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During the first five months of this year, southbound enemy truck traffic has doubled over that during the same 1965 period, while delivery of Red supplies south of the 17th parallel has jumped 150% and of troops 120%, to an estimated 4,500 men a month. As evidence, McNamara displayed a recent infra-red reconnaissance photograph of a 51-truck convoy creeping bumper-to-bumper at night down a North Vietnamese section of the trail. Said he: "Some of these routes are new, some have been widened and upgraded for all-weather truck use. Bypasses have been built, and bamboo-trellised canopies rigged over some jungle roads to inhibit aerial observation." What it boils down to, warned the Defense Secretary, is that the Reds are shifting "from a small-arms guerrilla action against South Viet Nam to a quasi-conventional military action."
Truck and barge convoys obviously cannot move without oil—which North Viet Nam does not produce or even refine, depending wholly on imports, mostly from Russia. In recent months, these imports have soared by 60%, and Hanoi has begun dispersing and burying its vulnerable storage tanks, as clearly shown by reconnaissance pictures. Given the "perishable nature" of such a target, the Secretary added crisply, "it became much more desirable to attack it now than it had been earlier."
Consistent Progression. Chary of expanding the conflict, President Johnson has been markedly reluctant to use his bombers in this fashion, even during recent weeks when he has been faulted in voters' polls for not prosecuting the war with greater intensity. In fact, though last week's attacks on Hanoi-Haiphong were almost universally described as escalation, in the strictest sense they were no such thing. As a European observer in Saigon put it, they amounted to "a change in quantity but not in quality," whereas escalation in terms of modern warfare also implies technological and qualitative change.
Given the fact that the U.S. has long been hitting every means of transport from truck to barge in the North, the decision to bomb major sources of the fuel on which they depend is a compelling, consistent progression. In any case, as Vice President Hubert Humphrey observed last week, even though "there will be friends who disagree with us, it is our men who are there. It is our men who are facing Communist bullets."