The Lessons of the Tet Offensive for Iraq and Afghanistan
The 1968 Tet Offensive is remembered as a critical turning point in the Vietnam War, the watershed in which major U.S. military victories on the ground were negated by hostile press coverage and ineffective leadership in Washington. Since then Tet has been an inspiration to America’s unconventional enemies seeking to replicate the offensive’s strategic effects. Since they have no hope of defeating the United States on the battlefield they are forced to attempt to prevail in the information and political domains.
The primary military lesson of the Tet Offensive for Iraq and Afghanistan is a warning to insurgents to stick to guerilla warfare and not attempt conventional assaults. During Tet the Viet Cong abandoned asymmetric warfare in a doomed mission to mount a stand-up fight. They sacrificed their primary advantage as guerillas, mobility, to confront the U.S. advantage in firepower. For the Americans and South Vietnamese this solved the most vexing tactical problem they faced, locating the enemy. Once the communists revealed themselves and were pinned down in South Vietnamese cities they were quickly defeated.
Insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan cannot mount an attack on the scale of Tet, which involved over 80,000 enemy troops, around half of which were North Vietnamese regulars. There is no good counterpart to these forces in America’s current unconventional wars, barring the sudden large-scale ground intervention of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Thus today’s enemies are unable to present a conventional challenge of the sort the North Vietnamese did at Khe Sanh or Hue.
The few times that insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan have massed for attacks on Coalition strong-points they have been soundly whipped. In April 2005 al Qaeda frontally attacked the Abu Ghraib prison complex with rockets, mortars, car bombs and small arms. In a two-hour battle the terrorists suffered around 25 percent killed in action with many more wounded, but no Americans were killed and no prisoners freed. The attack was a failure, and naturally was compared to Tet.
While the Tet Offensive was a communist military disaster, its political impact was decisive. In this respect Tet remains a standing invitation to insurgents, terrorists and other unconventional foes who seek to create conditions that will generate the kind of press coverage that turned a communist rout into a political victory.
Terrorists and insurgents understand that they must leverage the press in order to have any hope of achieving success. Osama bin Laden once wrote, “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.” Tet is especially useful to insurgents because it is a well-known and popular analogy that reporters can use to package stories using preexistent themes in order to give instant (and often erroneous) context to events. They desire coverage that exaggerates the impact and significance of their actions in the same way the media blew the Tet attacks out of proportion.
The best example of the impact of the press on perceptions of the Tet Offensive was coverage of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon on January 31, 1968. Nineteen Viet Cong sappers were ordered to seize the embassy grounds and await reinforcements. The embassy was a minor objective in the overall communist battle-plan; the VC who assaulted it were not specialists and had not even been told what their mission was until hours before the attack. Most of the attacking force was wiped out within minutes of blowing a hole in the embassy wall, and the rest were gradually picked in a matter of hours. In military terms the attack was a complete failure. But press reports dwelled on the “symbolic” nature of an assault on a center of U.S. power in the heart of Saigon. That the enemy had been defeated was not seen as significant; the fact that they could attack at all was deemed paramount.
Iraqi insurgents seemed to have learned this lesson when they planned an assault on the International or “Green” Zone in March 2006 by over 400 fighters posing as guards. They planned to storm the U.S. and British embassies, take hostages and generally wreak havoc. The plot was uncovered at the last minute by Iraqi security. Iraq’s Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said the insurgents had been “one bureaucrat’s signature away” from implementing the plan.
The attackers would have had no chance of holding the Green Zone. Insurgent reinforcements would not be coming, and the Coalition response would have been swift and overwhelming. Nevertheless the attack would engage the media’s Tet reflex, and the most important phases of the battle would be fought on the airwaves, the Internet, and in newspapers and magazines. The irresistible story-line would have been “Tet Offensive: The Sequel” with reports and analyses thick with the sense of quagmire and defeat.
As it stands the press is hardwired to draw the Tet analogy like a gun whenever weak, unconventional enemies lash out under limited and exceptional circumstances and briefly capture the media’s attention. The battle is a handy framework for revisiting familiar themes such as intelligence failure, war crimes, terrorism, troop surges, leadership breakdown, and media bias, among others. Sometimes the comparisons are serious stretches, such as when Time magazine declared the Wikileaks document dump of classified Afghan War documents a “Tet Offensive.” Journalists will go out of their way to invoke Tet no matter how absurd the comparison.
Thus the lesson of Tet for America’s enemies is that their standard for victory in the information domain is much lower than it is on the battlefield. They do not need to prevail on the field, but only try to. They do not have to seize and hold ground, but only threaten to. Violence in this framework becomes mere theater. It need not conform to the principles of war but only be dramatic enough to engage the media’s propensity to use the Tet analogy, and the desire of every journalist to be another Walter Cronkite.