  by criminally insane  Kissinger in a desperate bid to try to change the course of the war and to save the puppet regime in Saigon that was breathing through it's last straw,  because US didn't know how to fight Vietnamese in any other way but by carpet bombing N. Vietnam's basic population infrastructure and downtown of Hanoi.

At the end Linebacker amounted for nothing in long term for US and Saigon's interests but only left over 1600 dead civilians and enormous damage to civilian life and infrastructure.

 

Even if you read US written Wikipedia summary of Linebacker II it says that result was indecisive.

In non bias view, it was a failure.

Edited October 29, 2013 by hrc

[B52STRATO 215]

On a military side this operation could be considered as a failure, but in terms of global strategy and economic development its influence was significant enough to worsen hemorrhage that Vietnam had along the twenty years that followed. What is a local failure at a nation size can be consider as an overall succes... solely, at what price...

[+Gepard 10,988]

I'm not sure, which sources the authors really used.

I had only a short read, but when they descripe the air combats i miss the typical soviet writing style. Normally the pilots reported attack angles in a strange 0/4 to 4/4 system and so on. So i'm not sure wheter we see here a true soviet analysis or an american idea, what the soviets could have thought about Linebacker II.

[MigBuster 2,879]

Looking at 4 sources including the paper and the wiki page - they all agree that the political objective of LBII was to get Vietnam back to the negotiating table in a very short period of time - which was achieved.....all the military targets were also hit - so although each source spouts a lot of detail they all show a clear political and military success for the US.

 

From a Strategic point of view (the Vietnam war)  whether they were forced back or not Giap et al signed the papers which got rid of the US once and for all......................

 

 

Although the loss rate was relatively high (for Nam) - I'm not sure Nixon gave a toss about the 28 lost - its minor detail and actually not a bad return when you consider the scale, sophistication and experience of the SAM operators who could use various techniques with various versions of the SA-2.  

 

In the scale of things................and with over 3000 airframes supposedly lost in Vietnam.....whats a few more to get out of there with a deal!

Edited October 30, 2013 by MigBuster

[+Typhoid 231]

Linebacker II was a military and political success by most any measure.  It achieved what it was intended to achieve and demonstrated that interdiction of enemy supply routes, when properly planned and executed, will succeed. 

 

What followed was a political defeat engineered by a criminal political party. 

 

Referencing wikipedia as a valid reference on anything political is laughable and indefensible. 

[+eburger68 199]

Folks:

 

I must confess that I've never understood why some folks consider Linebacker II to be such a smashing success. Yes, in a narrow, limited way it was a success in getting the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating tables in Paris. But it's important to remember what North Vietnam was actually being asked to do.

 

In fact, they were only being asked to return to the negotiating table and make a few cosmetic changes to a peace agreement that they had already signed onto. Those cosmetic changes did not fundamentally alter the peace agreement or address the very real shortcomings in the original agreement that had caused President Thieu of South Vietnam to balk at signing the agreement that was reached in late October, 1972. (Yes, it was our own ally who pulled the plug on the original deal, not the North Vietnamese.)

 

The North Vietnamese were not being asked to surrender. They were not even being asked to withdraw all troops from South Vietnam. The troops that had invaded South Vietnam as part of the Eastertide Offensive launched in March 1972 were allowed to remain in place (a fact that made Thieu furious). So many aspects of the agreement were vague or without any serious hope of being implemented that each side to the deal could effectively interpret sections of it in self-serving ways. The agreement was really little more than a political/legal framework that allowed the United States to complete its withdrawal from South Vietnam while saving some degree of face. You could also think of as a kind of armistice with some additional provisions for encouraging the Hanoi and Saigon governments to continue working towards a final negotiated settlement.

 

And the North Vietnamese knew it. By December, 1972, the U.S. was down to around 50,000 personnel in South Vietnam, almost all in advisory or maintenance roles of one sort or another. The U.S. Congress was already in the process of passing legislation to cut off funding for continued military operations in Southeast Asia (Nixon won the 1972 Presidential election but his coattails were very short).

 

Nixon knew it, too. There's actually a good argument to made that the real objective of Linebacker II was not so much to force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table but to persuade the South Vietnamese -- President Thieu in particular -- that the United States could be trusted to apply serious military muscle against the North Vietnamese to ensure good behavior once the United States completed its withdrawal. Linebacker II, in other words, was Nixon's means for demonstrating to Thieu the support he could expect should the North Vietnamese renege on the deal and threaten South Vietnam again. Nixon also let it be known that if Thieu continued to be intransigent, the U.S. just might cut its own deal with Hanoi and leave Saigon to fend for itself.

