Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on October 26, 1999:
Colonel David Hackworth
The Marine Corps doesn't seem to have the same recruitment and morale problem as the Army. What does that tell us about the Army and Marine leadership?
I have never been in the Marine Corps, but I am very impressed with the Marine Corps. The Marines keep their standards up and their leadership is dynamite! It is the same kind of leadership we have seen throughout the Marines' history, and they are not lowering the bar. They are increasing the bar, and they have long lines of people who want to join the Marine Corps, while the rest of the services are spending $12,000 per head on advertising alone. Fifty percent of those who join these other services don't finish their first year, but they keep all that money we give them. If we copy the Marines' leadership in our other services, we will be in good shape. We have exactly today [the same situation] as George Washington had in 1776, when he paddled across the Delaware, with the exception of the establishment of the Air Force almost fifty years ago. There is so much redundancy, so much waste, so much duplication in our armed forces, we need to merge them and treat them like you treat your own businesses. We need to get rid of the blubber, get rid of the fat, get rid of the waste, and get rid of the redundancy.
The President signed off on a defense bill today that is about three hundred billion dollars when you add intelligence and maintenance of nuclear weapons. This is about what the rest of the world combined spends on defense. We spend this kind of money without one serious threat to our country. We can have a good military force for half that price! We can return the rest of it to the hospitals, schools, streets and your pocket books, and still have a more efficient military machine. What we need is some forward thinking. I am hoping that these issues of "how we have a military" and "what kind of structure it has" will be addressed in the election in the months to come.
Would you comment on the role of women in the military?
There are many vital spots in the military for women, but not in the fox holes. I speak to you not from this old dinosaur standing up here, but from eight years of experience as an infantry soldier in ground combat. It isn't a place for a man, and it surely isn't a place for women.
We are trying hard to provide equality for women in the armed forces, but the armed forces have nothing to do with equality. It is designed to be a lean, mean fighting machine. For the military to be effective, all branches must keep very high standards.
Can you talk about the mismanagement of the Vietnam conflict and its legacy?
Robert McNamara, who was the Secretary of Defense throughout most of the Vietnam conflict, recently went back to Vietnam and sat down with several Vietnamese generals who were responsible for that conflict. He came back with one conclusion: we did not understand the enemy. It is as simple as that, and that is why we lost. We did not understand the nature of that conflict.
Are we always going to be afraid of another Vietnam? Well, the answer was proven in Desert Storm. We put in the appropriate force, and used the proper strategy. We had great generalship and the Iraqi forces were knocked stiff. The problem was that Bush was stuck on the term "Hundred-hour War," instead of making it the One Hundred and Twenty-four Hour or Forty-eight Hour War. Instead of taking the snake and chopping its head off, he allowed the snake to escape. Now we suffer from this continuing war, the longest war in American history, the war with Iraq. Every day, American pilots and servicemen are risking their lives over Iraq in a war that can't be resolved. If you go to war, the lesson is that you must apply sufficient force, know what the hell you are doing, understand your enemy, and beat him. Don't go in there and just punch him out a little, and pull out.
Colonel, the question was not how Bush handled the Gulf War, or how Clinton repeated his mistakes, but what were the mistakes we made in Vietnam?
Well, we did not understand the nature of the war. I went there in 1965 with a parachute unit, one of the finest units the U.S. Army has ever mustered. I was there three months as a major, and I said, "We are not going to win this war, because we are re-fighting World War II." Our failure to understand the enemy, their intentions, how they fought, and their amazing endurance were the primary causes of our failure. We just had this mind-set that we could use this enormous military machine to win the war. We did not fully understand that it was a war for Vietnamese independence. The Vietnamese soldiers were not fighting for Communism, not for some big international organization, but for the exact same reasons that this country's founders fought for freedom and independence. We employed our military effort incorrectly.
I wrote a book that is one thousand pages that addressed the issue of Vietnam.
Having learned our lesson in Vietnam, do we now have an understanding of the dynamics in Kosovo?
Having spent a major portion of my life studying Vietnam, I can say that there was simply no way that war could have been won. We used three times more bombs in Vietnam than the allies had used in the entire World War II. I am surprised that we did not sink Vietnam. The situation in Serbia was different.
There are nine principles of war: mass maneuver, objective, surprise, simplicity, control and so on. Every single one of those rules was totally violated in the war with Serbia. Nothing was done right. The thing with LBJ on his knees picking targets in Vietnam was repeated in Serbia with President Clinton. Nineteen other executives from other countries were doing the same thing. The state department estimated that if we do a bombing, two days later Milosevic and his boys would wave the white flag. The Pentagon did not have the guts to challenge that, even though most of the people at the top knew that bombing would not work. We continued in the principle of mass [bombing], but we failed to put forces on the ground. This allowed Milosevic to maneuver his forces on the ground, so he could achieve his ethnic cleansing.
[As for the element of] "surprise"--which is another principle of war--the Serbian generals kind of got the idea that something was happening on the D-Day of the air war when Dan Rather and all these other major networks showed up in downtown Belgrade.
It is a war that was very badly handled, and I was opposed to the war from the very beginning. I think that we now have a running sore. We will probably have armed forces in that country for fifty years. When I went with the troops to Bosnia in'95, they were going to be there for one year, but it is now going on five [years]. That has cost the Americans about twelve or thirteen billion dollars so far. There is no way that force is going to accomplish anything. I talked to the soldiers there, and they tell me that all the hatred, bitterness and anger between the two ethnic groups is just slightly under the surface. As soon as the troops leave Bosnia, the violence will re-surface.
Would you talk about the erosion of sovereignty with regard to Kosovo and how this might relate to the future of relations between China and Taiwan?
Well, this is kind of out of my ballpark. I am a military guy, and I would rather defer the question to Ms. Albright. The Soviet Union is a sovereign country and we jumped into the middle of that, and I think it was a very bad precedent. China, when the year 2020 comes around, is going to be a very high-tech force that will be in a cold war situation with us, as we were with the Soviet Union. Taiwan has about thirty million people, and China has about one and a half billion. China can't take Taiwan, because Taiwan has such an incredible military machine at this moment. This is not going to stay this way for long, however, because President Clinton and these aircraft companies have provided China with so much technology that it soon will have a missile capability to offset the advantage of Taiwan or the technology that we have. Up until two years ago, the Chinese with a missile could not hit the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Believe me, today, they can hit Los Angeles because of what we transferred to them in the last two years.