0 - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
depletion of the active US strategic reserve --
of the JCS,
also dominated the concerns
Even more vehemently than on the emergency augmentation issue,
they opposed sending additional troops to Vietnam unless standby reserve
units were mobil ized.43/
The JCS,
CINCPAC and Gener3l Westmoreland all saw Tet as an
opportunity to convince President Johnson to move finally in the direction
of decisive escalation, a decision they had sought for several years. JCS
Chairman General Wheeler seized upon this opportunity and went to Saigon to
coax General Westmoreland, in private, into an ambitious additional force
request. Though General Westmorelano was not worried by the military
threat caused by the communist offensive itself, he set aoout planning to
seize the battlefield initiative and to move into DRV
sanctuaries in Laos
and Cambodia., He came up with a requirement for 206,000 additional men.
Actually, however, General Wheeler planned to use only half that number
immediately in support of RVN
operations and to use the balance to reconstitute
the active strategic reserve in the CONUS
so that more forces would
be available to respond to contingencies that were cropping up elsewhere --
in Korea and Europe.44/ When he returned to Washington though, General
Wheeler lobbied for those forces as being required to meet pressing combat
needs in Vietnam. President Johnson, shaken by the Tet setback on the home
front, decided to move General Westmoreland up the Army's organization into
the job of Army Chief of Staff and replace him as commander ,,ith General
Creighton Abrams. General Westmoreland was shocked and somewhat bitter
when he later discovered that General Wheeler had portrayed his troop
reinforcement request to policymakers in terms of such baleful urgency.45/
Faced with what amounted to a total US military commitment
to the war in Vietnam, President Johnson ordered an "A to Z" reassessment
by Secretary Clifford and a high level task force. Johnson directed
Clifford to "give me the lesser of evils., Give me your recommendations."46/
Clifford had the impression that his task force was only supposed
to develop alternative ways to implement General Westmoreland's troop
request, and that the more far-reaching options his group eventually developed
were real iy a venture beyond their mandate.47/
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