Ernest Graves
which is now being tried in New York between [General William C.] Westmoreland and
CBS. I was there during the deliberations on the last major request for troop
reinforcement made by Westmoreland. He came in with this request. We worked on it
some. The papers were sent over to the White House in draft. They came back, and it
was then not announced and the position was taken that there hadn't been any request.
After the Tet offensive, MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] took the
position that if they were going to deal more effectively with the insurgency, they
needed more effort. There was a review of policy in Washington, and basically they
decided that they weren't going to put any more effort in. In fact, they were going to
start scaling our effort back. They were going to have Vietnamization.
This took place over time. The involvement of Resor in all of this was to provide
[Secretary of Defense Robert S.] MacNamara accurate estimates of just what it would
take to do it.
In trying to generate resources for Vietnam--I don't mean dollars; I mean trained
people, equipment, and so forth--the Army was handicapped by the magnitude of the
job. But they were also severely handicapped by very antiquated, slow analytical tools.
If you asked the Army staff in those days to come up with a plan for putting more
troops in Vietnam, where they would get the troops from, what would be the impact
on readiness, and what would be the impact on our posture in Europe, it would take
weeks. It was a great drill, most of which was manual.
Those are things that could be done today with a computer in a week. In those days,
they were taking a couple of months. They were trying to use computers, but they were
having a terrible time with the data.
For example, they had a master list of units, but they couldn't get the computer to print
a list that was accurate. It was full of mistakes. They were trying to get master lists of
equipment, and they couldn't come up with that, where it was and how much. All that's
come a long way since then. But computers were in their early stages then, and they
couldn't marshal data quickly.
Another insight into that same kind of problem--but also different--they didn't know
the strength of the Army. You may say, "How in the world?" But there was a dispute
between OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Army of about ten thousand
people.
Why was this? Because the Army determined its strength based on morning reports.
You had losing and gaining units for every transfer. So Private Smith leaves Unit A to
105
Previous Page
