Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
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CORDS (Civil Operations and Rural Development Support) was a pacification program of the governments of South Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War. The program was created on 9 May 1967, and included military and civilian components of both governments. The objective of CORDS was to gain support for the government of South Vietnam from its rural population which was largely under influence or controlled by the insurgent communist forces of the Viet Cong (VC) and the North VietnamesePeople's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
A map of South Vietnam showing the provinces and military tactical zones (I, II, III, and IV Corps).
Unlike earlier pacification programs in Vietnam, CORDS is seen by many authorities as a "successful integration of civilian and military efforts" to combat the insurgency. By 1970, 93 percent of the rural population of South Vietnam was believed by the United States to be living in "relatively secure" villages. CORDS had been extended to all 44 provinces of South Vietnam, and the communist insurgency was much reduced.[1] Critics, however, have described the pacification programs and CORDS in terms such as "the illusion of progress".[1] CORDS was, in the estimation of its first leader, Robert W. Komer, "too little, too late."[2]:16
With the withdrawal of U.S. military forces and many civilian personnel, CORDS was abolished in February 1973. CORDS temporary successes were eroded in the 1970s, as the war became primarily a struggle between the conventional military forces of South and North Vietnam rather than an insurgency. North Vietnam prevailed in 1975.
South Vietnamese attempts at pacification
The continuing struggle during the Vietnam War to gain the support of the rural population for the government of South Vietnam was called pacification. To Americans, pacification programs were often referred to by the phrase winning hearts and minds.
The anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem government of South Vietnam (1955–63) had its power base among the urban and Catholic population. The government controlled the cities and large towns but Diem's efforts to extend government power to the villages, where most of the population lived, were mostly unsuccessful. The Viet Cong were gaining support and mobilizing the peasantry to oppose the government. Between 1956 and 1960, the VC instituted a land reform program dispossessing landlords and distributing land to farmers.[3]:11–5
In 1959, Diem revived the agroville program of the French era with the objective of moving peasants into new agricultural settlements which contained schools, medical clinics, and other facilities supported by the government. The program failed due to peasant resistance, poor management, and disruption by the VC using guerrilla and terrorist tactics. In 1961, the government embarked on the Strategic Hamlet Program, designed partly by Robert Thompson, a British counter-insurgency expert. The idea was to move rural dwellers into fortified villages in which they would participate in self-defense forces for their protection and isolation from the guerrillas. The United States Ambassador to South VietnamFrederick Nolting and CIA official William Colby supported the program. General Lionel C. McGarr, chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in South Vietnam, opposed it, favoring instead a mobile, professional South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) undertaking what would later be called Search and Destroy missions rather than defending villages and territory.[4] The program was implemented far too rapidly and coercively, and by 1964, many of the 2,600 strategic hamlets had fallen under VC control.[3]:22–3
The next iteration of the pacification program came in 1964 with, for the first time, the direct participation in planning by the US Embassy and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the successor to MAAG. The Chien Thang (Struggle for Victory) pacification program was less ambitious than the Strategic Hamlet program, envisioning a gradual expansion, like an "oil spot" from government-controlled to VC controlled areas, by providing security and services to rural areas. Along with the Chien Thang program was the related Hop Tac (Victory) program, directly involving the U.S. military in pacification for the first time. Hop Tac envisioned a gradual expansion outward from Saigon of areas under South Vietnamese government control. These programs also failed as the ARVN was unable to provide adequate security and safety to rural residents in disputed areas.[3]:25–30
American and North Vietnamese involvement
In 1965, both the United States and North Vietnam rapidly increased the numbers of their soldiers in South Vietnam. Communist forces totaled 221,000 including an estimated 105 VC and 55 PAVN battalions. American soldiers in Vietnam totaled 175,000 by the end of the year, and the ARVN numbered more than 600,000. Commanding General William Westmoreland rejected the use of the U.S. army to pacify rural areas, instead utilizing U.S. superiority in mobility and firepower to find and combat VC and PAVN units. Intensification of the conflict caused many peasants and rural dwellers to flee to the cities for safety. The number of internal refugees increased from about 500,000 in 1964 to one million in 1966. By December 1966, South Vietnam could only claim—optimistically in the U.S.'s view—to control 4,700 of the country's 12,000 hamlets and 10 of its 16 million people[3]:31–43
Robert Komer (left) meets with President Johnson.
