00:04:44.740But this project is actually fairly near and dear to my heart in a way, because obviously the project of Anarchonomicon, in a way, sort of, is to produce people who can actually resist state power and actually assert their liberty.
00:05:09.940And of course, as Joe Biden said, you can't take on the U.S. government. You need F-16s. How does one deal with air war if they do not have F-16s of their own?
00:05:23.840he said f-15s f-15s oh yes uh joe biden living living way in the past but uh but how does one
00:05:35.420take assert their liberty against a central state state a technologically superior world power
00:05:43.560if they do not have advanced air assets of their own how how can you do that and the answer is
00:05:50.420this question was plainly solved within u.s history by one of america's enemies uh the
00:05:57.740vietnamese endured a lot of casualties but they did take on the most powerful nation on the earth
00:06:03.360on the earth with the most advanced airframes in history and nuclear weapons had their back0.82
00:06:10.620and call they could have used if the vietnamese had escalated like too rapidly too quickly and0.95
00:06:17.740And they did all this whilst in pajamas and in pajamas eating out of rice bowls.
00:06:28.940And a lot of Americans, like, take the wrong lesson of this.
00:06:35.440That's like, oh, guerrilla warfare always wins or, like, insurgency is just superior to conventional warfare.
00:06:46.900which of course is not the case it actually like you actually have to fight it out uh
00:06:52.960you actually have to develop your own doctrines and belief and beliefs and like strategies and
00:07:00.000actually like execute them and endure like probably horrifying casualties as a result of it
00:07:05.500but brilliant men in the north vietnamese army and in uh the vietcong the uh the national
00:07:14.800liberation front uh they did develop these strategies and they did develop these doctrines
00:07:20.400and you can fight against people who are in the sky effectively from the ground or carry on a
00:07:27.180campaign that defeats it and it is not the case that a technologically superior force just
00:07:33.800immediately invalidates all your nationalist ambitions or liberties or ancient rights etc
00:07:40.300and under and this is where like i'm probably like far less than i aspire to be because i
00:07:52.060don't really understand air air power that well i have like some understanding but not
00:07:57.600not as much as i'd like whereas this is something where especially if you do not have an air force
00:08:04.040of your own it's incumbent upon you to understand how air power works and this tactics and logic
00:08:10.180in history of it because, well, if you're an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, you
00:08:16.760can 100% get away with not really understanding the nature of air power and air doctrine and
00:08:23.100air warfare and the history of air warfare because you have an air force that their job
00:13:42.000And Ho Chi Minh and all the figures are slowly are consolidating their power and like trying to unify a nationalist front to counteract the French in Vietnam, founding what will become the Viet Minh.0.59
00:14:06.560But what is the state of air power in 1945, Yopi?
00:14:12.000so in terms of the big global picture or in terms of what the french have in theater
00:14:17.940both what's the like global picture like uh because a lot of a lot of technology is like
00:14:27.260developing aggressively around this time like uh the first experiments with helicopters have
00:14:33.600happen and like a lot of like airborne logic like has played out in like 44 in uh like Normandy and
00:14:42.840stuff but uh in a lot of ways it's also like still incredibly new like uh like 1945 just four years
00:14:52.800or just uh five years earlier uh the Germans were taking Eben Emanuel with like collider attacks
00:15:01.760that they hadn't quite mastered, like, the idea of, like, parachute regiments.
00:15:25.040So it does depend a bit on which country you're in,
00:15:28.440but we're dealing with air forces that are in the process of either learning or maybe not learning the lessons of World War II.
00:15:39.220So a lot of theory prior to World War II had emphasized the use of strategic air power,
00:15:46.660the idea that large fleets of heavy bombers could potentially win wars on their own.
00:15:51.860In my opinion, this is largely a theory which was found wanting during the Second World War, but it could sort of be made to look like a success because of the atomic bombings of Japan, having been at least perceived to have precipitated Japanese surrender.
00:16:11.740And as a result of that, in the United States, for instance, you have, well, the creation
00:16:18.760of the Department of Defense in the immediate aftermath of the war, amalgamating what had
00:16:23.760previously been the War Department, which controlled the Army, and the Department of
00:16:27.300the Navy, which controlled the Navy, and the creation of the U.S. Air Force as an independent
00:16:34.720And because this is the period before August 29th, 1949, when the United States is the sole nuclear power, there was a prevailing feeling, especially in the leadership of the new U.S. Air Force and particularly Strategic Air Command led by Curtis LeMay, that the mere threat of the use of the atomic bomb was the only form of military power the United States necessarily needed.
00:17:00.700and that as a result, the other branches of service were probably obsolete, as was conventional war.
00:17:10.700This created a pretty substantial mess of bureaucratic infighting in the new Department of Defense in the late 1940s,
00:17:18.780with the U.S. Navy fighting a somewhat successful rearguard action generally known to history as the Revolt of the Admirals,
00:17:25.700admirals which saved the existing navy and stopped naval aviation being handed over to the air force
00:17:32.320but it also did mean that most of their future construction including all their
00:17:39.100so that's the situation in the u.s at least i can probably go into how things were going elsewhere
00:17:47.740All right. And for our listeners who are right out of their elementum, which I'm not claiming not to be one of them, the state of like just the combined arms of air power in like 45, like right at the end of World War II, you have strategic bombers, as you've just established, like massive, massive flying air fortresses that are carrying out strategic bombing missions.
00:18:17.740you know firebombing Hamburg and Frankfurt and all that you have a fighter aircraft that are like
00:18:24.640still kind of half half dogfighting like a like a air-to-air missile tech is like still in its
00:18:35.300infancy and developing uh you have like you have like anti-submarine and like patrol aircraft
00:18:43.560which are their, like, own kind of unique thing that seaborne aviation has its own logic.
00:18:55.660But then you also have the aircraft carriers, which are carrying an assortment of fighters and fighter bombers.
00:19:03.340that World War II aircraft carriers are having, like, these standoff duels,
00:19:11.480and whoever can, like, launch their fires and get them on the other aircraft carrier burst
00:19:17.440is going to be decisive, and you can go into the battle midway,
00:19:22.960all this, like, interesting stuff around aircraft carrier and fighter logic.
00:19:28.500And, of course, recon aircraft are also developing quickly with advancements in airborne photography and other assets.
00:19:41.640Yet it's like still, in a long ways, it's still like a lot of aviation resembles like World War I, but faster in many ways.
00:19:56.020Like, the World War I and 1920s aircraft carriers, like, there is a continuity with that, even though the World War II aircraft carriers are, like, massive advancements.
00:20:10.740The actual, like, airframes and nature of the planes are, like, doing kind of similar things.
00:20:18.520Or am I, like, what's the big technology that's, like, big technologies are changing in 1945?
00:20:26.020so the thing that's been mostly driving technological development in aircraft up until
00:20:32.180this point has been engines and speed and sort of airframes keeping up with those enough that they
00:20:39.220will still hold together under those speeds although the mysteries of transonic and supersonic
00:20:45.620aerodynamics are beginning to make themselves known by 1945 if you like i could possibly try
00:20:52.580in a few minutes to summarize the developments
00:21:20.080it could probably be about five actually
00:21:22.580But in essence, the theories of strategic bombing developed in the lead-up to World War II.
00:21:28.000The idea that strategic airpower could win wars on its own without the need for costly land battles was quite appealing after the mass slaughter of World War I.
00:21:38.480But in practice, things went sideways with it pretty quickly.
00:21:43.460Unescorted bomber formations proved to be far too vulnerable to enemy fighters and were not capable of being as elusive in the sky as they were thought to be.
00:21:52.580And particularly if you look at the U.S. strategic air campaign against Germany, the effect that it had, almost unintentionally, although they would adopt strategy and tactics to kind of pursue this end in early 1944, was not so much to destroy German industry en masse, but to bring the Luftwaffe into air-to-air combat where it was largely destroyed.
00:22:17.580Quite a lot of it in a sort of decisive battle period between February, March-ish of 1944.
00:22:26.620And afterwards, like after D-Day, I would argue, was the period where strategic bombing was the most effective,
00:22:33.060when they started going after the most vital targets like the German transport network and Germany's genuine Achilles heel, which was fuel production.
00:22:41.240Prior to this, they had mostly been targeting the aircraft industry.
00:22:44.600so in terms of tactical air power this is something that sort of evolved almost a little
00:22:51.340bit organically very early on in the war there were sort of two different ways that this was done
00:22:59.080the Luftwaffe was a very sort of tactically and operationally oriented air force they had their
00:23:05.920Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers which would hit tactical targets with pretty impressive precision in dive
00:23:12.060bombing attacks, often relatively close to their own troops, and their medium bombers,
00:23:17.440HEC-111s, JU-88s, Dornier-17s, would hit operational targets like rail yards, groupings
00:23:24.860of enemy reserve forces, bridges, that kind of thing, by level bombing from medium altitudes,
00:23:30.540say 10,000 to 15,000 feet. Whereas the British and the French going into the war mostly employed
00:23:38.700medium bombers in the tactical air power role flying at relatively low to medium altitudes
00:23:45.180trying to hit tactical targets in level flight so level bombing with bomb sites this proved to be
00:23:53.420both not accurate enough and extremely costly to do in daylight and quite a lot of the british
00:23:59.500light bomber force was destroyed in the battle of france for instance later on in the war though
00:24:05.380they carried on trying to do this, but also with obviously fighter escort along. And those escort
00:24:11.500fighters say during the North African campaign were increasingly noticing on the way to and from
00:24:16.560their targets, they were spotting these various targets of opportunity on the ground, columns of
00:24:21.760trucks, enemy troop positions, headquarters, that kind of thing, and began taking it upon themselves
00:24:27.960to strafe these targets and the use of fighters as fighter bombers in the at the tactical level
00:24:36.860kind of emerges from this so by the normandy campaign you've got fighter bombers mostly
00:24:42.760hawker typhoons and p-47 thunderbolts performing a mission that today would be called probably
00:24:49.680battlefield air interdiction where they're given say a square on the map in which to go and look
00:24:55.900for anything unfriendly and shoot it up stuff like airfields trains columns of vehicles that
00:25:03.060kind of thing the modern concept of close air support begins to emerge during this period
00:25:09.220it's probably first really perfected by the u.s marines in the pacific because they don't have
00:25:14.840access to the kind of on-call artillery that the u.s army does so actually having a guy on the
00:25:20.060ground with a radio talking a plane onto a target kind of starts to happen there in europe it's
00:25:25.880starts to happen later in the Normandy campaign and increasingly begins to develop as a capability
00:25:32.380towards the end of the war. The Marines retained the institutional knowledge on how to do this
00:25:38.180to this day. The U.S. Air Force really didn't, and I'm sure we'll get to that.
00:30:35.160is in Vietnam he's uniting all these factions that like some of them had done like some
00:30:42.760resistance against the Japanese some of them had just endured the Japanese occupation some of them
00:30:49.900are different ideological factions Ho Chi Minh and his his military man Giap are communists
00:30:57.640But they're able to unite a, like, wide coalition of Vietnamese nationalists in this manner that is actually, like, kind of unique for communist forces.
00:31:15.460And they start the French Vietnam War, the French Indochino War.
00:31:24.280And, of course, Laos and Cambodia and all that is happening in the background,
00:31:53.520so before korea i mean really the france's conflict with the vietnam really starts to
00:32:05.120heat up probably during the years of the korean war if memory is serving me correctly
00:32:09.860because things like the americans british and everyone else finally leaving vietnam and
00:32:16.740leaving it all to the french kind of all shakes out in the late 1940s or thereabouts
00:32:21.680yeah um specifically it kind of lined so so mao wins the chinese civil war in 49
00:32:32.580and this is like uh kind of the key that unlocks like why there's this crisis that like starts
00:32:41.480in 1950 why so 49 uh uh you have both the soviet union getting the atomic bomb which is like the
00:32:53.420greatest blow america ever ever received probably the greatest uh uh espionage portrayal in in
00:33:02.800history and the rosenbergs did not suffer enough for it like every american since has lived under0.87
00:33:10.820the threat of, like, atomic destruction because of the betrayal of these New York Ellis Islanders
00:33:19.780that should have been in no position whatsoever to touch America's atomic secrets, yet were.0.72
00:33:28.220But that happens, and Mao wins the Civil War, and the most populous country on Earth is now communist.
