Before each acceleration of the U.S. military effort in Viet Nam over the past 30 months, Lyndon Johnson has painstakingly reviewed the progress of the war and the prospects for peace. Last week, dissatisfied with the conflict's grindingly slow pace, the President was in the midst of yet another reappraisal. The choice, as the White House sees it, is either to maintain pressure on the Communists at roughly the present level or increase the punishment significantly in the next few months.
Johnson does not consider present policy a failure. The Communists, after all, have been thwarted in their attempt to isolate Saigon and undermine it politically. They can no longer hope to bisect the country at its waist along Route 19. Their third and most ambitious effort, to take the northernmost provinces by storm, has been blocked at great expense to Hanoi.
The price to the U.S. has been substantial as well. More than 12,400 Americans have died. Nearly 500,000 men are in South Viet Nam, and the number will grow. The dollar cost now runs some $25 billion a year. While this tremendous investment has denied Hanoi and the Viet Cong hegemony in the South, the U.S. and the Saigon government have also been unable to win effective control. General Harold Johnson, Army Chief of Staff and a man not given to hyperbole, said last week in Saigon that he sniffed a "smell of success," that the enemy was choosing to run rather than fight more often than a year ago.
Yet despite the punishment being absorbed daily by the Communists, no one envisions any dramatic breakthrough in the military balance very soon. This prospect has already prompted both pro-and anti-war camps to cry ever more loudly for drastic changes in strategy, leaving President Johnson little choice but to press for considerably more substantial gains in the field to bulwark his Administration's showing before 1968.
Rolling Thunder. One logical decision, long urged by his military advisers, would be a determined thrust by land and sea in and above the so-called Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Viet Nams. The "Inchon Thing," as Pentagon planners call it—referring to Douglas MacArthur's end run into enemy territory during the Korean War —would carry the ground war to North Vietnamese soil for the first time. The purpose would be to seal off the DMZ as an operational base for North Vietnamese regular forces above the 17th Parallel and to crimp the southward flow of Communist troops. The major drawback of any such offensive is that it would still leave unplugged the Communists' infiltration routes through Laos and Cambodia.