 

Once Thieu signed on, the final peace agreement could be worked out in Paris and the deal signed with Le Duc Tho in late January. But, of course, Nixon would never be in a position to deliver on his promise to Thieu. By early February 1973 the Watergate scandal (which began at the height of Linebacker I back in June 1972) was already starting to consume Nixon's Presidency. By August 1974 he was gone. And we all know what ensued in the months between August 1974 and April 1975.

 

So, yes, in some limited sense Linebacker II was a success. But it's important to understand its objectives and the context in which those limited objectives were realized. The best thing I ever heard about Linebacker II was from some wag who bitterly commented, "With Linebacker II we essentially bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our withdrawal from South Vietnam."

 

Those who are interested in the diplomatic back story of the negotiations that brought an end to our involvement in South Vietnam could do worse than check out Larry Berman's "No, Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam."

 

http://www.amazon.com/No-Peace-Honor-Kissinger-Betrayal/dp/0743223497

 

Eric Howes

[+Typhoid 231]

One has to view the LBII operation in the overall context of what the objectives were.  The overriding objective was to force the NV back to the negotiating table.  LB2 did that by inflcting a level of damage on those military and logistics targets that crippled the NV ability to continue the fight. 

 

It was clear from the bombing campaign that we could and would range the country and destroy any objective that we determined necessary.  The NV could not stop us from doing that, nor could they inflict sufficient attrition to make us stop.  For the first time in the war, we unleashed the ability of the US forces to interdict and shut down their critical supply lines, and decimated their air defense forces, rail lines, port facilities (mining), and other critical facilities. 

 

So we achieved the political objective by demonstrating conclusively that we could win militarily. 

 

Our returned POW's reported that their guards and their officers showed real fear and respect for the first time as the LBII operations hammered the north. 

 

Having said that, it was clearly a short-term goal that was determined by the US political leadership and, yes, it forced the NV to negotiate our departure from the fight, thereby clearing the way for their eventual betrayal of the peace terms and subsequent conquer of SV. 

 

Linebacker II was a battle that we won, hands down. 

 

The politicians betrayed our sacrifice and lost the war.  That is separate from the operation itself. 

[+eburger68 199]

Typhoid:

 

I'm afraid I have to disagree with your analysis, because it tries to salvage some kind of "victory" from a situation that could have had no other ending. It also imagines that there was some kind of "victory" that was then followed by a later act of "betrayal." I often encounter this kind of claim from folks -- esp. Americans -- who want to preserve some final sense of victory in a war that that U.S. cannot credibly claim to have won. It usually takes the form of "we actually won the war, but xyz," where xyz is some act of betrayal by the usual suspects (lefties, politicians, gutless careerists in the officer corps), some sure-fire strategy that the U.S. failed to pursue, etc., etc.

 

You wrote:

 

So we achieved the political objective by demonstrating conclusively that we could win militarily.

 

 

Win precisely what militarily? The war? A particular battle? And what kind of demonstration of military victory is this that immediately results in the U.S. completing its departure from Vietnam in less than a month's time, a result that was not only Hanoi's major objective but was an event that was all but inevitable -- even if the North Vietnamese had sat back and done nothing further? It's difficult to claim victory when the outcome of that "victory" is what your opponent had been waiting for all along.

 

So what objective of any great significance was accomplished with that bombing campaign? It lent Nixon a bit of political face-saving cover to complete a withdrawal that was all but finished by the time Linebacker II started. It also gave Nixon the juice he needed to cajole (and coerce) Thieu into signing on to a peace agreement that Thieu himself knew was next to worthless as a guarantee of South Vietnam's survival. Again, it's hard to see how any of that can be claimed as a victory.

 

Put another way, it's a mistake to view Linebacker II and what followed as a victory followed by an act of betrayal. Rather, it is important to recognize that Linebacker II was itself part of a larger move by the United States to walk away from the Vietnam War on terms that satisfied the immediate political needs of the Nixon Administration, even if that meant leaving its South Vietnamese ally saddled with an empty shell of a peace agreement that set the stage for the events of March and April 1975. The betrayal didn't occur after Linebacker II -- it had been in the cards long before.

 

Eric Howes

Edited November 1, 2013 by eburger68

[+Typhoid 231]

Eric,

 

I agree with your last para. 

 

In large measure, we are in agreement that the political objectives were met by the military objective of LBII.

 

What we did prove in LBII was that we could close the ports and shut down the infiltration routes.  We proved in late 1972 that we could militarily win the war and force NV to stop its war of conquest against SV. 

 

but it is very true that we, the US, did not have the political will nor the political objective to do that. 