00:33:35.460And of course, this starts, this is where the domino theory is right, but it's about China. It's not about Vietnam, that China falls to communism, and all of a sudden, within a year-ish, there's war in Korea.
00:33:56.840And this is escalating rapidly. We aren't going to do a full Korean War deep dive, but 1950 to 1953, the Korean War, what are we seeing with the air power? What are the big developments?
00:34:19.760so initially as the korean people's army comes across the 38 parallel into the south what's
00:34:28.400flying over them on their own side are mostly world war ii era or immediately post-war soviet
00:34:35.280built aircraft so their main tactical attack aircraft is the il-10 which is the successor to
00:34:43.780the famous World War II IL-2 Sturmovik ground attack aircraft. It has a bigger engine. It's
00:34:49.540faster. But other than that, it mostly performs the same mission, just better. They're also
00:34:54.180operating the Tupolev Tu... Oh boy, I better get this right. Tu-2, which is a twin engine sort of
00:35:02.100light to medium bomber, which entered service in the Soviet Air Force in 1943. And they're also
00:35:08.400operating a number of soviet piston engine fighter planes mostly yak nines
00:35:14.800all right and so north korea uh commis korea it has accessed all these because
00:35:25.620uh stalin and mao have just like funneled all the these to them like uh
00:35:32.000like obviously like the idea of a fresh like rogue state having an immediate like air force
00:35:42.580in a box is like kind of incomprehensible today because like you have to build up logistics you
00:35:48.420have to train all these people it's like a real nightmare to get like an air force going and like
00:35:54.980We can see from the state of Iran and, like, several third and second world, like, middle powers that most of them struggle with it, yet this is still an era in which, you know, kind of a rogue state or, like, a fresh state on one side of the Cold War can get up to the point of having, like, significant air power this quickly.0.52
00:36:24.980It does take a lot longer to train pilots nowadays than it did then. In this period, if you really wanted to cut a lot of corners with which the North Koreans kind of did, you could probably take a fresh, fresh faced recruit and have him be a fighter pilot, possibly not even a terrible one within several months.
00:36:44.980that's quite impressive that like you can do that and also that these airframes are simple enough0.91
00:36:55.460that like you can have people maintaining them because that's like the big limiting factor of
00:37:02.700a lot of uh air forces in the world that having flight time for pilots and then having maintenance
00:37:10.000on the airframes is a massive barrier.
00:37:15.880Yes, and this is sort of, we're leading into,
00:37:18.740but have not yet reached at this point,
00:37:20.420a technical revolution where an airplane
00:37:36.800So the Korean War, what are kind of the big technological developments with it?
00:37:44.260Because everyone's image of the Korean War, if they have an image of the Korean War, many don't, but everyone's image of the Korean War is MASH.
00:37:54.380And these surgeons, these American surgeons dealing with GIs being flown back on helicopters from the front line for medical assistance and what have you.
00:38:12.400And MASH itself is a commentary more on the Vietnam War than the Korean War, but it's a TV show that frames itself around this earlier American war because that's less political or you can stay very round about things that way.
00:38:34.640So tell me about kind of helicopters and their admission to the Korean War.
00:38:40.080well with that it's pretty much what it says on the tin and the main use of helicopters in the
00:38:47.240korean war as depicted quite correctly in mash was for medevac purposes and the one you see in
00:38:53.400the show was probably the most frequently seen one in the actual war which was the bell 47 which
00:38:59.400was a relatively small piston-engined helicopter which is unusual most helicopters are turbine
00:39:05.620powered these days um which was relatively small aircraft with a fairly small useful load
00:39:12.400but it could carry uh two wounded soldiers uh lashed somewhat precariously to stretchers
00:39:19.960mounted on the outside of the aircraft on either side so if one happened to be conscious for that
00:39:25.380trip it was probably pretty exciting but a lot of them most likely weren't it's a pretty nifty
00:39:30.900little aircraft i actually know someone who has one and so you're saying it's primarily used for
00:39:40.280medevac uh they haven't like attached rocket pods or like small chain guns to the to these
00:39:46.600or like machine guns they aren't using them in support roles yet they are occasionally seen
00:39:52.360armed but in general the early ones are relatively small and have a pretty limited useful load to be
00:39:59.160either as gunships or as troop transports,
00:40:01.440although they would do both of those things
00:41:50.100I assume there are some that go further, but, like,
00:41:53.840this is a massive limitation for helicopters and it's about like maybe two three hours of like
00:42:01.240continuous flight time which um i've never seen heard of anyone doing it but this is actually
00:42:08.200like a major limitation for like helicopter searches for fugitives that uh if you can
00:42:15.540if you can just stay on the land for like two to three hours or if you can be like
00:42:20.380hidden in the hills for two to three hours.
00:42:23.160Those helicopters have to go back and refuel at some point.
00:42:27.840But this is why the U.S. Marine Corps and Army, et cetera,
00:42:36.680are obsessed with the Ospreys and the very tilt-motor aircraft.
00:42:43.740They want vertical takeoff, but they also want the fuel range of an airplane.
00:42:48.180And so they're willing to experiment with all these dangerous designs to get the equivalent of a helicopter that has a fuel range of a few thousand kilometers, as opposed to a few hundred.
00:43:01.500I'm imagining that these early helicopters are even worse for this, that they're like very sensitive to like fuel limitations in time.
00:43:11.520Yeah, their range and endurance weren't particularly impressive.
00:43:14.880And the other limiting factor that we're generally dealing with helicopters in general is useful load.
00:43:25.220Right, because any additional weight, it's not like a plane where you can just add more runway and get up to a faster speed and you can take off something heavier.
00:43:38.080A helicopter has to extend more fuel, lifting it vertically.
00:43:44.880There is a little bit of wiggle room there.
00:43:46.660A helicopter, one which is equipped with wheels rather than skids anyway, can do a little bit of a rolling takeoff if it's overloaded for the, well, if it's just overloaded or operating at high altitudes, like Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan did that quite a bit.
00:47:58.520But no, I remember thinking about this when I saw the Cajun Air Force during the Hurricane Helene relief that actually were far closer to kind of Mad Max-ian guerrilla air power.
00:48:17.640Or I suppose even Mad Max only, like, depict it very limitedly with gyrocopters.
00:48:23.220But we're far, the prepper set and, like, the hobbyist set are actually far closer to, like, operating some of these, like, early air power than you might think.
00:48:38.040but uh focusing in on on the french so give us a brief summary of like kind of the
00:48:47.720the progress of the war war on the ground like the advancement of the the vietnam men from like
00:48:57.320kind of the scrabble force to to what will happen in bienven phu and then uh also right at
00:49:06.900So right at the end of 53, we have Operation Caster, which is one of the first like real strategic bombing campaigns that is starting up in Vietnam to try and contain the growing communist menace.
00:49:24.620Not sure where you want to start with that.0.76
00:49:26.360So something that's sort of partially related to air power that does turn a bit of a corner for the Viet Minh is actually the end of the Korean War, because it frees up a lot of equipment, mostly Chinese equipment, which is then sent to them.
00:49:43.240They get a significant amount of Chinese artillery, which is later going to be used at Dien Bien Phu, and also various calibers of anti-aircraft guns, which are going to make resupply and close air support increasingly difficult for the French during that battle.
00:50:00.260right and and so looking through the history i haven't deep dived the french warrant into china
00:50:11.420either yet but uh looking through the battles it i couldn't find really any like set piece battles
00:50:18.380or anything like like that before this final ending engagement uh uh what are the like um
00:50:26.560vietnam tactics and against france is it just like guerrilla operations and like uh
00:50:33.360hit and run type stuff or are they carrying out a more committed uh ground operation
00:50:40.640so it almost becomes something of a hybrid between guerrilla and conventional operations
00:50:48.320like dian bian phu itself which again i'm going to sort of pull the ripcord and mainly focus on
00:50:54.840because it's the one I mainly know about,
00:50:57.340in many ways starts to resemble a sort of First World War siege
00:51:01.500with the Viet Minh sort of creeping their trenches
00:53:39.860So, explain this term, triple canopy jungle, because I actually had to struggle at one point to look down a proper definition of it, that it's a shockingly hard term to Google search.
00:53:56.460So, explain briefly to our listeners this unique factor of the Vant now more, because it is important, and I want to lay it out for our listeners.
00:54:08.060it just gets repeatedly referenced in all the books i'm reading i take it to mean that there's
00:54:14.120just multiple quite thick layers of foliage on the way up the trees between the ground and the sky
00:57:28.240big trees, but, like, trees themselves, like, densely
00:57:32.500overlapping with each other. Each other.
00:57:36.340But, uh, even that is actually like, I, I want to get a botanist to actually like define it properly because, because this is, as you said, this is one of those terms that's shockingly hard, hard to like get, get specified yet.
00:57:56.440everyone references it but uh but so we'll pull the trigger on it on it we progress from 1945
00:58:07.420we've kind of gone through through the 40s we've gotten to the rosenbergs and now winning the
00:58:12.560chinese civil war we've gone through the korean war uh oh can i add my little footnote to korea
00:58:18.320there sure yeah so pretty much the other side of the korean war early on is i've mentioned what
00:58:25.480the north koreans came over the border with once the americans arrive in force the u.s air force
00:58:31.540are bringing world war ii surplus p-51 fighters that re-designated f-51 when the u.s air force
00:58:39.620became an independent branch of service uh b-26 light bombers this is the douglas a-26 invader
00:58:46.980re-designated b-26 once again not to be confused with the original martin b-26 marauder thanks
00:58:54.140guys as their principal ground attack aircraft in terms of fighters they have the f-80 and f-84
00:59:03.100which are first generation straight wing jet fighters which very quickly along with the u.s
00:59:10.600navy's f-9 f panthers which are their first generation jet pretty quickly sweep the north
00:59:17.580korean people's air force from the sky and if anything tactical air power proved to be pretty
00:59:23.460decisive in the early months of the korean war in halting the initial north korean advance and
00:59:28.780holding the pusan perimeter and eventually enabling the breakout
00:59:31.880yes and this this is very important that uh that uh the u.s was able to hold this like tiny tiny
00:59:44.900pocket of korea and like really according to like a lot of conventional military theory like
00:59:53.900shouldn't have been able to because uh like it's isolated it's cut off like it's being resupplied
00:59:59.560from the sea but it doesn't have like a huge assortment of land logistics like it's almost
01:00:06.140like by rights busan should have been like dunkirk 2.0 where it's like just a question of can you get
01:00:13.480them out of this like strap of land that they've become tracked in but uh with naval logistics and
01:00:21.880with air power uh they're able to hold and eventually and reverse the tide of the battle
01:00:30.160which uh is like quite dramatic and you can see where something like like uh dn bin fu or like
01:00:40.860later encirclements like the prospect that with air support they can withstand in the
01:00:48.140encirclement like isn't as absurd as it like it might seem otherwise looking at the rest of
01:00:56.920military history. Indeed and another sort of slightly anecdotal event that happens during
01:01:03.020that early period which also probably saved U.S. naval aviation to a great degree was the fact
01:01:10.460that they were the ones bringing most of the air power into the theater in the early weeks
01:01:14.680and also the fact that they were able to mount a raid on Pyongyang quite early on in the war
01:01:23.620had actually quite a severe impact on Soviet strategy for how they were going to manage their
01:01:29.840North Korean proxy because you've got Soviet advisors sitting in Pyongyang which is now 400
01:01:35.680miles from the front line and they've got enemy aircraft circling overhead in broad daylight
01:01:40.740unopposed and at that point the soviet advisory group and joseph stalin as well basically decided
01:01:47.940that they were going to limit their exposure and their involvement from that point forward was
01:01:52.880going to be covert just because of the demonstration of capability that had been made there
01:01:58.360yeah that's actually quite extraordinary that um that it came that close to like
01:02:07.560u.s naval aviation either being like crippled or like scrapped and
01:02:11.380entirely or given to the air force which uh as the royal navy's fleet air arm knows is a fate
01:02:18.300worse than death yes yes exactly but like that's extraordinary to consider to think considering
01:02:26.420like the U.S. empire is like entirely built on naval aviation right now like that's that's what's
01:02:33.560holding the nothing ever happens together is American naval aviation so it's quite quite
01:02:40.680extraordinary to think that uh that almost wrapped up but uh so that concludes the our
01:02:50.340engagement with the korean war the the war in vietnam 1953 operation caster
01:02:59.260uh the start of the use of like strategic bombing in vietnam is this one you want to dive into or
01:03:06.680is this one you want to glance glance over in favor of i'm embarrassed to say i know very
01:03:12.820little about it i can talk about the strategic air campaign in korea if you want there
01:03:20.340oh okay tell us about the strategic air campaign in korea
01:03:28.240the poor french no one no one ever studies their doctrines and campaigns i'll get around to it one
01:03:35.160day i promise not in the 20th century at least but uh tell us about the strategic air campaign in
01:03:41.600korea so another thing that gets going pretty quickly in 1950 from the start of the korean war
01:03:47.420is American B-29s in Japan begin a strategic bombing campaign against North Korea. Initially
01:03:54.980by daylight against what are considered to be primary strategic targets, so industrial areas,
01:04:02.120particularly in the northwest of North Korea, around places like Sinuiju, where most of those
01:04:07.880are located. However, in November and December of 1950, this became increasingly difficult when
01:04:17.340And the Soviet Air Force, flying covertly with North Korean markings, began flying their MiG-15 jets from bases in Korea and intercepting the Americans.
