To War Or Not To War: Vietnam And The Sigma Wargames

>> Jacob Ganz: Hello and welcome, everybody. We're just gonna get started right now. I know people are still filing in, and the first thing we're gonna do is show a little video, so I hope you enjoy.

>> Presenter: It's 1964, and America stands at a crossroads in Southeast Asia. President Johnson is in the midst of a reelection campaign while I attempting to grapple with a deteriorating situation in Vietnam.

The south Vietnamese government appears increasingly weak and unstable, as the Viet Cong are increasing the tempo of their attacks. As the president weighs his options, many of his top advisers convene in the basement of the Pentagon to play a series of war games. These were the Sigma war games, a series of political military simulations that were played from 1962 to 1967.

The games explored potential scenarios for America's deepening involvement in Southeast Asia. Featuring prominent figures such as national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Earl Wheeler, and Air Force General Curtis Lemay. The Sigma war games provide a revealing glimpse into the paths not taken by the United States.

These predictions proved to be strikingly accurate, as these war games projected the failure of America's bombing strategy, and warned of a prolonged, costly quagmire, which would lead to severe domestic political repercussions. Despite these stark warnings, there is little evidence that the insights from the Sigma war games influenced American policy in Vietnam.

Why were these critical lessons ignored? Were they overlooked, dismissed, or I deliberately concealed? This panel will delve into these questions and examine the game's impact, or lack thereof, on President Johnson's decisions. Join us for expert insights from H.R. McMaster, Mark Moyer, and Mai Elliott, moderated by Jacquelyn Schneider, with introductory remarks by Jacob Ganz.

>> Jacob Ganz: Okay, hello and welcome to today's event, To War or Not To War: Vietnam and the Sigma War Games. My name is Jacob Ganz, and I'm the program manager here at the Hoover Institution's War Gaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. We are thrilled to have you with us today for what promises to be in its setting discussion.

We are honored to be joined by three distinguished experts on the Vietnam War and the Sigma war games, H.R. McMaster, Mai Elliott, and Mark Moyer. Our moderator for today is Jacquelyn Schneider, the director of the Hoover Institution's War Gaming and Crisis Simulation initiative, and a leading authority on war games and their impact on US foreign and defense policy.

This is truly a full circle moment for me as I wrote my master's thesis on these very games. This event is designed to be informative, interactive, but most importantly, fun. You should have a button with you that has a picture of your chosen wargamer. Throughout the panel, we will pause to ask questions that will appear on the screen behind me.

You can respond to these questions using your phone, giving you a chance to step into the shoes of these historic figures who faced difficult decisions in these games. Before we dive in, I'm gonna provide a quick overview of the history of war games and the context of the Sigma series, as well as their significance to the Vietnam War, thank you and enjoy the event.

Modern war games first appeared in the early 19th Century Prussia. Known as Kriegsspiel, they were used by the Prussian army to test out new tactics during the various wars of the 1860s and 1870s. By 1884, wargaming had proliferated into the United States military, especially the US Navy, which began to incorporate it into its training and planning.

The breakout moment for war games came in the years before World War II, when the Naval War College used wargames to determine how to fight a war with Japan in the Pacific. Admiral Chester Nimitz later remarked, that nothing in the war surprised him except for kamikaze tactics, because the conflict had been played out so thoroughly during these games.

Wargaming boomed during the Cold War, driven by innovations at think taints like the Rand Corporation. One key development during this period was the politico military wargame, which focused on leadership decision-making rather than solely military tactics. From these politico military wargames, emerged the Sigma wargame series, a set of ten Pentagon run games that took place between 1962 and 1967, and centered on the evolving conflict in Southeast Asia.

Over the years, the scope of the games shifted to reflect the region's changing dynamics. Early games like Sigma 162, the first one, focused on Laos, while later games like the 1966 version explored strategies for de escalating the war already raging in Vietnam. These shifts mirrored America's transformation from a transformed observer to a primary actor in the conflict.

Two of the most important Sigma games took place in the spring and the fall of 1964. Known as Sigma 164 and Sigma 264, these two games were played while President Johnson and his top advisors were deciding whether to wade further into the war in Vietnam. They offer fascinating insight into the decision-making process of the Johnson administration.

Now that we have the history of wargames, let's move on to what it felt like to be in the room for them. A politico military war game like the Sigma series was not what you picture with maps and dice and little tanks moving across a board. Instead, the players were divided into teams representing decision makers in different countries.

For example, in the first Sigma war game of 1964, there were three teams, blue, representing the United States and South Vietnam, red, representing North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, and yellow, representing communist China. Later games, like the second Sigma War games of 1964, dropped the yellow team and focused on just blue and red.

Once the teams were formed, they were presented with an initial scenario that described the challenges that they faced. They were then asked to respond as their respective governments. Teams communicated strategy through game messages, detailing their military and political actions. Lastly, a control team of experts would assess each team's moves, update the scenario, and prompt a new round of responses.

The timeline within the game was usually two to four months. At the end of each game, all participants gathered for discussion of the outcomes. Some of the most memorable moments of the games occurred during these sessions. For instance, when one participant, likely Air Force general Curtis Lemay, who some of you may have as your button, famously stated that the US should bomb North Vietnam into the Stone Age.

You'll be able to experience some of these dilemmas throughout this event as we pause for the poll questions. Now, let's set the scene of what was happening in Vietnam in April of 1964, before the first Sigma war game of that year was played. By that time, the situation in America's allies, South Vietnam, had sharply deteriorated.

President Johnson, who had only recently taken office after President Kennedy's assassination and was focused on his own reelection campaign, described how the conditions had unquestionably grown worse. Specifically, weaknesses in security, morale, and political effectiveness. This was the challenging reality that the players of Sigma 164 confronted. Finally, let's introduce some of these key players.

What set the Sigma series apart was the direct participation of high-level decision makers from across the administration. These include notable figures such as national security adviser Mitch George Bundy, the hawkish chief of staff of the Air Force Curtis Lemay, CIA director John McCone, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earl Wheeler.

This impressive lineup of officials demonstrated the administration's initial interest in these games, and their presence suggested the possibility that the lessons taken from these games could potentially be applied to American policy. The Sigma war games displayed an almost clairvoyant accuracy in predicting key events of American escalation. They forecasted that, a major US bombing campaign would begin in the early spring of 1965, remarkably close to when it actually was launched during operation rolling thunder on March 2nd, 1965.

The games also anticipated that American Marines would land at Da Nang on February 26t, 1965, just days before they actually arrived on March 8th. More ominously, the games predicted that America would not be able to contain the limited war that they wanted to fight. Instead, they predicted that the US would be forced into a protracted quadmire with over 500,000 us troops eventually deployed and massive domestic protests opposing the war.

These predictions proved to be uncannily accurate. Despite the accuracy of these games, the lessons from the Sigma wargames were ultimately not reflected in American policy decisions. The rest of our event will explore why. Now that we've covered the history of wargames, the deteriorating situation in Vietnam and how it felt to plan these games, I'll turn this event over to our esteemed panel.

Thank you for joining us today, and I hope you enjoy the insightful discussions and interactive questions we will be engaging with throughout the event. Thank you.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thank you, Jacob. We are so excited to have you. This is the first of our programs that we're going to be having this year.

And the reason why the Sigma wargames were where we wanted to start was because in many ways, these games are such a huge historical puzzle. I work a lot on how games influence foreign policy, and I have all the ingredients of a game that really should have mattered, and yet they didn't.

And so what we have today here on the panel are a set of experts that'll help me understand why these games could be so successful at predicting outcomes and yet ultimately make so little impact, potentially on the future of our Vietnam policy. So before we start, I wanna kind of get us a little bit into the historical context.

And the first game is 1962 in the Kennedy administration. And Mark, you have two books. So you have a book that covers, was it 61 to-

>> Mark Moyar: 54 to 65, and then 65 to.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Right, so in the first book, you do a great job of explaining what is happening in decision-making and what's happening in the ground in Southeast Asia.

Can you give us a little background about what's happening in US foreign policy in Southeast Asia leading up to the game in 1962? And for those of you who haven't done a war game series in the Pentagon, for something to get a series where we're interested in a subject, and now we're gonna run this game, and then the next year we're gonna run another game.

