Operation Igloo White - Conclusion

Conclusion

The stated goal of the American aerial interdiction campaigns was to force Hanoi to pay too high a price in blood to make the continued support of its goals in South Vietnam tenable. In this effort, the U.S. failed. Not only were the PAVN/NLF able to continue their efforts, but they managed, under a deluge of ordnance, to launch two major offensives (the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the Nguyen Hue Offensive in 1972 and a counteroffensive (against Operation Lam Son 719 in 1971). The key to the failure of the American strategy was that the anti-infiltration campaigns targeted supplies and transportation (both of which were imported), instead of manpower. The price in casualties for the PAVN/NLF was high, but it was a price that Hanoi was able and willing to pay.

Chief among the criticisms leveled against the system was its failure to detect the build-up to PAVN's 1972 Nguyen Hue Offensive. This cast doubt not only on the trustworthiness of the sensors, but on the adequacy of the entire system. The headquarters of the Pacific Air Force launched an investigation of the apparent failure and reported that "our estimates were in error." The report went on to state, however, that the lapse was not the result any failure of the sensors themselves, but the Air Force's false assumption that the trail net had adequate coverage.

The interdiction campaigns were also expensive. Igloo White cost around one billion dollars per year to operate. The cost of the bombing operations that the sensors supported amounted to approximately 18.2 million dollars per week. Those costs did not include the hundreds of aircraft lost during the interdiction campaigns or the priceless crews that manned them.

Scholars today remain divided on the merits of the electronic barrier system and the efficacy of the bombing campaigns that it directed. The claims of destruction made by the U.S. Air Force, both during and after the war, were originally taken as given. The only exception to this rule was at the CIA, which discounted Air Force claims at the time by as much as 75 percent. This was understandable due to the fact that the Vietnamese were basically silent during the 1970s and 1980s.

By the 1990s, new historical research (especially by Air Force historians Earl Tilford, Bernard Nalty, and Jacob Van Staaveren) and the publications of the Military Institute of Vietnam finally opened new perspectives on aerial interdiction during the Vietnam War. During Commando Hunt for example, the Air Force claimed that 46,000 PAVN trucks had been destroyed or damaged by air strikes in Laos. These figures were hard to reconcile with the 6,000 trucks imported annually into North Vietnam between 1965 and 1970 – for all of its operations. American claims that 80 percent of the materiel that started down the trail was destroyed while en route to the southern battlefields had to be altered in the face of loss claims of only 15 percent by the Vietnamese.

Thomas C. Thayer, chief of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for four years during the war, believed that only about one-twentieth of the cargo imported into the north moved southward on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and that more than two-thirds eventually reached the battlefields in the south. More recently however, a new study by Air Force historian Eduard Mark has attempted to rehabilitate the Air Force's original claims by finding a rough correlation between trucks imported into North Vietnam during the war and those that were claimed by the American pilots as destroyed. Only the opening of the Vietnamese archives to scholarly research will reveal the true effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the American electronic and aerial effort.