To Dare Even More Boldly: The losing gambler in Vegas Syndrome; The United States Tragically Doubles Down in Vietnam
Tragically, there are a legion of recent examples of the US falling into the Losing Gambler Syndrome. By the autumn of 1967, there were fully 500,000 US troops in Vietnam, with Commanding General William Westmoreland requesting 100,000 more. A primary American commitment had been made to a country that ought to have been only a negligible interest to the United States.
What analytical madness had driven this process? And why was it to take so long for the United States to agonisingly extricate itself from the endless morass that was Vietnam? The losing gambler syndrome is the clear culprit that answers both of these questions.
After my rather similar Iraq and Afghanistan experiences in Washington, I am highly skeptical of the supposed analytical prowess of the present Washington establishment. Saying this, incredulous shock and anger can be the only acceptable human emotions when assessing the decision-making over Vietnam of the senior members of the previous Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
David Halberstam’s bold and utterly supportable thesis in his angry, peerless work, The Best and the Brightest, is clearly vindicated: The Washington establishment of the Vietnam era was highly intellectually overrated, as they time and again fell foul of the losing gambler syndrome, alongside making myriad other basic analytical mistakes. At its essence, the best these supposedly worldly men could come up with as a rationale for escalating the Vietnam War was the highly dangerous analytical view that ‘because we are losing we must up the ante,’ without stopping to consider the more important political risk question as to why they were losing in the first place.
Perhaps the key moment in the Vietnam tragedy came on January 27, 1965, when the two key intellectual players in the Johnson administration, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, wrote a wavering LBJ a memo strongly urging an enhanced military commitment to the flagging mission.
For no particular reason—for he had written no original books or developed any original thoughts to justify his Olympian position—Bundy was the preeminent foreign and defence policy intellectual of the Kennedy-Johnson era. Elitist, sharp, hawkish, good at the close verbal combat that is the key determination of bureaucratic success in Washington, Bundy was, at best, a bright process guy, adept at keeping the flow of decision-making going from his perch in the White House as national security adviser.
However, for all his supposed brittle brilliance, he lacked the ability to coldly assess policy decisions and neglected to constantly check to see if they were working, which is the mark of a first-rate foreign policy practitioner. Instead, in his enraging elitist manner, as the clouds darkened over Vietnam, he instinctively moved to shut down all discussion, to stifle all of the reasonable doubts that were emerging.
Of the two, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara is the more interesting, and the more tragic. Johnson was right to rejoice in his ability. Calm, analytical, driven by empirical data (a rarity then and now in the capital) rather than politics, McNamara send to be the harbinger of a beguiling new age when rational men eschewing ideology would reach the correct policy decisions for the right reasons.
Instead, he came to stunningly epitomise the peril of such a belief: If the data going into a system are junk, the outputs are bound to be junk, too. By focusing on the more intellectually manageable policy specifics of Vietnam (body counts), without ever looking at the broader, less quantifiable, but more important strategic factors determining the result (the relative political will of the two sides and the discrepancy in political legitimacy between the north and the south of the country), McNamara’s analysis was constantly missing the forest for the trees.
The Bundy-McNamara memo baldly stated that the then policy of steering a middle course between full-out military support and withdrawal had been a failure, and it conceded—without once questioning why the present policy wasn’t working—that continuing the present American policy would lead only to ‘disastrous defeat.’
Bundy and McNamara starkly outlined for the president that the United States needed either to move to the negotiations with North Vietnam or deploy vastly more force to right the sinking ship, particularly increasing the bombing of the north. They both came down strongly in favour of the latter option. It was particularly McNamara’s great influence over the president that swayed LBJ into making this cataclysmic error.
The problem with increasing the bombing was that it organically led to a much larger troop commitment, without a definitive strategic decision ever needing to take place. As Halberstam notes, ‘If you bombed you needed airfields, and if you had airfields you needed troops to protect the airfields and the ARVN (South Vietnamese troops) weren’t good enough.’
This was the moment at which the analytical arm bells should have been ringing. If after all those years of intense American military, economic, and political support, the South Vietnamese government couldn’t field a credible army, as even more recently in Afghanistan proved the case, then the United States was surely propping up a regime entirely incapable of standing on its own.
It was time to pare American losses and recognise that the fundamental lack of South Vietnamese political legitimacy (in contrast to the innate popularity of nationalist communist Ho Chi Minh) meant the United States was fighting for a wholly artificial political construct. Instead, those around LBJ, following on in true losing gambler fashion, used the failure of their current policy to advocate doing even more in the service of an obviously lost cause.
