NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET - Sensitive
operations. Making a distinction between border operations already arranged for (Recommendation 11) and those intended by Recommendat 12, they advocated incorporating in the second-stage scenario rotatory operations and overt military pressures against North Vietnam They also urged including border control operations of battalion-s or larger, low-level reconnaissance by U.S. aircraft, and VIAF air operations in Laos that include strikes on bridges and armed route reconnaissance. In justifying such actions, they stated;
"...Military operations against the DR to help stabilize the situation in the Republic of Vietnam, and other operations planned to help stabilize the situation in Laos, involve the attack of the same target systems and to a considerable extent the same targets. Assistance in the achievement of the objective in the Republic of Vietnam through operations against NN could likewise have a similar result in Laos, offering the possibility of favorable long-term solution to the insurgency problen in Southeast Asia."[66]
However, the deliberate, cautious approach continued to hold sway.
Secretary McNamara's trip to Saigon, called for early in the second-stage scenario as a means to obtain General Khanh's agreement to initiate overt operations against the North, did not include this purpose. On the contrary, a week prior to the visit Ceneral Khanh had raised with Ambassador Lodge the Issue of putting his country on a fully mobilized war footing -- accompanying it with a declaration that further interference by Hanoi in South Vietnamese affairs would bring reprisals - and Secretary McNamara was instructed to impress upon Khanh that such drastic measures and threatening gestures were unnecessary at the moment. [67] More important, It was stressed that the GVN "systematically and aggressively demonstrate to the world that the subversion of the South is directed from Hanoi," through sending "capable ambassadors to the important capitals of the world to convince governments of this fact." Moreover, while assuring General Khanh that our commitment to his country and Laos "does not rule out the use of force ...against North Vietnam," the Secretary was advised to remind him that "such actions must be supplementary to and not a substitute for successful counterinsurgency in the South" -- and that "we do not intend to provide military support nor undertake the military objective of 'rolling back' communist control in North Vietnam." [68]
