CHAPTER 7

Pacification 1970: Plans, Organization, and Problems

Pacification; The Nationwide Perspective-The 1970 GVN Pacification and Development Plan Pacification Plans and Organization in Military Region I-Pacification Situation in Quang Nam, Early 1970

Pacification; The Nationwide Perspective

In 1957, a French officer, summing up the lessons of his country's defeat in Indochina, wrote of warfare against guerrillas:

The destruction of rebel forces is not an end in itself: we know that as long as the enemy's infrastructure remains in place, he is able to maintain his control over the people and can replenish his decimated forces. Military operations are therefore only worthwhile insofar as they facilitate win­ning the people and contribute to the dismantling of the revolutionary politico-military organization . . . .'

This lesson, which the French had learned painfully in the 1950s, the Americans and their South Viet­namese allies had relearned, equally painfully, in the 1960s. By early 1970, 'pacification,' long a major con­cern of the Marines in Vietnam, had become the center of country-wide allied strategy. In theory and to an increasing extent in practice, all allied military opera­tions, from battalion-size sweeps of enemy base areas to squad ambushes on the outskirts of hamlets, were conducted in support of pacification. Increasingly, too, allied forces engaged in a variety of paramilitary and nonmilitary pacification activities.

Definitions of 'pacification' varied with time and with the agency using the word. The III MAP/ICTZ Combined Campaign Plan for 1970 defined pacifica­tion as:

The military, political, economic, and social process of es­tablishing or re-establishing local government responsive to and involving the participation of the people. It includes the provision of sustained, credible territorial security, the destruction of the enemy's underground government, the assertion or re-assertion of political control and involvement of the people in government, and the initiation of econom­ic and social activity capable of self-sustenance and expan­sion . . . 2

After years of confusion about goals and policies, resulting m divided authority and fragmented ad­ministration, the Americans and South Vietnamese had developed and were implementing a com­prehensive pacification strategy. This strategy involv­ed, first, the use of regular military units to clear the NVA and VC main forces and most of the guerrillas from the populated rural areas. The regular forces then were to keep the enemy out by a combination of small-unit patrolling, ambushing, and larger sweeps of base areas. Within the screen thus established, Regional and Popular Forces and paramilitary forces and civilian agencies of the Republic of Vietnam would attempt to destroy the enemy political organization among the people, reestablish government control in each village and hamlet, and, it was hoped, win the allegiance of the people through economic and social im­provements.

In the GVN's Accelerated Pacification Campaign, proclaimed in October 1968 by President Nguyen Van Thieu, the allies broke down these general concepts of pacification into specific tasks and assigned respon­sibility for each task to particular civil or military agen­cies. The plan set goals to be met for each task at national, corps, and province levels. Expanding upon the 1968 plan, the GVN Pacification and Development Plan for 1969 continued and refined the definition of tasks and assignment of goals and provided the frame­work for a nationwide effort.

By early 1970, both the United States and South Vietnam had achieved substantial central control over the many civilian and military agencies involved in pacification. For the Americans, the U.S. Civil Oper­ations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), formed in mid-1967, combined most of the personnel engaged in pacification and in advising GVN nonmilitary agencies into one chain of command under MACV. The CORDS organization paralleled the military and political structure of the South Viet­namese Government, with a deputy for CORDS un­der each U.S. corps area commander and lower-ranking CORDS deputies at province and district headquart­ers. In Saigon, the national head of CORDS in 1970, Ambassador William Colby, was a member of General Abrams's staff. On the South Vietnamese side, a Cen­tral Pacification and Development Council (CPDC)* chaired by the Prime Minister and including represen-

* The CPDC was defined in the 1970 Combined Campaign Plan as the 'ministerial council at the cabinet level responsible for plan­ning, coordinating and executing the national Pacification and De­velopment Program.'