That implies that somebody in the kind of bureaucracy thinks that a region or a problem is important enough to dedicate an entire war game series. So at some point in 1962, somebody in the Pentagon said something in Southeast Asia is important enough that we're gonna build a whole series on it.

We're gonna call it the Sigma series, and that's another thing. All the games in this time period were very arbitrary Greek letters. It's like a fraternity of war games.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So give us a little context, why are they thinking about Southeast Asia? What is happening? What's going on?

>> Mark Moyar: Yes, well, I think for those who may not be that familiar, it's worth going just briefly to how we got there. Starting in 1945, when France returns at the end of the war, the Viet Minh Vietnamese communist organization is trying to take control. They go to war 1946, and the US is fairly hands off until you get to 1950.

And that's because you have, well, two things happen. The Chinese civil war ends, and so suddenly the Truman administration is panicked about what's going on in Asia. Huge countries lost, and then korean war starts. There's now this great fear that we have to contain communism in Asia. So the US starts supporting the French.

The war goes till 1954. The US does not intervene directly, but it weighs in with some threats and ultimately leads to the division of Vietnam in 1954. And then Vietnam's largely at peace until 1960 when the Vietnamese communists who were controlling the North decide to initiate an armed rebellion.

And the end of 1960, you have the North Vietnamese moving into Laos to take control of what becomes the Ho Chi Minh trail. And so when President Eisenhower leaves, he tells Kennedy that Laos is perhaps the most important place in the world right now. A lot of times people forget about the Laotian angle.

But in 1960, it is the thing Kennedy, and he even tells Kennedy he should send in American troops if he has to, even if no allies are gonna go along with this. So Kennedy in 1961 is weighing, do we send in troops to Laos? And he comes close.

One of the big reasons he doesn't is the Bay of Pigs happens, and that leads to fallout. He has his falling out with the CIA and the military, which is gonna continue and be a problem throughout this period. But then you have Avril Harriman convinces him, we'll neutralize Laos, we'll get a coalition of non-communists and communists.

So that kinda puts Laos on the back burner for a time, but then this coalition rapidly breaks down. And so you have more North Vietnamese coming through Laos, and you have a lot of people saying, if Laos doesn't hold, South Vietnam is gonna be untenable. And so that is the big picture when you get to 1962.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I think it's probably important to note at this point that the 1962 game is actually about Laos. So we always think of these Sigma games as Vietnam games, but the 62 game is not that. The 62 game is the focus on Laos, but they end up escalating to Vietnam, and they end up using a lot of the similar strategies they try in 64, 65, 66 games as well.

And like the games that come after them, they find that this strategy of bombing and gradual escalation leads to eventually just kind of a quagmire. But starts in 62, we start thinking about Laos, and it variably goes towards Vietnam as we move into the later games. Now, H.R., Mark did a great job of setting up what the US cares about in Southeast Asia.

But there's also something big happening domestically, which is that in 1963, we have an assassination and we have a transition between Kennedy and Johnson. Can you describe how that structure of decision-making changed or stayed the same between Kennedy and Johnson? And then I love these characters. So if you could tell me a little bit, who's who in the zoo, who stays on, who gets lost, who's fighting for survival in the Johnson administration?

And then I'd love to understand a little better that relationship between the joint Chiefs of Staff and some of these kind of civilian organizations and civilian leaders in both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations.

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, so I have to go back even a little bit earlier to the Kennedy administration, which put into place a big shift in decision-making and policy-making processes from the Eisenhower administration.

As you can imagine, General Eisenhower, having been the supreme ally commander of Europe, was used to having kind of a staff, and a staff that organized paperwork and teed up decisions and allowed him to select from multiple options. There's a great book called the Hidden Hand Presidency by Fred Greenstein, which talks about Eisenhower's decision-making style, that he wanted debate, he wanted to hear about multiple options.

And he would hide his own hand, because he didn't want to bias his advisors in one way or another. When President Kennedy comes in, it's a generational change as well between Eisenhower and Kennedy. And the first chapter of my book is the new frontiersman and the old guard and the new frontiersmen saw themselves as more forward-looking, as more agile as decision makers.

He was more creative, and Kennedy had a much more informal decision making style which kind of hearkened back to the way Truman ran things until the Korean War. So all of these decision making processes really reflect the personality and expectations of the president fundamentally. And so Kennedy is more at ease with informal exchanges, and there isn't the systematic examination of courses of action or a consideration of long-term costs and consequences.

And, Mark, I'm thinking about the Ridgway report for example in 1954, which led to non intervention on behalf of the French in Vietnam. And the contrast between that for example, and the Bay of Pigs, which happens because I think in large measure of the failure to consider long-term costs and consequences.

So Kennedy gets burned by that, that's important context, and what he does is he kind of draws his advisory group even more closely. And he has a profound distrust of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should have been more distrust of the CIA about the Bay of Pigs. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff got painted with that same kind of brush of dissatisfaction about the Bay of Pigs.

At the same time then, Kennedy is looking for other sources of advice other than the Joint Chiefs cuz he lost kind of confidence in them. And he hires Maxwell Taylor, who had retired from active duty after having been chief of staff of the army and had written a book called the Uncertain Trumpet.

About how the policies of the Eisenhower administration were wrong defense policies, and we needed kind of this new look in defense. He has a lot of influence with Kennedy, and of course the Joint Chiefs of Staff are pretty disgruntled about this, because they've got a formerly retired person in the White House advising them.

What happens after that is that he becomes the actual chairman of the Joint Chiefs and has kind of the dominant voice as an advisor from the military side. But as you've alluded to, another big turning point here, right, Mark already mentioned a big turning point, 1959, with the communist plenum.

And the intensification of North Vietnam support for the Vietnamese communists in the Southeast, right, so the situation is deteriorating in Vietnam as this is happening. President Kennedy makes a series of decisions, one of them is to exceed the limit on advisors established by the Geneva Accord in 1954, above 600, right?

So it goes from 600 to like 3,600 for example, those advisors are doing a heck a lot of fighting and combat advising as well as advising. So our involvement's deepening and deepening in the war under Kennedy, burned by the Bay of Pigs, then he closes his advisory circle in even more tightly.

And then of course, he is indecisive though, and he appoints again, this is for political purposes. His old Massachusetts political adversary, Henry Cabot Lodge, to be the ambassador in Vietnam. And Lodge just starts running an operation against, Ngo Dinh Diem the president and his brother knew. And so his hands off allows really lodge to run amok with the CIA, and this results in a coup in November of 1963 and Diem's assassination, right, now what do we do?

Hey, if you organize this now, who's responsible for the political successor? Well, we kind of are deepening again, two weeks later, Kennedy's assassinated, and Johnson gets thrust into that role. He inherits Kennedy's advisors, the trauma the country's going through, he doesn't wanna change out everybody who Kennedy trusted.

He hates Bobby Kennedy, and he doesn't really trust any of these guys, he was kind of frozen out by Kennedy Johnson, okay? He needed him to get elected, to get kind of the Southern vote, but he wasn't an active vice president and wasn't brought into the inner circle.

Now he's got Kennedy's advisors who have been kind of stiff arming him, now they're his advisors. So he's very distrustful, and he draws his advisory circle in very closely, begins to make decisions. On Tuesdays over lunch with McGeorge Bundy, with Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara. McGeorge Bundy is an academic, he is sort of, I think takes kind of a lawyerly approach to courses of action, doesn't really advocate for any course of action or another.

But he also doesn't really force or encourage the president to consider multiple options. Walt Rostow is not a very aggressive person either, he is a sort of a solid caretaker, Secretary of State Mark jump in on any of these personalities. But the person who appears to be supremely confident, Robert McNamara, he's the man who's got an answer for everything.

Everything with him is boiled down to being very quantitative, he and the whiz kids who he's brought in, this is civilians in the Department of Defense have a lot of confidence in their own abilities. I mean, one of them says, hey, I don't know what the hell there is in a military career that prepares you any better for strategy or strategy making than a graduate of the Harvard business school.

