NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
was recognized that these recommendations were not palatable to President Diem, but reorganization along the lines specified was regarded as essential to successful accomplishment of the counterinsurgent effort. 26/
The CIP was an indictment of GVN failure to organize effectively and to produce coordinated national plans. 27/ It advanced no operational concepts for adoption by GVN. This obvious omission was corrected in the "Geographically Phased National Level Operation Plan for Counterinsurgency" which MAAG Vietnam published on 15 September 1961. 28/ Not only did this plan specify the areas of primary interest for pacification operations -- as its title indicates -- it also set forth a conceptual outline of the three sequential phases of actions which must be undertaken. In the first, "preparatory phase," the intelligence effort was to be concentrated in the priority target areas, surveys were to be made to pinpoint needed economic and political reforms, plans were to be drawn up, and military and political cadres were to be trained for the specific objective area. 29/ The second, or "military phase," would be devoted to clearing the objective area with regular forces, then handing local security responsibility over to the Civil Guard (CG) and to establishing GVN presence. 30/ In the final, "security phase," the Self Defense Corps (SDC) would assume the civil action-local security mission, the populace was to be "reoriented," political control was to pass to civilian hands, and economic and social programs were to be initiated to consolidate government control. Military units would be withdrawn as security was achieved and the target area would be "secured" by the loyalty of its inhabitants -- a loyalty attributable to GVN's successful responses to the felt needs of the inhabitants. 31/
First priority in this plan (1962 operations) was to go to six provinces around Saigon and to the Kontum area. Second priority (1963) would be given to expansion southward into the Delta and southward in the Central Highlands from Kontum. Third priority (1964) would continue the spread of GVN control in the highlands and shift the emphasis in the south to the provinces north and east of Saigon. Before any of these priority actions were undertaken, however, it was proposed to conduct an ARVN sweep in War Zone D, in the jungles northeast of Saigon, to reduce the danger to the capital and to increase ARVN's self-confidence. 32/ (See Map 1.)
The geographically phased plan complemented the earlier CIP. Together, these two U.S. efforts constituted an outline blueprint for action. It is, of course, arguable that this was the best conceivable blueprint, but it was at least a comprehensive basis for refinement -- for arguments for different priorities or a changed "series of events" in the process of pacification.
D. Initial Vietnamese Reactions
This is not how matters proceeded, in the event. Ambassador Durbrow, General McGarr, and others urged acceptance of the CIP upon President Diem, but with only partial success. 33/ Diem stoutly resisted the adoption of a single, integrated chain of operational command, showed no enthusiasm for detailed prior planning, continued his practice of centralized decision-marking (sometimes tantamount to decision piegonholing),
