However, nearly US aircraft were lost. The financial cost of Operation Rolling Thunder was huge. Operation Rolling Thunder ended when President Johnson offered its termination as a way of securing the North Vietnamese to a negotiating table. Peace talks began in earnest in January just two months after Johnson ordered the ending of Operation Rolling Thunder.
The partial halt merged into an overall halt of bombing in North Vietnam on Nov. Rolling Thunder was over. During its course—over three years and eight months—the Air Force and the other services had flown , fighter sorties and 2, B sorties. Earl H. Tilford Jr. A Senate Armed Services subcommittee, which held hearings on Rolling Thunder in August , reached a different conclusion. There is no way to know what an all-out bombing effort in might have achieved.
Perhaps no amount of bombing would have done the job, but when Rolling Thunder ended, our best chance of knocking North Vietnam out of the war was gone. Skip to content. By John T. Doubts and Redirection The conventional wisdom, often repeated at the time, was that the United States must not get bogged down in a land war in Asia.
John T. Correll was editor in chief of Air Force Magazine for 18 years and is now a contributing editor. One of the biggest personnel issues Towberman…. A startup figuring out how to surveil the cislunar domain thinks a swarm of self-guiding cubesats could cover it, each revisiting the moon every 26 days. The Air Force released updated scoring charts for its revamped physical fitness test Nov. Missing, however, was the 1-mile walk that the service had said it would implement as a measure of aerobic fitness.
After decades of combat flying in the harsh Middle East environment, the Air Force embarked on an aggressive program to deal with an insidious problem that steals aircraft performance, greatly increases maintenance requirements, results in higher fuel consumption rates, and increases emissions. The culprit, the constant erosion and corrosion of high pressure compressor and turbofan blades due to environmental particulates.
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Happy Veterans Day Nov. In today's all-volunteer military, not many need to answer that call. Those few who do, hue to a higher call," says AFA president retired Lt. Bruce "Orville" Wright in his Veterans Day message. This website uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. By using this site, you agree to our use of cookies. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.
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These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. It was on this point that the Johnson administration made one of the more egregious errors of Rolling Thunder. It selected the hortatory admonishment to minimize civilian casualties as the campaign standard, rather than the law of war prohibition of excessive collateral civilian casualties.
Although other reasons were cited on occasion, the buffer zones around Hanoi and Haiphong were placed there primarily to reduce to an absolute minimum civilian casualties among the enemy population.
In practice, the criterion for White House selection of targets slipped farther from approving only those targets that would minimize civilian casualties to one of authorizing attacks against only such targets as would result in a minimum of civilian casualties. This criterion was incorrect for several reasons.
Whereas the question of whether a nation has utilized illegal means and methods of warfare generally is measured against an overall campaign or war, the Johnson administration elected to apply it against each individual fixed target; it chose to slide the standard to an increasingly stringent level, i. While such humanitarianism is laudable, it ignored not only the law of war but fundamental concepts of warfare.
As Euripides wrote in Heracles ," The standard was not applied without criticism. The JCS, in responding to a 14 October McNamara memorandum on Rolling Thunder, argued that if it were to be effective, "the air campaign should be conducted with only those minimum constraints to avoid indiscriminate killing of population," which would have been consistent with the law of war. Rolling Thunder drew to a close six months later. There were other errors with respect to the application of the law of war in Rolling Thunder.
The first lay in the failure to distinguish between civilian casualties as such and the law of war prohibition against excessive collateral civilian casualties. Casualties among civilians working in a facility that is a legitimate target cannot prevent attack on that facility; their injury or death as a result of the attack of that target is an occupational hazard and the exclusive responsibility of the defender.
Moreover, a serious error was made with respect to the determination of who was entitled to protection as a "civilian. Individuals supporting the war effort by moving military supplies and personnel down lines of communication into South Vietnam or repairing the roads and bridges making up those LOCs were taking a direct part in the hostilities and therefore were subject to attack. Personnel who manned AA sites, including those individuals trained in the "Hanoi habit" to run into the street with small arms to fire into the air during air raids, were similarly subject to attack while they participated in the conflict.
However, the North Vietnamese classified all of these individuals as protected "civilians" and included them in their civilian casualty reports, without challenge by the White House.
Rather, casualties among civilians within military targets and among these unprotected civilians erroneously were included in civilian casualty estimates reviewed at the Tuesday lunch.
The law of war is not a one-way street, imposing obligations on the attacker while absolving the defender of any responsibility for collateral civilian casualties. It expects each to act in good faith with respect to the minimization of collateral civilian casualties. To the extent that the defender elects to disregard the law of war, he is responsible for the civilian casualties that flow from his actions.
