At the core of the SHP was the assumption that the real fight for South Vietnam was between the Communists and the South Vietnamese people, not between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese government. When President Diem wholeheartedly adopted the SHP, the message communicated to the Americans, both directly and indirectly, was that he rejected their counterinsurgency plan, which was based on immediate democratic reforms of his government and conventional warfare by Vietnamese and American forces controlled by the U.S. military.1
Their understanding of where the true fight was taking place led Robert Thompson and Ngo Dinh Nhu to slightly different conclusions about strategic hamlet security. Based on Thompson’s previous Malaya experience, he thought armed forces should surround the fledgling community to protect it from attacks by the enemy and to sever any links between the inhabitants and the Viet Cong.2 Nhu, with the help of William Colby, argued that the protection of the hamlet should begin with the inhabitants. Taking responsibility for their own defence, he reasoned, would both flow from and help to strengthen the political core of the community.3
Ngo Dinh Nhu led the implementation of SHP.4 To inaugurate the program, he formed committees, which held lectures and discussions, to organise the leadership of the strategic hamlets.5 Nhu also established three initial goals for the program. First, the GVN would link the peasants in the strategic hamlets into a communications network while also providing them with local defence units that could fight off insurgent raids. These local defence units would establish an emergency reserve that could rapidly deploy to meet immediate security needs. Second, the program would motivate the inhabitants to unite and to involve themselves in the political affairs of the community. Third and most important, the program was to improve the living standards of the rural Vietnamese.6With these goals Nhu was attempting to create a comprehensive political and economic alternative to the Viet Cong and thereby prevent them from establishing themselves as the legitimate authority in the countryside.
Contrary to the reports in the New York Times, Nhu was not a disembodied intellect brooding in his study in Saigon.7 Rufus Phillips, a CIA operative subordinate to William Colby, said Nhu had been uncertain about his ideas until he was able to visit the hamlets and to see for himself whether the SHP was working. These trips convinced Nhu that the program was sound.8 He explained to Phillips that the strategic hamlets could defeat the Communists while assisting the rural Vietnamese people in the improvement of their way of life.
Nhu told Phillips that he envisioned a gradual blossoming of democratic institutions in the countryside through the SHP, which based local governance on free elections of hamlet chiefs and hamlet councils. As the people in the hamlets practiced self-government and experienced its positive results, Nhu explained, democracy would develop organically throughout the rural areas. Democratic reforms imposed by Saigon, under pressure from the Americans, Nhu had observed, had brought only political chaos, which the Communists had exploited, causing the need for more dictatorial powers to be exercised by the central authority. Thus, Nhu concluded that the SHP was a better way to introduce democracy.9
Nhu realised that the Vietnamese adoption of democracy would be a gradual process. When he visited the settlements, he investigated how their local elections were held. He explained to the villagers that election by a show of hands was not good enough because it made voters vulnerable to intimidation. Hamlet governments elected by this means could be considered only provisional, he told them, and would need to be replaced or endorsed by elections with secret ballot voting. Nhu instructed GVN workers in the strategic hamlets not to tell the people whom they should vote for.10
Nhu also told Phillips that Viet Cong should be allowed to surrender and to rejoin their communities. This tactic was in keeping with the British experience in Malaya, where Communist guerrillas had been successfully encouraged to switch sides. Nhu and Deim hoped to minimise the killing of insurgents by winning over as many as possible, and this concept was later developed into the Open Arms Program, or Chieu Hoi.11 This avoidance of bloodshed whenever possible sprang from the Ngo Dinh brothers’ Catholic faith.
