Above all, the peasants, who had been identified as the focus in the war against the insurgents, rejected the program because the promised reforms did not materialize amid the corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency associated with the implementation of the program.
View the full text of this report. Accession Number: ADA Descriptive Note: Master's thesis, Aug Jun Personal Author s : Leahy, Peter F. By early , most of the strategic hamlets had been destroyed, their populations returning to their former villages or streaming into the cities as refugees. One reason the strategic hamlets program failed is that it was too inflexible an application of a technique from Malaya.
Many analysts have criticized the U. The new counterinsurgency manual tries to avoid such mistakes. Planners in Afghanistan will not simply replicate techniques from Vietnam or Iraq. They will recognize that the goals, actors, resources and constraints in Afghanistan are different. But counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam was iterative too.
Popular mythology holds that the U. But in fact, numerous American analysts devoted immense resources to studying and addressing the sociopolitical side of the war. Marines with local soldiers living in a single village. Experts at USAID, RAND, the State Department and elsewhere saw the need for land reform to draw impoverished poor peasants away from the communists, and finally convinced the Vietnamese government to adopt a law that redistributed land from wealthy landowners to poor farmers.
And this is just a partial list of efforts to combat the war's social underpinnings. Indeed, American civilian aid efforts in South Vietnam dwarf the American efforts in Afghanistan today. Meanwhile, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan are almost entirely military, with just 50 civilian staff. The U. And South Vietnam was smaller, both in physical size and population, than Afghanistan. But U. This was a heavily VC-influltrated area rather than one of mini-mat penetration, as Thompson had urged.
But planning--as distinct from operations--continued on the Delta plan and strategic hamlets were constructed in a variegated, uncoordinated pattern throughout the spring and early summer. The U. In August , GVN produced its long awaited national pacification plan with four priority areas and specified priorities within each area.
At the same time, however, it indicated that over 2, strategic hamlets had already been completed and that work was already underway on more than 2, more. Although it was not until October , that GVN explicitly announced the Strategic Hamlet Program to be the unifying concept of its pacification and counterinsurgent effort it was clear earlier that the program had assumed this central position. Three important implications of this early progress or, more precisely, reported progress are also clear in retrospect.
These implications seem not to have impressed themselves acutely upon U. First, the program was truly one of GVN initiative rather than one embodying priorities and time phasing recommended by the U. Diem was running with his own ball in programmatic terms, no matter who articulated the theory of the approach. The geographic dispersion of hamlets already reported to be completed indicated that there was, in fact, a conscious effort to implement this phase almost simultaneously throughout the entire nation rather than to build slowly as Diem's foreign advisors both U.
Finally, the physical aspects of Diem's program were similar if not identical to earlier population resettlement and control efforts practiced by the French and by Diem. The long history of these efforts was marked by consistency in resuits as well as in techniques: all failed dismally because they ran into resentment if not active resistance on the part of the peasants at whose control and safety, then loyalty, they were aimed.
President Diem and his brother, for their part, had decided to emphasize control of the rural population as the precondition to winning loyalty. The record is inconclusive with respect to their weighing the record of the past but it appears that they, too, paid it scant attention.
Thus the early operational efforts indicated a danger of peasant resistance, on one hand, and of divergent approaches between, in the initial steps, the U. Since the physical actions to achieve security and those to impose control are in many respects the same, there was generated yet another area in which assessments of progress would be inconclusive and difficult to make.
Assessments tended to be favorable from a security or control viewpoint and uneven with respect to political development. The general conclusion was almost always one of cautious optimism when security control was emphasized, one of hopeful pessimism when political follow-up was stressed. The impression in Washington was typically slanted toward the more optimistic appraisals if for no other reason than that hamlet construction and security arrangements were the first chronological steps in the long process to pacification.
Was it not, after all, "progress" to have moved from doing nothing to doing something even though the something was being done imperfectly? These U. By the time, in , that the hopeful pessimist voices were clearer, it was also much clearer that the Ngo brothers had made the Strategic Hamlet Program into one closely identified with their regime and with Diem's rather esoterically phrased "personalist revolution.
These fears were not limited to the Strategic Hamlet Program, however; they extended to urban as weB as rural phases of South Vietnamese life and were subsumed, as the Buddhist question moved to the fore, by the general issue of the viability of Diem's regime. President Diem grew increasingly unwilling to meet U. He believed that to do so would cause his government to fail. In the event the government fell and the nation's counterinsurgent program took a definite turn for the worse, but the nation did not fall.
The Strategic Hamlet Program did. Closely identified with the Ngo brothers, it was almost bound to suffer their fortunes; when they died it died, too.