In February 1966, President Lyndon Johnson at a meeting with South Vietnamese and American leaders in Hawaii promoted the concept of pacification to "get the gospel of pacification carved into the hearts and minds of all concerned."[3]:70–1 Shortly after that he appointed CIA official and National Security Council member Robert W. Komer ("Blowtorch Bob") as his special assistant for supervising pacification. Komer's challenge was to unite the U.S. government agencies—the military, Department of State, CIA and the Agency for International Development—involved in pacification projects into a unified effort. Komer recommended the responsibility for pacification be vested in MACV, headed by Westmoreland, through a civilian deputy who would head the U.S. pacification effort commanding both U.S. military and civilian personnel. Although his proposal was unpopular in all the agencies, Komer, with the support of Johnson, pressed forward. As a halfway measure, the Office of Civil Operations (OCO) was set up with civilian leadership in November 1966, to coordinate all civilian pacification programs. OCO failed but strengthened Komer and Johnson's view that MACV leadership of the pacification program was essential. Komer believed that only the military had sufficient personnel and resources to undertake such an ambitious program.[3]:71–85
Development of the program
Komer argued that the pacification success desired by Johnson could only be achieved by integrating three tasks. The first and most basic requirement for pacification had to be security, because the rural population had to be kept isolated from the VC and PAVN. If this was achieved, the insurgents' forces had to be weakened both by destroying their infrastructure among the population and by developing programs to win over the people's sympathy for the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. forces. The third point emphasized by Komer was that the new strategy had to be applied on a large scale in order to turn around what had been up until then, at best, an indecisive war.[5]:77–91
Organizationally, these goals implicitly required that efforts be concentrated under a single command. In Komer's view, only the U.S. military had the resources and personnel to implement a large-scale pacification plan. After initial reservations, Westmoreland agreed with the plan, but civilian agencies still balked. Johnson overruled them, and on 9 May 1967, CORDS was created. Komer was appointed one of Westmoreland's three deputy commanders with the title of ambassador and the equivalent rank of a three-star general. This was the first time in U.S. history that an ambassador had served under a military command and been given authority over military personnel and resources.[6][5]:14
Komer chose a military officer as his deputy and repeated the pattern of having either a civilian in charge of every component of CORDS with a military deputy or, alternatively, a military commander with a civilian deputy. He consolidated all the diverse pacification and civil affairs programs in Vietnam—military and civilian—under the authority of CORDS. Starting with a staff of 4,980, CORDS expanded to 8,327 personnel in the first six months of its operation. In 1968, CORDS was working in all 44 provinces and eventually was functioning in all 250 districts of South Vietnam.[7] About 85 percent of CORDS personnel were military, the remainder civilians.[2]:12 Each province was headed by a Vietnamese province chief, usually a colonel, who was supported by an American provincial senior adviser. The adviser's staff was divided into a civilian part which supervised area and community development and a military part which handled security issues.[5]:83
Organization and function
The local and regional militia forces were an important component of the pacification program to defeat the Viet Cong and provide security to villages.
CORDS at the Corps level (I, II, III, and IV Corps) had an organization similar to its headquarters organization in Saigon. A three-star general headed each corps with a deputy commander for CORDS, usually a civilian. Within each Corps, all 44 South Vietnamese provinces were headed by a native province chief, usually an ARVN army colonel, who was supported by an American province senior adviser, either military or a civilian. The province adviser's staff was divided into a civilian part which supervised area and community development and a military part which assisted the Vietnamese with security operations.[5]:83
CORDS focused on U.S. support for Vietnamese efforts at pacification in three broad areas: security, centralized planning, and operations against the VC. Komer quickly increased the number of U.S. military advisers assigned to Mobile Advisory Teams advising the Regional and Popular forces (RF/PF) from 141 to 2,331. The advisers provided training and better weapons to the RF/PF and the South Vietnamese government expanded their numbers from 300,000 in 1967, to 517,400 in 1972. CORDS also facilitated the expansion of the National Police from 60,000 to 80,000 personnel.[8] CORDS also placed emphasis on improving South Vietnam's support and implementation of the Chieu Hoi program (encouraging defectors from the VC and PAVN), rural development programs, and generating fewer refugees from the war and taking better care of those who had become refugees.
