The American people may find it hard to believe that the U.S. is winning the war in Viet Nam. They have, after all, been ladled too many over-sanguine assurances in the past, only to be confronted later with the familiar due bills of heavier manpower commitments, steeper costs and higher casualties. Nonetheless, one of the most exhaustive inquiries into the status of the conflict yet compiled offers considerable evidence that the weight of U.S. power, 21 years after the big build-up began, is beginning to make itself felt. Within the next 18 months or so, White House officials maintain, the increasing impact of that strength may bring the enemy to the point where he could simply be unable to continue fighting.
Because Lyndon Johnson fears that the U.S. public is in no mood to accept its optimistic conclusions, he may never permit the report to be released in full. Even so, he is sufficiently impressed with the findings—and sufficiently anxious to make their conclusions known—to permit the experts who have been working on it to talk about it in general terms. Highlights: > Bombing of the North, while it cannot alone prove decisive, is putting so great a strain on Hanoi that before long a major break will ensue. Last spring, U.S. Air Force Lieut. General William ("Spike") Momyer, commander of the bombing war in Viet Nam, devised a tactic known as "pursuit-of-a-target system" that puts relentless pressure on the North's transportation network. Instead of blasting a road or bridge and then leaving it alone for a while, the system calls for flyers to make continuous "multiple cuts" in roads and rail lines, trapping trains and trucks between the gaps and leaving them exposed to U.S. planes (see THE WORLD). Last week's strikes at Haiphong and Cam Pha, the North's first and third biggest ports, signaled a shift to the next step—isolating the ports by blasting roads, marshaling yards and rail sidings around dock areas. > Antiaircraft and SAM-missile fire from the ground has fallen off dramatically in some areas, thanks largely to shortages of shells and missiles. This has been reflected by a decline in the ratio of U.S. planes lost to sorties flown. Further, there has been a drop in the number of bomb loads that had to be jettisoned by U.S. flyers in order to combat pursuing MIGs, now considerably less in evidence. > In the South, Viet Cong strength is dropping. Recruitment, once thought to be adding 7,000 men per month to guerrilla ranks, is now estimated to be running at only 3,500. One result has been a decline in terrorist incidents from 2,700 to 1,700 a month. While estimates of either side's effective control over the populace have always been suspect, the Administration figures that the South Vietnamese civilians under guerrilla rule now total some 25% of the country's 17 million people (v. more than 40% under outright Viet Cong control or in sharply contested areas at the beginning of 1965). A telling piece of evidence is the flight of more than 1,000,000 South Vietnamese to the cities in the past year. Whatever their reasons—war-weariness, the lure of jobs or plain fear of the guerrillas—their exodus has markedly reduced the Viet Cong's rural base.