William Colby, who had more influence over the direction of the SHP than any other American,12 discerned that Nhu had embarked on a program that had real potential for stopping and reversing Communist political advances in the countryside. Thus, he directed that all CIA special projects be incorporated into, and in some cases subordinated to, Nhu’s revolutionary program.13 According to Colby’s account, he was not the only influential American to get behind Nhu’s SHP: also supportive was Ambassador Nolting, who directed that the entire U.S. mission in South Vietnam assist the GVN in this effort.14
Ambassador Nolting defended the SHP on a number of occasions and in his telegrams to DOS. He argued that the American Task Force on Counterinsurgency had the means to fund the strategic hamlets while at the same time fulfilling U.S. priorities. In January 1962, the task force drew up a geographically phased approach to counterinsurgency efforts, which placed emphasis on defending the environs of Saigon—War Zone D, as requested by MAAG, before defending the Mekong River Delta Zone outlined by Thompson.15 Nolting informed Washington that the GVN was committed to implementing the SHP on a nationwide basis. He emphasised that, while there might be some local failures in such a massive program, the experts in Vietnam held that there was no substantial risk that the program would prove fatal to the GVN.
There were indeed some local failures, as noted by Colby. Some of these were caused by corrupt GVN officials, who claimed that hamlets were being fortified when the reality was otherwise, cheated on the figures, or even abused some of the peasants. The reason Colby knew of such instances was that Diem sent out inspectors to report any corruption so that it could be rectified. Diem’s attitude was that missteps were bound to happen during the implementation of a huge program and that they could be fixed along the way. As Colby said, in answer to Diem’s critics, “The fact that you get these reports doesn’t mean that the program is no good.” Only if nothing is done about such reports is the program bad.
Not every U.S. official was as sanguine about the program as Nolting and Colby. Averell Harriman, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, “was dubious about what he heard from the American embassy because he considered Ambassador Frederick Nolting too close to Diem”.16 Secretary Harriman had heard that the SHP was a mess, that “the enclaves had not been located in a manner to create an expanding secure zone. Instead, they had been set up at breakneck speed across the country, many of them no more secure than the old villages whose inhabitants had been uprooted and driven into hamlets as virtual prisoners.”17 Harriman seemed to have purchased the criticism of the SHP found in the American press, which reported that the program was spreading itself too thin and leading to the mistreatment of the Vietnamese peasants. In particular, New York Times reporter David Halberstam and Associated Press reporter Neil Sheehan wrote negative articles about Diem’s SHP and Nolting’s support of it.18 Regardless of his sources, Secretary Harriman pressed Ambassador Nolting for quicker and better results.19 Thompson, who was involved in implementing the program, gave a different report from that given by the media and DOS. He noted that contrary to reports of massive and abusive relocations of peasants, “It was not the intention that any householder should be relocated more than a reasonable distance from his land, i.e., up to a maximum of three miles. Only in the remaining 5 per cent was it likely to be necessary to move all houses entirely to a new site, a measure that would entail loss of existing land.”20 Moreover, he added,
It may come as a surprise to learn that, both in Vietnam and in Malaya, there were many occasions when large numbers of the population asked to be moved and did so voluntarily without any pressure being brought to bear on them. In fact it can be said that, throughout, the Vietnamese peasant understood perfectly well the whole purpose in the programme, and was prepared to play his part in carrying it out even to the extent of devoting full-time labour for the construction work involved.21
One of the sources of disagreement between Thompson and the Kennedy administration was the way they perceived the kind of war they were fighting and the role of the SHP in the overall strategy. Thompson and the British Advisory Mission viewed the strategic hamlets as a means to deprive the Communists of political legitimacy. The British recognised that armies, by their very nature, tend to lend a certain amount of political legitimacy to their opponents. Proper police forces, on the other hand, maintain an air of law and order and cast a mantle of criminality upon their opponents. After all, policemen arrest and jail criminals—they do not necessarily want to slay them as enemies on a battlefield or put them in prisoner-of-war camps, where they no longer enjoy the rights of citizens. This observation seemed to be missed by the Americans in their search for greater efficacy in the war effort (which almost always translated into more haste).
