Bear Taylor 
RIPPLE SALVO… #364.. A few words on “THE VORACIOUS DEMAND FOR BLOOD AND TREASURE OF THE PROTRACTED VIETNAM WAR”… but first..
Good Morning” Day THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-FOUR of a return to the bombing of North Vietnam by Yankee Air Pirates and Red River Rats…
4 MARCH 1967… HEAD LINES and LEADS from The New York Times on a cold but fair Saturday in NYC…
Page 1: “Civilian Death Put at 95 In Raid in South Vietnam”...”Ninety-five south Vietnamese civilians are reported to have been killed and 200 wounded when two jet planes knifed in from Laotian territory Thursday night and bombed and strafed a village near the border. The rising death toll was announced this morning…an urgent inquiry was started to determine which planes had carrier out the raid… If the attack was a mistaken American bombing it was the worst such mistake of the war. The prior worst accident record was 63 killed and 83 wounded in the village of Lanvei. If it was the work of enemy pilots it would have been their first such strike into South Vietnam.”... Page 1: “U.S. Offers allies New Plan to Ease Troop Cost Load”… “The United States outlined a new plan today to the financial problems of maintaining American forces in West Germany. If the approach is excepted by the North Atlantic Treaty allies, it could remove financial considerations from the current discussions on the level of United States forces in Europe. The State Department said that the United States would abandon the concept that the Bonn Government through arms purchases in the United States would offset the dollar cost of the United States of stationing troops in West Germany. In stead, the United States and the other allies would rely on monetary cooperation to prevent the troop costs from contributing to balance of payment problems or a drain on gold reserves.”... Page 1: “South Arabia Strife Spurs U.S. Warning on Meddling”… “The United States issued tonight what appeared to be a warning to the United Arab Republic and other outside powers not to attempt armed intervention in the troubled South Arabian Federation…Informed sources interpreted this as an extension of an American protective umbrella to South Arabia for the first time.”…
Page 1: “Rift In Congress Over the War Widens”...”The Congressional disagreement over the search for peace in Vietnam hardened today following Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s proposal that the United States suspend the bombing of North Vietnam as an inducement to the Communists to enter peace negotiations. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate Republican leader, stood by President Johnson’s refusal to halt the bombing without an ‘equivalent action’ by the Communists to reduce the war.”...Page 3: “New Phase In Vietnam Fighting” …”General Westmoreland’s drive against the main forces of the enemy has entered a new and critical phase. In a classic war, it would be called the offensive. In this unconventional war it is sometimes called sustained combat. What it amounts to is that South Vietnam and its allies now have enough troops to mount multiple large-scale operations in widely scattered sections of the country. This means more troops, more fighting and higher costs in blood and treasure. American force levels are now at 415,000 in Southeast Asia.”...Page 3: The Department of Defense’s “Little Box” reporting 36 more American servicemen killed in action in South Vietnam…
Page 1: “Peking Cautions Red Guards Against the Dangers of Anarchy”… “Overzealous supporters of Mao Tse Tung were warned today against promoting anarchy in China. The Communist party newspaper Jenmin Jih Pao published an article, ‘Down With Anarchism’… “…an end to the cultural revolution? If this is true, it would mark the first area in which the Maoist experiment has ended.’ “…
4 March 1967… The President’s Daily Brief…CIA (TS sanitized)… NORTH KOREA/COMMUNIST CHINA: Now the North Koreans are beginning openly to take a few whacks at the Chinese. North Korean diplomats in several countries have objected strongly and publicly to Red Guard poster attacks last month charging the Pyongyang regime with “revisionism.” The fifty remaining technicians in North Korea meanwhile have been forced to hole up at the embassy; the Koreans closed the hotel where they were living….SOVIET UNION: It took only two days after launch for the Soviets to begin transmitting weather data to the US from their satellite Cosmos 144. With the last satellite it took two months…
4 MARCH 1967…OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER... New York Times... (5 Mar reporting 4 Mar ops) Page 3: “Clouds Bring Hanoi Two weeks of Calm”…”Hanoi has been enjoying almost perfect tranquility for the last two weeks thanks to a persistent overcast. Except for an occasional alert, air raid sirens have not been heard since February 21. Only the rumble of far away bombs reached here on February 25 and again on the 26th when the United States aircraft struck at an electric power station in the Hanoi area.”… “Vietnam: Air Losses” (Hobson) Two American fixed wing aircraft were downed in Southeast Asia on 4 March 1967…
(1) MAJOR FRANK DAVID WILEY was flying an F-5C of the 10th FCS and 3rd TFW out of Bien Hoa on a close air support mission in South Vietnam and incurred an engine failure and subsequent crash that killed MAJOR WILEY… Fate is the hunter… a salute to a fallen warrior on the 50th anniversary of his final flight…
(2) MAJOR RALPH LAURENCE CARLOCK was flying an F-105D of the 357th TFS and 355th TFW out of Takhli on an armed reconnaissance mission in Laos and went down while on the attack. Here is the tale as told by Chris Hobson: “…spotted a truck on a road near Ban Paka. The flight leader saw MAJOR CARLOCK’s F-105 dive toward the truck but then saw the F-105 hit by 37mm anti-aircraft fire and start to burn. Despite radio calls to eject, no one saw MAJOR CARLOCK escape the aircraft as it crashed close to the road near the village of Nong Het, just within Laos. Pathet Lao radio the following day announced the shooting down of an F-105, but also claimed the capture of the pilot. In 1988 a witness told U.S investigators that he had seen an F-105 shot down and the pilot eject at a very low altitude and was killed. Whatever the actual events RALPH CARLOCK remains missing in action to this day (2001).” Today, on the 50th anniversary of MAJOR CARLOCK’s gift of “the last full measure” to his country, we join his family in praising his memory.