So these are the dynamics, Johnson's insecure, he draws the circle in tighter. McNamara, the man with the answers, is the dominant, if you wanna say an alpha male or something in this Tuesday lunch group. And it's a setup I think, a setup for some pretty poor decision making during the period of 64 and into 65.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Gotta love those, the first bros.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I wanna stick in 63 a little bit because, I think becomes really important to whether the 64 games matter or not. So Mai wrote this extraordinary book about rand in Southeast Asia, and the second chapter of your book is entitled.

What Makes the Viet Cong tick, can you explain where that phrase came from? And then a little bit about the debate that was occurring in the early in 1963 about the Viet Cong ability to withstand a US or South Vietnamese offensive.

>> Mai Elliott: As the United States, even under Kennedy, got even more deeply into Vietnam.

Vietnam became a national security crisis, and Rand Corporation think in Santa Monica had made its name in strategic studies. Thinking during the Eisenhower administration, when the strategic doctrine was mass retaliation, because it's like deterrence. If the Soviet Union attacked us, we could retaliate in a massive fashion and destroyed it.

And the most famous thinker was Herman Kahn, who was the prototype for the movie Doctor Strangelove. So in 1963, the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, later on, known as the Viet Cong, was created in December 1960. And at that time, the Soviet Union and China in particular, were espousing limited wars, wars of national liberation, insurgencies, subversive warfare.

Because they believe that that was a way to fight the Western Bloc, the United States, without triggering a nuclear warfare limited war. So Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor Thought the theory, the doctrine of massive retaliation was too inflexible because the United States had to find a way to find this bushfire war.

Without escalating to a nuclear warfare which would be mutually destructive for the United States and China and the Soviet, in particular, the Soviet Union. So limited warfare became the strategy of the Kennedy administration. And Rand didn't have any real expertise in limited warfare, but it wanted to become a major player in Washington, advising the Kennedy administration about this new form of warfare.

So it sent a team, actually the president of Iran, Frank Colbaum, and Guy Palker, a social scientist who was actually an expert on Indonesia. To Washington to find out what it could do to help the administration fight this new war. So they went to see various people, and they went to see William Sullivan, who was then chairman of the intertask force agency.

Which was trying to come up with options for President Johnson, who had not settled yet on a strategy or course of action for South Vietnam. So according to Sullivan, they looked at options from going in all out, win or not going in at all, but anything in between.

So he had a list of questions, and one of the questions was, what makes the Viet Cong tick? And so they asked Sullivan, they said, who asked this question? And the answer was McNamara. He was very interested in knowing more about the enemy he was fighting in South Vietnam at that time.

The Viet Cong were called faceless enemies. They appear, they attack, they ambush, and they disappear. Nobody knew much about them. So he wanted to know, who were the Viet Cong, who were the South Vietnamese who joined the guerrillas and fought the Saigon government with so much tenacity. Because the Americans were increasing aid to Diem, President Diem.

And the war was getting more violent, and Yazefirkang were growing. So he wanted to know the answer. So Rand then sent a team to Vietnam to do research, and the best sources of information were the Viet Cong defectors and Viet Congs who had been captured. So they would go around the country, talk to these people, and after they did about 145 interviews, they decided that they had enough data to present the findings in Washington.

So their conclusion was that the United States was facing a formidable enemy in the Viet Cong. Because the Viet Cong were highly motivated. They felt that they were fighting another occupier. The Americans thought of themselves as good guys coming in to help the South Vietnamese, but the insurgents were viewing them as the new.

They call them the new colonialists who were replacing the French to dominate Vietnam. So they believed that they should fight these new imperialists and throw them out, along with the Saigon government, which they called the puppets. So they were very highly motivated and they also believed that they were fighting.

There were a lot of grievances in the countryside and insurgencies fed on grievances. So they found out that the peasants were very unhappy with the Saigon government, and the Viet Cong believed that they were fighting for what they call the just cause. Which is to bring social justice, economic equality, reunify the country, because Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel in 1954.

And reunified the country under a government that would bring social justice, economic equality, to give land to the peasants, because there were a lot of peasants who didn't have land. So they really believed in what they call a just cause. So the picture they painted was that this is a very strong enemy, very cohesive, very motivated enemy.

And that the, what they call the steel structure of the insurgency were these veterans of the war against the French who are now leading the fight against another foreign occupier. So they presented the results in Saigon, and they presented the results at the Pentagon to John McNaughton. Who was then assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs for McNamara.

And McNamara had appointed him to deal with Vietnam. So they presented their results to John McNaughton. And John McNaughton, according to the people who were present at the briefing, said that, gentlemen, if what you told me were true. We are fighting on the wrong side in South Vietnam, the side that's going to win this war.

So I think that the results of the findings were not followed because by that time the United States had decided to intervene directly in South Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin had happened. The Tonkin Gulf resolution had been passed, and there had been a retaliatory airstrike against North Vietnam.

And the United States was already embarked on a policy of intervention, direct intervention. So I think that the results just show that, yeah, the United States was going to have a tough road ahead, but we committed. Our credibility is already on the line. We should just press ahead.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So I wanna bring up a few names that you mentioned there because they end up mattering. McNaughton ends up playing the red team for, I think, both Sigma 164 and Sigma 264. Sullivan, William Sullivan plays the red team for Sigma 164. You also in the book you mentioned Harry Rowan, who also plays.

The reason all these kind of this Rand study is so interesting for the Sigma games is that a lot of the players that either commissioned the work or were briefed the work actually played the red team. So they are inputting into the game their insights from this study.

And they also become very influential to how the control team adjudicates how the Viet Cong are able to withstand the blue team kind of bombing actions. So there's this interesting relationship between a report which, as you point out in your book, ends up not being briefed until really these decisions about what the US wants to do in Vietnam.

It's actually late, right? It's a good academic paper. It's well researched and comes out a little late. But it influences these individuals that play in the game. And I think it does have an input into how both the Sigma 64 series end up unfolding. So it's an interesting kind of the way all these things interact.

And I think it's time for us to step into the war game. Each one of you, most of you have picked out a character. I have picked out Curtis LeMay because I have spent time in the Air Force, and I have been trained to love strategic bombing. So I like to bomb all things to the Stone Age.

>> H.R. McMaster: It reminds me of Mark Klotzfelder's book, Beneficial Bombing. Have you read that, anybody? Great, he's like, hey, it's really good for you, the bombing.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: But some of you may have not picked LeMay. Some of you may not believe in bombing people back to the Stone Age.

So we also have Earl Wheeler, who Mark is wearing, as well as McCone, who is the CIA director, and McGeorge Bundy. And as we've heard, McGeorge Bundy was a Harvard man. So if you wanna hang out with someone who has a compound that they summer in, you would pick McGeorge Bundy.

Okay, so you guys, we're giving you clues about these people as we're going through the panel. You're hearing a little bit more about who they are, what their motivations are, and how their beliefs evolve over this game series. So I want you to take that and really become Bundy.

Become LeMay. I don't think we're allowed to smoke in here. But as you answer these questions, so you are now being introduced to the first kind of question that you're gonna need to answer. So it's July 22nd, 1964. America is concerned about losing the international battle for good press against the communists.

To make matters worse, Ho Chi Minh just flew to New York, wearing a simple peasant costume, addressed the delegates in fluent English. With pictures and a disarmingly impressive manner, the benign looking old gentleman painted a sordid picture of mangled civilian corpses, women, and children who had fallen victim to US terror bombing.

Millions were impressed and shocked, although it was evident to some that the pictures were in some cases rigged and faked. So the game is introducing you to info ops a la 1964, okay? So now it's your turn to play. You are the character that you're wearing. And if you go to that QR code, where's Jacob?

He's under 30 and knows how to use all technology. And use your phone to get on the QR code, and then you're gonna choose your next move in the game based on the player that you had. So you can either go to the United nations and refute his claims, ignore his visit and downplay America's involvement, or send President Johnson to South Vietnam on a press tour.

So we'll give you guys a few minutes, but I'd love to hear from the panelist, Mark, what would you do? And this is a scenario that the players were presented with in the Sigma I64, the first Sigma 164.

