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Vietnam Divisive Issues
During the postwar years, a number of nettlesome issues arose
to trouble the generally symbiotic relationship between the armed
forces and the party. A point of major contention was the dual
command system, in which responsibility for a military unit was
shared between its commander and political officer. During the
First Indochina War, the military had been directed entirely by
the party. What had counted chiefly in a leader was not military
knowledge but political acumen, organizational skills, and the
ability to persuade and motivate. However, as the war had
increased in intensity, a need had developed for experienced
combat officers. When the demand soon exhausted manpower pools,
the party had been obliged to turn to large numbers of officers
with military rather than party credentials to fill PAVN officer
ranks. Fearing it would lose control, the party in 1952
introduced in PAVN the position of political commissar or
political officer (borrowed from the Soviet Union and China),
thereby creating the so-called two-commander system. It was dogma
at the time, however, that even with two commanders neither was a
purely military officer. A large part of officer training
consisted of political orientation to military activity.
Nevertheless, the division of power between the two officers was
not clearly defined. In theory, they shared authority in tactical
matters, but in reality they competed for power over the years.
The system generated party-military friction, bitter
jurisdictional disputes, sharp personality clashes, and confusion
in authority. Despite its many flaws it endured for nearly three
decades, surviving the Second Indochina War. As that conflict
intensified in the early 1960s, however, the balance of power
between the two figures began to favor the military officer.
Pressure to revise the role of the political officer and to
end the dual command structure developed only after the Second
Indochina War. Selected PAVN units were experimentally
restructured in 1977 in such a way that the functions of military
commander and political officer were combined in a single
officer. Gradually, this system was extended throughout PAVN, but
as a concession to the party, PAVN agreed that the authority
formerly wielded by the political officer in company-, battalion-
, and regimental-level units should be vested in the party
committee at each level. The chief difficulty encountered in this
plan was that a dual command became a multiple command. Party
committees sending orders directly to specific military,
logistic, or technical officers in a unit could bypass the
military commander, with the result that PAVN units were run by
committee. When this system was taken into Cambodia, it proved
totally unworkable. In 1980 the arrangement was supplanted by a
"one-man-command system." Authority was vested in the unit
commander, who was responsible to higher authorities, including
the party committee at his level, but who exercised actual
control of his unit. A March 1982 party resolution endorsed this
change but added a new arrangement that supported retaining the
position of political officer as an institution but spelled out
its subordinate status to the military commander. Still in the
developmental stage in 1987, this new arrangement clearly
established the authority of the military commander over the
political officer, but left his authority with respect to the
party committee somewhat ambiguous. The military commander was
permitted greater latitude in initiating decisions, but remained
ultimately accountable to the party for whatever actions he took.
A second major divisive issue between the party and PAVN was
commonly termed the "red versus expert" argument. This doctrine,
imported from China and reflective of Mao Zedong's thinking about
the conduct of war, began with the assumption that warfare was a
test of all adversarial strengths--ideological, economic,
psychological, and spiritual, as well as military. It then asked
successively which ranked higher in such a test--the material or
the immaterial, men or weapons, and whether it was more important
for the individual soldier to be ideologically motivated ("red")
or technologically skilled in combat ("expert"). As expressed,
the choice raised a false dichotomy, but it was an argument that
raged within PAVN for decades. It was not simply a philosophical
question, but a question that manifested itself in party-PAVN
personnel relations, in strategic and tactical military planning,
in officer selection, assignment, and promotion, and in training
programs designed to produce the ideal soldier. The debate
surfaced in Vietnam after the First Indochina War when a PAVN
modernization program was launched. Part of that effort involved
creating a series of specialized military schools and academies.
Planning the course work for these new institutions triggered a
spirited dispute over the relative value and importance of
military expertise and revolutionary consciousness. In 1987 an
easy resolution of this dichotomy was still beyond reach. Even in
a politicized military organization such as PAVN, nonprofessional
influences, whether political, ideological, or social, were
limited by the demands of the work itself. New technology,
requiring the mastery of complicated weapons and military
processes, increasingly demanded the soldier's attention and
time.
Data as of December 1987
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