Kennedy and Vietnam

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No quantitative analysis here, but a decent and balanced look at Kennedy’s thinking on Vietnam in 1963, when we had more than 16,000 advisors committed but had not yet put in combat troops: Kennedy and Vietnam

A couple of salient points:

  1. His ruminations on a Congo intervention are particularly interesting: “I assume this probably won’t be successful. Nothing ever seems to be….”
  2. Concerning the Congo: “He also reiterated the need for an expert military assessment ‘of the chances of its [US military intervention] success'”
  3. Conclusion: “My view, rooted in the documents and tape recordings at the JFK Library, does not support the conclusions of either Kennedy advocates or critics.”

The U.S. at the end of 1960, under Eisenhower, the U.S had 685 troops in South Vietnam. Under Kennedy, at the end of 1961 it was 3,164, in 1962 it was 11,326 and in 1963 it was 16,263. Under Johnson, it continued to grow to 23,210 in 1964 and 184,314 at the end of 1965. At the end of 1968 it was at 536,040 (source: DISS — Dupuy Insurgency Spread Sheets).

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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