 

the betrayal was later, when the Congress withdrew the military and logistical support to the SV government that might have kept that country alive.  That was the betrayal of the sacrifice of those who fought in Vietnam.  That is the betrayal, to throw away what our troops fought for rather than fund the continuing aid to SV. 

 

and I might add that the same betrayal has now occurred and is playing out in Iraq and will in Afghanistan. 

 

We may agree to disagree on many of these points, but that is how I see it as do many of my shipmates. 

[+CrazyhorseB34 937]

SAC really showed it's incompetence and arrogance during LBII. Political objectives met yes but the overall effect was just to hilight the obsurdity of USAF senior leadership during the whole Vietnam period. The main lesson that should of been learned from this is that political victories are really losses to the guys that have to fight them. The real betrayal happened during McNamara's tenure. Any trigger puller that has studied Vietnam will tell you that. Also in reference to Iraq and Afghanistan the true betrayal in those wars started from the very beginning. No legal or moral reason to invade Iraq what so ever. War for the sake of war. Trust me I know I did it. The Afghan war started with the outsourcing of the war from the very beginning. Tora Bora would of resulted in OBL's head on a pike if the Bush fucks would have been in it to win it. But their incompetent leadership made horrible mistakes in DEC 01. I know I was at CENTCOM HQ Forward during the time. So Keep this conversation with in the confines on LBII and don't turn it into a Tea Party I hate Obama session.

[+Typhoid 231]

We'll have to disagree on Iraq and Afghanistan. 

 

I was on the secure networks from within NORAD and I saw the intel.  There was very good reason to go in.  That it was not explained well and perhaps fumbled in the execution is a different matter.

 

The betrayal is from our political leadership - take the parties and specific administrations out of it.

 

Don't send us to war and then back out of it after thousands of us have laid down our lives for whatever you sent us there to do.  Either go in to win it, or don't go in. 

 

Don't decide after a decade and several thousand dead and maimed that "oh what the heck, here you can have it back Mr. NVA/Taliban/Al Queda".

 

That is the betrayal.  And it is the same one engineered in Vietnam. 

 

I had friends in Vietnam and sons in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Both are a betrayal of our (military) loyalty and sacrifices. 

 

We should never go again.  Next time, we should simply turn keys and be done with it. 

Edited November 2, 2013 by Typhoid

[macelena 1,070]

Talking about LB2, we are talking about several factors being changed over the previous Rolling Thunder Operation. The main troubles the US aviation faced during the whole war were, in my unexpert opinion, doctrine (training, weapon systems, planning) and politics concerning targets. Both of them were solved partially by the the time of LB2, but the US aviation was still unefficient in terms of air power for a given result. When compared with the contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, you can see how different an AIr Force performs with a doctrine adapted to its needs and the political will to survive. Probably, the IDFAF had more in common with the NVAF in terms of being Effed Up and pragmatical, facing an air force with internal problems, like the USAF or the Arab coalition

 

The reason it ultimately failed to prevent the South from falling a couple of years later was that, the way i see it, LB2 was not intended to secure SV as much as ending the war in terms satisfactory to the US. If Linebacker 2 was a failure, it is because none had the guts to launch Linebacker 3 in 1975.

Edited November 3, 2013 by macelena

[hrc 156]

Just finished reading the whole document. Very interesting analysis.  Thanks for this info!

[+Gepard 10,988]

  For the first time in the war, we unleashed the ability of the US forces to interdict and shut down their critical supply lines, and decimated their air defense forces, rail lines, port facilities (mining), and other critical facilities. 

 

 

If you count on western way, then you may be correct. But, be honest. Does LBII really stop the Ho Chi Minh trail? While the US bombs fall on NV the Bo Dai moved troops, food, ammo toward south. And nothing could really stop them. If a street was so destroyed, that trucks were unable to use it, then the Bo Dai used bicylcles to carry all neccessary things. And this worked well.

[+Dave 2,321]

But the Ho Chi Minh trail was useless if the supplies it was used to carry wasnt getting there due to US airstrikes during LBII disrupting those lines. That is what LBII did. 

[+eburger68 199]

Dave:

 

No U.S. bombing campaign ever completely disrupted the NV ability to bring in supplies from other countries. Even the Navy's success in shutting down Haiphong and other ports through Operation Pocket Money didn't completely stop it. The NV and Chinese simply turned the border city of Lang Son into a land port and began trucking it in. Also, in 1972-73 the North Vietnamese were nearing completion of an oil pipeline that U.S. analysts knew would be very difficult to shut down for any great length of time.

