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Vietnam Security Concerns
Victory did not bring Vietnam the security that Hanoi leaders
had assumed would be theirs in the postwar world. Vietnam in the
1980s was beleaguered, in some ways more so than North Vietnam
had been during the Second Indochina War. It feared invasion,
which it had not feared then, and Vietnamese society in what was
formerly North Vietnam was far more restive and dispirited than
it had been even during the darkest days of the war. Newly
acquired South Vietnam remained largely unassimilated. Hanoi's
chief instrument for assuring internal security and tranquility,
the VCP, had seriously declined in effectiveness, tarnished by a
decade of failure. The party's wartime reputation for being
virtually omnipotent was all but gone. In addition, Hanoi's
victory in the spring of 1975 had radically altered geopolitics,
not only for Vietnam and Indochina, but also for all of Asia. It
had precipitated drastic changes in relations among several of
the nations of the Pacific, and some of these changes had severe
consequences for Vietnam.
In the 1980s, Hanoi regarded itself as a major force in Asia
for the first time in history. Vietnam's population of about 60
million made it the thirteenth largest of the world's 126
nations, and the third largest of the communist nations
(see Population
, ch. 2). It was strategically located at a crossroads
of Asia and had considerable natural wealth and economic
potential. It also had a large, battle-hardened, and
well-equipped army. Ironically, the strengthened Vietnamese
geopolitical position that resulted from victory in war became
something of a postwar weakness, for it thrust on an unprepared
Hanoi leadership tasks in national security planning that it was
ill-prepared to handle. For decades Hanoi's security planners had
been totally preoccupied with their struggle within the Indochina
peninsula and had ignored the world beyond. With victory they
were required for the first time to look outward and examine
their nation's strategic position; to estimate potential threats
and determine possible enemies and allies; to think in terms of
strategic manpower, fire power, and weapons systems; and to plan
strategies accordingly. Despite their great experience in
warfare, they were relative novices in peace; their performance
in the first postwar decade did not prove impressive.
Vietnam suffered from other remediable liabilities, in
addition to inexperienced strategic planners. These included an
army still oriented toward guerrilla infantry; an inability to
project air and naval forces over long distances; the lack of
logistics and transport systems required by a modern armed force
(particularly, lack of air transport); a low level of technical
competence in the officer corps; and a shortage of good, reliable
equipment and weapons. Hanoi's strategic planners, and their
Soviet advisers, clearly recognized that new weapons systems were
required for the vastly changed security conditions facing
Vietnam. Efforts were undertaken to develop the Vietnamese navy,
and new
Soviet-built ships arrived to be added to the fleet captured in
the South. Vietnam was also rumored to be creating a submarine
force. Hanoi's vaunted military strongpoint, its divisions of
light infantry, however, required conversion to a more orthodox
high-technology force in order to become militarily credible in
the region. Hanoi's military journals indicated that ambitious
research and development projects were underway, but a
significant upgrading of military technology was unlikely. In the
late 1980s, Vietnam was at least a decade and a half away from a
nuclear weapons delivery system--unless the Soviet Union were to
provide a crash development program, which was considered
unlikely.
In the meantime, Vietnam remained a nation fully mobilized
for war. This was a condition that eventually would require a
change to a peacetime mode, accompanied by some demobilization of
PAVN and the reallocation of most resources to the task of
economic development, if the country were to keep pace with its
Asian neighbors. The fact that PAVN continued to grow, in fact to
double in size in the decade after 1975, was a government
concession to entrenched PAVN interests as well as to internal
and external security fears, many of them brought on by the fact
that Vietnam had not renounced warfare as a foreign policy
option. In any event, hard decisions lay ahead for the Hanoi
leadership concerning the armed forces' share of the annual
governmental budget, the ultimate size and deployment of PAVN,
the kind of air and naval power to be developed, the levels of
military spending, and the development of indigenous sources of
military hardware.
