NATURE OF THE WAR
General Abrams brought to his post a markedly different outlook on the conflict and how it ought to be conducted than his predecessor. He pronounced it 'One War' in which combat operations, improvement of South Vietnamese forces and pacification were all of equal importance and priority. During the earlier period, the emphasis had been almost exclusively on large-scale combat operations intended to inflict crippling casualties on the enemy, on the premise that that would eventually cause him to cease aggression against the south.

Week after week and month after month, Abrams sought to educate his commanders. 'Our people have got to realize what this war is about,' he stressed. 'It isn't that you lay around in your base camp waiting for somebody to sight a division marching down the road, and then you sally forth and take the division on. This war is a far more complex thing than that.' As Abrams told Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Earle Wheeler, it's the people — 'That's what both sides are struggling for.'

Abrams continued: 'On our side, instead of talking about offensives, we've got to put a lot of effort up there so that pacification continues to march and continues to consolidate. That's the nature of the beast! Instead of toying around about whether you ought to move another brigade of the 4th Division, something like that. That's not the real answer!

'This war, if you're really going to understand it and really get with it — he runs it, the enemy runs it, at about five or six levels,' said Abrams. 'The levels are his infrastructure, guerrilla structure, local force structure, main force structure, his political effort, his propaganda effort. In order to play in that game effectively, you've got to operate at all those levels yourself.'

Emphasizing the need to work against the entirety of the enemy system, Abrams told his commanders: 'What we've been doing is sort of on a treadmill. We have focused on these main units, and they're always getting ready to hit Saigon or Tay Ninh, whatever it is, Ban Me Thuot — and so we go after that and we're whacking them with B-52s, tacair and artillery, and dumping in on them and piling on and that sort of thing. And the history of that is that we go ahead and mash it all up, but then he sends a lot more guys down and builds it back up again and we mash it all up again and just — you know, cause a lot of casualties and so on. Now the way to put a stop to it, the way to get off the treadmill, is to go after this other part which always seems to survive….This is the way to run the war! Our war!'

Large-scale operations conducted primarily in the deep jungles now gave way to large numbers of small-unit ambushes and sweeps sited to deny the enemy access to the population, with'search and destroy' operations replaced by 'clear-and-hold' tactics. Such operations were designed to protect the people, especially those in South Vietnam's rural hamlets and villages, and to root out the covert enemy infrastructure that had long dominated the rural population through terror and coercion.By early 1969, a senior commander commented: 'We have a lot of battalion operations going on, but when I say battalion — in many cases it's companies, and the companies are broken down in platoons and so on. But basically putting out many LRRPs or armed equivalents — 30 from the 4th Division, 12 from the 173rd Airborne Brigade.'

Even Lt. Gen. Julian Ewell, widely known for his devotion to body count, would say, 'I'm perfectly willing to admit pacification's my primary mission.'

They were in essence implementing the principles of the PROVN Study — 'A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam' — developed under General Harold K. Johnson's direction when he was chief of staff. That study held, in its central finding, that 'the critical actions are those that occur at the village, district and provincial levels. This is where the war must be fought; this is where the war and the object which lies beyond it must be won.'

Very early on, Abrams made it clear that in such a conflict body count was no longer the primary measure of merit. 'There's a lot of evidence to go around of a developing disinterest in body count per se,' he told his nominal boss, Pacific Theater commander Admiral John S. McCain Jr. 'Weapons are important.'

To his field commanders, Abrams said: 'I don't think it makes any difference how many losses [the enemy] takes. I don't think that makes any difference.'

Then, again to the field commanders: 'I know body count, you know — it has something about it, but it's really a lo-o-o-ong way from what's involved in this war. Yeah, you have to do that, I know that, but the mistake is to think that that's the central issue.'

And yet again: 'Now I know the fighting's important. But all of these things in the pacification — building the village and the hamlet, and really building a base there and so on. I really think that, of all the things, that's the most important. That's where the battle ultimately is won.'

Finally, to regional ambassadors meeting in Saigon, Abrams' comment was, 'In the whole picture of the war, the battles don't really mean much.'

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