A Protracted War

The National Liberation Front’s (NLF) success in its struggle against the Government of South Vietnam (GVN) was possible only due to the combination of three key factors: the political situation in Vietnam, military-insurgent action in the South, and the nature of American domestic politics. Without each of these elements in its favour, the Vietnamese resistance movement would almost certainly have been futile. Moreover, the NLF’s recognition that these necessary conditions were inherently linked allowed it to exploit all three in its favour: with its masterful political arm, the NLF was able to ensure the continuation of its guerrilla campaign; and with this extended warfare it was able, in turn, to affect American domestic politics enough to elicit a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam was thus the instrument of revolutionary politics, an essentially Clausewitzian continuation of policy by other means. Unlike conflict in the Clausewitzian model, however, the war in South Vietnam was not a simple contest between two field armies. Instead, it was a fundamentally unconventional struggle fought by the NLF in the spirit of Mao’s revolutionary principles of war against an American force technologically superior to anything dreamed of in Clausewitz’s era.

Part I of this essay examines the nature of the NLF’s political arm, illustrating how it supported and sustained the guerrilla struggle. Part II looks at the success of the NLF’s military organisation, support and tactics, and explains how its style of warfare was tailored to generate an American political response.

Part I

A central tenet of the NLF’s resistance movement was its reliance on the support of the general population in Vietnam. This maxim was in accordance with the revolutionary principles popularised by Mao Tse-tung, who wrote as early as 1937 that “[w]ithout question, the fountainhead of guerrilla warfare is in the masses of the people.” Operating under this basic assumption, President Nguyen Huu Tho of the NLF deemed that, above all other considerations, “it is the human factor that is decisive.” In light of this philosophy, the great extent to which the NLF went to ensure the loyalty of the people of South Vietnam is hardly surprising. The NLF waged what was clearly recognised by scholars in 1969 as a “constant political offensive in the South” designed to generate support for its cause. This endeavour involved three main elements: casting the current American-backed government and its policies in a negative light, portraying itself and its own actions in a conversely positive light, and finally securing complete devotion to the revolutionary cause in the minds of as many citizens as possible.