Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET - Sensitive
of target emphasis occurred, stressing interdiction of the DRV's lines of communication (LOC's) -- the visible manifestations of North Vietnamese aggression. The JCS had called the SecDef's attention to this infiltration target complex as early as mid-February, and an integrated counter-infiltration attack plan against LOC targets south of the 20th parallel began to be developed by CINCPAC, culminating at the end of March in the submission of the JCS 12-week bombing program. This program was built around the "LOC-cut" concept developed by the Pacific Command and was strongly endorsed by General Westmoreland and Ambassador Taylor. The JCS recommended that only the first phase (third through fifth weeks) of the 12-week program be adopted, as they had not reached agreement on the later phases. The JCS submission, however, was not accepted as a program, although it strongly influenced the new interdiction-oriented focus of the attacks that were to follow. But neither the SecDef nor the President was willing to approve a multi-week program in advance. They preferred to retain continual personal control over attack concepts and individual target selection and to communicate their decisions through weekly guidance provided by the SecDef's ROLLING THUNDER planning messages.
April 1 Reassessment. By the end of March, in Saigon's view, the situation in South Vietnam appeared to have rebounded somewhat. Morale seemed to have been boosted, at least temporarily, by the air strikes, and Vietnamese forces had not recently suffered any major defeats. Washington, on the other hand, continued to regard the situation as "bad and deteriorating," and could see no signs of "give" on the part of Hanoi. None of the several diplomatic initiatives that had been launched looked promising, and VC terrorism continued unabated, with the March 29 bombing of the US embassy in Saigon being by far the boldest provocation.
Ambassador Taylor returned to Washington to participate in a Presidential policy review on April 1 and 2, in which a wide range of possible military and non-military actions in South and North Vietnam were examined. The discussions, however, did not deal principally with the air war, but focused mainly on the prospect of major deployments of US and Third Country combat forces to South Vietnam. As a result of the discussions, the far-reaching decision was made, at least conceptually, to permit US troops to engage in offensive ground operations against Asian insurgents. With respect to future air pressures policy, the actions adopted amounted to little more than a continuation of "roughly the present slowly ascending tempo of ROLLING THUNDER operations," directed mainly at the LOC targets that were then beginning to be struck. The Director of Central Intelligence John McCone demurred, arguing that a change in the US ground force role in the South also demanded comparably more forceful action against the North. He felt that the ground force decision was correct only "if our air strikes against the North are sufficiently heavy and damaging really to hurt the North Vietnamese."
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