01:04:29.460And after a fairly bloody series of air battles, by early 1951, the U.S. bombers had been driven from the daylight skies of North Korea.
01:04:39.240and at that point they began a basically something akin to what RAF Bomber Command had done to
01:04:46.920Germany in World War II and what the U.S. 20th Air Force had done to Japan which was nighttime
01:04:51.940area bombing of North Korean cities with incendiary bombs. It's been said and is not really
01:04:59.160an exaggeration that very nearly every standing structure in North Korea was destroyed during the
01:05:04.280something which the north koreans have never forgotten and although it did not have the
01:05:10.900intended strategic effects it did create plenty of generational hatred
01:05:15.260this will be a running theme of american policy for the next few decades uh uh this is this is
01:05:27.720prophetic this little moment but uh so before still 1953 uh you've said the magic word
01:05:37.880helps about what a make it is because this is one of those like um aircraft or like categories of
01:05:45.620aircraft that i'm always hearing about but never actually deep diving or like getting an explainer
01:05:52.920because it's not an American aircraft, it's a Soviet aircraft.
01:05:56.940So what is the MiG and how does it kind of develop?
01:06:03.340We'll have a digression on the MiG now.
01:06:05.500So a MiG is any aircraft built in principle by, well, designed,
01:06:12.040it would have been built by someone else because of the nature of Soviet communism,
01:06:15.120But anyway, designed by the Mikoyan and Guriyevich, M-I-G-I being the Russian word for and E.
01:06:26.380So it's a bit of a sort of weird acronym compound thing there.
01:06:31.380So any product of that design bureau that sees mass production will be given the designation MIG and then a number.
01:06:39.240And it was always an odd number for reasons not entirely clear to me.
01:06:43.000their first uh sort of fairly successful product was the mig 3 which was a world war ii fighter
01:06:52.080after the war they produced the mig 9 which was an early soviet jet and in the korean war
01:07:01.280what the americans were facing was the mig 15 which was a soviet swept wing jet fighter
01:07:09.500All right. So the MiG demonstration is like the F designation in U.S. aircraft design.
01:07:19.040The same way that like in F-14 and F-16 and F-18 and F-22 and an F-35 are all profoundly different aircraft with like profoundly different roles and profoundly different specification roles and uses and honorabilities and capabilities.
01:07:39.500uh they just they're just all designated f for some reason uh uh presumably because they're not
01:07:48.000b for bomber f for fighter before the u.s air force was an independent branch it was p for pursuit
01:07:53.800yes uh uh but realistically like they aren't even necessarily you can mount an air terror missile
01:08:06.860on them but like they aren't even necessarily all like air superiority vehicles or like
01:08:13.600even primarily meant for like engaging other aircraft likewise the MiG designation
01:08:19.640does not really designate a continuity between them like a like a MiG plus a number is not just
01:08:28.900like the newer and better version of it the same the way it is with uh with uh tanks in the number
01:08:37.080so it's sort of halfway between those two things because any mig will be like i said a product of
01:08:44.140the mig design bureau so it will have that lineage but it won't be an iteration of the same airframe
01:08:49.100necessarily the mig 27 was a development of the mig 23 and things like that and also there were
01:08:56.620other soviet and russian fighters built by other bureaus like sukhoi aircraft will have the prefix
01:09:02.760su or su the su-35 stuff like that or you know in world war ii there were more
01:09:10.700design bureaus it seems to be mostly just the two these days
01:09:15.820oh so you you listeners at home you actually do have to look up the individual for airframe
01:09:25.300Uh, you can't, there isn't a cheat code to just look at, at the letter and number and say, oh, I know what that is.
01:09:34.200Uh, they are varying wisely, much like, much like U.S. aircraft.
01:09:41.220Uh, but, okay, we're, we're going to do it.
01:09:45.280We're going to transition from 1953 to 1954.
01:15:07.720They're getting anti-aircraft weaponry, like whack cannons and stuff like that, heavy machine guns that, from their position in the north, they're able to access the wide economy of all of communist militarism.0.92
01:15:26.620tourism but uh the french at least for a bit in the 50s were able to kick the viet men out of
01:15:37.360hanoi like they had had actually been like relatively successful in establishing some
01:15:42.800control over hanoi but uh that all starts to collapse around the battle battle of dan ben phu
01:15:50.680Uh, uh, so, so the, the battle itself, uh, uh, Dien Ben Phu is, is like this flat valley
01:16:11.360in the middle of that flat valley in the middle of oh wow it's i'm just looking at the map right
01:16:28.840now you have to picture it's right on the border of uh of what will become laos
01:16:35.680and about 100 kilometers from the border of China.
01:16:41.100Yeah, relative to the French center of gravity in Hanoi,
01:20:17.900Right. And after this, like, decisive defeat, capture of 10,000 plus soldiers by the French and loss of several thousand more, the French are forced to withdraw from Hanoi.
01:20:39.240And during the negotiations, they're basically forced to cede the entire north of Vietnam to the new People's Republic of Vietnam.
01:20:54.480Officially called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
01:21:00.420I knew there was a magic word in there that I couldn't remember which one.0.79
01:21:03.520but uh and this creates a uh a lull in the combat where because the north enemies are now creating
01:21:17.560a state like uh there's a division just like in korea north and south and they're getting
01:21:26.820Extensive resupply, and there's extensive politics to do with Laos and Cambodia, which is like quite beyond the scope of this.
01:21:38.940I will, if we do another episode, I will get into Laos and Cambodia, but that's just like such a mess to cover.
01:21:46.720uh but uh in 1995 uh diem the dictator of the president dictator of elected presidente
01:21:59.640of south vietnam uh declares the republic of you possibly mean 1955
01:22:05.060yeah sorry 55 55 i forgot the slip of the tongue 1955 diem declares it and the first
01:22:16.080U.S. supplies start reaching Saigon. And in 56, the last French troops leave Indochina,
01:22:26.860though not the last French men because there are like many planters, et cetera, who stay
01:22:35.200in Vietnam. There's many ethnic French throughout the continuation of the Vietnam War as fans
01:22:44.840of apocalypse now redux will will recognize yes that uh there is a not too sizable but an
01:22:56.300existent french minority so um throughout the the remainder of the 50s there's uh there
01:23:05.200there's this tension building in vietnam because they're especially in south vietnam because of
01:23:14.640Of course, the North is building up the state and this military capacity and is aspiring to take all of it, you know, at some point.0.90
01:23:24.120There's this tension building and lousing Cambodia that will descend into absolute madness over the coming while.0.92
01:23:33.460And in the South, Diem and his regime is composed of the people who are closest to the French regime.0.90
01:23:46.820It's composed of the legacy French population that's still there is closely attached to the regime.
01:23:54.980But the urban secular population, and especially the Vietnamese Catholic population, is fanatically for the South Vietnamese regime.
01:24:10.400But the majority of South Vietnam is Buddhist.
01:24:13.400The majority of South Vietnam is this unconverted Buddhist peasant population and, like, wider segments of society that was, like, aggressively oppressed under the French regime, although many will debate that.
01:24:32.220uh and the kind of for the south vietnam independence is actually kind of worse than
01:24:46.420the french because all of a sudden instead of having like this distant colonial regime trying
01:24:52.180to like maintain a balanced equilibrium uh suddenly it's only the the like mixture the
01:25:01.180collaborators that were attached to to the colonial regime left in charge and of course
01:25:07.520they've cultivated a deep internal hatred and resentment of the peasant population and
01:25:14.980and are very aggressive towards them you can think of many countries in the world that are like this
01:25:22.380where the collaborationist administrators
01:25:31.600is aggressively hateful towards the rubes in the countryside
01:25:38.820and the people who are not attached to the regime
01:25:42.120and are natural enemies of the regime.
01:25:44.320But they start aggressively oppressing the Buddhist Vietnamese population.
01:25:55.120And famously, this will come to a head with the self-immolations of Buddhist priests protesting the Diem regime.
01:26:07.780and this is part of the deep problem of the diem regime is that uh they cannot have elections
01:26:15.640or if they have elections they have to steal them aggressively and like basically to the point where
01:26:22.780it's farcical and they might as well not they do so extremely blatantly in a way that's not fooling
01:26:28.860anyone well largely they they can't uh in a lot of ways they can't even admit uh a population that0.83
01:26:42.180oppose them because everyone knows how small the diember regime is so if you say well we won 80
01:26:47.460percent of the vote vote everyone can see oh wait there were there are hundreds of thousands of0.70
01:26:56.300people who've turned out against you we know there are only like 10 000 of you so they so once you're
01:27:02.860like a small enough elite uh you can't even like proclaim to have won an incredibly lopsided election
01:27:10.560because you know you have to have like like mass conformity or else you're admitting how much
01:27:18.560opposition is really out there but uh but this oppression is aggressive and because they're
01:27:27.060getting backing from the u.s they can't do the same thing and just like reorient their society
01:27:33.620around like a semi-coherent uh militarized dictatorship like they can't actually make
01:27:40.080a lot of the sane decisions that a lot of dictatorships historically would have made they
01:27:47.160have to they have to maintain this like faux democracy with all these faux democratic
01:27:53.620institutions they're actually like quite bloated and inefficient and like stop you from putting
01:28:00.680like the coherent the semi-coherent military elite in charge of things because uh urban forces
01:28:07.880The North Vietnamese, sorry, the South Vietnamese military is actually like not, not awful compared to, compared to like what they're being set up with.
01:28:25.720Like, they actually do some impressive stuff, and they are putting up with, like, extreme conditions and hardships and, like, this really impossible position they're in.
01:28:45.820And yet they're doing really impressive work and fighting very impressively hard for not having logistics, having to run a half-Westernized military, appeasing the Americans, and carrying out this campaign all without really being able to fund themselves the way you would a traditional occupying military.
01:29:15.820But fundamentally, you can't promote the competent people into just, like, administering provinces and stuff because you have to maintain the structures of a democracy because that's what the Americans want to see to keep giving you funding.
01:29:31.880But so all this is coming to a head and like South Vietnam is enduring this incoherence and the negotiations between the South and North is breaking down around like the fact that they aren't having any of these referendums that were promised as part of the negotiated French withdrawal from Indochina.
01:30:01.880And in 1959, North Vietnam explicitly begins the armed revolution.
01:30:14.760They send 4,000 Vietnam men troops south.
01:30:19.880And in 1960, the National Labor Front, what will be called in the future the Viet Cong, is founded in North Vietnam, but it's going to recruit extensively from both the North and the South.
01:30:38.140And, oh, I should have written this down.
01:30:44.580The Ho Chi Minh Trail is also begun in earnest during this time.
