0 - The Black Vault

THE o•M CORPORATION
Professor Herring, a highly respected diplomatic historian, described
the problem succinctly:
The basic problem . . was that the army was
trained for the wrong mission, The MAAG would be
sharply criticized for failing to prepare the South
Vietnamese Army for dealirg with guer-illa operations,
"but from the perspective of the mid-1950s its emphas~s
appears quite logical, Confronting the near-impossible
task of building fro'm scratch an army capaule of performing
two quite diverse missions, 11AAG naturally
leaned toward the conventional warfare with which it
was most familiar.. At least until 1958, moreover, the
countryside was quiescent and Diem appeared firmly
entrenched. [L.. Gen. Samuel T.] Williams and most of
his staff had served in Korea, and the remarkable
resemblance between the Korean and Vietnamese situations
inclined them to focus on the threat of an invasion
from the north. The army was therefore trained,
organized ana equipped primarily to fight a conventional
war and its inadequacies were obvious only after
South Vietnam was enveloped by a rural insurgency. 12/
Li
j
During that period, President Diem's efforts to impr-ve rural security
in the face of the increasing communist threat centered around the regroupment
below:
of the populace under the various resettlement schemes discussed
1. Civic Action (see Figure 5-2)
While dealing with his political and security problems, President
Diem simultaneously undertook a program of Civic Action in the rural areas.
SInitially emerging f,-om a military effort to stimulate and assist local
I
peasants in rebuilding war-damaged public facilities, the Civic Action Pro-
gram quickly developed into a program of community development.
Although Civic Action showed signs of success in its first full
year of operation, the program was curtailed at the end of 1956 because of
inter-agency rivalries between the Civic Action Directorate and the Ministries
of Health, Information, and Agriculture. The latter organization
apparently felt threatened Ly the intrusion of the Civic Action Program
into areas traditio.ially under the Ministry ef Agriculture jurisdiction.
5-7