Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
THE COUNTERINSURGENCY PLAN
I. WINTER, 1961
The Vietnam Counter-Insurgency Plan which vas being "worked on through most of 1960 finally reached the White House in late January, apparently just after Kennedy took office. We do not have a document showing the exact date, but we know that Kennedy approved the main provisions of the Plan after a meeting on January 28th, and negotiations with Diem began February 13. 1/
The provisions of the CIP tell a good deal about how the Viet Cong threat looked to American and Vietnamese officials, at the beginning of 1961, for there is nothing in the record to suggest that anyone -- either in Saigon or Washington, Vietnamese or American -- judged the CIP to be an inadequate response to the VC threat.
The U.S. offered Diem equipment and supplies to outfit a 20,000 man increase in his army. The cost was estimated at $28.4 million. The U.S. also offered to train, outfit and supply 32,000 men of the Civil Guard (a counterguerrilla auxilliary) at a cost of $12.7 million. These two moves would help Diem expand the RVNAF to a total of 170,000 men, and expand the Civil Guard to a total of 68,000 men. There were some further odds and ends totalling less than another million. The full package added up to less than $42 million, which was a substantial but not enormous increment to on-going U.S. aid to Vietnam of about $220 million a year. (Since most of these costs were for initial outfitting of new forces, the package was mainly a one-time shot in the arm.) 2/
For their part, the Vietnamese were supposed to pay the local currency costs of the new forces, and carry out a number of military and civil reforms.
The key military reforms were to straighten out the chain of command, and to develop an agreed overall plan of operations.
[The chain of command problem was that control of the counter-insurgency effort in the provinces was divided between the local military commander and the Province Chief, a personal appointee of Diem, and reporting directly to Diem. Even at a higher level, 3 regional field commands reported directly to Diem, by-passing the Chief of Staff. So a total of 42 officials with some substantial (and overlapping) control of the war effort reported directly to Diem: 38 Province Chiefs, 3 regional commanders, and the Chief of Staff. The "reform" eventually gotten from Diem put