In Thompson’s November 1961 report to President Diem about the plan for pacifying the Mekong Delta, of which SHP was a part, he called for the development of a National Police force.22 Because the purpose of the overall pacification plan was to create an attractive and constructive alternative to Communist rule in the countryside, the government’s focus needed to be on development of the rural areas. “To do so would require extensive and stringent security measures, to be sure, but these measures required primarily police rather than regular military forces. The police could establish a close rapport with the populace; the army could not. The army should have the mission to keep the VC off balance by mobile action in order to prevent insurgent attacks on the limited areas in which GVN would concentrate its initial pacification efforts.”23
In his overall aims for the police, Thompson said their goal was to win over the people, not to kill Communists. He noted: “If the main emphasis is placed merely on killing terrorists there is a grave risk that more Communists will be created than are killed. Winning the people must, therefore, be kept in the forefront of the minds of every single person, whether military or civilian, who is engaged in anti-terrorist operations.”24 Thompson stated that staying focused on winning the people would produce the following results:
1. Extended protection of the rural population
2. Increased mobility of security forces, particularly the ARVN
3. Greater flexibility in the use of forces within the whole area where insurgents were operating
4. Improvement in the economy of force as a result of increased mobility and flexibility and better communications
5. Increased confidence of the people toward their government, and improved morale of the security forces
6. Better intelligence about Communist insurgents and their organisation due to the people’s increased confidence in their government
7. More kills of the hard-line Communist cadres as a result of better intelligence
According to Thompson’s argument, if these results were achieved, then “protection, confidence, intelligence and kills should become a constantly expanding circuit” that would end with the effective destruction of the Communist insurgent infrastructure and its ability to wage any kind of war.25 While the military certainly had a role to play in Thompson’s plan, it was not the dominant force in his counterinsurgency proposal. Needless to say, Thompson’s vision clashed with that of the U.S. military.
In addition to the SHP, there were many other types of development programs being carried out in South Vietnam by various U.S. government agencies, simultaneous with the CIP and in conjunction with it. In spite of the good work being done, these efforts were constantly under attack by the Viet Cong. Thus, the GVN and the Americans were concerned about how to protect the civilian populace and the civilian agencies at work throughout the country. In this regard, even the most democratically minded Americans realised that one could not set up a polling station if one could not protect it from insurgent violence.
With these considerations in mind, the U.S. military advisors and the ARVN agreed with Thompson that the Viet Cong had to be separated from the people via the SHP. But to their way of thinking, the purpose of this separation was to force the Communists to give battle on terrain where they would be destroyed by the superior firepower of the professionally trained Vietnamese and American armed forces. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with this classic military strategy. Undoubtedly, if one can subject an enemy to superior firepower, one will win the battle. The problem for the American and Vietnamese armies became what to do when the enemy does not accept defeat after losing the conventional battles. Recognising that the battlefield in Vietnam was not necessarily only a military one but also a political one would prove difficult for any soldier. The American commanders and advisors, capable though they were, found this reality almost inconceivable.
The American military advisors in South Vietnam, or MAAG, had ingrained the ARVN with the doctrine that their primary purpose was to repel a formal attack from the NVA, very much as the United States and its allies had done in Korea. There was little doubt amongst the likes of General Lionel McGarr that programs such as the SHP were secondary in importance to making the ARVN more aggressive and efficient. In short, military strategy and tactics were to predominate over other considerations. This approach translated in the field into a single command: Kill more Viet Cong, more efficiently.26 The protection of civilians within strategic hamlets or defended villages was all well and good to MAAG, but it was second, at best, to the necessity of utilising military means to destroy the insurgents. This attitude contradicted the British experience in Malaya, in which they saw that the more insurgents one indiscriminately kills, with all the horrible attendant collateral damage, the more guerrillas are created from the friends and the relatives of the fallen. In other words, simply killing insurgents would reach, quite rapidly, the point of diminishing returns for the government.
