Vietnam War Intelligence Failure Analysis

On February 3, 1968, William J. Jorden, a staff member of the National Security Council, called the enemy’s offensive America’s “worst intelligence failure of the war.” U.S. intelligence analysts failed to understand their adversary because they focused on only two aspects of their opponent’s strategy: the Vietnamese application of people’s war, which relied heavily on the ideas articulated by Lin Piao and Mao Tse-tung; and the military aspects-especially military operations involving conventional units-of the communist effort to unite Vietnam. The offensive failed to achieve its primary objective, the quick termination of the war on the communists’ terms; yet, in a manner unanticipated by the communists, it initiated a chain of events …show more content…
In a sense, analysts and those responsible for responding to warning solved the dilemma posed by the “cry-wolf” syndrome in an extremely unproductive fashion: they shifted the responsibility for discriminating among warnings to field commanders. Field commanders were forced to rely on their own devices: those who collected and analyzed information that indicated a threat against their units responded to the Tet alert; those in an apparently quiet sector dismissed warnings issued by MACV as just another false alarm. The story of the intelligence failure also highlights the herculean task faced by officers, analysts, and policy makers as they strove to complete the intelligence cycle. The failure to anticipate an attack in wartime, when Americans could have assumed that their opponents would do everything in their power to hurt the allied war effort, testifies to the difficulty inherent in avoiding failures of intelligence. The extremes of the Tet intelligence controversy are represented by senior army officers themselves; there is no need for looking under rugs for perverse, so called revisionist historians purportedly trying to overturn some conventional wisdom. At one extreme is General David R. Palmer, who in a text used at West Point held that Tet had been an intelligence failure …show more content…
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the officers who held command and intelligence posts in Vietnam in January 1968, arguing that Military Assistance Command Vietnam knew all about the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive represented, in the words of National Security Council staff member William Jorden, “the worst intelligence failure of the war.” It was not a surprise at all because of the numerous captured documents and prisoner interrogations that spoke of a major winter-spring