divisions in favor of six new light infantry divisions, which were similar to American divisions and no longer regionally oriented. Another field division was also added, bringing the total number to ten (six light and four field). By 1959, the light divisions had been further transformed into standard heavier infantry divisions, and the field divisions had become armored cavalry regiments.
Meanwhile, the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam continued to grow. Civil authorities were increasingly overwhelmed, and the ARVN was more and more called upon to assist in counterinsurgency. MAAG's mission, once simply to design and train the ARVN, now included recommending a strategy for employing those forces against the insurgents.
In 1960, Lieutenant General Lionel C. McGarr assumed command of MAAG. Faced with the formal establishment of the National Liberation Front that year, and the activation of the Peoples' Liberation Armed Forces, McGarr and MAAG began to develop a counterinsurgency plan for 1961. The plan focused primarily on offensive operations designed to destroy guerrilla forces in the field. The objective was to 'find, fix, and destroy the enemy.' This was even before President Kennedy blessed other, more unconventional approaches to counterinsurgency.
In spite of the growing involvement of MAAG and the ARVN in counterinsurgency operations, the guerrillas continued to gain strength, and Viet Cong infrastructures and control increased rapidly, especially in rural areas where the government had little presence or influence.
In response to the worsening situation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to upgrade MAAG. In November 1961, they proposed the creation of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, and on February 8, 1962, MACV was activated under the command of General Paul Harkins.[12] MACV's mission was the same as its predecessor's: to 'assist the government of South Vietnam in defeating the Communist insurgency'; and it took the same operational approach: to destroy the enemy's field forces through large-scale operations. MACV doctrine and tactics were also conventional: making extensive use of helicopters and air mobile operations to attempt to surprise and 'fix' guerrillas.
The MACV approach was not totally conventional, however. During that time MACV also attempted a pacification program (a kind of heavy-handed civil affairs operation), and in January 1962, the 'Strategic Hamlet Program' was initiated. This program grew out of two distinct plans: The first had been proposed by MAAG before the activation of MACV; the other (the one preferred by the regime of South Vietnam's President Diem) had been proposed by the British Advisory Team, headed by counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson.
At that time, the insurgency had been building for approximately six years, and the six provinces near Saigon had become Viet Cong strongholds with well-established infrastructures — an obvious threat to the capital. In MAAG's view, the government had little choice but to start clearing the areas closest to home. Thus, the MAAG plan would begin with the pacification of the six provinces closest to Saigon.
MAAG's target date for the pacification of these provinces, as well as Kontum Province (approximately twenty miles to the north), was the end of 1961. Once that was accomplished, the priority would shift to the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands; the rest of the country would follow. The target date for the pacification of the entire country was the end of 1964.
The plan proposed by Thompson and the British was based on the successful British counterinsurgency in Malaya and was focused on the implementation of strict security measures by the civil guard and the self-defense corps. They proposed to launch it initially in an area of weak VC activity, not the insurgent strongholds in the provinces surrounding Saigon, and with the ARVN playing a supporting rather than a leading role.
The final result, the Strategic Hamlet Program, was a compromise between the two plans. It consisted of three phases:
In the first phase, intelligence would be gathered concerning the area targeted for pacification, and the political cadre expected to administer the area would be trained. The second phase called for large-scale ARVN sweep operations in the target areas, aimed at driving out Viet Cong guerrillas. In phase three, the ARVN would hand over control of the areas to the civil guard and the self-defense corps, who would establish permanent security. At the same time, much of the local population would be forcibly resettled in fortified villages, where they could be presumed to be safe from attack.
MACV hoped that all this would somehow win over the hearts and minds of large numbers of rural Vietnamese.
On March 19, 1962, the Strategic Hamlet Program began with an ARVN sweep, code-named 'Sunrise,' through Binh Doung province north of Saigon. The operation was not a rousing success. The area of the sweep was close to Viet Cong support bases and heavily infested with VC. That wasn't a problem for the ARVN troops, but it turned out to be very difficult for the civil forces whose mission was to follow up and root out the VC infrastructure. After the ARVN forces conducted the sweep, the troops left, but the sweep operation had neither destroyed nor neutralized the existing VC infrastructure. This job was left to the civil forces, who simply could not do it.
Meanwhile, the local peasants were taken from their homes and the land they farmed for a living and forced into tin huts in euphemistically named 'strategic hamlets,' that were in reality refugee camps. The population resettlement left these people feeling more alienated from the regime, rather than less.
Despite complaints from U.S. advisers, not only were these failures repeated as the program grew, but no serious attempts were made to fix them. MACV's focus was on military operations to destroy the guerrilla forces, not on long-term pacification, the program's supposed purpose. Thus the Strategic Hamlet Program never had a unified command structure; and MACV, always primarily interested in the military sweep operations, continued to provide little support to the civil guard or the self-defense forces, whose mission was long-term security.
The South Vietnamese government, meanwhile, blatantly falsified reports: Less than a month into the program, for example, the government claimed more than 1,300 operational fortified hamlets; six months later, the number was 2,500; and when Diem was assassinated in November 1963, less than two years into the program, the total number of hamlets reported was more than 8,000. Most of these were fortified on paper only.
MACV made no serious attempt either to challenge the Vietnamese assertions or to correct the situation on the ground.
THE CIA AND ARMY SPECIAL FORCES
The Strategic Hamlet Program was not the only attempt at pacification. In late 1961, Army Special Forces began to implement the CIA-conceived Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) Program, whose goal was to deny the VC access to food, supplies, recruits, and intelligence in the Central Highlands of Vietnam — and, it was hoped, to block or at least severely hinder NVA access into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Highlands were inhabited primarily by an assortment of minority groups and primitive tribes going under the collective name of Montagnards — Mountain People (the name was supplied by the French) — though other minority groups and tribes lived in other out-of-the-way parts of the country, having long ago been driven out of the more fertile lowland plains by the Vietnamese (many of these other groups also participated in the CIDG). As in Laos with the Meo and the Kha, the Montagnards and other such groups were held in contempt by the Vietnamese, who thought of them as savages. The Vietnamese government was never enthusiastic about turning Montagnards into a counterinsurgency force, since such a force might casily turn against
Because of these tensions, the CIDG program was at first run solely by Americans — specifically the CIA and Special Forces — and was only loosely connected to the Strategic Hamlet Program. Although the program was conceived and funded by the CIA, the task of designing a specific strategy and implementing it fell to Special Forces. In November 1961, two Special Forces A-Detachments were deployed from the 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa to begin the program.
The strategy developed by the SF, called the Village Defense Program, was simple and defensive in nature:
The A-Detachments would locate themselves in an area, win the trust of the people and local villages, and begin to prepare simple defenses. They would meanwhile recruit and train men from local villages with the aim of forming a small paramilitary 'strike force' designed and trained to provide the villages with a full-time security force. They would provide reinforcements to villages under attack, patrol between villages, and set ambushes for the