Opposite MAAG were Thompson and the British Advisory Mission, who advocated denying the Communists the battle they wanted to fight: the battle for political legitimacy. As previously noted, this is the battle South Vietnam would lose if they overused their army. It is worth reiterating that police forces tend to deny their opponents legitimacy because they impute them with criminality. It is the job of good policemen to arrest wrongdoers. Then through due process, the government can jail or otherwise punish convicted criminals. However, when an army captures enemy soldiers on a battlefield, they become prisoners of war and subject to different treatment.27
It was central to the British counterinsurgency concept that the public saw policemen doing their justifiable duty conferred upon them by the lawful authority of the state; justice not only had to be done but had to be seen by the people as being done. This foundation of civil legal authority superseding armed might was never entirely accepted in American military thinking on the subject. Nevertheless, Thompson made it very clear that it was essential to subordinate the military to the civil authority. Indeed, Thompson maintained that winning the people over and retaining their support could be achieved only if strong civil authority had full reign over the means of protecting the populace.28 Of course, this did not mean that the military was eliminated from the process; instead, the military’s role was one of working in concert with the police in isolating and eliminating the Viet Cong.29 Thus, Thompson spelled out the specific roles of the Civil Guard and the ARVN: the main work of defence in the villages and hamlets was to be conducted by the Civil Guard (what the British called special constables in both Kenya and Malaya) and the military was to assist them.30
It would not be farfetched to suggest that Thompson, having been made aware of General McGarr’s objection to the primary role of policemen over soldiers, had replaced the term “police” with paramilitary descriptions such as “Self-Defence Corps” and “Civil Guard”. Nevertheless, not more than four years later, in his seminal work on counterinsurgency warfare, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, Thompson underscored exactly what he was getting at with these terms, and why the police or special constabulary forces were so important.
In Malaya, Thompson explained, there were basically two government forces: the police and the army. The strength of the police force was deliberately maintained at more than twice that of the army, and this remained the case even when Commonwealth battalions were factored into the equation. The Home Guard, arguably a third force, operated under the direction of the police force even though its members were recruited and administered separately. When the Malayan Emergency broke out in 1948, the police had 11,285 men in all ranks. During the course of the Communist insurgency, this force was rapidly built up to incorporate 30,000 regular policemen and another 30,000 special constables. The special constables were assigned the tasks of defending villages, estates, and mines. The Malaya police also put into place a field force made up of platoons and companies that were equivalent to light infantry. All of these forces were carefully controlled and co-ordinated in such a manner as to allow the police to carry on their normal functions while providing protection against insurgent attacks and undertaking counterinsurgency operations. The armed forces acted as a buttress to this civil power. This dominance of the policemen, Thompson pointed out, enhanced political stability while making certain that there was a continuance of legitimate governance by rule of law throughout the duration of the insurgency.31
Thompson’s description of the balance of forces in Malaya compared with that of Vietnam in the early 1960s warranted more serious consideration than it was given by MAAG chief General McGarr. Another item deserving scrutiny was the high number (at least eighty) of security organisations that existed in South Vietnam during this period. Thompson noted that they overlapped each other, which led to confusion of roles and duties in the implementation of security measures—simply co-ordinating them all was problematic for the GVN. In Thompson’s opinion, many of these forces should have been amalgamated, and their roles clearly defined. The very size of the army, in addition to all of South Vietnam’s paramilitary organisations, tended to increase political instability and to endorse the rule of force over the rule of law.32
Unfortunately for all concerned, the Americans perceived Thompson’s recommendations to be in direct conflict with their new plan, which tied the release of substantial sums of new aid to President Diem’s acceptance of U.S.-specified governmental reforms and his willingness to co-ordinate his counterinsurgency strategy with that formulated by U.S. military experts. As stated previously, since Thompson’s plan gave President Diem a way to circumvent both conditions, the Americans saw it as a rival to their own.33A specific point of contention between Thompson and the Americans was the offensive planned by MAAG. Unlike the U.S. military advisors, Thompson viewed the primary threat to be to the political stability of the populated rural areas. Consequently, and as noted previously, he regarded Lionel McGarr’s proposed initial operation in War Zone D to be a step in the wrong direction.34 Understandably General McGarr did not appreciate Thompson’s opinion. He was not moved by professional jealousy or pettiness but by a profoundly different approach to fighting an insurgency.