>> Mark Moyar: Well, I am in general sympathy with General Wheeler.

One thing that Sigma process kind of sweeps under the rug is at this very moment, you have bitter debate between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many of the civilians over the bombing of North Vietnam. And this question of sort of public relation's interesting. Gets a lot of play in Sigma.

That's not really what they're thinking about. They're mostly thinking about, how is this going to influence North Vietnam? And you have the Joint Chiefs saying, we've got to hit them hard and hit them right away. You have a lot of civilians based on people like McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk, who have read these academic theorists that H.R. was mentioning.

They've bought into these ideas of game theory, that we're gonna send a signal.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Who is the academic theorists that they're talking about? Cuz Marya has kind of-

>> Mark Moyar: Yes, Herman Kahn is right.

>> Mark Moyar: I think Thomas Schelling is the most influential. And so he has this idea, and this supposedly is confirmed by the Cuban missile crisis, although it is actually, in my opinion, not because we didn't really understand what happened.

But the idea is you send a signal, and this is all based on this a priori theorizing. He's an economist, and so rather than using history or experience, let's do this. Now, partly they're not using history because this is supposed to be for nuclear war and there's not an actual nuclear war we can look to.

But they're saying in this hypothetical situation, the North Vietnamese are rational actors. We send a signal, and we know they will respond rationally. They will realize, okay, let's back off. Whereas the joint Chiefs are saying, that's not how people are, that's not how they respond. If you want to send them a message, you hit them as hard as you can.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So I haven't brought this up yet, but it is the elephant in the room. And these three are historians. I'm a political scientist. What does that mean? That means that these critiques you have of Schelling are apostasy. Like, you can't do that, right?

>> Mark Moyar: Yes, I'm a historian.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: This is back for me. But these ideas that Schelling is espousing in books, Arms of Influence, The Strategies of Conflict, they end up influencing not just McNamara and this early generation of civilians, but actually, if you're a political scientist in the room, you've read it, right? If you have gone to professional military education, you have read some Schelling.

So it's interesting how influential he becomes in these decisions about Vietnam. But then we can really see the threat of Schelling all the way through to today and the influence that he has on American decisions about crisis management and deterrence.

>> H.R. McMaster: Brodie, too, probably.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yes, absolutely. So, looks like the consensus in the room is we are going to the United Nations to directly refute Ho Chi Minh's claims.

We are not ignoring him. All right, so that moves us into the actual Sigma series. So we're now into 1964. And, okay, two things as the non historian in the room, just to put it out there. One, my gosh, the dates in 1964 really matter. I kept flipping between, like, was that March?

Was it September? Was it June? So decision making about Vietnam is coming down to weeks. Reports are coming out, and people are visiting Vietnam, and conversations are happening. And as somebody who's trying to piece the history back together, that year becomes, these dates are really, really important. So I want to go through the timeline a little.

The other thing that, as a non-historian, boy, sometimes these characters felt like a Russian, like a Dostoevsky novel. Like, I needed to have a list that I needed to keep going back to because they keep coming up and changing kind of their position when it comes to Vietnam.

So, in 1964, if I needed to draw a line that showed kind of, the McNamara would be easy. But other characters, like McNaughton, it's hard for me to understand some of his beliefs as they change throughout 1964 and get these different inputs. So, on that, Mark, introduce us to what's happening in Vietnam in the spring of 1964.

So, you guys, Sigma 1, 1964 is run in April, 1960, in April. And then they decide it's so important that they run it again in September. It's the first time in the series that they do two in one year. So they run that one in September. Which means that the outbreaks So if you're playing in April, that means the outbreak is in May.

If you're playing in September, the outbreak is in October or so. What's changing between April and September? Why do those months matter?

>> Mark Moyar: Well,and it's worth keeping in mind, this has been a great point of debate among historians. I think it's pretty clear now that the military situation nosedives at the end of 1963 after President Diem is assassinated.

And it's confused. You mentioned people who changed their views. So David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, I think, exemplify this because they actually support this coup in 1963 and they think the war needs to be won. And when it becomes unpopular, they change and then they try to rewrite the history.

But we know by all indications the war goes, falls apart because what happens after the coup is they purge many of the military leaders. They disband the strategic hamlet program that they've set up and disarmed the members. And so the North Vietnamese, we also know, recognize this and they're pushing hard.

So things are getting worse pretty rapidly in early 1964. And you actually see a coup, another coup end of January, because the existing government's so bad, but it continues to get worse under this new government. And so Lyndon Johnson, you might think he's just simply thinking about what his strategy is going to be, but he's actually.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, because he's got an election, in November, right? other words.

>> Mark Moyar: Yeah, so the election is actually what he's thinking the most.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: A rational actor. His primary motivation is winning election in November 1964.

>> Mark Moyar: Now he's, so his primary objective is keep Vietnam out of the newspapers.

He'll send more aid, but we don't want it blowing up. And it's very clear from all the internal records that he knew war was likely, but he wanted to keep it from happening until after the election. So what really kind of throws him off are the Tonkin Gulf incidents, August of 1964, which we now know one of them may not have happened, but anyway, it appears this attack on the high seas.

So Johnson has to respond with what's a very small, limited response. And this is, again, where this game theory and limited war theory comes in. McNamara and Rusk are telling him and Bundy a little dose of force that'll send the right message, whereas the joint Chiefs are saying, whack them hard, Johnson again.

And at this point he is as H.R. described. He's really in awe of McNamara. So whatever McNamara says goes basically. So they do this little pinprick, and then we now know, not know the time, but then this sends the opposite message to the North Vietnamese. They interpret this as american weakness.

So they're going to intensify even more. But so you have this sort of fairly steady downward trend as you approach the end of the year. And we're ultimately at the end of the year as the North Vietnamese, as soon as Johnson wins his election, they are going to go for broke in 1965.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So when I started looking into the Sigma games, I was probably still am a Vietnam amateur dilettante. And I thought, well, okay, there's a debate happening. The debate is escalate, not escalate. The debate is strategic bombing, not strategic bombing. This is not true. The debate is far more complicated than bombing, not bombing.

Except for Lemay. Like, Lemay is the easy one. Lemay's the only one who's having that debate. Everybody else is having a lot more complicated of a conversation about what should happen in Vietnam.

>> H.R. McMaster: And he makes everybody feel uncomfortable, you know, so, which is why they get him out of the picture.

They're talking about, like, setting him on a world tour. Can we just send him on a world tour? Will he be the ambassador to Portugal? Will he take that? I mean, it's like, you know, they're. Yeah, I just can't wait.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Gotta love the air force. So, can you do us a favor?

Explain these big debates that are happening and then especially the Rosso thesis. People cite that as the reason why they did Sigma 264, like, as set up as a validation war game. I'm not sure if that's true or not. But can you explain, what are these debates? What are they debating?

What are the options that are on the table?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I'll just say the whole thing is bounded by what Mark already talked about, which is the president's preoccupation with getting elected in his own right in 1964, right? This is an accidental president who came into power because his predecessor was assassinated.

So he really feels a drive to get elected in his own right. But then also, he is then later preoccupied with passing the Great Society legislation in 1965. As Mark alluded to, he sees Vietnam principally as a danger to those goals. So what he wants are options that allows him to escape what could be a controversial decision to either go to war in Vietnam or to withdraw.

And so the president's advisors in this period of time give him what he wants. They developed this strategy of graduated pressure, which rested on the rostow thesis that a power that is supporting an insurgency can be dissuaded from providing that support through the threat of force. Threat of force that is communicated by measured, you know, limited bombing in this case, or actually covert activity that had been initiated in January of 1964 under OPLAN 34A.

So these limited, limited military actions can convince the actor. And this is where I think the debate really doesn't ever really happen, Jackie, because John McNaughton, he might have been taken with Iran study and thought, wow, this is going to be a lot harder than everybody thinks, and that should force the decision.

Well, okay, either we have to fight harder and more resolute matter with more resources, or we should withdraw or just remain in an advisory effort. But instead, what he says is, well, it doesn't matter whether we win or lose. What we have to be seen is as the good doctor.

