Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
concept may have been — and in view of demonstrated Viet Cong and DRV flexibility it is not clear that the concept was completely unsound — it was never successfully implemented. The VNA, gradually transformed into ARVN, was organized and trained along U.S. lines (at least in the view of those doing the training and reporting on their progress97 and by the end of 1958 MAAG was able to state that "The combat posture of the Vietnamese Armed Forces has improved to a marked degree in the past few years. At the end of CY 1958, the Vietnamese Army, compared with other army forces in Southeast Asia, reached a relatively high degree of combat effectiveness...."98 But the Civil Guard and the Self-Defense Corps were never brought to the stage of development at which they might have relieved the army of the internal security mission for which its new-found organization, training, and equipment were rendering it unfit.
As far as can be estimated on the basis of available information, training within Vietnam was conducted in as centralized a fashion as possible. Limited availability of personnel and GVN opposition precluded posting of U.S. advisors to lower than airborne brigade level until 1961, although the need for advisors at lower levels was well recognized.99 Training methods were, as far as can be judged, standard U.S. methods minimally adapted to the Vietnamese context; standard training cycles similar to U.S. programs were employed; extensive use was made of translated U.S. training films and training and field manuals. Extensive training of Vietnamese officers in the U.S. was conducted. Combat and support units, especially logistics units, benefited equally from U.S. methods and procedures. Equipment (including personal gear) reflected U.S. taste in kind, if not in quality. And U.S. organizational preferences became fully realized when, in 1959, the agitation begun by General O'Daniel during the Indochina war had its full flowering in the reorganization of the Vietnamese Army into a General Headquarters, Field Command, six Military Region Headquarters, two Corps Headquarters and Corps Troops, one provisional Corps Headquarters, and seven standard divisions of 10,500 men each. By 1959 these forces were judged capable of maintaining internal security and of providing limited initial resistance to any renewed aggression from the North.100
In spite of all this progress, however, MAAG statements in 1959 reveal that many of the problems and deficiencies found in the VNA of 1954 and noted above were still to be found in the ARVN of 1959:101 although force size had been settled by fiat, it was still a, troublesome problem particularly vis-a-vis the GVN which persisted in its desire for larger forces; force structure was still unclear, particularly with reference to command and control; as the abortive coup of 1960 was to show, high-ranking officers were still politically active;102 plans for an internal security program relied heavily on the virtually nonexistent capabilities of the Civil Guard and Self-Defense Corps;