01:30:49.280the long logistical supply line from north to south by foot through mostly laos and then into
01:30:56.540the central highlands of south vietnam excellent so so that period between like the french leaving
01:31:08.820indochina in 56 and kind of the beginnings of the u.s involvement in the war in 61 what's
01:31:19.140what's happening in air power so in the broader sense of air power particularly for the united
01:31:28.520states which is mostly what's going to be relevant later they're kind of it must be said at the very
01:31:35.360least especially the u.s air force the navy maybe does a little better is not really learning the
01:31:42.120lessons of the Korean War all that effectively. And the other thing is that they are utterly
01:31:51.080convinced, especially the US Air Force, that the Korean War was a one-off anomaly and that the
01:31:58.040only war they're really preparing for is total war with nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union
01:32:04.140in Europe. And aircraft begin to take a pretty serious turn in terms of how they're being
01:32:12.200developed for that war. The F-86 Sabre, which was the main American fighter in Korea, would be the
01:32:21.260last U.S. fighter really to be built explicitly for the purpose of shooting down enemy fighters
01:32:28.220and achieving air superiority. Maybe there's a bit of an argument that the Navy's F-8 Crusader was
01:32:33.640sort of for that as well but increasingly the role of fighters is branching off in two directions
01:32:41.320or at least aircraft with the designation fighter they are either interceptors designed to fly very
01:32:48.300fast very high and very far to intercept the enemy's nuclear armed bombers as far away from
01:32:55.000one's own homeland as possible and the other fighter designated aircraft this is going to be
01:33:01.960things like the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, which will see extensive use in Vietnam,
01:33:07.440are tactical nuclear bombers designed to hit, like it says on the tin,
01:33:12.300tactical targets in sort of the Eastern Europe, Warsaw Pact countries,
01:33:16.560East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, with tactical nuclear weapons,
01:33:21.640partially to clear the way for strategic air commands, nuclear-armed,
01:33:26.380mostly B-52 at this point, bombers, which are going to be flying into the heartlands of the0.72
01:33:32.540Soviet Union and obliterating it with nuclear weapons. So both equipment and training to fight
01:33:41.560a conventional air war is very much going by the board in the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Navy is
01:33:49.280It's to a degree divesting itself of the sort of equipment and doctrine intended for fighting nuclear war and is still a little bit more focused on conventional power projection, which is going to pay dividends for them later on.
01:34:05.160In the Soviet Union, because mostly for sort of geographical reasons, they're not really building large numbers of intercontinental strategic bombers meant to fly into the United States and drop nuclear weapons on its cities.
01:34:23.140They've pretty much gone all in on the intercontinental ballistic missile, which they're going to basically field in operationally credible numbers at the end of the 50s.
01:34:35.160that and eventually ballistic missile submarines but in terms of tactical aircraft they're taking
01:34:41.160a very similar direction their fighters are to a degree probably at least better suited if not
01:34:48.920necessarily intended to be close in dog fighters meant to fight other um fighters and achiever
01:34:56.680superiority like the mig-17 mig-19 and mig-21 are kind of better as pure fighters
01:35:05.160than their american equivalents arguably but again still their primary role is going to be
01:35:10.520intercepting enemy bombers which the americans absolutely are planning in the late 50s and
01:35:16.440early 60s to have the main arm of their nuclear striking force be their b-52s which are going to
01:35:23.780fly into the soviet union from mostly bases in europe the middle east and japan and hit everything
01:35:30.380this leads to uh also the development in the soviet union of the first operational surface
01:35:37.900to air missiles which will definitely be a subject worth exploring in more detail
01:36:50.540so air-to-air missiles are something that start getting tinkered with in the u.s and the soviet
01:36:57.740union in a fairly serious way in the late 1940s in the early 50s the first american radar guided
01:37:06.160air-to-air missile the aim 7 sparrow goes into testing it becomes notionally operational a
01:37:12.960little while after the korean war similarly the what's initially called the gar 8 and later
01:37:20.380the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile will also become operational in the mid-50s, which is a short-range
01:37:26.820heat seeker, the Sparrow being a sort of medium-range radar-guided missile. The Soviet
01:37:33.700Union also comes up with a line of radar-guided air-to-air missiles. They're not really pursuing
01:37:41.340infrared heat seekers initially until a highly improbable and almost slightly funny event happens
01:37:49.020in oh boy here's where i embarrass myself it's either 1956 or 57 i don't quite have it off the
01:37:56.700top of my head but there's an air battle over the taiwan strait between republic of china
01:38:02.140f-86 sabers equipped with early sidewinders and chinese mig-17s or their locally produced
01:38:11.140equivalent and an ROC F-86 fires a sidewinder at the MiG-17 the missile lodges in the tail of the
01:38:19.880MiG and fails to explode the MiG returns to base with a an essentially completely intact example
01:38:28.260of this American missile which the Chinese and the Soviets then immediately reverse engineered
01:38:34.220and produced a pretty much identical copy,
01:38:38.400which is called the Vimple K-13 or R-3S,
01:38:42.500which was then fielded on Soviet fighters
01:38:44.500as their infrared air-to-air missile of choice.
01:38:48.360They did have, actually, now that I'm thinking about it,
01:38:51.300they did have one homegrown infrared air-to-air missile
01:38:58.020before then, I think, but it wasn't quite as advanced.
01:39:01.020So that's pretty much the situation we're dealing with
01:39:03.400going into Vietnam is fairly primitive early air-to-air missiles, which are going to prove0.87
01:39:09.740to be very unreliable in combat, which is going to bite the Americans more than it does the North0.53
01:39:16.400Vietnamese, because the Americans are much more reliant on them. The mainstay U.S. fighter for0.69
01:39:21.580both the U.S. Air Force and Navy during that war is going to be the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom,
01:39:27.020which at least most of the versions of which see combat in Vietnam did not have an internal gun.
01:39:32.340So it was reliant purely on missile armament and had originally been developed for the U.S. Navy as a fleet defense fighter and bomber interceptor.
01:39:41.340interceptor and now that lack of internal gun uh they go back to putting internal guns uh
01:39:54.460even like very small ones capable of like very minor strafing on everything for the longest
01:40:00.500period uh do they ever go back to a gunless fighter or or do they
01:40:06.700the u.s aircraft designs to this day all feature a some kind of machine gun they never made that
01:40:16.760mistake again the f-22 and the f-35 have internal cannons interesting so so no matter what no matter
01:40:26.240what happens with the missiles they have something on them and if they see you even after they have
01:41:02.360exactly exactly uh so we're seeing this massive technological development at this time at the same
01:41:14.080time we're seeing some really remarkable doctrinal uh hubris in many different directions uh and
01:41:26.860And speaking of doctrinal heurus, the Kennedy administration.
01:41:35.340So, 1960, we have the Ho Chi Minh Trail starting.
01:41:41.740We have North Vietnam has declared their armed revolution South Vietnam.
01:41:48.440The Viet Minh is sending troops into South Vietnam.
01:41:53.160And the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front, has formed in South Vietnam.
01:42:01.280And in 1961, Kennedy formally offers military assistance to South Vietnam.
01:42:08.960So the first U.S. military advisors are arriving on the scene in 1961.
01:42:13.760And I don't think the air war between North and South Vietnam has heated up at this point, or has it?
01:42:25.740So the air war, in a way, at least the contiguous U.S.-involved air war, actually does begin in 1961, although it doesn't involve North Vietnam directly yet.
01:42:39.580and i can go into the full business of how that works if you'd like all right uh yes go into it
01:42:49.360because at the same time we have to talk about uh era reconnaissance which is in a lot of ways
01:42:54.700almost more important than the uh the fighting and bombing capability
01:42:59.180yeah and how that is developing over this era so in late 1961 as essentially folded in with
01:43:09.180the presence of u.s advisors in south vietnam they begin something called operation farmgate
01:43:16.220which is an operation notionally being conducted by the united states to train south vietnamese
01:43:23.360air force pilots and they are doing that but they are also doing some direct off the books
01:43:30.720aerial warfare in the process of this they're flying
01:43:35.260sort of close air support missions in south vietnam and interdiction missions over the
01:43:40.620ho chi minh trail is mainly what they're doing and but because they have to maintain the bureaucratic
01:43:48.700facade of this being a training operation there is a requirement for all these operations
01:43:55.460that south vietnamese the spirit of the things they were supposed to be south vietnamese pilots
01:44:02.180would be at least on board the aircraft now the planes that are being used for this are all
01:44:08.320two-seaters or more the main sort of light tactical aircraft that are being used are
01:44:14.720armed versions of the t-28 trainer so that's obviously a two-seater they're also again using
01:44:22.140world war ii surplus b-26 bombers that's former douglas a-26 not martin b-26 and also some
01:44:30.600various transports but the main combat is being done by these t-28s and a-26s so again we come
01:44:39.020back to this requirement there's supposed to be a south vietnamese military in principle pilot
01:44:47.220on board this became a bit of a fig leaf very quickly though it sort of faded to there must be
01:44:55.520just a member of the south vietnamese armed forces on board and we're not actually really
01:45:03.320training them we're just flying the operations ourselves with them on board to satisfy the
01:45:10.120various bureaucratic requirements of this operation so you get to the point and i came across
01:45:15.200in a book one pilot mentioned how and this was a t-28 pilot i believe mentioned how the south
01:45:22.320Vietnamese uh person flying with him was a cook from the base who liked to fly so this we will
01:45:31.740encounter a number of bureaucratic fig leaves like this over the course of the war where they
01:45:36.180publicly say they're doing one thing whilst actually doing another in practice so farm
01:45:41.060gate which again notionally a training operation but in practice really a combat operation runs
01:45:47.820from late 1961 until about the middle of 63.
01:46:53.340This is just an operation where the U.S. advised.
01:46:58.380But, so in 1962, the U.S. has special forces operating in Quezon.
01:47:05.000uh uh kennedy's military assistance is extending to like creating special forces outposts and bases
01:47:14.560in will become some of the hottest pot parts of the war and the the strategic hamlet initiative
01:47:24.940of the u.s is starting up uh this i i'll summarize it briefly if you want
01:47:32.040If you want a real, like, no-holds-barred look at how counterinsurgency operations are actually done on the ground and, like, what, like, special forces officers and whatnot actually think of counterinsurgency, read Roger Trinquire's Modern Warfare.
01:47:58.460Uh, basically Trinquire was a, a French officer who was deployed to Vietnam during this, the
01:48:24.520But he had done all these operations in Vietnam and would go on to do stuff in Algeria, which is right outside the scope of this.
01:48:34.700But basically his theory of modern warfare, counterinsurgency warfare, focused heavily on a torture.
01:48:47.440He's very explicit that you have to torture insurgents to get information out of them so that you can, like, draw out these networks and wrap them up quickly.
01:49:06.220Mind you, he also says that, like, in addition to the torture, like, you should not treat, like, an insurgent hitman as a murderer, that you should treat him as a POW after the torture, after you've gotten the information out of him.
01:49:24.560And that this will make it easier to extract all this information under torture if his confessions and whatnot are not going to, like, result in him, like, being hanged or dying in prison, like, 40 years down the road.
01:49:39.260if after the war is wrapped up and he's one of, like, countless prisoners
01:49:47.140that he can rationally expect that he will be sent home under some form of house arrest
01:49:54.860to last forever after all this has been wrapped up.
01:50:01.580He has some, like, weird theories and stuff.
01:50:03.900But he's an extensive torture, has tortured, like, tens of thousands of people in his life.
01:50:08.780And one of the policies he's very hardcore on is strategic hamlets, or I think he uses another French term for it, but basically concentration camps.
01:50:22.940and the conceit of the strategic hamlet is it's a fortified village meant to keep the insurgents
01:50:30.940out but really largely to control the coming and goings of the population and to track all food
01:50:38.200in and out and to track all animal livestock assets and to maintain this total surveillance
01:50:44.460of the population so that no resources can reach the insurgents. This is the conceit of strategic
01:50:51.980Hamlets. And of course, Americans will be very familiar with this because it's basically what
01:50:58.120was done to the Japanese in World War II. It's what was done to, like, Ukrainian Canadians in
01:51:04.700World War I. It's what was done to Germans, citizens, and whatnot in both World Wars.
01:51:13.220The Germans obviously did as well famously, and whether the German policies are the logical conclusion of it or not is up to much debate.
