Strategic Hamlet Program

12 Key excerpts on "Strategic Hamlet Program"

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  US Special Forces and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam

  Military Innovation and Institutional Failure, 1961-63

  • Christopher K. Ives(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Insurgent military formations reconstituted and formed new ones. Leaders in Saigon and Washington also saw the apparent insecurity of the strategic hamlets as the thin reed of Diemist assertions of success snapped in a steady breeze of Viet Cong/National Liberation Front subversion and clandestine political development. Despite a sustained military and offensive strategy, success proved elusive, helping bring about the coup that removed Diem in November 1963.

  Strategic hamlets

  South Vietnamese efforts in village-based counterinsurgency like the Strategic Hamlet Program, though successful on paper, not only failed, but actually accelerated the crisis in rural South Vietnam. The Strategic Hamlet Program violated peasant trust, and created tensions with relocations and corvée labor for public works and defenses, as well as and providing more security problems. The program set as its goal ultimately to have 90 percent of rural South Vietnam’s population settled in government-fortified and developed hamlets. Interim objectives of this program included security from VC mobilization efforts, economic development, and political indoctrination through developing an awareness of democratic values. With a nod to indigenous programs tried in 1959, Saigon’s efforts mirrored British programs in Malaysia and followed the advice of Sir Robert Thompson, since 1962 the head of the British Advisory Mission in Saigon.

  Precedents

  The Strategic Hamlet Program was the principal counterinsurgency element of the combined operations.2 Promulgated by a National Security Council Action Memorandum in August 1961, the program built, in theory, on the lessons learned from Diem’s less-than-successful agroville experiments.3 Agrovilles began in 1959 and ran into 1961 before their collapse. This program was an ambitious undertaking to concentrate rural populations for economic development and control. Joseph Zasloff, a former administrator with the Michigan State University advisory group, quoted President Diem’s words from a radio address that promised southern peasants that he would ‘‘create densely populated settlement areas in the countryside, where conditions are favorable to communication and sanitation and where minimum facilities for the grouping of the farmers living in isolation and destitution in the back country exist.’’ Based on relocation, corv´ee labor, and without any legitimate land reform, agrovilles were not well received or successful. Propaganda efforts by the Diem regime could not overcome the program’s shortcomings or the very real resentment felt by the peasants, who bore the weight of the labor, and the uncertainty, and then found themselves targeted by insurgent mobilization efforts with propaganda and more.4

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  A Global History of Relocation in Counterinsurgency Warfare

  • Edward J. Erickson, Edward J Erickson(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  11 Counterinsurgency at the ‘rice roots’ level: South Vietnam’s Strategic Hamlet Campaign Dr Nathan R. Packard

  This vast movement, born in the heat of war, is our pre-emptory reply to the Communist challenge. … The strategic hamlet is also and primarily the point of impact of a political and social revolution which will serve as a foundation of our economic revolution.

  PRESIDENT NGO DINH DIEM, 1962

  1

  Introduction

  From 1961 to 1963, the South Vietnamese government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by the United States, implemented the Strategic Hamlet Program. The primary threat to South Vietnam was a communist insurgency known as the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). In a country that was 88 per cent rural, with an estimated 2,500 villages divided into 16,000 self-sustaining hamlets, winning the war in the countryside was essential.

  2

  The communists considered the villages their centre of gravity and organizing at the village level had been the centrepiece of their strategy dating back to the colonial era. The Strategic Hamlet Program was one of the few strategies pursued by South Vietnamese and the Americans that directly challenged their adversary’s programme in the countryside. The intent was to separate the rural population from the insurgents by establishing protected hamlets. In addition to security, the government would hold free elections and provide economic aid, medical facilities and educational services. The ultimate objective was to build support for the government in the countryside thereby reducing the insurgents’ influence.

  Conceptually the programme called for building defences around existing hamlets. In practice, however, tens of thousands of villagers were forcibly relocated. In time, relocation came to define the programme. This chapter will examine whether or not the Strategic Hamlet Program achieved its military objective of pacifying the countryside by increasing support for the government at the village level. At best, the programme represented a comprehensive, whole-of-government effort to defeat the insurgency at the ‘rice roots’ level. Despite some initial successes, involuntary resettlement, forced labour and the failure of the government to deliver on its promises bred resentment. The programme ultimately failed to win over the populace and was cancelled following the overthrow of the Diem regime in late 1963.