A major priority of CORDS was to destroy the VC's political and support infrastructure which extended into most villages of the country. The Phoenix Program was CORDS' most controversial activity. Seven hundred American advisers assisted the South Vietnamese government in identifying, capturing, trying, imprisoning and often executing members of the VC infrastructure. Between 1968 and 1972, the Phoenix program, according to CORDS statistics, neutralized 81,740 VC of whom 26,369 were killed. 87 percent of those deaths were attributed to conventional military operations by South Vietnam and the U.S.; the remainder were executed and, in the opinion of critics, were often innocent or non-combatants and were assassinated by "death squads."[5]:17–21
Tet and its aftermath
On January 24, 1968, Komer warned that "something is in the wind." Seven days later the Tet Offensive was launched by the VC and PAVN. Tet weakened the Saigon government's presence in the countryside, which had been aided by CORDS. The RF/PF abandoned the countryside in some areas to defend cities and towns, suffering more than 6,500 casualties, including desertions. Tet was a military victory but a psychological defeat for South Vietnam and its American ally, but heavy VC casualties facilitated an early return to the countryside by South Vietnamese authorities and CORDS.[3]:133–43 Project Recovery distributed food and construction material to rural dwellers and involved CORDS in reconstruction efforts in the cities and towns. By May 1968, the rural population living in "relatively secure" hamlets had returned to pre-Tet levels of 67 percent. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, CIA official William Colby, Komer's successor as head of CORDS and the new head of MACV, General Creighton Abrams, persuaded the South Vietnamese government to embark on an accelerated pacification program. The casualties suffered by the VC and the PAVN, during Tet and their subsequent offensives in 1968, enabled CORDS to strengthen its programs in the countryside.[3]:144–59
Evaluations of CORDS
John Paul Vann (white shirt) and his CORDS staff at their Pleiku headquarters in 1971.
In February 1970, John Paul Vann, CORDS head in the IV Corps area (the Mekong River delta south of Saigon), gave an optimistic progress report about pacification to the United States Senate. According to Vann, in IV Corps a person could drive during daylight hours without armed escort to any of the 16 provincial capitals for the first time since 1961. Fewer than 800,000 people out of the six million people living in IV Corps were in contested or VC-controlled areas. 30,000 VC had defected under the Chieu Hoi program. In 1969, the number of refugees had declined from 220,000 to less than 35,000, and rice production had increased nearly 25 percent. Vann, a civilian after retiring from the army as a Lt. Colonel, had 234 American civilian and 2,138 military advisers under his command. More than 300,000 armed Vietnamese soldiers, militia and police in the Corps area were being advised and assisted by CORDS.[9]
CORDS was designed to combat the peasant-based Maoist insurgency of the VC in South Vietnam. "One of the ironies of the Vietnam War is that the southern-rooted insurgency that prompted U.S. military intervention in the first place was significantly pacified – although by no means extirpated – by the time the last major U.S. ground combat forces departed South Vietnam." The years, after reverses during Tet, from 1969 until early 1972 saw "uninterrupted gains in population security throughout South Vietnam and further erosion of the VC. The VC had only a minor role in the 1972 and 1975 communist offensives, the latter resulting in the conquest of South Vietnam by the conventional military forces of North Vietnam.[10]
With the war coming to rely more on the conventional military forces of South and North Vietnam, pacification under CORDS became less relevant. After the withdrawal from Vietnam of U.S. military forces and many civilian personnel, CORDS was terminated in February 1973.[11]
CORDS was successful in several ways. The program successfully integrated U.S. military and civilian efforts to defeat the insurgency in South Vietnam. Communication and cooperation between the U.S. and South Vietnamese government improved; CORDS revitalized several earlier failed attempts at pacification; CORDS leaders Komer and Colby persuaded South Vietnam to take the offensive in rural areas after Tet to challenge the long primacy of the Viet Cong in many areas of the country; and CORDS had some impact of persuading the South Vietnamese government to replace corrupt and incompetent officials.[11]:115–6
However, the CORDS pacification programs "could not overcome the South Vietnamese government's defective execution of plans and programs, its omnipresent corruption, or its inability to develop a sturdy, self-sustaining political base."[11]:116 In light of the outcome of the war, CORDS founder Komer attributed the eventual failure of pacification to "too little, too late".[2]:100 Richard Hunt concluded similarly in his book Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds that "the advocates of pacification hoped it would cause a fundamental transformation of South Vietnam. But even if that transformation had occurred it would most likely have taken too long and would in any case have exhausted the patience of the American people, inevitably eroding political support in the United States."[3]:279
The Tet Offensive was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) launched a surprise attack on January 30, 1968, against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the United States Armed Forces and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. The name is the truncated version of the Lunar New Year festival name in Vietnamese, Tết Nguyên Đán, with the offense chosen during a holiday period as most ARVN personnel were on leave. The purpose of the wide-scale offensive by the Hanoi Politburo was to trigger political instability, in a belief that mass armed assault on urban centers would trigger defections and rebellions.