01:51:29.900Obviously, the Russians maintain the gulags, and the British invent the entire policy in the Boer War, or arguably the Americans invent the policy during the Civil War.
01:51:42.120and in the reservation system against the American Natives.
01:51:48.180But so he's, so Trinkwire, in his book Modern Warfare, published in like the 60s,
01:51:54.400argues for all this policy, and he argues kind of like Colonel Kurtz for special forces operations
01:52:08.440to train up and create insurgent, counterinsurgents and guerrilla forces aligned with the government.
01:52:18.340If you imagine Colonel Kurtzoff River with his like tribal military force that he's trained
01:52:25.460and like enabled to be as savage, if not more savage than the savages.
01:52:33.640These three policies of creating, of torture,0.94
01:52:39.740creating ethnic militias of your own0.94
01:52:43.120and concentration camps for the neutral population0.85
01:52:47.060to control their food supply and control everything in and out of the villages.
01:52:53.640These are the policies that are floating around in Vietnam around time.
01:52:59.260And in 1962, we get the first of the strategic hamlets, quote unquote, started by the Americans and being employed against the Vietnamese population, which doesn't work as well as you think it would.
01:53:18.400Both because it's a very wild area where, like, food is not that hard to restrict, but also because it's an incredibly abundant setting and, like, rice is very fungible.
01:53:30.620And there's, like, three other countries around South Vietnam that are able to supply food and other supplies into the insurgents.
01:53:39.300So it just becomes this incredibly punishing policy against the South Vietnamese population, or it becomes a way to settle scores and impose kind of punishment regimes on populations that they're mad at collaborating without, like, much prospect of actually crippling the uncertainty.
01:54:02.780see but uh that starts up in 62 and you can see how how as you start implementing these policies
01:54:13.940against the population the escalatory logic of the war becomes very extreme so we started in 59 with
01:54:23.280North Vietnam sending nearly 4,000 troops south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
01:54:33.220And as we progress, you're going to see the numbers just of U.S. troops increase radically
01:54:40.260to the point where we, in 69, there are over half a million U.S. troops alone in Vietnam,
01:54:46.580Not counting all the armed forces, not counting counting other countries like Australia and New Zealand that have been and and South Korea that have been sending troops to Vietnam.
01:55:00.720And, of course, not counting the entire other half of the equation, that we're going very quickly from, like, these, like, very dinky small numbers of combatants up to, like, something approaching total war within the limited area of South Vietnam.
01:55:22.300And then expanding out to Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, etc.
01:55:29.140and in the middle of all this starting up starting i have all this escalatory logic starting to
01:55:38.920to snowball uh the cuban missile crisis happens so the world is like
01:55:45.520like the world is on the brink outside vietnam and can see where why this starts escalating
01:55:56.060so precipitously within Vietnam that none of the world powers are in a position where
01:56:06.740they want to escalate with each other around Cuba or around geopolitics where the nukes0.52
02:01:44.740uh okay what was said happened and what did happen uh might actually be a little easier
02:01:53.060to do it the other way around so really there were two gulf of tonkin incidents if you want
02:02:01.200to put it that way on um august oh boy what was it august 2nd and then august 4th 1964
02:02:12.180So the first incident on the second, you have USS Maddox conducting what was called a DeSoto patrol off the coast of North Vietnam, which was a signals intelligence gathering mission, which was conducted in a slightly comical ramshackle way.
02:02:30.040They had a van full of signals intelligence equipment lashed to the deck amid ships.
02:02:35.720But anyway, that's what she was doing there off the coast of North Vietnam in international waters, but pretty close to the territorial limit, as the United States likes to do, always under the guise of enforcing freedom of navigation.
02:02:49.020over the course of the second she begins to be shadowed by a group of north vietnamese torpedo
02:02:57.680boats and smaller like motor gun boats which shadow her over the course of the day and then
02:03:05.180a little bit later on the americans intercept a series of conflicting radio messages some of
02:03:12.320which are ordering the boats to attack maddox others are ordering them to return to base there's
02:03:18.280a bit of a communications breakdown happening between Hanoi and their naval bases at this
02:03:23.600point. But at any rate, this is the information the Americans have when the boats eventually
02:03:30.620begin to close with Maddox. And Maddox's captain makes the decision that when they close to
02:03:39.420within 10,000 yards, he will fire warning shots. And if they don't heed those and turn
02:03:44.740away he will like shoot with intent to actually hit them put it that way and so eventually they
02:03:55.520do close within 10 000 yards maddox fires warning shots so the americans did shoot first here which
02:04:01.260is contrary to what the administration would state publicly later on and the boats don't turn away
02:04:08.620They continue to close in. Maddox resumes fire and the boats return fire at Maddox with their heavy machine guns and such like.
02:04:18.820In the end, Maddox will be struck by exactly one machine gun bullet.
02:04:23.660They will find one bullet hole in the ship and her gunfire damages the three boats, all of which eventually manage to limp back to base.
02:04:33.780after this the americans make a fair bit of hay publicly about how basically any further acts of
02:04:42.740aggression against american ships in the gulf of tonkin will bring forth you know a commensurate
02:04:49.060response blah blah usual things about you know conventional deterrence and the likes of that
02:04:54.840the second incident which is the controversial one happens uh on the night of august 4th two days
02:05:02.240later, where Maddox, now joined by a second destroyer, USS Turner Joy, is continuing this
02:05:09.420patrol, and they detect and engage a series of sporadic radar returns and what they believe to
02:05:17.860be bridge lights from North Vietnamese torpedo boats. And because they see these sporadic radar
02:05:24.100returns appear to make sharp turns, although it's a very incomplete picture because these are very
02:05:30.700sort of on and off contacts, they assume that these are launch maneuvers and that the, and that
02:05:38.260the boats have fired torpedoes at them. So they go into these wild evasive maneuvers and continue
02:05:45.100to fire at contacts for a fairly substantial period of time until eventually they don't see
02:05:52.460anything either visually or on radar anymore and the next day the um maddox's captain reports
02:06:01.600that a he's been attacked by north vietnamese boats during the night and that he sank two of0.85
02:06:09.060them which he appears to have pulled right out of his arse as a figure uh but the administration
02:06:16.640then obviously jumps on this you know we said we would respond if this was done again0.96
02:06:23.980blah blah blah blah and the and eventually the gulf of tonkin resolution comes of it and
02:06:30.440operation pierce arrow as an immediate retaliatory airstrike but the general consensus these days
02:06:38.560is that the radar returns and lights that maddox and turner joy were shooting at were probably a
02:06:45.700large school of flying fish so so this is the 9-11 of the 1960s this this draws america into
02:06:58.440a massive war on the other side of the world uh this is weapons of mass destruction of the 1960s
02:07:06.860and you're telling me it was a school of flying fish yes and i'll add one more thing to it
02:07:12.720actually, because the reason this was able to be made to look legitimate in public,
02:07:16.720the main piece of evidence that was put forward by McNamara to Johnson as a sort of smoking gun
02:07:24.620that this had really happened was an intercepted North Vietnamese after action report, which said
02:07:31.380something to the effect of, we engaged the enemy, we lost two boats. And based on the timing
02:07:40.620of when this after action report was sent it was during the uh action described difficult to write
02:07:49.680an after action report during something so it's very probable that this intercepted message was
02:07:56.060actually referring to a separate engagement because the north vietnamese uh sort of torpedo
02:08:02.980boats and motor gun boats had been fighting a series of engagements over the preceding few weeks
02:09:41.780no uh i once came back to my car and there was this
02:09:50.740a a bullet hole in it like looked like from a 22 round
02:09:55.800uh just in the grill it might have might have been a twig it might not have been
02:10:01.340But it's weird to think that such a hole in a U.S. ship started this massive escalation in Vietnam. Insane.
02:10:12.120But, uh, all right, so rolling thunder, Gulf of Tonkin incident happens, Congress almost unanimously votes for an authorization of military force.
02:10:26.240It's not an official declaration of war, but an authorization of U.S. involvement.
02:10:36.220And immediately within the next year, 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder begins,
02:10:41.920and U.S. troop levels explode to 184,700 troops.
02:10:51.180And the thing to remember, dear listener, is that the U.S. military, since World War II, has been almost entirely conscription-based.
02:11:05.940NCOs have to sign a, like, contract to continue, and, like, officers have to, like, volunteer for, like, officer training and whatnot, go through that process.
02:11:19.160But the rank and file of the U.S. military is almost purely conscription-based.
02:11:27.900Some volunteers, but throughout all of Korea, throughout all the 1950s,
02:11:34.840the U.S. military has been just conscripting the majority of its manpower,
02:11:41.080like some European militaries do today.
02:11:44.380So from day one, basically, as soon as the military force is authorized, these are largely conscripts being sent over to Vietnam.
02:12:01.000Before that, there were requirements that, like, conscripts could not be sent as part of these advisory rules.
02:12:09.840but uh but uh as soon as it starts escalating this way suddenly you have these force requirements
02:12:18.940that that all these uh 18 and 19 year olds are showing up in vietnam sorry 19
02:12:27.200there's a weird age gap they do it's like you wouldn't actually show up at 8 18 but like uh
02:12:35.800And we'll do another episode probably on the history of conscription at some point.
02:12:56.540So initially you have Operation Pierce Arrow, which is the immediate retaliation for the alleged second Gulf of Tonkin incident, which goes ahead on August 5th, 1964, which targets four North Vietnamese naval bases where these torpedo boats were based, and also oil storage facilities at VIN.
02:13:18.420And if memory serves, two U.S. aircraft were shot down.
02:13:23.080One pilot was killed and the other, Lieutenant Everett Alvarez, I believe, became the first American airman to become a prisoner of war during the air war in Vietnam.
02:13:35.960And a little while after that, we have another series of incidents which provoke another sort of finite response, which in late 64, early 65, there are a series of National Liberation Front, sort of Viet Cong attacks on American bases in South Vietnam.
02:13:59.300And in response to this, the U.S. conducts Operation Flaming Dart, which is a sort of short strategic air campaign against some selected targets in North Vietnam.
02:14:17.680A lot of them are military barracks and things of that nature where a lot of NLF forces are being trained.
02:14:25.840This goes over the course of a couple of weeks in February of 1965.
02:20:26.320and guide a missile on an intercept course to that target.
02:20:31.760The first operational radar-guided SAM
02:20:34.720was built in the Soviet Union, and it was initially called Berkut, meaning Golden Eagle,
02:20:41.600later re-designated System 25, or S-25, which was a series of fixed radars and batteries
02:20:50.660installed around Moscow meant to shoot down U.S. strategic bombers that were believed to be
02:20:57.140flying in with nuclear weapons in World War III. But the limitations of this system became obvious
02:21:04.480quite quickly for one it was very expensive uh the construction of moscow's two outer ring roads
02:21:10.160to service this system consumed an entire year's production of concrete for the entire country
02:21:16.040and also because it was fixed it was arguably and quite correctly as it turned out a pretty
02:21:22.460vulnerable target so s75 or sa2 once again uh was developed essentially as the next generation
02:21:31.260which was a relatively mobile system not really by modern standards where everything's mounted
02:21:36.900on an all-terrain vehicle that can just be driven into a field and it's ready in a few minutes this
02:21:41.760was a system that could be packed up over the course of a few hours driven to a new location
02:21:48.880and then set back up there and it was this system that would first be used in anger one
02:21:56.520that had been supplied to the People's Republic of China shot down a Republic of China RB-57
02:22:03.320reconnaissance aircraft over the Taiwan Strait in 1959. And then a few months later in 1960,
02:22:12.000another one would shoot down Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union in his U-2.
02:22:19.580And another U-2 would be shot down by one during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
02:22:24.720So this was an improved version of this system was ultimately what would be fielded in North Vietnam in 1965.
02:22:32.720All right. So here we're beginning to see what is modern airfare coming to being that you have these interdiction missions happening in Laos and Cambodia along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which, of course, missions like this happen all over the world.
02:23:00.840Now, you see U.S. missions to strike ISIS or our Shia militias or whatnot that gather farm meeting place out in the middle of the desert in their pickup trucks.0.51
02:23:16.440That if they have the intelligence and they're in position, they can do the strike missions against mobile forces.0.77
02:23:25.380As we will see coming up, we're seeing the beginning of like air assault and like modern air logistics and reconnaissance and whatnot and close air support in South Vietnam itself.