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  Vietnam's Lost Revolution

  Ngô ?ình Di?m's Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955–1963

  • Geoffrey C. Stewart(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  44 In this light, then, the Strategic Hamlet Program can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the Civic Action program, modified to contend with a more sustained insurgency. Addressing the Civil Guard on the seventh anni- versary of its founding in April 1962, Diệm echoed earlier statements about the Commissariat when he stated that the strategic hamlets rep- resented the “foundation” of a “new Vietnamese society where values are reassessed according to the spirit of the personalist revolution where social, cultural and economic reform will improve the living conditions of the large working class down to the remotest villages.” 45 By providing government cadres with a more secure environment in which to mobilize the rural population, the political, social and economic transformation of 41 Directorate General of Information, Vietnam’s Strategic Hamlets. (Saigon: Directorate General of Information, 1963), 4–5 and 10; and Catton, Diem’s Final Failure, 119–121. 42 Memorandum from Canadian Delegation ICSC, Saigon to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Ottawa (part 3), October 19, 1962, Folder 50052-A-1–40 pt 3, Box 4639, Record Group 25 (hereafter RG25), Library and Archives Canada (hereafter, LAC). 43 The quotation is from Catton, Diem’s Final Failure, 120–121. For the other details see Directorate General of Information, Vietnam’s Strategic Hamlets, 3–21. 44 Memorandum From the Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence for the Acting Secretary of State, July 1, 1963, Item number: 2321518004, Texas Tech Virtual Vietnam Archive, www.virtualarchive.vietnam.ttu.edu (hereafter referred to as TTVVA) (accessed February 2, 2007); and Miller, Misalliance, 234–235. 45 Quotations from Osborne, Strategic Hamlets in South Viet-Nam, 28. See also, Directorate General of Information, Vietnam’s Strategic Hamlets, 20–21. The Strategic Hamlet Program 210 the countryside that had been the fundamental mission of the CDV could still happen.

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  Misalliance

  Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam

  • Edward Miller(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Although many U.S. officials were aware that the Ngos’ under-standing of the program differed significantly from their own, most re-mained optimistic that it could be molded to fit with the particular coun-terinsurgency theories and strategies they preferred. As a result, Americans and South Vietnamese often found themselves talking past each other, even as the scope and scale of U.S.-RVN collaboration on strategic ham-lets expanded. Initially, U.S. officials expected to fold the Strategic Hamlet Program into one or another of the U.S. counterinsurgency plans that were circu-lating inside the embassy and in Washington during late 1961 and early 1962. General Paul Harkins, the new senior U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, viewed the strategic hamlets as part of a general overhaul of RVN military strategy that he hoped to persuade Diem to undertake. As the first head of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MAC-V)—an organization established in early 1962 to oversee the implementa-tion of the military aspects of the limited partnership—Harkins argued that the ARVN should go on the offensive by launching a nationwide “explosion” of sweep operations and tactical air attacks. Strategic hamlets, Harkins suggested, could be used to sequester, protect, and control the population while this offensive was taking place. 63 Harkins’s attempts to fit the Strategic Hamlet Program into a conven-tional military strategy were opposed by William Colby, who advocated an unconventional warfare approach. Under Colby’s direction, the CIA’s Saigon station had undertaken a series of small-scale counterinsurgency “experiments” in various locales across South Vietnam during 1961. These projects emphasized the creation of community-based paramilitary units as a means to enlist the rural population in the fight against the NLF. The Strategic Hamlet Program, Colby argued, should be organized on a simi-lar model.

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  Reflections On The Vietnam War

  • General Cao Van Vien, Lt. Gen. Dong Van Khuyen(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  Criticizing a strategic concept by just dwelling on its single aspect of dislocation was perhaps unfair, narrow, and prejudiced. Such a criticism reflected an incomplete understanding of the Vietnamese people and its historical experience. Regardless of what had been said about it, the Strategic Hamlet Program remained a judicious national policy, a true antidote to Communist subversive and total warfare. Its chief merit lay in the fact that it had been comprehensively designed to improve the people’s living standards through socio-economic development at the rice-roots level. It was a sound strategic concept whose objective was to neutralize and counterbalance the effects of a war without frontlines by transforming the countryside into a system of mutually-supporting fortifications. It sought to build and consolidate the spirit of self-assurance, self-reliance, and voluntary participation which would sustain the nation’s efforts in a protracted war of attrition.

  Finally, the Strategic Hamlet Program should prove to be a less costly defense enterprise in the long run, but its success depended on perseverance and continued popular support. Indeed, only the people could neutralize the subversive effects of insurgency warfare, and only the hamlet residents in particular could identify and eliminate the Insurgents. For counterinsurgency purposes, no other motive could be stronger than the need to protect one’s own family and property. This was the overriding self-defense principle on which the strategic hamlet concept was built.

  The major flaw of this undertaking stemmed primarily from the methods and spirit with which local government officials implemented the program. Driven by overzeal and a desire to please President Diem, these officials failed to work out basic plans designed to prepare the local people psycho-logically for the event and elicit their voluntary participation. In the complex and difficult political situation of South Vietnam at that time, this process required patience and persuasive skills. The first step that would have paved the way for success was to explain how the program would benefit hamlet residents and those who had to resettle in terms of security and protection against Communist insurgents. This step was important because South Vietnam was a free country and the people should be given time to weigh these benefits and decide for themselves to accept sacrifice. But instead of doing this, local governments had acted in a most mischievous manner, conducting for example swift cordon operations to round up people and move them against their will into designated hamlets where resettlement facilities did not exist. Often, hamlet people were also forced to perform maintenance on CG and SDC outposts or to clean them, which provided an opportunity for local officials to claim efficiency and popular support.

