Vietnamization

Template:TOC-right Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard M. Nixon administration, to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnam's forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops." This referred to U.S. combat troops specifically in the ground combat role, but did not reject combat by U.S. air forces, as well as the support to South Vietnam, consistent with the policies of U.S. foreign military assistance organizations. After Nixon's election in 1968, this became the policy of the United States, beginning in 1969.

Vietnamization fit into the broader Nixon Administration detente policy, in which the United States no longer regarded its fundamental stategy as containment of Communism, but a cooperative world order in which Nixon and his chief adviser Henry Kissinger were basically "realists" in world affairs, interested in the broader constellation of forces, and the biggest powers. Nixon had ordered Kissinger to negotiate basic U.S.-Soviet policy between the heads of state via Kissinger and Dobrynin, with the agreements then transferred to diplomats for implementation. In like manner, Nixon opened high-level contact with China. U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and China were seen as far more important than the fate of South Vietnam, which certainly did not preclude South Vietnam maintaining its own independence.

Nixon Administration analysis of options

Kissinger, earlier, had asked asked the Rand Corporation to provide a list of policy options, prepared by Daniel Ellsberg. On receiving the report, Kissinger and Schelling asked Ellsberg about the apparent absence of a victory option; Ellsberg said "I don't believe there is a win option in Vietnam." While Ellsberg eventually did send a withdrawal option, Kissinger would not circulate something that could be perceived as defeat. .

According to a record, prepared by Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoliy Dobrynin, of discussions between Dobrynin and Kissinger, the crux of the U.S. position, was progress still must be made at the Paris talks and, for domestic political reasons, Nixon “simply cannot wait a year for Hanoi to decide to take some new step and take a more flexible position.” Dobrynin expressed the Soviet position that the U.S.needed to stop trying to divide the Paris Peace Talks into two parts:

• discussion of military issues between the U.S. and the DRV
• resolution of political issues by placing them, "for all practical purposes, entirely

in the hands of Saigon, which does not want to resolve them and is unable to do so, since it is unable to soberly assess the situation and the alignment of forces in South Vietnam."Dobrynin, however, misunderstood the extent to which the U.S. was willing to apply military force not involving ground troops, culminating in Operation LINEBACKER II.

Nixon policy direction

Nixon directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare a six-step withdrawal plan. he Commandant of the Marine Corps General Leonard F. Chapman remembered, "I felt, and I think that most Marines felt, that the time had come to get out of Vietnam." Leading the ground force withdrawals, Marine redeployments started in mid-1969, and by the end of the year the entire 3d Marine Division had departed.

ARVN situation in 1969

While not all of the U.S. support, for reasons of domestic politics, was public, it included air attack on the North Vietnamese movements into the South, and combat service support including intelligence.

By 1969 Saigon forces were able to sustain the pressure on the NLF and Viet Cong and dramatically expand their control over both population and territory. Indeed, for the first time GVN found itself in control of more than 90% of the population. The Tet objectives were beyond our strength, concluded General Tran Van Tra, the commander of Vietcong forces in the South:

We suffered large sacrifices and losses with regard to manpower and materiel, especially cadres at the various echelons, which clearly weakened us. Afterwards, we were not only unable to retain the gains we had made but had to overcome a myriad of difficulties in 1969 and 1970.

Air attacks on Cambodia

In 1969, Nixon ordered B-52 strikes against PAVN supply routes in Cambodia. The orders for U.S. bombing of Cambodia were classified, and thus kept from the U.S. media and Congress. In a given strike, each B-52 normally dropped 42,000 pounds of bombs, and the strike consistedflying in groups of 3 or 6. Surviving personnel in the target area were apt to know they had been bombed, and, since the U.S. had the only aircraft capable of that volume, would know the U.S. had done it.

The "secrecy" may have been meant to be face-saving for Sihanouk, but there is substantial reason to believe that the secrecy, in U.S. military channels, was to keep knowledge of the bombing from the U.S. Congress and public. Actually, a reasonable case could be made that the bombing fell under the "hot pursuit" doctrine of international law, where if a neutral (Sihanouk) could not stop one country from attacking another from the neutral sanctuary, the attacked country(ies) had every right to counterattack.

Ground attack into Cambodia

Responding to a Communist attempt to take Cambodia, Nixon in April 1970 authorized a large scale US-ARVN incursion into Cambodia to directly hit the PAVN headquarters and supply dumps. The forewarned PAVN had evacuated most of their soldiers, but they lost a third of its arms stockpile, as well as a critical supply line from the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The incursion prevented the immediate takeover by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Pot broke with his original North Vietnamese sponsors, and aligned with China. This made American involvement visible to the U.S. population, and there were intense protests, including deaths in a confrontation between rock-throwing protesters and poorly-trained National Guardsmen at Kent State University.

Intelligence and security

The first American soldier to die in Vietnam was a member of a communications intelligence unit. The U.S. intelligence collection systems, a significant amount of which (especially the techniques) were not shared with the ARVN, and, while not fully declassified, examples have been mentioned earlier in this article. The Communist side's intelligence operations, beyond the spies that were discovered, are much less known.

While there had been many assumptions that the South Vietnamese government was penetrated by many spies, and there indeed were many, a December 1969 capture of a Viet Cong communications intelligence center and documents revealed that they had been getting a huge amount of information using simple technology and smart people, as well as sloppy U.S. communications security. This specific discovery was by U.S. Army infantry, with interpretation by regular communications officers; the matter infuriated GEN Abrams &mdash at the communications specialists. Before and after, there had been a much more highly classified, and only now available in heavily censored form, National Security Agency analysis of how the Communists were getting their information, which has led to a good deal of modern counterintelligence and operations security.

Some of the material from Touchdown also gave insight into the North Vietnamese intelligence system. For example, the NVA equivalent of the Defense Intelligence Agency was the Central Research Directorate (CRD) in Hanoi. COSVN intelligence staff, however, disseminated the tactically useful material. Their espionage was under the control of the Military Intelligence Sections (MIS), which were directed by the Strategic Intelligence Section (SIS) of CRD.

U.S. direct discussions with North Vietnam

Henry Kissinger began secret talks with the North Vietnamese official, Le Duc Tho, in February 1970.