Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
- Rational direction of manpower was not proposed by American advisors and would have lain beyond the capacity for organization of the RVN Government; all young professional graduates were enlisted into the army, which then controlled most of the manpower to do the jobs and had to be allowed to make good the civilian shortcomings engendered by conscription.124
This insatiable requirement for the "best" men to build up the officer corps was in part a reflection of the requirements of the South Vietnamese social structure; in any event, it was much closer to the conventional U.S. view of an officer corps than to the view of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, and reflected the view that well-schooled men are required to manage complex modern armies
6. The equipment provided the Vietnamese regular forces was more suited to countering aggression from the North than to preserving internal security in the South. While ARVN were not equipped as heavily as those of the U.S.—they had no tracked vehicles (tanks or personnel carriers), fewer trucks, and generally lighter weapons—727 trucks, 660 trailers—to make them mechanized and road-bound. Armor was provided, but was not organic to the standard division.
- ...U.S. military aid was programmed in more or less the same fashion as for countries like Turkey and Korea, where guerrillas were not a threat. The Vietnamese armed forces not only were equipped with tanks, planes, artillery and similar hardware that was relatively little value against guerrrillas as the French had discovered so painfully and the Pentagon apparently had not noticed. They were also trained to depend on that kind of big bang support in battle, reducing both their capability and their psychological willingness to get out and fight the guerrillas the only way that works: with rifles, close in.125
7. That the training of the Vietnamese armed forces was conducted along U.S. lines has been documented above. Between 1950 and 1959:
- (1) 3,296 Vietnamese military personnel had received training in military facilities in the United States, while 747 had been trained in other Free World military schools.126
- (2) Training films, manuals and lesson plans were those used by the U.S. military adapted to Vietnamese culture and environment.127
- (3) The U.S. was particularly proud of its accomplishments in the training of armed forces in Korea, where a large conventionally organized force had proven itself in the combat recently experienced there.128