The Phoenix Program was designed and initially coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American, Australian, and South Vietnamese militaries. In 1969, CIA responsibility was phased out, and the program was put under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).
Hearts and Minds or winning hearts and minds refers to the strategy and programs used by the governments of Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War to win the popular support of the Vietnamese people and to help defeat the Viet Cong insurgency. Pacification is the more formal term for winning hearts and minds. In this case, however, it was also defined as the process of countering the insurgency. Military, political, economic, and social means were used to attempt to establish or reestablish South Vietnamese government control over rural areas and people under the influence of the Viet Cong. Some progress was made in the 1967–1971 period by the joint military-civilian organization called CORDS, but the character of the war changed from a guerrilla war to a conventional war between the armies of South and North Vietnam. North Vietnam won in 1975.
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) was a highly classified, multi-service United States special operations unit which conducted covert unconventional warfare operations before and during the Vietnam War.
The Cambodian campaign was a series of military operations conducted in eastern Cambodia in mid-1970 by South Vietnam and the United States as an expansion of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. Thirteen operations were conducted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) between April 29 and July 22 and by U.S. forces between May 1 and June 30, 1970.
Robert William "Blowtorch Bob" Komer was an American national security adviser known for managing Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support during the Vietnam War.
The Battle of Huế, was a major battle in the Tết Offensive launched by North Vietnam and the Việt Cộng during the Vietnam War. Initially losing control of most of Huế and its surroundings, the combined forces of South Vietnam and the United States gradually recaptured the city after a little over one month of intense fighting. The battle was one of the longest and bloodiest of the war, causing it to negatively affect the American public perception of the war. The battle is widely considered to be one of the toughest and most intense urban battles ever fought.
During the Second Indochina War, better known as the Vietnam War, a distinctive land warfare strategy and organization was used by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) or better known as the Viet Cong (VC) in the West, and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) or North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to defeat their American and South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) opponents. These methods involved closely integrated political and military strategy – what was called dau tranh - literally "to struggle". The National Liberation Front, (NLF) was an umbrella of front groups, sympathizers and allies set up by the rulers of North Vietnam to conduct the insurgency in South Vietnam. The NLF also included fully armed formations- regional and local guerrillas, and the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). The PLAF was the "Main Force" – the Chu Luc or full-time soldiers of the NLF's military wing. Many histories lump both the NLF and the armed formations under the term "Viet Cong" or "VC" in common usage. Both were tightly interwoven and were in turn controlled by the North. Others consider the Viet Cong, or "VC" to primarily refer to the armed elements. The term PAVN, identifies regular troops of the North Vietnamese Army or NVA as they were commonly known by their Western opponents. Collectively, both forces- the southern armed wing and the regulars from the north were part of PAVN.
The South Vietnamese Regional Forces, originally the Civil Guard, were a component of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) territorial defence forces. Recruited locally, they served as full-time province-level forces, originally raised as a militia. In 1964, the Regional Forces were integrated into the ARVN and placed under the command of the Joint General Staff.
The South Vietnamese Popular Force was a part-time local militia of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) during the Vietnam War. The South Vietnamese Popular Force mainly protected homes and villages in South Vietnam from attacks by the Viet Cong (VC) and later the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
United States Department of Defense, and associated, civil affairs are civil-military operations (CMO) use of military force to control areas seized from the enemy, minimize insurgency or civil interference with military operations, and maximize civil support for military operations. CMO is conducted in conjunction with combat operations during wartime and becomes a central part of a military campaign in counter-insurgencies. CMO operations have been in frequent use since 1775 by the United States Army, as well as more recently by the Navy and Marine Corps.
The Seventh Division was part of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the army of the nation state of South Vietnam that existed from 1955 to 1975. It was part of the IV Corps, which oversaw the Mekong Delta region of the country.
The Fifth Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—the army of the nation state of South Vietnam that existed from 1955 to 1975—was part of the III Corps that oversaw the region of the country surrounding the capital, Saigon.
The 25th Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—the army of the nation state of South Vietnam that existed from 1955 to 1975—was part of the III Corps that oversaw the region of the country surrounding the capital, Saigon. It was based at Củ Chi Base Camp to the northwest of the city.