Also, it must be remembered, if Diem adopted Thompson’s plans he would not adopt the chain of command changes desired by the Americans.35 According to Vietnam War scholar Kent M. Streeb, McGarr had been hoping that the utterly confusing web of the ARVN’s command structure would be streamlined by strict adherence to Washington’s CIP.36 The Americans recognised that Diem had kept this intricate interweaving and overlapping command structure in place to reduce the possibility of coup attempts. MAAG, however, came to view Diem’s command structure as a hindrance to the proper functioning of the ARVN. Thus, they ignored the fact that for Diem “to accede to the American military’s chain-of-command request would afford his forces the opportunity to co-ordinate and coalesce into numbers sufficient to overthrow him”.37 In effect, American advisors such as McGarr wanted to curb the Vietnamese president’s control over the CIP, because it was Diem’s alleged inabilities that were partially responsible for the need for greater American intervention.
Another area of dispute between Thompson and the Americans was control of intelligence. Thompson wanted the new National Police to direct and to co-ordinate all intelligence activities, which would be, ultimately, under President Diem’s control.38
The best organisation to be responsible for all internal security intelligence is the special branch of the police force rather than a completely separate organisation. It is a great advantage if intelligence officers have police powers and are able to call when necessary on the other branches of the police force for support and assistance in developing their intelligence network. The police force is a static organisation reaching out into every corner of the country and will have had long experience of close contact with the population. If it can possibly be avoided, the army should not be responsible for internal security intelligence. The army will have had little concern with subversion before the open insurgency breaks out; it will have had very limited experience of contacting the people, particularly rural communities, which are inherently suspicious of troops; and its units are always liable to be re-deployed throughout the country in accordance with the situation. Any intelligence lines which these units may have established are then immediately uprooted.39
Internal intelligence directed by one organisation avoids all kinds of problems, Thompson added, such as unreliable information being assumed reliable because it came from more than one source or competition between organisations leading agents to undercut each other in the field. “Mutual suspicion and jealousies will arise, quite likely with the result that the separate organisations merely end up spying on each other.”40
General McGarr balked at the very idea of conducting a war from a static security framework,41 that is, strategic hamlets defended largely by policemen.42 To American military thinkers, civic action in static positions smacked of too much reliance on the defensive; in fact, it constituted a switching over to the strategic defensive. Thompson addressed this criticism directly:
Certainly the first object of the programme is the protection of the population, and each hamlet must therefore be capable of defending itself. But the concept as a whole is designed to secure a firm base and then to expand from that into disputed, and finally enemy-controlled, territory. If the programme is strategically directed, and supported by the armed forces, it becomes an offensive advance which will wrest the military initiative from the insurgent. This is far more aggressive, because it is effective, than launching thousands of operations with hundreds of troops in each, all wading through the paddy fields with their rifles cocked to no purpose.43
Thompson’s insistence that the size and the role of the conventional military should be downgraded and that police forces should be brought to the fore was directly at odds with General McGarr, who thought the size and the role of the military must be upgraded in order to win the war.44 He was not alone in his opinion. Joint Chiefs Chairman Lemnitzer also saw the need for the military to have priority over the police. He wrote in October 1961, “It seems clear that in recent months the insurgency in South Vietnam has developed far beyond the capacity of police control.” In the same memo he explained that the police turned Civil Guard were being specially targeted by the Viet Cong:
It is most important to note that the heaviest casualties in the Vietnam insurgency have been suffered by the Civil Guard previously trained as police. Almost without exception, the Viet Cong have attacked the untrained Civil Guard rather than the better trained Army units. This has resulted in a heavy loss of weapons and equipment to the Viet Cong. Untrained Civil Guard units have, in fact, been an important source of weapons and supplies for the Viet Cong, and their known vulnerability has been an invitation for the Viet Cong to attack. General McGarr believes that reversion of the Civil Guard to police control would set back the counter-insurgency operation in Vietnam by at least a year.45