The new government of generals, presumably realizing the extent of peasant displeasure with resettlement and control measures, did nothing to save it. A number of contributory reasons can be cited for the failure of the Strategic Hamlet Program. Over-expansion of construction and poor quality of defenses forms one category. This reason concentrates only on the initial phase of the program, however. While valid, it does little to explain why the entire program collapsed rather than only some hamlets within it.
Rural antagonisms which identified the program with its sponsors in the central government are more suggestive of the basis for the complete collapse as Diem and Nhu departed the scene. The reasons why they departed are traceable in part to the different expectations which combined in the apparent consensus at the program's beginning: to Diem's insistence on material assistance and independence, to U. Having said this, it does not automatically follow that the program would have succeeded even if Diem had met U.
To point to the causes of failure is one thing; to assume that changes of style would have led to success is quite another.
It may well be that the program was doomed from the outset because of peasant resistance to measures which changed the pattern of rural life--whether aimed at security or control. It might have been possible, on the other hand, for a well-executed program eventually to have achieved some measure of success. The early demise of the program does not permit a conclusive evaluation. The weight of evidence suggests that the Strategic Hamlet Program was fatally flawed in its conception by the unintended consequence of alienating many of those whose loyalty it aimed to win.
This inconclusive finding, in turn, suggests that the sequential phases embodied in the doctrine of counterinsurgency may slight some very important problem areas. The evidence is not sufficient for an indictment; still less is one able to validate the counterinsurgent doctrine with reference to a program that failed. The only verdict that may be given at this time with respect to the validity of the doctrine is that used by Scots courts--"case not proved.
French and GVN early attempts at population resettlement into defended communities to create secure zones. Agroville Program modified by construction of "Agro-Hamlets" to meet peasant objections. Cable to Ambassador Nolting, instructing him to meet with Diem, lays out proposed U. State to Lodge, Message , says that U.
The Strategic Hamlet Program in the Republic of Vietnam RVN -articulated and carried forward from late until late has created some confusion because of terminology. One source of confusion stems from the similarity between the physical aspects of the program and earlier fortified communities of one kind or another.
Another source of confusion rises because of the loose usage of "hamlet" as compared to "village" and because of the practice of referring to these communities as "defended," "secure," and "fortified" as well as "strategic. The hamlet is the smallest organized community in rural South Vietnam. Several hamlets typically comprise a village. During the strategic hamlet program both hamlets and villages were fortified. The distinction is unimportant for the present analysis, except as it bears on the defensibility of the community protected.
The several adjectives coupled with hamlet or village were occasionally used to differentiate communities according to the extent of their defenses or the initial presumed loyalty of their inhabitants.
More often no such distinction was made; the terms were used interchangeably. Where a distinction exists, the following account explains it. The phrase Strategic Hamlet Program when used to represent the program is much broader than the phrase applied to the hamlets themselves.
The program, as explained below, envisioned a process of pacification of which the construction of strategic hamlets was but part of one phase, albeit a very important part. This paper examines the program, not just the hamlets. Population relocation into defended villages was by no means a recent development in Southeast Asia.
Parts of South Vietnam had experience with the physical aspects of fortified communities going back many years. As the intellectual godfather of the Strategic Hamlet Program has put it, the concept's use as one of the measures to defeat communist insurgency ".
The administration of President Diem had relearned these lessons much earlier than late There was, in fact, no need to relearn them because they had never been forgotten. The French had made resettlement and the development of "secure zones" an important element in their effort near the end of the war with the Viet Minh.
The government of newly-created South Vietnam, headed since by President Diem, had continued resettlement schemes to accommodate displaced persons, to control suspected rural populations, and to safeguard loyal peasants in the threatened areas.
None of these efforts involving resettlement had succeeded. Each had inspired antagonism among the peasants who were moved from their ancestral lands and away from family burial plots.
Diem's actions in late were thus inescapably tied to earlier actions by proximity in time, place, and the personal experiences of many peasants. Chief among the earlier programs was that of the so-called Agrovilles or "Rural Community Development Centers," launched in The Agrovilles, groupments of families, were designed to afford the peasantry the social benefits of city life schools and services , to increase their physical security, and to control certain key locations by denying them to the communists.
They were designed to improve simultaneously the security and well-being of their inhabitants and the government's control over the rural population and rural areas. The Agroville program was generally unsuccessful. The peasants had many complaints about it ranging from clumsy, dishonest administration to the physical hardship of being too far from their fields and the psychological wrench of being separated from ancestral homes and burial plots.
By , President Diem had slowed the program in response to peasant complaints and the Viet Cong's ability to exploit this dissatisfaction. The transition from Agrovilles to strategic hamlets in was marked by the so-called "Agro-hamlet" which attempted to meet some of the peasants' objections:. The smaller family Agro-hamlet was located more closely to lands tilled by the occupants. Construction was carried out at a slower pace filled to the peasant's planting and harvesting schedule.