For example, civilian casualties or damage to civilian objects resulting from intentional actions by the defender to screen targets from attack are the responsibility of the defender exclusively. Knowing U. Similarly, MiG aircraft dispersals were placed in villages adjacent to airfields to screen the aircraft from attack. A military target does not change its character by being situated in a populated area. The law of war does not prohibit their attack but places the responsibility on the defender for civilian casualties caused by its deliberate acts.
Similarly, the defender rather than the attacker is accountable for damage or injury accruing from actions taken to thwart the attack of legitimate targets. Passes by MiG aircraft, the firing of air-to-air missiles, or the launching of SAMs to force attacking aircraft to jettison their ordnance may lead to civilian casualties for which the defender alone is accountable.
The North Vietnamese utilized all these actions to screen and protect their military targets from attack, without response from the Johnson administration. Like limited war, the law of war depends on both parties to a conflict adhering to agreed standards. Whereas the United States considered the Vietnam War to be a limited struggle, to the North Vietnamese the conflict was total. To the extent the United States undertook Rolling Thunder to induce the North Vietnamese to limit the conflict, it was singularly unsuccessful.
The United States might have been more successful in enforcing the law of war, for the law of war provides specific sanctions to induce compliance. Again, however, apparent ignorance of the law resulted in inaction when transgressions occurred. In addition to parking military convoys in civilian residential areas and storing military supplies in such places as the Haiphong cultural center, normally a civilian object protected from attack, the North Vietnamese maximized for military purposes their use of objects enjoying special protection under the law of war.
Not the least of these was the utilization of hospitals as AA sites. In relating his experience in attacking the rail facilities and associated equipment at Viet Tri, one pilot noted sardonically:. They had one large complex of buildings just north of town that was billed as a hospital, and [it] was naturally off limits. If it was in fact a hospital, it must have been a hospital for sick flak gunners, because every time we looked at it from a run on the railhead, it was one mass of sputtering, flashing gun barrels.
The Geneva Convention relating to the protection of the wounded and sick is explicit in providing for discontinuance of protection for hospitals when they are used for "acts harmful to the enemy. Given the insistence on widespread photographic coverage of air strikes over North Vietnam, U. Had the North Vietnamese ignored the demands, appropriate action could have followed.
Again, however, the North Vietnamese succeeded in placing the United States on the defensive early in the Rolling Thunder campaign by alleging that the United States was bombing hospitals intentionally.
Apparently lacking the capacity for sparring with the North Vietnamese in the world public opinion arena, the White House never entertained any thought of availing itself of its legal remedies. Rolling Thunder was one of the most constrained military campaigns in history. But ignorantia juris neminem excusat ignorance of the law excuses no one. The law of war evolves through one of two processes or a combination thereof.
First, it is the product of the widespread practice of nations over an extended period of time and in numerous conflicts. Alternatively, a rule may be drafted and codified in a treaty by virtue of multilateral negotiations. History also records that where such rules have not accurately codified customary practice or met the preceding requirements, they have been disregarded in the ensuing conflicts. If one accepts these lessons, then recognition should be provided the corollary that while the law of war generally is considered to be the minimum standard of conduct acceptable from a nation at war, those laws relating to the use of force may very well also reflect the maximum limitations a nation may accept and still succeed.
One may exceed the minimum legal ration for a prisoner of war by feeding him the very best and have no effect on the war except to repatriate a healthy, overweight prisoner of war on the cessation of hostilities. However, to the extent that a nation exceeds those minimum standards through such unreasonable restrictions as those imposed on the Hanoi POL strike forces, it does so to its peril.
In his commencement address at West Point on 27 May , President Reagan wisely cautioned against an overreliance on negotiation of treaties and agreements to the detriment of military strength.
The latter was the folly of Rolling Thunder. General William W. Professor Thompson describes himself as a DOD intelligence analyst at the time of Rolling Thunder, but his precise position or association with the campaign, if any, is not made clear. Navy F aircraft in international airspace on 19 August Henry F.
The latter posed no viable threat after , if it ever did. Although a lawyer, McNaughton had no international law or law-of-war background. Nonetheless, he declined to consult the law-of-war experts in OSD General Counsel on the basis that a lawyer does not need to talk to other lawyers.
IV London, , pp. Lieutenant Colonel James L. RTSH, p. The pilot subsequently was lost on his seventy-seventh mission attacking a single truck. Graff, pp. He stated RTSH, p. The evidence is to the contrary. Four U. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Frankum, Ronald B. Herring, George C. Nagl, John A. Schlight, John. Sharp, U. Grant, Jr. Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect. Thompson, Wayne.
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