Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET - Sensitive
It is the purpose of this study to reconstruct the immediate circumstances that led up to the U.S. reprisal decision of February 1965, to retrace the changes in rationale that progressively transformed the reprisal concept into a sustained graduated bombing effort, and to chronicle the relationship between that effort and the military-political moves to shore up Saigon and the military-diplomatic signals to dissuade Hanoi, during the crucial early months of February through May of 1965.
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Background to Pleiku. The growing realization, throughout 1964, that the final consolidation of VC power in South Vietnam was a distinct possibility, had led to a protracted US policy reassessment and a determined search for forceful military alternatives in the Worth that might help salvage the deteriorating situation in the South. The proposed program of graduated military pressures against North Vietnam that emerged from this reassessment in late 1964 had three major objectives: (1) to signal to the Communist enemy the firmness of U.S. resolve, (2) to boost the sagging morale of the GVN in the South, and (3) to impose increased costs and strains upon the DRV in the North. Underlying the rationale of the program was the hope that it might restore some equilibrium to the balance of forces, hopefully increasing the moment of US/GVN bargaining leverage sufficiently to permit an approach to a negotiated solution on something other than surrender terms.
Throughout the planning process, (and even after the initiation of the program) the President's principal advisors differed widely in their views as to the intensity of the bombing effort that would be desirable or required, and as to its likely effectiveness in influencing Hanoi's will to continue its aggression. The JCS, for example, consistently argued that only a most dramatic and forceful application of military power would exert significant pressure on North Vietnam, but firmly believed that such application could and would affect the enemy's will. Most civilian officials in State, OSD, and the White House, on the other hand, tended to favor a more gradual, restrained approach, "progressively mounting in scope and intensity," in which the prospect of greater pressure to come was at least as important as any damage actually inflicted. But these officials also tended, for the most part, to have much less confidence that such pressures would have much impact on Hanoi's course, making such equivocal assessments as:- "on balance we believe that such action would have some faint hope of really improving the Vietnamese situation."
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