And following this perilous analytical logic, the United States was to do much more; before too much longer it totally dominated the war effort of the supposed South Vietnamese cause. US troops guarding airfields for increased bombing missions morphed into American troops leading the fight in the jungle against the Communists. Inevitably, American casualties began to mount, further playing into the losing gambler syndrome. As Halberstam acutely observes, ‘Each dead American became one more rationale for more dead Americans.’
Of the senior figures in government, only Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs George Ball had a real sense of the ruinous analytical errors being made over the prosecution of the war. To Ball, ‘the arguments of Mac Bundy and Taylor (General Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later US Ambassador to South Vietnam) that we must bomb to shore up the morale of the South Vietnamese because the government was so frail that it would otherwise collapse was foolishness of a high order. It was all the more reason not to commit the power and reputation of the US to something that weak.’ Ball was analytically on the money, but bureaucratically almost alone in his dissent. While Johnson mournfully listened to his doubts, he sided with the vast majority of the Washington establishment, terribly wrong though it was.
As the war inevitably lapsed into an unwinnable quagmire, a charnel house for a generation of young American men, the losing gambler syndrome—as it so perniciously does—further tightened its grip over America decision-making regarding Vietnam, precisely because things were going so badly wrong.
First, there was the emotional commitment the war’s original architects brought with them to subsequent decisions. General Maxwell Taylor came to be highly psychologically involved in the commitment, just as Secretary McNamara felt increasing guilt for both the war itself and the peril it posed for the president he had so ruinously advised. In both cases, when the doleful real-world facts of the war began trickling back to Washington, causing both men acute discomfort, it was this very sense of emergency and crisis that pushed them to further embroil both themselves and the country in the Vietnam morass.
As for Bundy, he became so intellectually tetchy that when pressed by subordinates as to what the worst-case scenario in Vietnam looked like, he madly responded, ‘We can’t assume what we don’t believe.’ Because failure was on the door-step, it must not be discussed, or even thought about, even as America mindlessly doubled down on its commitment to Vietnam. All of official Washington was in the deepest throes of the losing gambler syndrome.
The last, terrible phase of this analytical breakdown played out—as the political and military situation in Vietnam went from bad to worse—over spurious debates about prestige already committed. Yes, the argument went, perhaps the war was initially a mistake, but as we have already committed so much blood and treasure to the effort, to leave now would negate such sacrifices. Worse, American credibility around the world was bound to suffer a calamitous setback. Such a disastrously reasoned argument did nothing to change the outcome of the war, though it did tragically extend its length as the Vietnam conflict went on, seemingly forever.
Hauntingly setting the precedent for the later pattern in Iraq and Afghanistan, the worse things got on the battlefield in Vietnam, the less dissent was tolerated in decision-making circles. After it was apparent to all that Vietnam was a catastrophe, official Washington—almost universally complicit in the disaster—circled its political wagons. As Halberstam relates, ‘At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it would hurt our boys and help the other side.’
The losing gambler syndrome compelled those in its grip to ferociously oppose any impulse to say that it was in American interests to cut its losses in light of the political unsustainability of the South Vietnamese cause. Things had progressed too far, and gone too badly, to even contemplate turning back. It is hard to think of a more damaging political risk mistake to make than this.
What occurred at the political level in Washington decision-making circles was repeated in terms of geopolitics. After Johnson’s presidency was destroyed by the war, his successor, Richard Nixon, also found it devilishly hard to quit the Vietnam morass. For Nixon himself at least partially believed in the losing gambler syndrome. He rationalised that if America threw in the towel in Vietnam, it would suffer a massive blow to its credibility around the world from which its prestige might not recover.
Beyond greatly historically overestimating the blow to American credibility that withdrawal actually caused (less than two decades later the United States triumphed in the Cold War), by this logic a country is forced to stay on forever in a quagmire, endlessly pursuing an inherent unwinnable policy to prosecute an inherently unwinnable war. It is the losing gambler syndrome—and not the highly useful analytical ability to recognise when it is time to cut policy losses—that does more to destroy a nation’s credibility than anything else.
But as was argued on depressingly similar grounds over both the Iraq and Afghan debacles, the analytical breakdown over Vietnam culminated in this wan justification. So much had already been invested and lost that America must simply keep going. Dad, having lost the kids’ college money, must stay at the gambling tables, all evidence to the contrary that this will retrieve the situation. And so, tragically, the losing gambler syndrome claimed America in Vietnam as another victim.