By the end of , the Agro-hamlet had become the prototype of a vast civil defense scheme known as strategic hamlets, Ap Chien Luoc. It was inevitable, given this lineage, that the strategic hamlet program be regarded by the peasants as old wine in newly-labelled bottles.
The successes and failures of the past were bound to condition its acceptance and by late the Diem government was having more failures than successes. By late , if not earlier, it had become clear in both Saigon and Washington that the yellow star of the Viet Cong was in the ascendancy.
Following the North Vietnamese announcement of the twin goals of ousting President Diem and reunifying Vietnam under communist rule, the Viet Cong began sharply to increase its guerrilla, subversive, and political warfare. Viet Cong regular forces, now estimated to have grown to 25,, had been organized into larger formations and employed with increasing frequency.
The terrorist-guerrilla organization had grown to an estimated 17, by November During the first half of , terrorists and guerrillas had assassinated over local officials and civilians, kidnapped more than 1,, and killed almost 1, RVNAF personnel. The VC continued to hold the initiative in the countryside, controlling major portions of the populace and drawing an increasingly tight cinch around Saigon.
The operative question was not whether the Diem government as it was then moving could defeat the insurgents, but whether it could save itself. Much of this deterioration of the situation in RVN was attributable, in U.
The struggle-whether viewed as one to gain loyalty or simply to assert control-was focused in and around the villages and hamlets in the countryside.
It was precisely in those areas that the bilineal GVN organization ARVN and civilian province chiefs most lacked the capability for concerted and cohesive action. The abortive coup of late had made Diem even more reluctant than he had earlier been to permit power especially coercive power to be gathered into one set of hands other than his own. Still, the establishment of an effective military chain of command which could operate where necessary in the countryside remained the prime objective of U.
A unitary chain of command had recently been ordered into effect within ARVN, but this had not solved the operational problems, for military operations were inescapably conducted in areas under the control of an independent political organization with its own military forces and influence on operations of all kinds-military, paramilitary, and civic action.
The province chiefs, personally selected by President Diem and presumably loyal to him, controlled politically the territory in dispute with the VC and within which ARVN must operate. For President Diem's purposes this bilineal organization offered an opportunity to counterbalance the power and coup potential of the generals by the power of the province chiefs.
It was a device for survival. But the natural byproduct of this duality, in terms of the effectiveness of actions against the VC, was poor coordination and imperfect cooperation in intelligence collection and production, in planning, and in operational execution in the countryside, where the battles were fought-both the "battle for men's minds" and the more easily understood battles for control of the hamlets, villages, districts, and provinces.
They were agreed, too, that some measure of physical security must be provided the rural population if this end were to be achieved. Both agreed that the GVN must be the principal agent to carry out the actions which would bring the insurgency to an end. The high level U. A subsidiary and related discussion revolved around the U. The problem of how additional resources in some improved organizational framework were to be applied operationally was fragmented into many sub-issues ranging from securing the border to building social infrastructure.
The story of the Strategic Hamlet Program, as it came to be called, is one in which an operational concept specifying a sequence of concrete steps was introduced by an articulate advocate, nominally accepted by all of the principal actors, and advanced to a position of apparent centrality in which it became the operational blueprint for ending the insurgency.
But it is also the story of an apparent consensus built on differing, sometimes competing, expectations and of an effort which was, in retrospect, doomed by the failure to resolve in one context the problem it was designed to alleviate in another-the problem of GVN stability.
Beginning in May , the U. The Vice President's consultations were designed to reinforce the U. The purpose of this military strategy, Taylor asserted, was apparently not to capture the nation by force.
Rather, in concert with non-military means, it was to produce a political crisis which would topple the government and bring to power a group willing to contemplate the unification of Vietnam on Hanoi's terms. It was in the U. The Diem Government itself had to be reformed in order to permit it to mobilize the nation. Diem had, in Taylor's assessment, allowed two vicious circles to develop which vitiated government effectiveness.
In the first of these circles poor military intelligence led to a defensive stance designed primarily to guard against attacks, which in turn meant that most of the military forces came under the control of the province chiefs whose responsibility it was to protect the populace and installations. This control by province chiefs meant that reserves could not, because of tangled lines of command and control, be moved and controlled quickly enough to be effective.
The effect of high losses in unsuccessful defensive battles served further to dry up the basic sources of intelligence. The second vicious circle stemmed from Diem's instinctive attempts to centralize power in his own hands while fragmenting it beneath him. His excessive mistrust of many intellectuals and younger Vietnamese, individuals badly needed to give his administration vitality, served only to alienate them and led them to stand aside from constructive participation--thereby further increasing Diem's mistrust.