RIPPLE SALVO… #364… “PAYING FOR AN ILL-BEGOTTEN WAR”… A few words from Volume VI of the Secretary of Defense Historical Series: McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam 1965-1969 by Edward J. Drea (pages 110-12). This is about the “voracious demand” on scarce American resources– blood and treasure– to prosecute the protracted Vietnam war… Quotes from the Drea volume…
“Did McNamara deliberately mislead Congress and the nation’s economists about the cost of the war? The argument has persisted that the upward revision of his original projections proved the administration knew all along that the costs would go much higher than their initial estimate.”… “The voracious demands of the Vietnam War ran up the bill faster and longer than McNamara or anyone else had anticipated. Actual costs consistently outpaced DOD’s constantly readjusted estimates.”… “The president’s domestic priorities and conflicting political pressures beyond question shaped the amounts of his proposed budgets and announced expenditures, but McNamara was not the first secretary of defense to labor under those Washington realities. His budget premises were on record, and he openly and repeatedly told Congress that the administration would need more money to prosecute the war. Both the secretary of defense and the president met with congressmen individually and collectively to alert them to likely price tags on the conflict. Economists understood the situation as evidenced by their calls for tax increases, interest rate hikes, and spending cuts. As Fortune magazine put it: ‘The budget is not misleading once it’s rather sophisticated underlying assumptions are understood; but the assumptions are not widely understood, and the administration had not made much of an effort to see that they are.'”…
“To McNamara’s discredit, however, he misled Congress about the growing scope of American involvement and its actual cost to the U.S. taxpayer. His selective use of information, his obfuscation by detail, his repeated failure even to estimate future costs of the war, and his decision to place loyalty to the president above accuracy became more pronounced as the administration deployed more and more troops to Vietnam. Truth and transparency became the costs of his efficient control of the budget. McNamara knew the president’s wishes; McNamara knew the dimensions of the Vietnam buildup; and only McNamara, it was reputed, understood the Defense budget. Paradoxically, at this critical juncture McNamara did not seem to fully appreciate the impact of a protracted war on the Nation’s economic health….
“As so often happened in this ill-begotten war, changing circumstances left otherwise seemingly rational and intelligent decisions foundering because their timing was inappropriate to the situation. If unemployment had been higher, if the economy had greater slack to increase production, if a tax cut in June 1965 had not reduced federal revenues, if the Great Society had not materialized coincidentally with massive escalation of the commitment in Southeast Asia–then deficit spending could have spurred full production and greater employment while keeping inflation in check. Instead, the additional expenses of the Vietnam War and the Great Society swelled the federal deficit, stroked rising inflation, and inevitably led to serious instability in the economy.
“Johnson later insisted that ‘moving step by step was not only the best way to plan the budget; it was the best way to save the Great Society.’ Perhaps, but by 1966 the administration was already cutting domestic spending to pay for the war. ‘Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought,’ recalled Johnson, ‘but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.’ Had the president given priority to either domestic reform or the war instead of trying to realize them simultaneously, he might have avoided the accusations then and later the mishandling of both.”…
CAG’s QUOTES for 4 March: KARL VON CLAUSEWITZ: “Boldness, directed by a predominating intelligence is the stamp of a hero.”
PATTON: “May God deliver us from our friends; we can handle the enemy.”…
Lest we forget… Bear.
