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The Vietnam conflict spread dissension into every corner of our political and cultural environment and shattered the foreign policy consensus that had guided US relations since World War II. The initial combined effort of the United States and South Vietnam to defeat the insurgency was the Strategic Hamlet Program. This monograph argues that the Strategic Hamlet Program failed due to the absence of an operational link between strategic concept and tactical execution. The monograph initially reviews the strategic context that existed in South Vietnam during the critical period of 1961-1963, that window in time in which the United States first became an active and full-fledged ally of the South Vietnamese. This review establishes that the two partners held very different perspectives on the conflict and had different objectives in mind when they entered into the Strategic Hamlet Program as a combined effort. The author identifies four principal lessons. First, one should avoid attempting to accomplish significant political or social reforms while simultaneously trying to conduct a major counter insurgency operation. Second, for a program to be effective, there is an absolute requirement to establish an operational link between strategic concept and tactical execution. Third, there exists an inherent “influence dilemma” that every third party must face in a counter insurgency effort. Finally, every insurgency/counterinsurgency is unique and must be and judged on its own merits. The monograph concludes by arguing that the strategic hamlet approach does have utility as a general counterinsurgency strategy in certain types of situations and suggests encadrement as a means for attaining the critical all-requirement for local security in such an effort.
This monograph analyzes the effectiveness of operational campaign design during the initial US ground combat in the Vietnam War. The focus is on the linkage of national strategic ends with military means and ways from the Spring of 1965 through the results of the la Drang battles of November 1965. The monograph identifies lessons from this period that are applicable to current US Joint and Army doctrine as well as lessons for planners and executors of US military action under the American system of civilian control of the military. First, the monograph evaluates current US doctrine for campaigns and identifies the concept of linkage of national strategic ends with military ways and means as critical to successful campaign design. Then the monograph assesses US military doctrine in 1965, identifying the weakness of unconventional warfare capabilities. A detailed discussion of the concept of both limited war and gradualism as national strategies, includes the limits on military action imposed by these strategies. Section III identifies specific military objectives identified by the National Command Authority, including preventing the war in Vietnam from escalating to a general war. The primacy of President Johnson’s domestic concerns is also identified. The monograph then assesses the effectiveness of US military campaign planning and execution in 1965. The conclusion is that the operational ways and means used by General Westmoreland in the conduct of his chosen strategy of attrition were not linked in any way with the national strategic aim of limited warfare. The monograph also identifies a failure in supervision by civilian leaders, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of the military planning and conduct of the air and ground campaign in South Vietnam. Too little supervision was the cause of failure, not over supervision by the civilian and military leadership.
Vietnam's Lost Revolution employs newly-released archival material from Vietnam to examine the rise and fall of the Special Commissariat for Civic Action in the First Republic of Vietnam, and in so doing reassesses the origins of the Vietnam War. A cornerstone of Ngô Đình Diệm's presidency, Civic Action was intended to transform Vietnam into a thriving, modern, independent, noncommunist Southeast Asian nation. Geoffrey Stewart juxtaposes Diem's revolutionary plan with the conflicting and competing visions of Vietnam's postcolonial future held by other indigenous groups. He shows how the government failed to gain legitimacy within the peasantry, ceding the advantage to the communist-led opposition and paving the way for the American military intervention in the mid-1960s. This book provides a richer and more nuanced analysis of the origins of the Vietnam War in which internal struggles over national identity, self-determination, and even modernity itself are central.
This is the first of a series of chronological histories prepared by the Marine Corps History and Museums Division to cover the entire span of Marine Corps involvement in the Vietnam conflict. This particular volume covers a relatively obscure chapter in U.S. Marine Corps history—the activities of Marines in Vietnam between 1954 and 1964. The narrative traces the evolution of those activities from a one-man advisory operation at the conclusion of the French-Indochina War in 1954 to the advisory and combat support activities of some 700 Marines at the end of 1964. As the introductory volume for the series this account has an important secondary objective: to establish a geographical, political, and military foundation upon which the subsequent histories can be developed.
This is the second volume in a series of chronological histories prepared by the Marine Corps History and Museums Division to cover the entire span of Marine Corps involvement in the Vietnam War. This volume details the Marine activities during 1965, the year the war escalated and major American combat units were committed to the conflict. The narrative traces the landing of the nearly 5,000-man 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade and its transformation into the ΙII Marine Amphibious Force, which by the end of the year contained over 38,000 Marines. During this period, the Marines established three enclaves in South Vietnam’s northernmost corps area, I Corps, and their mission expanded from defense of the Da Nang Airbase to a balanced strategy involving base defense, offensive operations, and pacification. This volume continues to treat the activities of Marine advisors to the South Vietnamese armed forces but in less detail than its predecessor volume, U.S. Marines in Vietnam, 1954-1964; The Advisory and Combat Assistance Era.
Diem’s alliance with Washington has long been seen as a Cold War relationship gone bad, undone by either American arrogance or Diem’s stubbornness. Edward Miller argues that this misalliance was more than just a joint effort to contain communism. It was also a means for each side to shrewdly pursue its plans for nation building in South Vietnam.
Of the many facets of the American war in Southeast Asia debated by U.S. authorities in Washington, by the military services and the public, none has proved more controversial than the air war against North Vietnam. The air war s inauguration with the nickname Rolling Thunder followed an eleven-year American effort to induce communist North Vietnam to sign a peace treaty without openly attacking its territory. Thus, Rolling Thunder was a new military program in what had been a relatively low-key attempt by the United States to win the war within South Vietnam against insurgent communist Viet Cong forces, aided and abetted by the north. The present volume covers the first phase of the Rolling Thunder campaign from March 1965 to late 1966. It begins with a description of the planning and execution of two initial limited air strikes, nicknamed Flaming Dart I and II. The Flaming Dart strikes were carried out against North Vietnam in February 1965 as the precursors to a regular, albeit limited, Rolling Thunder air program launched the following month. Before proceeding with an account of Rolling Thunder, its roots are traced in the events that compelled the United States to adopt an anti-communist containment policy in Southeast Asia after the defeat of French forces by the communist Vietnamese in May 1954.