And he writes a good doctor memo in 1964, and he argues that if we lose in Vietnam, it's okay as long as we get bloodied. He uses that term, we just need to get bloodied so we can convince the world that we did our best. But like a good doctor who tried to treat a patient with an intractable disease, it's not our fault.

And so this is kind of, you know, I think this is a pretty cynical way to look at war, and it is actually inconsistent with the nature of war. And then the Rostov thesis, of course, is invalidated in Sigma two, but it doesn't have any appreciable impact because that's not the answer that Lyndon Johnson wants.

George Bundy, I got my button on right here. He says at this period of time, the sigma results were too pessimistic. And then he also says that, that what we should do is obfuscate as to what our objective is in Vietnam, right? So remember, again, this is talking yourself out of winning, right?

And this is, we have the same problem today, I should say, with the mantra of de escalation, everything else. And we want to manage wars. We want a responsible end that doesn't really work in war because each side tries to outdo the other. And the death, the prospect of death and killing, that unleashes a psychological dynamic that defies this kind of systems analysis, McNamara type approach to things.

And this is what they're not sensitive to. But George Pointy says it's better not to have an objective in Vietnam, because then if we don't accomplish that objective, it will, quote, give the president more flexibility in the domestic political arena. So I think we may be jumping ahead, Jackie, but I think these are some of the dynamics that prevent the outcome of the war game, as prophetic as it was from having any appreciable impact on the decision making.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: With that, I think it's time to move back into the game. So we're on Sabami, it is April 15, 1965. The US has launched the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, aimed at deterring their aggression and crippling their industrial base. However, the results have not been as promising as expected.

Following the airstrikes of the 2nd April, indicators were constantly watched for evidence that Hanoi was halting the offensive, there were none. On the contrary, Viet Cong activity within itself, Vietnam immediately increased, and from its dormant position, the Pathet Lao suddenly came alive. That leads you to your next decision making moment.

So how do you respond to the lack of success from your initial bombing campaign against North Vietnam? Do you scale back, cease the bombing campaign, and look for political options? Do you bomb more, double down on the current strategy? Do you escalate by intensifying the campaign, by targeting city and mining harbors?

And while y'all are doing that, Mai, I wanted to turn to you, because one of the debates that we're kind of encapsulating in this vignette from sigma 264 is the question of the role of air power in Vietnam. And RAND is intimately tied to kind of how the US Air Force has built its ideology of air power.

And so it's interested, from your perspective, how was the Air Force thinking about air power in Vietnam, and then what inputs did RAND have and how that thinking evolved during that time period?

>> Mai Elliott: Okay, so once the United States got very deeply involved in Vietnam, then the question became, how do we win this war?

So the first RAND study was about finding how strong the Viet Cong were, their strengths. Now the question is, where are they vulnerable? How do we hit them and make them and defeat them? So RAND reoriented its study to how to make American operations, in particular air power, more effective.

So there's an analyst that ran by the name of Leon Goree, who proposed to study the effect of American operations in Vietnam, in particular air power. And he said that air power was very powerful because it could do several things. It could turn the Viet Cong from, as he put it, hunters into hunters and then air power could hamper their movements.

Air power could kill a lot of them, air power could weaken their morale, air power could destroy their will to fight and erode their faith in victory. At the same time, air power could drive the people who were living in the Viet Cong control areas to the government areas, so that they would be controlled by the government.

So basically, it would depopulate the Viet Cong areas, and it would cut the Viet Cong off from resources, manpower, economic support, everything. So Mao Zedong, had said that the gorillas were like fish swimming in a pond, so air power would drain the pond, move all the people to the government side.

So he believed in the power of air power, the effectiveness of air power, especially B-52. And he was extremely optimistic, he would brief McNamara and McNamara at the time wanted so much to believe that things were working in Vietnam. So not only McNamara, but other people, like McGeorge Bundy, Wal Rostow was very receptive to what he was saying.

And so he would brief McNamara regularly and John McNaughton, too and so he came to believe that B-52 could win the war. And that could explain maybe why air attacks in South Vietnam were intensified to the extent that it eventually did. And it ended up something like 7.5 million tons of bomb were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

I think 5 million tons were dropped in Vietnam, more than all the ordinances were dropped during World War II. But Leon Gouré was not, his view was not shared by a lot of people at rand. In fact, a lot of people were very unhappy with his conclusion, and especially his conclusion that air power, you could use air power with impunity.

Because while the first team of RAND researchers said that killing innocent peoples with artillery and bombings would anger the population and they would join the Viet Cong in anger. So bombing would create more Viet Cong and Leon Goure said, no that's not the case. When you bomb the villagers, they don't blame us, they blame the Viet Cong for being there and bringing the planes in.

So we could bomb with impunity, It could achieve all these things, and it would not make more Viet Cong. So some people around were very unhappy with this, and they said, well, you advocating a license to kill, and that's not in our value. And it would create a lot of popular anger, it would create more Viet Cong, so not everybody believed in it.

And they also said that the bombing of Germany in world War Two didn't actually stiffen the morale of the people. And it's happened in North Vietnam, too air power didn't break the will to fight the morale of the people there. They just felt that, my gosh, now they're bombing us, we better fight to the death because we should fight to save our country, our families, ourselves.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I wanna take a little bit of moderators, my imperative to spend a little bit more time on the Air Force. We'll blame the Air Force for more things in dereliction of duty Adri, you had a quote from historian Earl Tilford that the Air Force, like an illegitimate child at a family reunion felt less than comfortable with its origins.

And all the more so since its primary reason for being was based on the unproven doctrine of strategic bombing. And Mai very nicely laid out some of these debates and these strong beliefs that were happening in the Vietnam time period. So how do you think the Air Force's need to kind of secure air power emissions affected the decisions about Vietnam and how the Sigma games were received?

And then how do you think inner service rivalry? We talk a lot about, your book talks a lot about JCS versus the civilians, but there's inner service rivalry that's occurring as well. How did that affect both the way in which these games were received, but also in how Vietnam decision making progressed?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, so it's not just all in the Air Force, right? I mean, I think a lot of this thinking about service parochialism. I mean, that was across all of the services, I think maybe with the exception of the army, because the army relies so much on the other services and it needed all these joint capabilities.

But under Curtis LeMay and then under General McConnell later, the emphasis was almost exclusively on air power and against North Vietnam in particular. I mean, of course, there was bombing in the south and against the Vietnamese communists in the south. But it was mainly to coerce North Vietnam under the kind of theory of strategic bombing.

But to be fair to the air force, as that air campaign was executed, it was nothing like the strategic bombing campaign that Curtis LeMay would have wanted, or McConnell. And in fact, it was based on really, again, this unproven theory that you can communicate with bombing, right? And you can communicate your resolve and you can coerce the other by the prospect of more bombing later if you don't alter your behavior.

And so in around this period of time, William Bundy, was he the cousin, I think.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Brother.

>> Mark Moyar: Brother.

>> H.R. McMaster: Brother, brother, brother, McCoy.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Must have been fun Thanksgiving.

>> H.R. McMaster: Brother of McGeorge Bundy.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: At the compound.

>> H.R. McMaster: Again and another attorney writing these memos because they tend to look at things in a legalistic way.

And I think attorneys, sometimes any present companies accept it here. But for sure, if you're an attorney, they think if they write it like in a memo, it's like reality. And so he writes this memo in 1964 talking about establishing a common law pattern of bombing against the North.

So you might think, okay, what the heck is that? What is a common law pattern of bombing? And what he's referring to is the reasonable man in English common law. And he actually makes the argument that Ho Chi Minh, like the reasonable man in English common law, will behave in a certain way.

Again, discounting the ideology, the emotion that drives and constrains the adversary, not thinking about the adversary. So that was on civilian and military failure of not thinking this through. The second big parochial issue was the chief of naval operations, right? This is General McDonald, and he was the chief of naval operations.

And McNamara was gonna replace the commander of Pacific command, the crown jewel in the navy, with an air force officer, Jacob Smart, right?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Run for it.

>> H.R. McMaster: Who was actually universally respected, officer Jacob Smart was. And McDonald goes in and goes, you can't do this to me.

