NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Second, the proposed priority in the Delta clashed with McGarr's priorities which placed War Zone D first, the area around Saigon second, and the Delta third. There was a lack of unanimity among the U.S. advisors about the relative importance of the War Zone D operation but the military, in particular, were looking for an important operation to help the (hopefully) revitalized ARVN demonstrate its offensive spirit and mobile capabilities. This desire gave rise to the third and fourth objections -- or fears.
The "static security framework" in the villages to which Thompson referred struck General McGarr as an unwarranted downgrading of the need for a sizeable conventional military force to play an important role in pacification. Thompson's stated desire to emphasize police forces in lieu of regular military forces was regarded by the U.S. military advisory chief as unrealistic -- a transferral of Malayan experience to a locale in which the existing tools of policy were very different.
Related to this objection was a final set of disagreements. Thompson had wanted to go slowly and to let a new GVN organization grow from the effort. The U.S. military advisory chief also wanted to go slowly -- but not that slowly. Not only would the Viet Cong not wait, it was simply unsound policy not to use the tools at hand. It would not do to reduce the ARVN and increase police forces while the VC continued thier successes. It was necessary, in sum, to act in a limited area but to act quickly. Thompson's recommendations did not look to quick action, emphasized the wrong area, were designed to emphasize the wrong operational agency, and proposed unacceptable command lines. 42/
It is important to note that in spite of these explicit disagreements there were broad areas of apparent agreement between Thompson and his U.S. counterparts. (Apparent, because the "areas of agreement" concealed differences, too.) The U.S. MAAG was amenable to the development of strategic hamlets, General McGarr claimed. 43/ Indeed, MAAG's long, diffuse doctrinal "handbook" for advisors in the field did devote three pages -- without any particular emphasis -- to the "secure village concept." 44/ MAAG did not stress the centrality of strategic hamlets per se, but neither did Thompson. Strategic hamlets were to Thompson a way station enroute to his real objective -- winning the loyalty of the rural peasants. This was apparently compatible with the sequential steps to pacitication outlined in MAAG's own Geographically Phased Counterinsurgency Plan. If the competing approaches of the U.S. and British advisors had not been made compatible, there was, at least, some agreed ground from which to launch the effort to make them compatible.
B. Reactions in Washington
That such ground existed was fortunate, for Thompson's evolutionary plan was not only finding a warm reception at the Presidential Palace, it was also winning an attentive ear in Washington. As already mentioned, Thompson talked with General Taylor during the latter's October 1961 mission to Saigon and provided Taylor a copy of the initial British "appreciation."
