The McNamara Wall - Piss Poor
Thursday, January 10, 2019
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| Infiltration Surveillance Center (ISC) at Nakhon Phanom RTAFB
(Image courtesy of Chris Jeppeson) |
I am in the middle of a book so enthralling and interesting
that I must write a second blog about it. Here is the first one The CarltonHotel Pastry Chef, Mariel Hemingway & the Wild Weasels
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| Republic F-105F Thunderchief Wild Weasel |
The book is not a fast read. Attempting to figure out how a pilot and and EWO ( Electronic Warfare Officer) in a Thud (F-105 Thunderchief) lure a SAM (Surface to air missile) site run by North Vietnamese personnel and aided by Soviets to turn on its radar guiding system so as to ID the location of the missile site is difficult for me to understand while marvelling at the fact that these Wild Weasels, as they were called were actually sort of saying, "I dare you to shoot me down with your missile!"
The book The Hunter Killers by Dan Hampton reveals all kinds
of stuff that many of us did not understand about the Viet Nam war and how all
that happened then has bearings with our scary present. And then there is the
story of McNamara's Line (wall) and the urine bags. I will not write here of
another great idea the American used. This involved creating more mud by using
silver crystals in clouds. And then they modified Calgon to make the mud
stickier and redder. A confused American flyer was told to bomb enemy
elephants. Understandably the pilot was flummoxed. He was told that enemy elephants would have muddy and red undersides.
Below is Dan Hampton's revelations of McNamara's Wall something so timely today
1967…But McNamara’s real
emphasis was a barrier – a fortified line by which infiltration could be
stopped and the North contained. Called “an iron-curtain counter-infiltration
system,” it would stretch from the South China Sea across the DMZ [Demilitarized
Zone] and Laos into Thailand. If interdiction could not be halted by bombing,
then the Viet Cong could be strangled when the Ho Chi Minh Trail was
permanently cut. Again, this illustrates a fundamental miscalculation regarding
the trail’s logistical importance, since most support for the VC was indigenous,
and the few tons of required supplies leaked to South Vietnam despite American
efforts. The barrier would also contain the People’s Army, or so McNamara
believed. In fact discussions about such a plan went back as far as 1965 but
ultimately it was quite correctly regarded by the military as totally
impractical.
All through the summer of 1966 various studies had been
commissioned, including those by the Institute of Defense Analysis and the
JASON group. By that September, disregarding all practical opposition, cost and
wasted manpower, the secretary of defense ordered the barriers implemented in
one year. Phase One would run from the coastal area near Gio Linh, just below
the DMZ, west to Con Thien. Phase Two would extend farther west into Laos and
would be constructed at a later date. More than 50,000 miles of barbed wire,
five million fence posts, and 200,000 tons of other materials were needed. The
initial cost hovered around $1.6 billion, which included $600 million for a
command center at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand. Phase One fell entirely within the
3rd Marine Division’s area of operations and General Lewis Walt, the
Marine commander, was not at all happy about it.
McNamara brushed off Walt’s very real operational concerns,
just as he had ignored the Joint Chiefs; construction commenced. Under the
title Joint Task Force 738, also called “Practice Nine,” the bulldozers, Rome
plows, and engineers began clearing terrain. The main concept was an
overlapping system of physical obstacles and sensors tied into a centralized,
computerized command center. Seismic and sonic sensors would detect movement
and sound, respectively. Electrochemical sniffers like the XM-2 personnel
detector were supposed to detect urine on the premise that where there was
urine there were people. Others were employed that would find the enemy by
smell, though no one seemed quite sure of body odor differences among
Vietnamese, or even Americans who’d been living
of native food.
However it was to happen, when infiltrators were detected,
cluster bombs, mines, and barbed wire would discourage them, or at least give a
warning to close air support aircraft or ground teams, who would then respond.
To the surprise of no one, except perhaps the secretary of defense, the barrier
didn’t work. As axiomatic as it sounds, the greatest vulnerability to high technology
often seems to be low-technology solutions. The North Vietnamese promptly blew
up the initial fourteen guard towers along the cleared trace then moved the
acoustic sensors far off the Trail. They also draped urine bags near the
chemical sniffers and herded domestic animals in all directions to mislead the
seismic sensors.
Practice Nine was headed by Lieutenant General Alfred
Starbird, a 1933 graduate of West Point who competed as a pentathlete in the
1936 Olympics, then earned a master’s in engineering from Princeton in 1937. A
Wizard by training, Starbird was also a combat engineer who’d been in the first
unit to cross the Rhine River during World War II. Following the mediocre
results of Cedar Falls and Junction City [military operations] in early 1967,
the pressure was on to make the barrier – The McNamara Line, as it came to be
known – a success. So despite the failure of fixed fortifications in history
from Hadrian’s Wall to the Maginot Line, Starbird persisted. By early 1967,
McNamara overlooked test results and complaints by those in the field and
declared the system operational.
Some of the projects were interesting, some marginally
effective, and some as shown, were outright wastes of time. As such, these
projects illustrated the fact that winning the war was no longer Washington’s
priority, if it ever had been. What is certain is that vast amounts of men,
materials, and money were diverted from the real fighting, where a difference
could have been made if Washington had decided upon a military solution.
In a website that had a virus attached I read that the Vietnamese at one time considered rebuilding part of the wall for tourists.
In a website that had a virus attached I read that the Vietnamese at one time considered rebuilding part of the wall for tourists.