I can't be seen as the CNO that gave up Paycom. And so McNamara says to him, okay, I'll back down on this. I'll reverse the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs, but you're gonna owe me on Vietnam and everything else. And it's McDonald who writes or says in his oral history, we should have pounded the table about this cuz we knew the strategy would fail.

And he said, I'm ashamed of myself for this. The Marine Corps, Admiral Wallace General Wallace Greene. Johnson gives him the treatment like when he comes in and they're about to question the strategy and this incremental approach, shakes his hand, puts his arm around him. I'm gonna need some good recommendations from you today, general.

And had made the promise to him that if he goes along with Johnson on this strategy of graduated pressure, they'll get a third Marine division, right? They'll expand the Marine Corps by a third. And so you get an idea about how parochialism played into this. McNamara calls up Johnson during this period of time.

He goes, hey, Mr. President, I'm taking a divide and conquer approach with the chiefs. These are the tapes of telephone conversations, and it's coming along pretty well. So Johnson didn't want good advice from his military. He wanted divided advice and just wanted them to sign up for the program that allowed him to avoid a difficult decision.

So, I mean, this is why we have Goldwater Nichols to a certain extent. This is why we now have combatant commands with commanders who look at the complex challenges they're facing through the lens of joint capabilities, right? So these were important reforms that were made as a result of the failure of civilian and military advice during this period.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And this interservice rivalry and how Johnson and McNamara used interservice rivalry to kind of keep the JCS out of influencing these Vietnam decisions. I think for me, after spending some time with these documents, I think it's my primary hypothesis about why the games ended up not being relevant and yet were played multiple times.

And you have a quote in your book, H.R., that I wanna bring out here. Because one of the big puzzles for me was why keep playing a game and putting these important people in the game if you don't care about the answer anyway, why not just bury the game and not play it at all?

And you had a quote on page 94 of this fantastic book, dereliction of the duty.

>> H.R. McMaster: Page Turner.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: William Bundy later viewed the planning effort in the spring of 1964. So keep in mind, spring of 1964 includes the first sigma of 1964 as an emotional safety valve that's in quotes for those who might otherwise pressure the president into taking actions that he was determined to avoid.

The planning efforts actually served the purpose of delaying genuine consideration of the situation in Vietnam until after the election. Keeping the JCS busy and at the same time permitting LBJ to keep the war low key. And I thought that was a pretty remarkable insight. These games, the level of people playing in these games.

H.R., have you ever been at a game that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is plays every single day of the game? It's very rare.

>> H.R. McMaster: And run very effectively, Colonel Lincoln, we didn't talk about him, and he was universally respected. He was the head of social science department of West Point who sets this whole thing up.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: But this idea for modern day, for us to have these type of people playing these games, that's crazy. So the fact that maybe these games were used not to influence, but instead to hedge, to bureaucrat the decision away is a really interesting use of games to influence policy in a very different direction.

>> H.R. McMaster: Just a quick point on this. Johnson's doing this on both ends of the spectrum, right? Those who would maybe before withdrawal and those who would be for more resolute action. If you just flash forward quickly here to April of 1965, when he gives the Johns Hopkins speech, right?

Where he talks about a beautiful vision for Southeast Asia and the Mekong Delta river project. And historians made a really big deal about that for a long time until the notes became available of those Tuesday lunches. And he talks about that speech being aimed, quote, at the Saab sisters and peace societies, right?

So what he's doing is he's placating all constituencies. He's taking this path of released resistance on this middle path, which crumbles beneath his feet with every lie and obfuscation that he's telling.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So this is great because it brings me into 1965, which is where I wanna go.

And actually I wanna read a quote which is from the deputy assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, Greene. Who actually played, I think, in the Sigma two, I can't remember if Sigma one in 64. But he writes this memo to the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, which is George Bundy.

So the other bundy, this is February 1965. And the memo says the DRV is not likely to cave out of fear of further bombing of North Vietnam. Tough old characters like Ho Chi Minh have So, 1965, there are people who are influenced by the games, who have felt like the games showed the future and they're advocating for it, but it's not making a difference in decision making.

And that brings me, Mark, I want you to help us historically, we spent a lot of time on Sigma 64. Really high this people are in Sigma 64, but the series continued to be played in 65, 66, and 67. If you look at the timeline you see during that time period, we're just increasing the amount of troops that are there in Vietnam.

So the 1965 game was played from 26th July to the 5 August, but it was primarily by mid level officials. The final out brief was scheduled for a few hours with senior decision makers and actually was filmed and we've been trying to find it unsuccessfully so far. However, that was shortened to just a 30 minutes out brief, which the game director highlighted in his final report.

He argued that the game was given too little priority and therefore would not be a useful input and decision making. There's a full three paragraphs devoted to how angry he is about how this got pushed to the side of the senior decision makers. So, okay, this is the 26 July to 5 August 1965, can you explain to us what's happening in the Summer of 1965?

Why is a late July, early August war game maybe not super consequential to decision makers?

>> Mark Moyar: Yes, well, so the end of, and by the way, I wanted to comment too on what you were saying about sort of tying up the Joint Chiefs. There's a lengthy history of Johnson and McNamara using all sorts of devious tricks.

And H.R., I think, was the first really in dereliction of duty to bring this out. And he herald General Greene, who was the Marine Corps commandant, his papers got leaked and H.R. was the first. And so that's helped us understand just how devious McNamara, and at the end of 64, right before the election, the joint Chiefs are furious because there's a bombing.

And McNamara goes to them and says, well, after the election we're going to go clobber China like you guys want. And then after the election, he doesn't do anything of the kind, so he's Magnumar is consistently being devious and deceitful to try to copy cover things up. And also, if you look at Sigma, Sigma mostly is looking at graduated pressure option, not the heavy bombing.

And so this question of does graduated pressure versus the heavy blow work better? That will be a running theme throughout the war, and the closest we actually get to resolving, I think, is 72 when they bomb full war. And the North Vietnamese agreed a peace finally, after everything else didn't work.

But as far as 65, early 65, the United States does not yet realize that a big invasion is on the way. So after the election, North Vietnamese send their first entire division into South Vietnam. And so this war is already becoming a conventional war, there's a lot of misperception later that this is still a guerrilla war, it's not primarily, you have big battles with 1000 people getting killed.

And so not really until April does the administration figure out, because they start to detect these big north Vietnamese units in the south through prisoner interrogations. So then they're really panicked at this point, I mean, they're very distraught. I will say there was for a long time a belief that Johnson sort of naively believed this was going to end quickly.

And I think now the information pretty clear is that Johnson, probably more so than McNamara realized this is not gonna be easy, this is a tough fellow. This is going to be long and bloody, and I'm going to lose political support over this. Generally, to the question of then why don't you just leave?

Well, the answer to that, I think, is that the consequences of leaving are even worse. Now, another thing that's interesting they didn't include in this is the broader Southeast Asia picture. Most people this time are saying dominoes are going to fall, and that's ultimately the rationale for why the US goes in.

If Vietnam falls, they're going to lose Indonesia, Thailand, Malaya, maybe Japan. And so Johnson thinks this war is going to be awful, but it's going to be even worse because a lot of people are saying you're going to lose basically East Asia. Now, there's a lot of controversy over that, and I actually think there's a pretty compelling case to be made that the domino theory is valid.

Other people disagree, but Johnson at this point, the big meetings are July 21 and 22. So his mind is pretty much made up that he's going to go in and fight this war by the time you get to this next Sigma. So I think at this point, I think they feel basically we are now set on the course and it's a little too late for.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Yeah, it wasn't like they were all like, just happened to be busy that day. It's like, why waste an hour and a half of our afternoon when we already know the decision is going to be

>> Mark Moyar: Yes, and it gets announced on July 28 publicly.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So that brings us to our final moment of the game, which is the troops, so we're on to escalation.

It's Monday, July 26, 1965, three months since your last decision about US strategy in Vietnam. The situation in South Vietnam appears to be going badly as the Viet Cong forces are having it pretty much their own way, particularly in the Northern area. Your team proposes to introduce large numbers of additional us forces in South Vietnam.