02:23:43.980And we're seeing the standoff logic of surface air missiles versus air assets versus what we'll get into soon, a wild weasel suppression of enemy air defense missions in North Vietnam.
02:24:01.200So you actually, in this one little war, you actually have like a good set of kind of all, well, become almost all modern air missions.
02:24:12.600The only thing you don't have an example of, or actually you do, you do have like examples of strikes on like semi-hardened targets in North Vietnam as well.
02:24:23.500So within the Vietnam War and the air war in Vietnam, you can kind of see what will become the full set of air missions, even like some light anti-naval missions against the North Vietnamese Navy in some limited capacity.
02:24:48.100But we saw that with Pierce Arrow just now.
02:24:50.540Yeah. So, like, almost everything except, like, anti-submarine operations, you can see within the Vietnam War, like, picking up into its modern form.
02:25:06.100But we're getting all these troops now deploying into Vietnam.
02:25:13.600We're getting the U.S. troops into Vietnam.
02:25:15.220So the classic image that everyone will have of Vietnam is, of course, the air cav, a ride of the Valkyrie, Colonel Kilgore taking the beachhead where Charlie don't surf.
02:38:24.260And this will become like one of the most bombed areas in human history.0.97
02:38:29.200The Iron Triangle itself might still outstrip Gaza
02:38:33.460in terms of bombs per square kilomere.
02:38:38.320But they managed to get 82 kilomeres of tunnel networks in there that you can still tour.
02:38:43.460The tunnels of Coo Chi are a major tourist attraction in Vietnam, now no longer Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.
02:38:53.520That you can tour it and they wind out the tunnels for western rear ends that you will be able to go down and tour these tunnels that are still claustrophobic as can be.
02:39:05.540and see the elaborate setups they have.
02:39:09.240But this holds out against millions, millions of tons of explosive.
02:39:23.420And, you know, several megatons of explosive are dropped on this area alone.
02:39:32.940And, of course, in Gaza, they were actually able to construct concrete, not just shovels going through clay.0.90
02:39:41.940And in Gaza, they have 500-plus kilomeres of tunnel across this little, like, 20-kilometer-long area that it's incredibly doubtful that Hamas has been any more damaged than the Cu Chi contingent of the Viet Cong.0.83
02:40:11.940But, again, all of modern air war is contained in the Vietnam War.0.77
02:40:40.300so the u.s air force's wild weasels were kind of at the very least the u.s air force's tactical
02:40:50.100air command's first foray into the field of electronic warfare because after the shootdown
02:40:58.200of the u2 uh flown by francis gary powers over sverdlovsk in 1960 that did cause a little bit
02:41:05.860of a shakeup within Strategic Air Command, because their doctrine prior to then was to hit targets in
02:41:11.100the Soviet Union in relatively high speed and high altitude jet bombers like the B-52, and the
02:41:18.600surface-to-air missile suddenly made those B-52s extremely vulnerable targets. The S-75 could hit
02:41:25.840an aircraft at potentially 80,000 feet. But Strategic Air Command's answer to this was to
02:41:32.600fit large jammers in their b-52s which they hoped at least would blind the enemy early warning and
02:41:40.340sam radars and basically they'd be able to jam their way to moscow and at the very least get
02:41:46.100there i mean there was a lot of implied but never said out loud things about you know nuclear strikes
02:41:54.580probably being one-way trips not that there was much to come back to anyway but tactical air
02:42:01.080command had been kept almost entirely in the dark about all of this. So their aircraft were not
02:42:07.460initially fitted with the jammers that the B-52s had, and were also not fitted with the radar
02:42:12.460warning receivers that the B-52s had, which would tell them when a SAM radar was tracking them and
02:42:17.360had fired on them. So as a result of this information not being shared with the tactical
02:42:23.780air forces we have a situation where an increasing number of sand batteries are being constructed
02:42:31.400in north vietnam in 1964 and 65 and the senior military leadership in the u.s a lot of them are
02:42:39.000actually convinced that the soviets are building these in north vietnam as a bluff and they will
02:42:44.200never be fired in anger, which very, very suddenly was, well, was an illusion that very
02:42:53.620suddenly came to an end on the 24th of July, 1965, when a U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom fighter
02:43:00.880with the callsign Leopard 2 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile near Dien Bien Phu.
02:43:06.560The backseater was killed, and the pilot became a prisoner of war for the second time in his life,
02:43:13.700He had been a bomber pilot in World War II, had been shot down over Germany, and spent the last several months of the war in Stalag Luft 1.
02:47:14.980And then some other F-105s flew in and dropped iron bombs on it, I believe.
02:47:20.800In the early days of these operations,
02:47:22.820they operated as sort of a hunter-killer duopoly
02:47:27.360with the F-100 wild weasels actually finding the SAM sites and marking them.
02:47:32.920And then regular F-105D fighter bombers would fly in
02:47:36.160and drop their regular iron bombs on them.
02:47:41.200And initially, this was how all of this worked.
02:47:44.120An additional weapon was added to the inventory a little bit later,
02:47:49.940which was the AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation missile,
02:47:55.660which had been borrowed from the U.S. Navy.
02:47:58.180This was a missile developed by Texas Instruments,
02:48:02.120instruments known to most people these days for their overpriced graphing calculators and it was
02:48:09.180an anti-radiation missile meaning it would home in on a specific radar emission that it would lock
02:48:15.180onto and essentially ride it back to the source and destroy it there was a limitation to this
02:48:21.800weapon system that being that if the radar stopped emitting and the north vietnamese learned about
02:48:28.500emissions control very quickly because of this if the radar stopped emitting the missile would
02:48:34.140stop guiding and fall to earth so in practice it was more of a suppression weapon than a hard kill
02:48:42.340weapon so good for forcing radars off the air long enough for say a strike force to get in drop their
02:48:48.700bombs and get out but not necessarily to kill it at least not very often and not unless you got
02:48:54.140very lucky its other limitation was that its range was a lot less than that of a sam only about 100.75
02:49:01.360miles so you had to work your way in close enough which was a non-trivial thing and usually the best
02:49:08.780way to actually locate a sam was to get close enough using the electronic equipment and then
02:49:14.580persuade it to fire at you and then spot the ensuing giant smoke plume and rocket exhaust
02:49:20.780lifting off the ground and then if you survived if you could close in on the site and hit it with
02:49:28.300various more conventional weapons the weasel weapon of choice would eventually be mostly
02:49:35.480cluster bombs although it took a while before that conclusion was really arrived at so throughout
02:49:42.180the war there was something of a challenge and response dynamic in both tactics and technology
02:49:47.720between the American Wild Weasels and the North Vietnamese SAM operators.
02:49:54.400The Weasels in early 1965 would replace their F-100 Super Sabres
02:50:01.180after losing half of them with the two-seat version of the F-105 Thunder Chief,
02:50:07.940which was the same aircraft that was the main fighter-bomber aircraft
02:50:13.740being used by the rest of the US Air Force contingents operating out of Thailand and
02:50:18.740participating in Rolling Thunder. So it could actually keep up with them, which the F-100
02:50:22.940really couldn't. The F-105 was extremely fast at low altitude. And eventually they would also
02:50:30.240get a new anti-radiation missile called the Standard ARM, which was a derivative of a Navy
02:50:39.980surfaced air missile of all things, which had a much longer range for one thing, which actually
02:50:45.800exceeded that of the SAMs. And also it could theoretically load the inertial, well, load the
02:50:54.960position of the detected SAM radar into an inertial navigation system and then continue to navigate
02:51:00.140to the target, even if the radar went off the air. In practice, this wasn't really accurate enough to
02:51:06.440be super effective, but it was a bit of a slightly foretold things to come in future wars a little
02:51:14.840bit. So this dynamic continued throughout the war. The U.S. Navy chose not to develop a specific
02:51:23.800specialist unit for the suppression of enemy air defenses mission. They gave that role to
02:51:30.800their regular attack squadrons, flying Air Force Skyhawks, A6 Intruders, and occasionally other
02:51:36.920aircraft, but usually those two. And so individual skill within those units and knowledge of the
02:51:44.260systems necessary for it varied a bit. In some ways, though, the U.S. Navy was a little bit
02:51:49.780ahead of the curve in the realm of electronic combat. They were rolling out radar warning
02:51:54.380receivers to their attack squadrons pretty much right at the beginning of the war, whereas the
02:51:59.320US Air Force wouldn't get them until later. And also they had the AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation
02:52:06.180missile earlier on, whereas the Air Force had to somewhat begrudgingly, it must be said, get it
02:52:11.640from the Navy. So I think that's pretty much a summary of how that got going. Yes. And of course,
02:52:21.060So all these technologies have developed massively since this time.
02:52:27.460So the SEED missions are now a suppression of enemy air defense missions are now a like mainstay of strike warfare.
02:52:37.900Uh, you can see these happening, uh, throughout the, throughout Desert Storm and throughout, uh, very source sense that this logic has just continued to develop.
02:52:51.700And of course, a seed missile is an anti-air defense missile missile that the air defense is firing a missile from an active radar and the seed missile is detecting the active radar.
02:53:09.340And allegedly there's been like extreme developments of anti-anti and anti-anti-anti radar detector detectors that this has gotten extremely obtuse and maddeningly the tactical logic the rock, paper, scissors has gotten.
02:53:39.340iterated to an extreme level but uh and the patents are apparently quite obscene to go through
02:53:47.860because half of them are classified and yet occasionally one of them will get out that
02:53:52.940that uh suggests even more madness but uh this is the beginning of the maddening uh
02:54:02.980insane world that this develops into and you can see the initial uh uh heat track of uh thermal
02:54:14.660uh missiles and the and the radar detect the active radar missiles and the radar detecting
02:54:23.400missiles and and this entire uh raw paper sigil logic just continues onwards and onwards
02:54:32.460so uh let's see we've been going for three hours now do you think we can do the entire rest of the
02:54:40.180vietnam war in one hour i think we've laid all the groundwork for it i think i can but i also
02:54:46.700think i might need a very brief intermission to get to the loo and get some more water
02:54:49.980all right we will we'll take a break now dear listener and we will uh we'll seek to cover
02:54:59.360the entirety of 1966 to 1975 in one hour.
02:56:58.200Uh, U.S. troop forces have doubled again to, uh, 389,000.
02:57:05.660Uh, we're getting all this technological marvels continuing.
02:57:11.180Uh, do you have any, uh, does anything jump out to you about the year 1966?
02:57:21.380I couldn't like really draw out any major events from the year.
02:57:29.400So there's a distinct intensification of the air war in 1966 as the initial sort of relatively short two month or so time frame initially declared for Rolling Thunder comes and goes.
02:57:47.260I mean, that happens in 1965. So more and more targets are eventually added to the list. But again, in a very gradual fashion, which the obviously the intent being to show capability and willingness to use force, but in practice kind of gave the North Vietnamese more breathing room to react and develop their capabilities.
