NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive
in intelligence collection and production, in planning, and in operational execution in the countryside, where the battles were fought -- both the "battle for men's minds" and the more easily understood battles for control of the hamlets, villages, districts, and provinces.
The U.S. and GVN were agreed that in order to defeat the insurgency it was necessary that the rural populace identify with at least the local representatives of the central government. They were agreed, too, that some measure of physical security must be provided the rural population if this end were to be achieved. Both agreed that the GVN must be the principal agent to carry out the actions which would bring the insurgency to an end.
The high level U.S.-GVN discussions held during President Kennedy's first year in office focused on what the U.S, could provide GVN to assist the latter's counterinsurgency efforts and on what GVN should do organizationally to make its efforts more effective. A subsidiary and related discussion revolved around the U,S. advisory organization to parallel the GVN reorganization. The problem of how additional resources in some improved organizational framework were to be applied operationally was fragmented into many sub-issues ranging from securing the border to building social infrastructure.
The story of the Strategic Hamlet Program, as it came to be called, is one in which an operational concept specifying a sequence of concrete steps was introduced by an articulate advocate, nominally accepted by all of the principal actors, and advanced to a position of apparent centrality in which it became the operational blueprint for ending the insurgency. But it is also the story of an apparent consensus built on differing, sometimes competing, expectations and of an effort which was, in retrospect, doomed by the failure to resolve in one context the problem it was designed to alleviate in another -- the problem of GW stability.
II. THE FORMULATION OF THE STRATEGIC HAMLET PROGRAM
A. U.S.-GVN Consultations
Beginning in May 1961, the U.S. and GVN conducted a series of high level conferences to fashion responses to the insurgent challenge. The first, of these was the visit to Saigon by the Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson. The Vice President's consultations were designed to reinforce the U.S. commitment to RVN and to improve the image of President Diem's government.
In a communique issued jointly in Saigon, it was agreed that the RVNAF was to be increased to 150,000 men, that the U.S. would support the entire Civil Guard with military assistance funds, that Vietnamese and U.S. military specialists would be used to support village-level health and public works activities, and that the two governments would "discuss