About 250,000 men are considered necessary, their mission would be to secure us bases and to engage in active counterinsurgency combat operations against the Viet Cong. They would not engage in pacification rather they would seek out and render ineffective the Viet Cong units now allowed to operate unimpeded. Now you need to make a decision as a member of the blue team how you respond to this proposal.

Are you going to approve and send in 250,000 troops for the mission as described, reject it and cancel the deployment or escalate, double the troop deployment to 500,000 and launch an invasion.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: So the 66 and 67 games end up focusing on negotiation, so 64 is, should we escalate?

How do we escalate? 65 is actually very similar about bombing brings China in, but 66 and 67 are trying to figure out how we bring them to the table and get the heck out of Dodge. What's happening in Vietnam? Mark Mai, can you explain what's happening in 66 and 67?

>> Mark Moyar: Well, I can give the big picture, one thing I should have mentioned too, in the 65 timeline you do have, the bombing starts in the February of 65. It is done very much according to the McNamara graduated pressure. Some troops are sent in in March, but the Americans don't think they're going to get involved in the war.

It's not until June that it's clear you're going to have American troops getting in, you're going to have to face this decision, ultimately, Johnson does decide to send in the troops. McNamara still is hoping through late 65 that mutual limitation, this is again a game theory idea. If we limit our commitment into South Vietnam, the North will limit theirs.

So he's not going to send as many troops as the Joint Chiefs want. Well, late 1965 intelligence reveals clearly North Vietnam is flooding South Vietnam with troops. So finally, and this is when McNamara starts to agonize because finally dawns on him that the enemy is not going to limit itself when we limit ourselves.

And so then he's looking for ways to negotiate a peace and repeatedly pauses the bombing, hoping that's going to entice the North Vietnamese, which it doesn't have that effect at all. And so you have the American forces awry, they stop the North Vietnamese from taking the cities, and you have sort of a war of attrition with a lot of casualties on both sides.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Maya, actually, I'm gonna ask you a different question because I realize I want to open up for questions, and there's two questions I want to get to on this panel. And maybe these questions are actually for all three of you so they can shorter answers about your thoughts, summing up.

So one of the overarching lessons that I've taken from the games that I've executed and that I've analyzed and that I've played is that players, especially my American players, really want these elegant escalation strategies that have these. I'm going to signal with this type of bomb on this B-52, and they're gonna know that it's that type of bomb.

And therefore, this kind of idea that you can estimate what you need to do to get the other side to back down without you having to escalate, it's just very complicated strategies. And as I read through the Sigma games, they feel like strategies I've seen in games I've played about AI and Cyber, name your emerging technology.

So I guess the question, and this is for all of you, and we'll start with my, what is so compelling for American decision makers about strategies like graduated pressure or graduated escalation that they continue to be played all these years later?

>> Mai Elliott: Yeah, I think the graduated response appeal to the Americans because, basically, according to Schelling, the origin thinker of this strategy is that in a war, the side that has the most credible force, the most credible threats has an advantage.

And this advantage is reinforced by the fact that he could dish out even more if you don't do what he wants you to do. And the other side, faced with this, being hammered, has to make a decision. Do I keep going and I'm going to get hammered even more, I have to suffer more death and destruction?

Or do I back down? And the American belief was that the North Vietnamese would just back down because the United States at that time was a superpower in the world. And Vietnam, Johnson said at one point, was a piss and country, an army of coolies, there's no way they could resist our power.

So this strategy appealed to the McNamara and Johnson, because they think that they could force the North Vietnamese to stop supporting the Viet Cong in the south and just stop altogether or suffer the consequences. But the problem was that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were not going to give up.

They had fought all their lives to achieve their aims, which is to reunify the country. In 1954, when the Geneva Accords took place, the communists under Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh were on the virtue of winning. But Russia, the Soviet Union and communist China forced him to accept the partition of the country because they wanted to have a peaceful coexistence with the United States and the western rock.

So Ho Chi Minh and his lieutenants and the communists in general, the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, believed that victory was snatched from them. So they were not going to give up, they had fought so long. And Ho Chi Minh knew that there was no way he could defeat the United States, because the United States was just too strong.

But he told his people, just fight until the Americans got tired and leave. And then the puppet government, the Saigon government, would fall and then the war would be over. So he knew that Americans would eventually tire of this war because Vietnam was not really important as national interest to the United States.

Vietnam was only important because the United States thought it was fighting proxy of communist China which was using North Vietnam to expand to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and eventually to other countries. He was right, because in 1970 or 72, when Nixon had a rapprochement with China that undercut the rationale for fighting in Vietnam, and the war eventually, the United States eventually got out.

But Ho Chi Minh knew that he would just have to keep fighting because the time would come when this would happen. And that the history of Vietnam, which the Americans didn't know about, is that Vietnam was occupied many times by China, by France. And the Vietnamese would fight, they fought protracted wars, they fought guerrilla warfare because they were weak.

That was the only tactic they could use and waited for the enemies to either. Like in China, things happened, China fell apart and had to withdraw. Or in the case of the France, Algeria was becoming a more dominant issue, and the French, people were getting tired of the war too.

So Ho Chi Minh knew time was on his side. And he had the support of China and the Soviet Union, and he knew they could keep supplying him with what he needed for the war, so he was not gonna give up. So I think the Americans misread the situation.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Well, I mean you're talking about Vietnam. But I feel like you could replace Vietnam with a whole slew of other conflicts that we have tried to use some form of graduated escalation and limited war, and often underestimated the will of the countries that we're fighting. One word answer, final question for all three of you.

This panel is ostensibly about whether war games did or could have changed the course of decision making when it comes to the Vietnam War. Did these war games stand a chance? Is there a way in which these war games could have been more influential, or were they always just kind of an exercise in a futility?

Mark.

>> Mark Moyar: Can I say a few words?

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: You can say a small few words.

>> Mark Moyar: I think they would have been much more useful if they explored more options. And one, intensified bombing, and another thing we didn't really get to, but invading North Vietnam is a big option that would have changed the dynamics a lot.

That would take a lot more to explain, but I think it would have been more useful if there had been more options.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Okay, Mike?

>> Mai Elliott: I really don't know what the assumptions were or these were, I only looked at the conclusions because that's what interested me. But I think that, again, the assumptions have to be more realistic because, like signal war games who assume that the North Vietnamese Is irrational you pummel them and they're going to say, my gosh, we can't fight the United States and we negotiate.

Negotiate means surrendering because negotiate on the terms favorable to the United States, on the terms dictated by the United States. So I think that maybe the assumptions about your opponent should be more realistic.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: All right and H.R..

>> H.R. McMaster: I would say, yes, it can have an impact, but it depends on the president.

The president can get the advice that he or she wants based on their predilections, their character and so forth.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: All right, now I want to open up for question and answer. So we have a roaming mic. You guys want to raise your hand and we will open up for questions.

>> Audience 1: Just curious, I'm very happy to have so many historians and wondered, are there any lessons from the Vietnam conflict that you would take in looking at today's situation in either Ukraine or Gaza? Doesn't have to be lessons for the US, but just for the parties involved.

>> H.R. McMaster: God, how long do you have?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yes, I mean, when I listen to the mantra of de-escalation today, I think it's Robert McNamara's throwing his voice, right? And there's this idea that we should have a ceasefire, right, and then get to a political settlement. When in history has there been a favorable political settlement to a war that does not reflect the military realities on the ground?

We have neglected history, right? We have, I would just say that, it goes back to Clausewitz's observation that the first duty of the statesman is not try to turn war into something alien to its nature. That's what we did in Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan we kept saying, there's no military solution here.

Well, you know, the Taliban came up with one, right? Or that we need to come up with a good political outcome, in Gaza, before we defeat before Israel destroys Hamas. Hey, it's Hamas who says they want to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. I mean, does that get you on a path to a two state solution?

I don't think so. I think that it's really important to understand history. And I think that these sort of social science theories that so many have imbibed in and who are now in our government, I think leads them to try to turn war into something alien to its very nature.

And in war, each side tries to outdo the other. And winning in war requires convincing your enemy that your enemies defeated. There's not really kind of a nifty way to do that. I feel better now.

