Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
- — What was the threat to South Vietnam?
- — What was the mission of the South Vietnamese army?
- — What was the state of the South Vietnamese army?
- — How did the U.S. go about altering this condition?
- — Did U.S. assistance through 1960 result in creation of South Vietnamese army in the image of the U.S. army?
The principal conclusion is that U.S. efforts in the period 1954–1959 failed to produce an effective Vietnamese counterinsurgent force due to contemporary perceptions of and reactions to the threat, to exaggerated estimates of the value and relevance of American military standards in responding to that threat, to lack of effective bargaining techniques vis-a-vis the Government of Vietnam, and to fragmentation and other inadequacies in the American system of determining and administering the overall program of assistance to Vietnam.
U.S. efforts in the period 1954–1960 to create an effective South Vietnamese military establishment — and particularly an effective National Army — were critically affected by the following considerations:
- — The reasons the U.S. undertook the training of the Vietnamese armed forces had their roots not only in the desire to contain communism and preserve the freedom of South Vietnam, but also in U.S. discontent and frustration with French military policy during the Indochina War. A strong desire to correct French mistakes generated considerable bureaucratic momentum; preoccupation with the perceived inadequacies of French practices led to underestimation of the problems the French had to overcome — including that of internal division and governmental reluctance — in developing an effective Vietnamese army, and to overcorrection of French mistakes by the creation of a conventional military force. That Vietnamese army came to be organized in divisions — as the U.S. had so often and so unsuccessfully urged the French to do — that would have the capability to perform well against the Viet Minh divisions in the Red River Delta in 1954, or presumably against their post–1954 equivalent, communist divisions crossing the 17th parallel. But the French Indochina War was over; circumstances had radically changed.
- — The decision to train the South Vietnamese military was based on a compromise between the Departments of State and Defense in which "political considerations" which had nothing to do with the military objections to an affirmative decision,
