U.S. bombing in Vietnam drove civilians to Viet Cong

For the first time, a study shows that the aerial bombing of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. and allied forces was an ineffective, wrongheaded strategy that drove neutral citizens into the arms of the Viet Cong. The study combines two sets of data to reconstruct the Vietnam War late in 1969 - a point at which U.S. forces appeared to have the upper hand in the conflict - to map where bombing occurred and then determine how territory was held or lost. "This is a unique strategy to chart the co-evolution of bombing and insurgent control over time," said Thomas Pepinsky, assistant professor of government and co-author of the study, which is published online by the American Journal of Political Science. "We can actually observe hamlets across the territory of South Vietnam and the ways in which bombing subsequently leads to changes in the ability of the Viet Cong to hold them." Pepinsky and Yale University colleagues Matthew Kocher and Stathis Kalyvas looked at whether South Vietnamese and American counterinsurgency operations benefited from massive bombing in the south. "No one has ever actually tried to see in a broad, comparative sense if the bombardment was effective," Pepinsky said. "No one's been able to show, with anything close to the level of detail, broad coverage and rich statistical evidence that we have, that this was uniformly counterproductive for the U.S. military's broader strategic goals." Then as now - when American drones kill civilians near targets in Afghanistan - the problem of distinguishing between insurgents and noncombatants remains unsolved.