>> H.R. McMaster: Thank you for asking that question. I'm sorry I'm sorry to go.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Let's go ahead and move to another question so that we can get some more.

>> Audience 2: Thanks very much. I was wondering if you could put the decisions of 1964-65 that you've been talking about into a broader context, which must have been the context that decision makers were thinking about.

Communist China wins in 1949, there's the Korean War, but then there's the Malayan emergency during the 1950s where the communist insurgent there. There was communist insurgency in Thailand and Indonesia wouldn't have these issues. And the broader, as they perceived it at the time, sounds a bit anachronistic to talk about it now.

But as they perceived it, the broader threat of Southeast Asia becoming communist being the main issue, not just the details of IndoChina or specifically Vietnam. It wasn't just about Vietnam. It was about defeating communism in Southeast Asia.

>> Mark Moyar: And that's what I was the domino theory basically refers to Southeast Asia, but it can be applied more broadly.

But that was the overarching rationale. And I spent a lot of time, because what some people do is they say, well, 1975, Vietnam, when Vietnam falls, you don't have all the dominoes falling. Well, that's largely true, although Cambodia falls and Khmer Rouge murders a few million people. But in 1965, the world's a vastly different place.

China is on the same side as North Vietnam in 65, so is the Soviet Union, although they're fighting each other, and Indonesia is considered the most important country in Vietnam. I've written at length about how the Indonesians are telling Americans in 1965, if Vietnam falls, you're gonna lose Asia.

And in September, October 1965, Sukarno, the pro communist leader, tries to wipe out his military leadership, and they fight back and destroy the Communist Party. And there's a lot of evidence to indicate that this is actually influenced by Vietnam. So I argue, in some sense, the US does achieve the broader strategic objective of saving Southeast Asia, which, of course, has implications for today.

Because Indonesia and Thailand, Malaya, Philippines, etc, Japan, are big allies in the region yes.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I think the interesting thing about the war game is that most of the war games in the Sigma series assume domino theory is not tested. It is assumed the early, the 62 game.

And we don't have the 63 game, by the way, the 63 game was scheduled to be run on Halloween of 1963. So October 31, and in November, we have two assassinations. And so for whatever reason, we can't find the 63 game. But the 62 game gets at this question a little bit and tries to look at kind of how US foreign policy in Laos affects other areas in the region, but it becomes an assumption in the later games.

And so instead of testing them, it becomes, like the motivation behind why you're doing the action. And I think that's interesting in terms of kind of game design and how games end up. Their outcomes are influenced by the assumptions and the theories in which we create the game themselves.

>> Mai Elliott: I think that in that period, you're right, because as US president, you look down and you see all these unstable countries, corrupt, poor, ripe for the picking by the communists if they use subversion. Warfare to nibble, taking one country after another in a domino fashion, and pretty soon the United States and Europe would be surrounded.

So when you look at that, yeah, Vietnam looked like, in a bigger context that it was. Especially if you believe that China was behind it and China was using a proxy to win in Vietnam and then expand to the rest of Southeast Asia, I think you would look at Vietnam in a different context.

You were right. Yeah, I agree.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: I think we have time for one last question.

>> Audience 3: Seems to me this is a perfect example of what H.R. would call strategic narcissism and Neil Ferguson would say a lack of understanding of the contingency of history. Because sitting in Washington doing these war games, no one even thought about the fact that Indonesia might suddenly turn strongly anti communist after a really bloody awful internal event.

No one would have foreseen that Vietnam today would become the strongest opponent of China, and no one would have foreseen. I'm sorry, there's a third one in my head. What I'm thinking about is, the fact is Lee Kuan Yew believes that the United States saved Southeast Asia and Singapore by buying ten years for the Sino-Soviet split, for the Vietnamese-Chinese split, and for Indonesia to turn peaceful in Southeast Asia.

And no war game can capture that kind of prediction about the future, especially if it believes that everything's gonna be affected by how many bombs the Americans drop on Vietnam. Sorry, that's a speech. What do you think of that? There's the question.

>> H.R. McMaster: I'll just say quickly, because I've been critical of George Bundy.

But George Bundy, actually, the rest of that quotation, when I talked about really not having a clear objective. He said that what we could then say is our objective wasn't to win in Vietnam, but to buy time for other southeast Asian countries to develop their own democracies and to become bulwarks against communism.

So, this idea was in the minds of some of the critical policymakers and advisors at that time. And Lee Kuan Yew, that's a fantastic perspective that he has. I'm familiar with that. I mean, it's worth reading. It's worth reading his long format interview with him and Dr. Kissinger and I forget his name, the former US ambassador in India.

Anyway-

>> Mai Elliott: Blackwell.

>> H.R. McMaster: No, I can't remember. Yeah, Blackwell. So, Blackwell and Kissinger did this long form interview with Lee Kuan Yew very late in his life, Lee Kuan Yew's life, and it's retrospective on Vietnam and then on the US-China relationship and so forth.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I think I'm gonna use that as the segue to say, why do we care about war games?

What is their purpose? In these games, I kind of set up this puzzle where, look, they got it right and then we ignored it. How could that happen? But they got it right in many ways because they made the right hunch. The decisions that they made about the adjudication, about domestic opinion, international opinion, Viet Cong will, they mostly got it right because they hunched in the correct direction.

But as my husband would say, even a blind squirrel finds a nut. And if this game had been run 20, 30,100, 200 more times, it might have led to very different outcomes. And so, as somebody who uses games as a part of my research, I would say that we should not think of whether a game predicts the future accurately as whether a game is a good game or a bad game.

Instead, games are a way in which we understand the uncertainty in the world we live. And as historians and political scientists looking at games from a historical point of view, they help us understand the reasoning behind decisions and the beliefs that people bring into the important questions of the day.

And they often reveal to us almost more about the bureaucratic politics and the maneuvering behind the scenes than the outcomes might reveal about what could have or what did happen. So, with that, I want to highlight all the extraordinary work that we're bringing into the collection. So, the wargaming collection is housed within the Hoover Library and Archives.

We have Talia sitting in the room right here. I think we have 1300 documents that will be published over the next year. And what we're doing right now is we're publishing them in kind of tranches of materials. So, every two weeks, we'll upload a new tranche of material, and then there's a lot of manual behind the scenes.

We're tagging documents where we have documents that we pulled in for the SGMA war games that were supposedly about SGMA 63, because that's how they show up to us from the archives. And then as you start looking at the historiography and realize, my gosh, absolutely not. So, all to say, we want you to engage with the materials.

If you find that some material should be associated with something else, let us know. And so, part of what we're doing in order to encourage people to engage with materials is we've launched a scavenger hunt for the SGMA series, for these two weeks. And every two weeks, we'll have a different scavenger hunt.

But I posted the scavenger hunt on my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Instagram. I'm trying, you all, I'm trying. But it's got three questions. I'll tell you them right now. And if you guys find those three questions the answers, you can email them to us at hooverwargaming@stanford.edu. So, the questions are, the original dates of SGMA 1963 had to be delayed because of what events?

The second question is, and I think H.R. already even knows this one, who was the game director for SGMA 265? And the third question is, what time of the day did the senior policy team meet for SGMA 164? So, whoever gets the first answer to those questions correctly, we have signed books by our esteemed panelists.

You send us your name and your address, we will send them to you. So, thank you all for coming today. Before you guys leave here, I wanna highlight the extraordinary work that goes into an event like this. So we have Lillian sitting in the back here. Lillian has done an extraordinary job.

Hillary may be making sure that the party is going. And the events team, Talia, who has painstakingly uploaded each and every one of these documents and moved them. And we were like, no, no, no, don't put it there, put it somewhere else. And Jacob and Shawna, the marketing team, and we want you to engage, we want you to interact.

And anything that we can do, if you guys have research questions or interests, let us know. We're happy to help you guys use war games as part of your data and part of how you understand history. So, with that, we have food. So, please join us for a reception afterwards out in the Trades Hill lobby.

And I wanna thank these extraordinary panelists. Thank you for coming and engaging with these games and having such a wonderful conversation.