This administrative style fed back, too, into the military equation and through it, created another potentially explosive political-military problem:. The inability to mobilize intelligence effectively for operational purposes directly flows from this fact [Diem's administrative practicel as do the generally poor relations between the Province Chiefs and the military commanders, the former being Diem's reliable agents, the latter a power base he fears.
The consequent frustration of Diem's military commanders--a frustration well-known to Diem and heightened by the November coup-leads him to actions which further complicate his problem; e. General Taylor's recommended actions for the U.
The President's emissary rejected the alternatives of a military takeover which would make the generals dominant in all fields. He rejected, too, the alternative of replacing Diem with a weaker figure who would be willing to delegate authority to both military and civil leaders. The first course would emphasize the solution to only one set of problems while slighting others; the second would permit action, but not coordinated action. In order to move in a coordinated way on the intermingled military, political, economic, and social problems facing South Vietnam, General Taylor recommended that the U.
Thus, Taylor consciously opted for a U. General Taylor did not argue explicitly that success would follow automatically if Diem's practices could he reformed and his operational capabilities upgraded, but he implied this outcome.
The question of an overall strategy to defeat the insurgency came very close to being regarded as a problem in the organization and management of resources. Since GVN had no national plan, efforts were concentrated on inducing them to produce one. There was much less concern about the substance of the non-existent GVN plan. It was almost as though there had to be something to endorse or to criticize before substantive issues could be treated as relevant.
This priority of business is reflected in the U. In late the U. The plan was an attempt to specify roles and relationships within GVN in the counterinsurgency effort, to persuade Diem to abandon his bilineal chain of command in favor of a single command line with integrated effort at all levels within the government, and to create the governmental machinery for coordinated national planning. It was recognized that these recommendations were not palatable to President Diem, but reorganization along the lines specified was regarded as essential to successful accomplishment of the counterinsurgent effort.
It advanced no operational concepts for adoption by GVN. Not only did this plan specify the areas of primary interest for pacification operations--as its title indicates--it also set forth a conceptual outline of the three sequential phases of actions which must be undertaken. In the first, "preparatory phase," the intelligence effort was to be concentrated in the priority target areas, surveys were to be made to pinpoint needed economic and political reforms, plans were to be drawn up, and military and political cadres were to be trained for the specific objective area.
The second, or "military phase," would be devoted to clearing the objective area with regular forces, then handing local security responsibility over to the Civil Guard CG and to establishing GVN presence. In the final, "security phase," the Self Defense Corps SDC would assume the civil action-local security mission, the populace was to be "reoriented," political control was to pass to civilian hands, and economic and social programs were to be initiated to consolidate government control.
Military units would be withdrawn as security was achieved and the target area would be "secured" by the loyalty of its inhabitants--a loyalty attributable to GVN's successful responses to the felt needs of the inhabitants. First priority in this plan operations was to go to six provinces around Saigon and to the Kontum area. Second priority would be given to expansion southward into the Delta and southward in the Central Highlands from Kontum.
Third priority would continue the spread of GVN control in the highlands and shift the emphasis in the south to the provinces north and east of Saigon. Before any of these priority actions were undertaken, however, it was proposed to conduct an ARVN sweep in War Zone D, in the jungles northeast of Saigon, to reduce the danger to the capital and to increase ARVN's self-confidence.
The geographically phased plan complemented the earlier CIP. Together, these two U. It is, of course, arguable that this was the best conceivable blueprint, but it was at least a comprehensive basis for refinement--for arguments for different priorities or a changed "series of events" in the process of pacification.
This is not how matters proceeded, in the event. Ambassador Durbrow, Genera! Diem stoutly resisted the adoption of a single, integrated chain of operational command, showed no enthusiasm for detailed prior planning, continued his practice of centralized decision-making sometimes tantamount to decision pigeonholing , and continued to play off the province chiefs against the generals.
Some aspects of the CIP were accepted, but the basic organizational issues remained unresolved and the strategic approach unresolved by default. The unsuccessful U. The American position was essentially that no operational plan could succeed unless GVN were reorganized to permit effective implementation. It was reorganization that Taylor emphasized, as detailed above. But General Taylor did bring up the need for some coordinated operational plan in his talks with President Diem.
Diem's response is described in a cable to Washington by Ambassador Nolting:. Taylor several times stressed importance of overall plan--military, political, economic, psychological, etc. Diem tended avoid clear response this suggestion but finally indicated that he has a new strategic plan of his own. Since it was not very clear in spite efforts to draw him out what this plan is, Taylor asked him to let us have a copy in writing.
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