02:58:10.740for their part they had decided by 1964 at the latest that they were going to be involved in a
02:58:17.300full-scale largely unrestricted air war against the americans and were making full preparations
02:58:23.260for that so they were ready for this going into it so 66 is the year where they start kind of
02:58:30.780running where the americans start running up against their limitations to a degree it's also
02:58:36.100the year where North Vietnamese MiGs start to really appear in somewhat larger numbers and
02:58:43.840challenge the American formations a bit more frequently. They're still hitting mostly
02:58:49.640infrastructure targets related to the transport network. So bridges, a lot of which were proving
02:58:56.660to be quite thorny targets. And also one thing that was a particular focus often were fuel storage
02:59:04.380site so-called petroleum oil and lubrication or pol which in principle would be kind of important
02:59:13.020and you can see where they were coming from because in world war ii like i said germany's
02:59:17.260genuine achilles heel had been fuel production but this wasn't really the case for north vietnam
02:59:21.960their armed forces were run on a relative shoestring logistically they weren't very heavily
02:59:27.280motorized so they didn't use very much fuel and the amount of oil and gasoline and everything
02:59:32.820else that they had in country was greatly surplus to requirements at any given time even when that
02:59:38.020supply was being bombed and also once they started once those started being hit and this would be
02:59:43.900the case with basically all types of targets is they started to disperse them in the case of
02:59:51.140oil and fuel often dispersing them into 55 gallon drums that could be stored anywhere in the garden
02:59:57.540shed and so the the idea with dispersion and this sort of goes to the theme that i think you've been
03:00:06.020trying to come back to throughout this of fighting an asymmetric air war is one of the key things you
03:00:12.580need to do is disperse camouflage harden and protect your various assets such that any given
03:00:19.500target isn't that important but becomes increasingly dangerous to actually go and hit
03:00:25.620and the other thing you can do is bait basically flak traps and sam sites with
03:00:31.560seemingly important infrastructure targets and this would happen on a number of occasions especially
03:00:37.360later on in 67 when quite a few targets were added to the authorized list that the americans could go
03:00:45.260and hit so 66 is just a year where all the graphs curve upwards and a lot of ominous signs begin to
03:00:53.000appear on the horizon that the ability of air power alone to achieve strategic and political
03:00:59.840effects is not living up to what was declared. And the other thing that I sort of feel inclined
03:01:08.140to point out about the air war in Vietnam is sort of the, I dissent a little bit from the
03:01:14.680conventional wisdom on Rolling Thunder, that being that essentially had the Americans fought
03:01:20.560it in a more unrestricted fashion with full force from the beginning that it would have been
03:01:26.420successful. I don't necessarily agree with this. And I mainly give in evidence the air campaign
03:01:35.540in Korea, which was fought with essentially no restriction short of the use of nuclear weapons,
03:01:41.980essentially making a wasteland of the area between the frontline and the Yalu River,
03:01:45.500trying to interdict the communist logistics but it never had a war-winning effect the
03:01:54.760north korean and chinese troops never wanted for basic needs of fuel and ammunition and they
03:02:00.300could with a decent amount of regularity build up enough logistical overhead to conduct limited
03:02:07.440defensive operations tactical air power employed right on the line of contact in korea had a
03:02:13.180devastating effect and inflicted mass casualties on the north koreans and chinese although not
03:02:18.120enough to win the war again so i think that's my summation of 1966 and also on the broader
03:02:26.000strategic picture of rolling thunder in general
03:02:29.160yeah um just on the face of it the idea that um air power alone can interdict
03:03:08.560most dramatic example of this uh one people don't think of uh the along the u.s border
03:03:15.420uh with mexico that uh open desert that should actually be like fairly trivial to air patrol
03:03:23.280and like secure with uh now with modern surveillance tech and like uh uh camera
03:03:31.420technology and checkpoints and a wall, or extensions of wall, that should be fairly
03:03:40.800trivial to, you'd think, to cut off this supply of cocaine pouring and other drugs
03:03:50.980pouring into the U.S. against a force that very explicitly has orders not to shoot at
03:03:58.120Border Patrol or not to try to take out U.S. air assets because the cartels themselves don't want
03:04:05.900a, like, escalated war with U.S. special forces and U.S. air assets. They don't want
03:04:11.660Reaper Jones flying over wars. In spite of that, like, even the cartels have 100% not been cut
03:04:23.980off from, like, supplying drugs into the U.S. or extracting ammo and firearms, etc., out
03:04:32.880of the U.S., and they consented to running their smuggling campaign with their hands
03:04:41.840behind their back, and there's no foliage on the U.S.-Mexico border.
03:04:48.600There are some moderately impressive hills and mountain terrain, but even there it's not anywhere near as extreme as a lot of geography in the world.
03:05:03.380that just on the face of it, air power alone trying to cut off any type of resupply in actual war
03:05:16.040seems largely undoable, well, even in the hypothetical.
03:05:23.740But moving on to 1967, so almost 100,000 more troops enter Vietnam in 67.
03:05:37.320It's up to 430 and 63,000 U.S. troops are operating within Vietnam in 67.
03:05:46.220And we get a lot of interesting events and operations this year.
03:05:51.300So, Operation Bellow against North Korean interceptors.
03:06:01.240People forget this about Vietnam, but there's actually, like, dogfights and, like, a semi-conventional air war that's going on over North Vietnam.
03:06:13.440North Vietnam has their own air asset scrambling and fighting it out against U.S. fighters.
03:06:21.300indeed and well you mentioned uh operation bolo which is actually on january 2nd 1967 so right
03:06:32.680at the beginning but it's a little bit of a highlight of the air to air part of the air war
03:06:37.940during that year and that was a plan cooked up by colonel robin olds who was one of the american
03:06:44.360wing commanders in thailand the idea being that they would attempt to ambush specifically north
03:06:52.620vietnam's force of mig 21s which was very small they only had around like the number of them that
03:06:59.880they had in 66 67 numbered in the mid teens at any given time they had more mig 17s we can get
03:07:06.580more into the tactical picture of uh sort of the uh of rolling thunder in a bit probably is worth
03:07:14.760doing but with operation bolo what they did was they flew using formations transponder codes and
03:07:23.540call signs well these were u.s air force f4 phantom fighters using formations call signs
03:07:31.840transponder codes and everything like that in order to resemble uh formations of f-105
03:07:40.520thunder chief fighter bombers which were the main targets for north vietnam's interceptors
03:07:47.000in order to lure the mig-21s into a fight and shoot them down and this was successful
03:07:54.200in the end they shot down five vietnamese people's air force vpaf mig 21s for no losses
03:08:05.240and this was one of the rare cases where the americans actually managed to achieve tactical
03:08:11.140surprise over the north vietnamese and when they were able to do that they tended to be able to
03:08:15.580hit them pretty hard because the various north vietnamese spies and intelligence network all
03:08:20.800over southeast asia had managed not to get wind of this so it was an isolated event and a little
03:08:28.900bit small in the grand scheme although it did eliminate a third or so of north vietnam's mid
03:08:33.92021s which was non-trivial in a way yeah uh impressive and also very telling that the only
03:08:47.920time one of the only times the americans can achieve a tactical surprise is within the air
03:08:54.660uh this is where like uh spy networks and uh human intelligence and just having observers
03:09:04.300uh and runners uh is one of those like devastating things that uh people often forget about in in
03:09:16.200warfare but just networks of people to to report or or uh show up and tell various things uh once
03:09:27.640you can once you can get runners and kids kids and women uh doing stuff like like that it becomes
03:09:35.960quite devastating to the enemy's operational capabilities uh also in 67 we have um
03:09:44.120Um, Cedar Falls, the beginning of the, uh, of the more targeted bombing campaign to clear
03:09:52.860out the Iron Triangle, which, uh, uh, you get the, um, the famous photo of like the
03:10:01.520napalm struck girl is actually from the, uh, Iron Triangle, the, uh, the naked girl
03:10:09.860who's been horribly burned by uh by napalm and uh are you sure about that i thought it was from
03:10:16.720later uh it's not it's not feeder feeder falls itself but it's a similar campaign against the
03:10:24.640iron triangle like uh throughout the entire war there's this on basically all these
03:11:19.520So Khaeson, semi-relatively famous name,
03:11:25.920It's a combat base right on the border of North and South Vietnam.
03:11:31.700It's right in the central highlands at the thinnest point of Vietnam.
03:11:38.360So right where the rice-carrying pole of, like, the two rice buckets of Vietnam,
03:11:50.260And it's right dead center, the part of the pole that's like resting against the neck.
03:11:59.360And it's also the thinnest point of Vietnam, maybe just tens of kilometers from the coast to the border of Laos, right where the caisson combat base is.
03:12:14.680And it's about the size of, it's only like two and a half kilometers long.
03:12:22.580It has an airfield, a caisson combat base.
03:12:27.020It has an airfield, you know, water tower in the U.S. Air Force, a forward offering base.
03:12:37.140And then just like these layers of defenses.
03:12:39.840It's this incredibly small area that is like a core logistical and operational point for controlling the central highlands.
03:12:52.360And it's going to come under intensive siege over the following year.
03:13:01.200and at the same time we have the river war heating up along the uh mekong delta which is
03:13:12.320weirdly parallels caisson in some ways but is also like the complete opposite because you have like
03:13:19.200these mountainous highlands they're like very hard to access then you have this massive river delta
03:13:25.100which itself is like very divided and and you have to have uh air assets and uh all these like
03:13:36.700riverine warfare assets that like the U.S. has not employed since uh like swift boats and uh
03:13:44.020and uh artillery fire bases built on barges and all this stuff that have to operate in
03:13:51.120conjunction with uh air assault units to try and patrol and deploy against uh uh vietcong forces
03:13:59.080on this extensive river delta and because you have all these uh all these like civilian boats
03:14:06.400going going around the mekong delta which uh a delta for those of you can't visualize it
03:14:14.260is like the mouth of the mississippi where it meets the end of louisiana that uh you have this
03:14:21.940in the vast maze of like islands and channels and whatnot that have been built up by uh all the
03:14:28.940soil that's deposited by by the extensive river river so it's this maze of like interconnecting
03:14:38.560rivers and channels and and navigable segments that's tricky to navigate and of course even
03:14:50.480trickier to wage war across and because there's a native population with a native trade along
03:14:56.740these rivers that natively has like a good logistical play the civilians are transporting
03:15:05.260farm equipment and and rice and all kind of goods along this river basin uh there's inherently this
03:15:14.220native like military logistical capability that's there where you can smuggle incredible amounts of
03:15:23.520stuff just in these boats that are going at all times anyway which of course is immortalized if
03:15:30.440If you watch Apocalypse Now, that entire film is taking place on the Mekong River Delta.
03:15:36.740This journey in a swift boat upriver along the Mekong River into Cambodia, where they're trying to find the mythical Colonel Kurtz.0.97
03:15:52.240But there's numerous points where you see the economy and the life of these Vietnamese people along this river and how this is inherently very hard to police and control and maintain a handball on.0.64
03:16:13.740That their entire villages are falling under the control of Charlie, the Viet Cong, and there are all these random Vietnamese boats that they don't quite know what's going on or what isn't or isn't there.
03:16:32.680And the swift boat captains are trying to stop these boats with, you know, all these insurgency and counterinsurgency parables and tragedies occurring.
03:16:51.200At the same time, they're floating artillery bases on this river and trying to do air assaults over the water.
03:17:00.360Which are relatively effective, but also they get, because you have this logistical capacity of all the civilian sizable boats, it's also fairly easy to bring anti-aircraft guns into various positions along the Mekong River Delta.
03:17:26.700because this is another avenue where you can transport stuff down
03:17:33.100from Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
03:17:39.820But, and, yeah, so do you have any thoughts on the River War
03:18:15.680and this would remain fundamentally the same largely throughout,
03:18:19.880although formation, composition, and tactics
03:18:21.820would change a little bit during this time,
03:18:23.840You have strikes being flown against, again, various infrastructure targets in North Vietnam by the U.S. Air Force from bases in Thailand, which it was not publicly acknowledged during the war that they were operating out of Thailand to basically spare the Thai government from the various implications of admitting that publicly.
03:18:45.440and also by the U.S. Navy from carriers of Task Force 77 at what was called Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.
