Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
amount that required for replacement, and that, rather, the DRV steadily modernized and expanded its forces during the decade after Geneva.85 In the first six months after the truce alone, U.S. intelligence reported that PAVN introduced from China, concealing the movements from the ICC, more than 150 pieces of field and anti-aircraft artillery, 500 mortars, 9,000 automatic weapons, 500 recoilless rifles, 400 military vehicles, and substantial amounts of ammunition.86 Thereafter, the U.S. was convinced that regular infusions of modern equipment from the CPR and the Soviet Union supported extensive reorganization and growth of DRV armed forces.
| PAVN | Navy | AF | Provincial Forces | Armed Public Security Force | Armed Militia | Total | |
| 1954 | 144 | N.A. | N.A. | 77 | N.A. | N.A. | 221 |
| 1955 | 173 | N.A. | N.A. | 72 | N.A. | 75 | 320 |
| 1959 | 270 | 1.6 | 0.3 | 35.5 | 15 | 100 | 422 |
| 1963 | 240 | 2.5 | 0.5 | -- | 15 | 200 | 458 |
According to U.S. estimates, the period 1954–1956 was devoted to regrouping and reorganizing. New divisions were formed, incorporating Viet Minh from South Vietnam regrouped to the North per the Geneva Agreements. Overage and unfit personnel were weeded out, and intensive political indoctrination begun. Divisions were deployed into the countryside, with the new southern formations concentrated in areas of civil unrest.88 In 1957 and 1958 improvements in organization and control were inaugurated, PAVN taking on the structure and trappings of a Bloc-style professional army, with regularized pay scales, insignia, rank, and the like. During 1958 and 1959, to meet goals for manning collective farms, some divisions were reduced in personnel and converted to brigades. Conscription was introduced, the Armed Public Security Forces—frontier and internal security troops—formed, and the air and naval forces elevated in status. In 1960 and 1961 additional divisions were reduced to brigades, but since diversions to agriculture diminished, this was presumably to provide smaller, more manageable formations for the infiltration then underway into Laos, and in prospect for South Vietnam. In sum, with Bloc aid, the DRV more than doubled its effective infantry divisions from 6 in 1954 to 14 by 1962. U.S. intelligence credited the PAVN in 1954 with the capability, by concentrating all its resources on a single objective, of mounting an attack of limited duration using three divisions supported by direct artillery fire. By 1961, the U.S. rated the North Vietnam Army (NVA) as capable of a five division offensive backed by substantially greater logistic and combat support, including indirect artillery fires.89 The U.S. did not know