During the Cold War in the 1960s, the United States and South Vietnam began a period of gradual escalation and direct intervention referred to as the "Americanization" of joint warfare in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. At the start of the decade, United States aid to South Vietnam consisted largely of supplies with approximately 900 military observers and trainers. After the assassination of both Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy close to the end of 1963 and Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 and amid continuing political instability in the South, the Lyndon Johnson Administration made a policy commitment to safeguard the South Vietnamese regime directly. The American military forces and other anti-communist SEATO countries increased their support, sending large scale combat forces into South Vietnam; at its height in 1969, slightly more than 400,000 American troops were deployed. The People's Army of Vietnam and the allied Viet Cong fought back, keeping to countryside strongholds while the anti-communist allied forces tended to control the cities. The most notable conflict of this era was the 1968 Tet Offensive, a widespread campaign by the communist forces to attack across all of South Vietnam; while the offensive was largely repelled, it was a strategic success in seeding doubt as to the long-term viability of the South Vietnamese state. This phase of the war lasted until the election of Richard Nixon and the change of U.S. policy to Vietnamization, or ending the direct involvement and phased withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and giving the main combat role back to the South Vietnamese military.
The year 1968 saw major developments in the Vietnam War. The military operations started with an attack on a US base by the North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong (VC) on January 1, ending a truce declared by the Pope and agreed upon by all sides. At the end of January, the PAVN and VC launched the Tet Offensive.
The Viet Cong (VC) insurgency expanded in South Vietnam in 1962. U.S. military personnel flew combat missions and accompanied South Vietnamese soldiers in ground operations to find and defeat the insurgents. Secrecy was the official U.S. policy concerning the extent of U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam. The commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), General Paul D. Harkins, projected optimism that progress was being made in the war, but that optimism was refuted by the concerns expressed by a large number of more junior officers and civilians. Several prominent magazines, newspapers and politicians in the U.S. questioned the military strategy the U.S. was pursuing in support of the South Vietnamese government of President Ngô Đình Diệm. Diệm created the Strategic Hamlet Program as his top priority to defeat the VC. The program intended to cluster South Vietnam's rural dwellers into defended villages where they would be provided with government social services.
The Battle for Quang Tri occurred in and around Quảng Trị City, the northernmost provincial capital of South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive when the Vietcong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) attacked Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and American forces across major cities and towns in South Vietnam in an attempt to force the Saigon government to collapse. This included several attacks across northern I Corps, most importantly at Huế, Da Nang and Quảng Trị City. After being put on the defensive in the city of Quảng Trị, the Allied forces regrouped and forced the PAVN/VC out of the town after a day of fighting.
The order of battle for the Viet Cong concerned a contested American intelligence issue of the Vietnam War. Arising In the mid-1960s, its focus was the count of enemy combatants. Often called the order of battle controversy, the debate came to divide the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and challenge military intelligence. The politics and strategy of the war became involved in the debate.
The attack on Tan Son Nhut Air Base, headquarters of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force (RVNAF) and the United States Air Force (USAF) 7th Air Force, occurred during the early hours of 31 January 1968. Tan Son Nhut Air Base was one of the major air bases used for offensive air operations within South Vietnam and for the support of United States Army and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) ground operations. The attack by Vietcong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) forces was one of several major attacks on Saigon in the first days of the Tet offensive. The attack was repulsed with the VC/PAVN suffering heavy losses; only superficial damage was done to the base.
References
1 2 Fisher, Christopher, "The Illusion of Progress" Pacific Historic Review, Vol 75, No. 1 (Feb 2006), pp. 25–55
1 2 3 Coffey, Maj. Ross (March–April 2006). "Revisiting Cords: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory in Iraq". Military Review.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Hunt, Richard (1995). Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds. Westview Press. ISBN9780813311821.
↑ Ahern, Thomas, Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and the Counterinsurgency Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2009, pp. 77–78
1 2 3 4 5 Andrade, Dale; Willbanks, James (March–April 2006). "CORDS/Phoenix. Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future". Military Review.
↑ Stewart, Dr. Richard W. "CORDS and the Vietnam Experience: An Interagency Organization for Counterinsurgency and Pacification" Security Assistance: U.S. and International Historical Perspectives Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006, pp. 257–258 http://usacac.army.mil/cac2cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/2006Symposium.pdf, accessed 22 May 2014
1 2 3 Jones, Frank (2013). Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification Policy. Naval Institute Press. ISBN978-1612512280.
External links
CORDS-related materials available from the USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse (USAID/DEC)
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