 

Now, mining Haiphong and other ports did put a major crimp in the NVA's ability to keep their more mechanized army properly supplied and was a major factor in causing the NVA offensive in South Vietnam to stall in June 1972.

 

But even during the height of Linebacker I with Haiphong, Hong Gai, and Cam Pha shut down and U.S. aircraft regularly pounding the NV transportation network, the NV were able to keep their army sufficiently supplied to hold their lines and force Nixon and Thieu to sign a peace agreement that allowed NVA units to remain in place in the South. Not even Linebacker II gave Nixon sufficient leverage to dislodge them, and that left South Vietnam with a knife to its throat following the signing of the peace agreement in January 1973.

 

Eric Howes

[+eburger68 199]

Folks:

 

I should have mentioned this earlier, but there is an excellent book on the Easter Offensive, Linebacker I and Linebacker II that was published in 2007:

 

Stephen Randolph. Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive.

http://www.amazon.com/Powerful-Brutal-Weapons-Kissinger-Offensive/dp/0674024915/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383702437&sr=1-1

 

The book draws on a number of relatively new sources sources including recently declassified U.S. documents and North Vietnamese sources that were previously unavailable. The author provides a fascinating window into how Hanoi and Washington strategized, planned, and fought during that last crucial year of active U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

 

Eric Howes

[+Dave 2,321]

I didnt say it completely stopped it, but it was significantly reduced. 

[+Typhoid 231]

I didnt say it completely stopped it, but it was significantly reduced. 

 

yep - the supply lines were finally cut by closing the ports and the rail lines from China.  So the NV's ran out of SAMs and stuff to send south. 

 

That's why I say it worked and made clear what we could have done had we had the political will and direction to do so.  Sadly, we didn't. 

[+eburger68 199]

Typhoid:

 

But they weren't "finally cut by closing the ports and the rail lines from China." Significantly reduced and impeded, yes -- but not "finally cut." The NV always managed to find a way to keep supplies moving -- by truck, train, bicycle, human pack mules, etc. One way or the other they always managed to keep some amount flowing -- enough to keep their war efforts viable.

 

The more important thing to recognize, though, is that pronouncements that LBII demonstrates that we could have won the Vietnam had we just mustered the necessary amount of "political will" (or that proposals to send a large American ground force into Laos to roll up the Ho Chi Minh Trail could have accomplished the same) are sheer speculation based on the unspoken and untested assumption that the NV would not have found still more ways to adapt to and counter a new American strategy -- something they had demonstrated quite a bit of talent for doing over the preceding decade -- or that the Soviets and Chinese would have stood idly by while Washington continued to pound the NV heartland indefinitely with B-52 raids.

 

Despite the diplomatic falling out between the Peking and Hanoi following the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969 (to say nothing of the historical enmity between the Chinese and Vietnamese peoples), despite Nixon's skillful policy of diplomatic "triangulation" vis-a-vis Peking and Moscow, and despite the great amount of suspicion the NV always maintained for the Soviets and their in-country advisors, it would have been extremely dangerous to assume that the Soviets and Chinese would grant Washington a free hand to pursue that kind of sustained bombing campaign against a communist ally -- esp. one on China's doorstep -- over any great period of time. I doubt even the "mad man" Nixon would have been willing to take that risk.

 

Yes, that's quite a bit of speculation there -- but no less than the idea that LBII demonstrated that we could have finally won the Vietnam War had we simply pressed on with more of the same. And that's why I said at the outset of this whole discussion that when discussing LBII it is important to recognize the extremely limited goals of LBII -- what it was actually being used to pressure the NV to do -- and not make the assumption that one eleven day bombing campaign demonstrated any greater potential achievement.

 

Eric Howes

Edited November 8, 2013 by eburger68

[+Typhoid 231]

but not "finally cut."

 

well, yes.  No blockade would be perfect.  It's all relative. 

 

But what we did see was a reduction to a level that they could not have sustained the war in the south, nor could they resupply their SAMs which we ran them out of. 

 

and yes - LBII was a very limited military objective intended to force a political objective - which it absolutely did. 

 

and in the final analysis - every military operation is focused on achieving a political objective.

[+CrazyhorseB34 937]

Watergate was the final battle that defeated the South. Nixon told Thieu he would send the bombers back if the North invaded again. Well after Nixon resigned Ford ( along with his Chief of staff Don Rumsfeld and assistant chief of staff Dick Cheney) refused to honor the agreement and left the South to wither on the vine.............. Political will vs. military prowess? The system of political betrayal continued, if by another brand. LBII did one thing, caused the North to deplete their stock of Guidelines shooting at SAC bombers commanded by dilettantes.