Vietnam in 1987 faced only one truly credible external
threat--China
(see
The Chinese Millennium;
Nine Centuries of Independence
, ch. 1). The complex Sino-Vietnamese relationship,
dating back two thousand years, is deeply rooted in the Confucian
concept of pupil-teacher. Thus, any issues under contention or
problems that exist between the two on the surface normally are
transcended by this basic relationship. Much of the behavior
demonstrated by the two since 1975--including Vietnam's invasion
of Cambodia and China's subsequent "lesson" to Vietnam--is, in
fact, traceable to the workings of this deep-rooted historic
association
(see Foreign Relations
, ch. 4). Victory in the
Indochina War left Hanoi leaders determined to change the
centuries-old relationship. The Vietnamese sought to end the
notion of the rimland barbarian's obligation to pay deference to
the Middle Kingdom. They felt the tutelary relationship should
give way to one of greater equality. The Chinese, however,
considered that nothing significant had changed and that the
original condition of mutual obligation should continue. For the
Chinese, the touchstone would always be the Sino-Soviet dispute
and the need to reduce Soviet influence in Hanoi. Most important
for China was the nature and future of the Soviet presence in
Indochina. Beijing tried several approaches to induce Hanoi to
maintain its distance from Moscow. However, none was successful.
In the 1980s it pursued what might be called a campaign of
protracted intimidation--military, diplomatic, and psychological
pressure--on the Vietnamese, calculating that eventually Hanoi
would seek some accommodation.
In the minds of Hanoi's strategic planners, Vietnam's two
Indochina neighbors posed nearly as large an external security
threat as did China. Strategically, Cambodia and Laos represented
weak flanks where internal anticommunist forces could challenge
the local regimes and threaten Vietnam itself. Geography
increased this threat. Vietnam is an extraordinarily narrow
country--at its "waist" near Dong Hoi it is only forty kilometers
across--and could be cut in half militarily with relative ease
either through an amphibious landing on its coast or through an
invasion from Laos. It is also a long country, with some 8,000
kilometers of border and coastline to defend. For these reasons
Hanoi was prepared to do whatever was necessary to achieve a
secure, cooperative, nonthreatening Laos and Cambodia.
External security threats to Vietnam from the Southeast Asia
region were also possible. Just as the relationship with China
was tied to Hanoi's Cambodian and Laotian policies, so the
relationship with Cambodia and Laos was bound up with policies
toward the six nations comprising the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN). Vietnamese security goals in Southeast
Asia in the 1980s appeared to be the elimination of any United
States military presence; the diminution of American influence; a
general balance of superpower activity in the region; and,
possibly, the unified economic development of the region. PAVN
dwarfed all of its ASEAN neighbors' armed forces and, in fact,
was larger than all six combined. Its size and continued growth
provided Hanoi's neighbors with legitimate cause for worry. PAVN,
given the advantage of terrain, was sufficiently powerful to
battle the Chinese army to a stalemate for a prolonged period,
although not indefinitely. The composition of PAVN--large numbers
of infantry with only guerrilla war experience, limited air
power, and virtually no offensive naval capability--meant that
Vietnam could not, however, project force over a long distance
and could not, for instance, offer a credible threat even to
Indonesia. Probably it could not even defend its holdings in the
Spratly Islands against a determined Chinese assault
(see
fig. 1).
In strict strategic terms, PAVN was not as threatening to
most of Vietnam's neighbors as its size suggested. Thailand,
however, was a clear exception. PAVN had the military capability
to crush Thailand's small, lightly equipped armed force in
frontal battle. It could invade and occupy Thailand quickly,
although most certainly that action would trigger the same kind
of resistance encountered in Cambodia. Furthermore, such an
invasion would incur the wrath of China, the displeasure of the
Soviet Union, and would probably precipitate military support
from the ASEAN states and the United States. In the long run,
PAVN will be a credible threat to its remaining neighbors only
when it develops adequate air and naval strength. Vietnam's
acquisition of such a capability, however, will depend more on
Moscow's inclinations than Hanoi's.
Data as of December 1987
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