The general mentioned the time consideration elsewhere in the memo. He wrote that making better use of police was generally a good idea but that it takes a long time to build up a competent police force: “It took the British nearly 12 years to defeat an insurgency which was less strong than the one in South Vietnam.”46 General McGarr also thought Thompson’s ideas would take too long to implement, because time was needed for hamlet administration and defences to grow organically from the effort. “Not only would the Viet Cong not wait,” McGarr thought, “it was simply unsound policy not to use the tools at hand. It would not do to reduce the ARVN and increase police forces while the VC continued their successes. It was necessary, in sum, to act in a limited area but to act quickly.”47
In short, the leading U.S. generals considered that “Thompson’s recommendations did not look to quick action, emphasized the wrong area, were designed to emphasize the wrong operational agency, and proposed unacceptable command lines.”48 Ambassador Nolting, in spite of his desire to fulfil U.S. policy directives, saw the merit in Thompson’s ideas, and he warmed to the man on a personal level.49 He sensed, however, that the Kennedy administration would not heed Thompson’s advice as it was looking for a quick military fix to the insurgency in South Vietnam, and that meant it would turn to conventional warfare, no matter how counterproductive it was in a political fight with the Communists.
Nolting saw the turn toward conventional warfare in the Taylor-Rostow report, and he was disturbed by it. The report called for the deployment of five thousand U.S. combat engineers to the Mekong Delta, ostensibly for the purpose of helping the GVN with flood control. But the American unit had full military capability, which meant it could defend itself if engaged in combat and cut off from the ARVN. Seeing the writing on the wall, Nolting sent his concerns to Washington: “When I cabled my comments to Washington, I noted that I was in thorough accord with the ideas that had been discussed in Vietnam, but not with this new addition. My opposition stemmed from the conviction that the introduction of American combat forces would set a precedent and eventually lead to a shuffling of responsibility from the Vietnamese Army onto the stronger, better equipped Americans.”50 Nolting knew that such a noticeable foreign military presence within the country would undermine Diem’s authority in the perceptions of the Vietnamese and therefore give the Communists a political weapon against the GVN. Although President Kennedy did not initiate such a deployment straightaway, Nolting knew that the military intervention advocates held a strong hand in the administration, and that Thompson’s advice was not likely to win against it.
Although the leading American military men had their criticisms of the plan, as we have seen, none wanted to reject wholesale the British advice given to President Diem. By early 1962 some of the British ideas had garnered considerable interest in Washington at the highest levels. General Maxwell Taylor and Roger Hilsman liked much of what Thompson had to say.51 Hilsman actually incorporated much of Thompson’s advice into his own plan, which he presented to President Kennedy, who expressed that he was in favour of such a scheme.52
In many ways the American concerns about British counterinsurgency methods were not at all obvious to the outside observer; after all, it appeared as though the Americans wholeheartedly agreed with the implementation of the SHP, because thousands of these communities were being quickly built with American financial help. Yet, in order to preserve good relations amongst MAAG, Diem’s government, and the British Advisory Mission, subtle but profound changes in the Thompson plan occurred on the ground in Vietnam. For example, Thompson agreed to revise his program so as to remove American objections to his proposed command arrangements. He also decided to drop, at least temporarily, his push for police primacy over the army in the pacification plan.53
Objectively, these changes may or may not have been a detriment to fighting the Communists. It cannot be denied, however, that the ascendancy of conventional warfare controlled by a foreign power undermined the Vietnamese president’s legitimacy in the eyes of his people, and this was no small matter. Unfortunately for both the Americans and the Vietnamese, this was to prove very costly—for all the reasons that Robert Thompson had explained.