Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
correction of a spirit of insubordination and irresponsibility was not complete, as revealed at low as veil as high (or "coup") levels;103 French cadre had been replaced, but with Vietnamese cadre generally less well-adapted to their role; a self-reliant officer corps was still a vision of the future, as were an independent logistics capability and adequate technical services; and although something had been learned about the problems of semi-military and police forces, not enough had been done to cope with them to provide genuine internal security.
There were, in fact, several views of the roles and missions of the paramilitary forces. The Michigan State University Advisory Group, under contract to USOM, Vietnam to provide counsel and guidance on the development of the Civil Guard (CG), viewed this organisation as a national police, civilian in character and function, lightly but adequately equipped, with sufficient delegated authority and training to enforce all laws, control subversion, and collect intelligence data in areas not covered by municipal police, as well as establishing close ties with the population of the rural areas by fixed basing in the villages within pacified areas.104 Diem envisaged the CG as a large and powerful military organization accountable to him through his appointed province chiefs — a counter to the army in the struggle for power which would also provide provincial security through mobility from posts outside the villages; in line with this view, he transferred the CG from the Ministry of the Interior to the Presidency in 1956. The USMAAG came to view the CG much as Diem did — not, of course, as an anti-coup safeguard, but as a mobile counter subversion force, an adjunct to the army that would relieve it of internal security duty and free it to learn how to counter the threat from the North.105 As of the end of 1956 the CG were being trained at the Quang Trung School to assist the army in case of crisis or of overt attack;106 by late 1957, they were conducting operations with ARVN in unpacified areas.107
The MSU Advisory Group, in a 1956 report,108 outlined the problems that existed with respect to the problems of the several Vietnamese law enforcement agencies, including the CG, and made far-reaching recommendations, some of which were reiterated in the Counterinsurgency Plan of 1960.109 This reiteration supports the hypothesis that few of the KSU recommendations were acted upon effectively in the intervening years.
In July 1957 the GVN requested $60 million worth of heavy equipment for the CG, which had been equipped only with non-U.S. weapons surplus to the army's requirements. MAAG and MSU proposed $14 – 18 million in lighter equipment; in 1958, a compromise was reached, providing for only $14 million but including some of the heavy equipment to be issued over a 4-year period with the understanding that the CG be reorganized into a civilian operation under the Ministry of Interior and along lines proposed by U.S. advisors.110 Little progress was made in changing the Civil Guard, however, in spite of this U.S. leverage; the $14 million in