03:18:55.920And North Vietnam was divided up in order to deconflict Air Force and Navy operations
03:19:01.440because they basically didn't do anything together except trying to rescue each other's downpilots
03:19:05.960into six of what were called route packages or route packs in North Vietnam,
03:19:12.860which would be divided between the two although both operated in route pack six which was around
03:19:19.880hanoi and haiphong and was the most dangerous area to operate in and this was a war conducted
03:19:27.020using tactical strike aircraft b-52s would go into north vietnam right at the end of the war
03:19:34.020but that's not happening just yet so a typical i'll probably well i'll do one for each a u.s
03:19:42.800air force strike package would be centered around f-105d thunderchiefs which was a fighter bomber
03:19:51.760built by republic aviation and an aircraft which i absolutely love i've seen a few of them in
03:19:56.720museums and i always have to be dragged away from them but anyway they would typically be carrying
03:20:01.560regular free fall iron bombs a typical loadout was six or eight m117 750 pound bombs although
03:20:11.060they could carry various others and there was a bomb shortage in 1966 and 67 during which they
03:20:19.100were very often carrying fewer often as few as two bombs but anyway you would have a force of
03:20:25.140up to potentially a couple dozen f-105s they would be escorted close in usually by f-4 phantoms of0.51
03:20:33.140the C or D model usually and occasionally the E later on which would protect them from North
03:20:41.640Vietnamese MiGs if they came into the air and typically there would be wild weasel units which
03:20:48.340would go in out ahead of them and try to keep the defenses suppressed while the strike force
03:20:52.960went in and got out. The U.S. Navy was flying early in the war mostly the A1 Skyraider which
03:21:00.900was an old prop plane from just after world war ii and the a4 skyhawk which was a light attack jet
03:21:07.800built by douglas in the mid-50s later on they got the a6 intruder and a7 corsair and those would be
03:21:16.060the strike aircraft going in and also doing sam and flack suppression and they would be escorted
03:21:21.960as well by their own versions of the mcdonald douglas f4 phantom in their case the b and j models
03:21:29.960and fundamentally similar tactics the fighters would protect the strikers from the migs and
03:21:35.400the strikers would be accompanied by sam and flax pression elements like i said before and opposing
03:21:41.940them and the thing that's really bears mentioning about the north vietnamese air defense system
03:21:48.000was it was an integrated air defense system meaning that the fighters the sams and to a
03:21:54.260great degree of the guns were centrally controlled from control rooms in hanoi and the fact that they
03:22:01.660were integrated made them a lot more dangerous than they would be individually so for example
03:22:07.920if the sams are communicating with each other and being controlled by a higher authority you can
03:22:14.420have a situation where multiple sam sites can stage elaborate ambushes where a formation gets
03:22:20.900caught between multiple sites and might have nowhere to go and additionally it's worth noting
03:22:30.280as well that the biggest killer of u.s aircraft during the war was anti-aircraft gunfire but this
03:22:36.760was also to a degree a product of the air defenses being integrated because the sams would shoot down
03:22:43.400a fair number of aircraft in their own right but also had the effect of forcing the u.s aircraft
03:22:48.580down low within range of the guns. And there were so many guns. Estimates vary wildly, but
03:22:58.220many thousands of anti-aircraft guns and also North Vietnam had a heavily armed civilian
03:23:05.560population who were instructed that if you see a U.S. aircraft fly overhead, grab your rifle and
03:23:11.960take a few shots at it and if everyone is doing that the the golden bb effect creates a sort of
03:23:19.220ubiquity to the anti-aircraft gunfire coming from the ground that it's just going to get you sooner
03:23:25.200or later no matter what you did it's kind of been said that air-to-air combat between fighters is a
03:23:30.780contest of skill whereas flying into gunfire is kind of just a dice roll where it doesn't
03:23:35.400necessarily matter as much what you do. Additionally, the gunfire forced the aircraft
03:23:42.220to drop their bombs from higher altitudes, which made them less accurate and necessitated that they
03:23:47.600drop more bombs, employing more aircraft to saturate a given target area in order to actually
03:23:52.840destroy their target. So the economy of effort was starting to become a little bit of a problem here.
03:23:59.800And what else can I say about the integrated air defense system? It's first and foremost
03:24:05.120an information sharing system that enables the battle to be directed in a central way,
03:34:25.820But this is into 1968, and the Battle of Que Son kind of leads into the Tet Offensive, which is the massive South Vietnamese push to attack all US positions over the supposed ceasefire of Tet.
03:34:55.820But it's not just in the modern day that ceasefires are abused to launch surprise attacks when troops have been, like, stood down or, like, given some leave or whatever.
03:35:31.260suffer extraordinary losses from this.
03:35:34.440Famously, the Tet Offensive is a failed campaign tactically
03:35:38.740but um strategically is quite dramatic because the offensive is occurring as the u.s election
03:35:46.540of 1968 is going on which is already like one of the most traumatizing things that
03:35:51.580america has ever experienced because uh uh johnson refuses to run again they doesn't feel he can
03:35:59.980And Robert F. Kennedy Sr., not Trump's health official, his dad, he's assassinated while running for the leadership of the Democratic Party on a campaign of at least simplicity investigating the JFK assassination.
03:36:24.300So he's assassinated for threatening to investigate the JFK assassination, which you can speculate about extensively.
03:36:37.880At least one prominent intel agency is heavily expected to have done it, and maybe some great American ally was also heavily involved.
03:36:51.300but uh but uh we're reaching close to the peak of u.s forces in vietnam uh 495 000 and this is
03:37:04.040approaching the peak of a u.s opposition to vietnam with uh 68 also coinciding with like
03:37:12.360extensive rioting and of course the entire 60s era is almost a civil war in the u.s
03:37:19.740uh uh are there any unique things on the air war side that's happening in this year
03:37:27.520so the main thing that happens in 1968 in the air war is in november so at the beginning of
03:37:35.080november november 2nd quite close to the election is rolling thunder is brought to an end and
03:37:41.120bombing of north vietnam ends and will not resume at least formally until 1972 so that part of the
03:37:50.000campaign does come to an end in 68 although the other two air wars over the ho chi minh trail and
03:37:58.240in south vietnam will continue more or less as they were beyond that point and indeed the
03:38:05.440introduction campaign and the off-the-books
03:50:45.200And we have lived up to our promise, dear prayer.
03:50:50.280We have brought you up to the modern era.
03:50:52.440We have gone from 1945 to Top Gun, which, of course, is somehow eternally relevant, even in 2022 and beyond.
03:51:03.280But so 1970, 1971, were there any big events you want to pull out before we wrap up the story with the saga of Nixon?
03:51:21.820so again you as you brought up you have uh operation menu which is a pretty enormous
03:51:29.980operation using strategic air commands b-52s to try and interdict the ho chi minh trial
03:51:35.320specifically in cambodia uh interdiction operations over laos and south vietnam
03:51:40.420continue close air support operations and supportive ground operations continue over
03:51:45.180south vietnam there is actually one story that's just too good not to tell but uh i do want to
03:51:51.500mentioned specifically from the interdiction campaign over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And that
03:51:58.060was the operations of the 606th Special Operations Squadron, which in some ways can be viewed as a
03:52:06.200little bit of a successor to the early Operation Farmgate ramshackle Sky Pirate War of the early
03:52:13.600days so this was a an unacknowledged secret special operations unit which also operated
03:52:21.380the old t-28 trainers and world war ii b-26 bombers and also c-123 transports they operated
03:52:30.340out of nakan phanom royal thai air force base in eastern thailand close to the border with laos
03:52:36.940This was the Americans tended to abbreviate Nacon Phenom to NKP in polite company and naked fanny in impolite company.
03:52:46.580But anyway, they mostly flew night introduction operations along the trail, flying these old airplanes with the C-123 transports dropping flares and then the other airplanes bombing any targets that they could see.
03:53:00.460They also used very early night vision and infrared optics to try and spot targets on the trail at night.
03:53:09.320But probably the most amusing thing that this unit did was specifically their T-28 pilots, so the ones flying the armed trainers.
03:53:17.680um they dyed their flight suits black uh painted a red zed on it and used the call sign zoro after
03:53:27.960the uh masked swordsman in the pulp novels and disney tv series from the 50s
03:53:35.100so couldn't couldn't let their story go unsaid because it's too weird and wonderful
04:15:27.680um i did read about it specifically the air evacuation from saigon in quite a bit of detail
04:15:33.480pretty recently there's again a whole chapter on it in talking gulf yacht club so quite a bit of
04:15:38.920detail on that it was pretty much a u.s navy and marine show because they're they were the ones
04:15:45.180bobbing around on the sea in their ships just off the coast for everyone to evacuate to so
04:15:51.000So there was a little bit of a state of denial amongst the U.S. administration, which I guess was Gerald Ford at this point, that Saigon would actually fall.
04:16:02.880There was a sense that South Vietnam was going to be able to mount a protracted resistance, at least in the cities, but it didn't really shake out that way.
04:16:11.720It's a curious thing because no one on either side expected North Vietnam's spring offensive of 1975 to be a war-ending event.
04:16:22.380They expected to take some additional territory in South Vietnam, but initially it was a pretty limited operation which snowballed into something that went all the way to Saigon because the South Vietnamese just really didn't have very much fight left in them.
04:16:38.280And also without the enormous weight of American air power, which had successfully blunted the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive, they didn't have enough to put up in front of it.
04:16:51.180So eventually the situation becomes clear. And on, I believe, April 7th, 1975, the order is finally given to start making serious preparations to evacuate the U.S. embassy and all remaining U.S. personnel from South Vietnam.
04:17:06.560So they start quietly because they don't want to cause any panic amongst the South Vietnamese going and doing things like chopping down trees to create helipads in certain parts of Saigon and, you know, drawing up plans in the embassy to get all of their people out.
04:17:26.340So initially, once the evacuation really gets going, it's being done from Tansanut Air Base in Saigon using fixed wing transport aircraft, evacuating U.S. personnel and some South Vietnamese refugees at this point, although a lot were prevented from leaving.
04:17:46.480and the famous specter of particularly ARVN soldiers
04:17:51.160being prevented from boring U.S. aircraft at gunpoint
04:17:53.840is very much seared into a lot of people's memories.
04:17:58.440Eventually, at about, I think, 11 at night on April 29th,
04:27:40.720Just because the reason the U.S. didn't escalate early and the same is like largely a sane reason is because they didn't want to get in a position where they were fighting this apocalyptic war with 500,000 troops in Vietnam and like 10% of the Vietnamese population dying.0.72
04:28:05.620And the Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese being more committed than ever to, like, fight them to the end.
04:28:17.580That if you just inflict unguided atrocity and damage without, like, actually inflicting marginal cost to the fighters, like you just harden the support base, people don't choose to escalate war based on absolute risk.0.83
04:28:46.140they choose to escalate it based on marginal risk. If you shoot a member of someone's family
04:28:54.600at random, it doesn't disincentivize them from attacking you. It disincentivizes them
04:29:04.160from being inactive because if the risk is not proportionate to your participation in the
04:29:16.520conflict, you're heavily incentivized to participate more and more. Whereas like the
04:29:22.940most effective deterrent is always the most focused and accurate deterrent that the way
04:29:32.040to disincentivize people from messing with you is to be in a position where you can impose
04:29:38.160incredible risk on the narrow individuals who are messing with you. This is why, like,
04:29:43.760you can control a country like America with blackmail, but you can't control or deter it
04:29:51.380with random violence that the stuff like the Epstein Network or whatnot
04:30:01.920can extract huge concessions from the U.S.
04:30:05.040in ways that far more lethal terrorist movements have not.
04:30:12.480And you can see this repeated across history
04:30:15.420that people just do not respond to absolute danger.
04:30:19.460They respond to the marginal danger their decision immediately affects.
04:30:28.060And you can see this plainly in Vietnam where the casualties are extreme
04:30:34.800and yet the actual risk to the individual fighters going up against the air war
04:31:26.500It also speaks to how the helicopters were used in the days before, like, the FAA-ification of everything.
04:31:35.600That you could be employing thousands and thousands of helicopters and just accepting the risk.
04:31:44.760Whereas, of course, now even the military has been kind of infected by the extreme horror of marginal risk costs around various more dangerous vehicles.
04:32:05.260Helicopters are kind of restricted the way motorcycles are in the US military.
04:41:13.300But like American society, while guys are serving in Vietnam, was rearranged to economically disposition them and like destroy their current prospects, even as they were serving their country.
04:41:29.140And that's a big part of the reason that a lot of these stories about soldiers being spat upon or guys being abandoned in Vietnam or these various interpretations are all so prominent because all of a sudden veterans couldn't be hired.
04:41:50.900You had to hire like this, this random woman who like wouldn't have even been employed in an earlier era or this DEI, this DEI hire who like did nothing for their country, country.
04:42:12.020And because all these companies were rushing to try and avoid lawsuits and, like, be ahead of, like, the lawsuit machine, they were – basically all these returning veterans were shut of the job market for the crime of having served their country.0.67
04:42:34.120which of course the boomers will never acknowledge because then they'd have to admit0.70
04:42:40.520that like uh martin luther king was a traitor to his country and like probably one of the worst0.53
04:42:46.140americans who ever lived and and the man who destroyed american industry and american dynamism
04:42:51.640and that mlk boulevard every mlk boulevard should be like dug up and reduced back to0.75