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  Inventing Vietnam

  The United States and State Building, 1954–1968

  • James M. Carter(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  K. Thompson’s experience in Malaya, and 26 David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), I:397–406. 27 Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1977), chap. 4. Quote is in PP, II:128. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara referred specifically to the strategic hamlets as the “backbone of Presidents Diem’s program” to defeat the insurgency. Of course, that also made it the backbone of the U.S. effort as the latter created and bankrolled the former; see PP, II:149. See also Latham, Modernization as Ideology, chap. 5. 124 COUNTERINSURGENCY, STRATEGIC HAMLETS American State Department intelligence officer Roger Hilsman’s ideas. They conceived of strategic hamlets as only one of a multiphased counterinsurgency process whereby the peasant’s loyalties would be won through a variety of measures. 28 In its initial phases, the overall process would involve setting up a government presence, as opposed to an overt military presence and show of force, to establish basic security. Villages would be organized for protection, requiring military forces on a limited basis, and gradually, they would be cleared of all insurgents or revolu- tionaries. A police force would remain in the area as part of a “clear and hold” strategy. Outlying villages or communities would thus have been brought into greater contact with an expanded and modernized Vietnam, with the Saigon regime at its center. Thus, from the start, the Strategic Hamlet Program was the embodiment of the administration’s combination of military and developmental solutions for Vietnam. Launched in March 1962 in the province of Binh Duong and dubbed Operation Sunrise, the hamlet program attempted the mass relocation of peasants from this area into fortified hamlets.

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  Aid Under Fire

  Nation Building and the Vietnam War

  • Jessica Elkind(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  52

  Although Taylor, Hilsman, and others expressed frustration with the way in which the Vietnamese government executed the program, in 1962 and early 1963 few American officials questioned the wisdom of the basic premise of strategic hamlets. In discussing the shortcomings of the program, Taylor stated: “A basically sound idea got off to a weak start.”53 Hilsman criticized the Diem regime’s handling of the hamlets. He claimed: “The GVN failure to emphasize political, social and economic reform at the outset may deprive the entire effort of much of its impact. Much depends on the ability of the government to show convincing evidence of its intent to improve the lot of peasants. Instead, government efforts appear to be aimed largely at increasing government control over the peasants.”54 Such military and political objectives superseded any other incidental benefits that the hamlet inhabitants might have received.

  The Strategic Hamlet Program was a direct response to escalating warfare and the failure of previous GVN attempts to secure the loyalty of Vietnam’s rural population. By the early 1960s, the antigovernment insurgency had become a full-scale civil war that disproportionately affected rural inhabitants and negatively affected even those people who sought to remain uninvolved in the conflict. Because of the military context and emphasis, the program strained relations between the Vietnamese population and Americans working in the country. American involvement in the program inspired doubts among many Vietnamese regarding the true objectives of the United States in their country. Through their financial and logistic support of new hamlets, American aid workers became highly visible participants in the program. American aid money helped fund the creation of these hamlets and cover the costs of relocating tens of thousands of people to live in them. Aid workers from organizations such as USOM and IVS took part in construction efforts and then continued working in hamlet medical clinics and schools.

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  The unimagined community

  Imperialism and culture in South Vietnam

  • Duy Lap Nguyen(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  186

  The “Strategic hamlets,” therefore, “were designed not only as a response to the communist insurgency, but also as a response to the threat of American interference in Vietnamese domestic affairs.”187 Nhu “viewed the strategic hamlets as a means to defeat communism while, at the same time, overcoming the problems of an underdeveloped country.”188 The aim of the program, in other words, was to create a “guerrilla infrastructure” for “fighting against the guerrillas and imperialism,” for freeing the Republic from the grips of the Communist Party as well as dependence on American power and influence.189

  Decentralization and the urban elite

  By 1963, the success of the program as both a security measure and a mechanism of social and economic transformation had increased support for the Ngos in the countryside, encouraging them to continue expanding for the program.190 From “an organizational standpoint the results were impressive. Virtually the entire bureaucracy from national level on down reoriented its activities to the hamlet program.”191

  This reorientation, however, was not only aimed at overcoming the insurgency in the South. Rather, Nhu also “seized upon the Strategic Hamlets as a unique means of … bypassing and isolating the inhospitable urban political climate.” Since the program, “by its internal logic,” as Nhu argued, “cannot fail to limit the powers of Central agencies, and even the presidential powers,”192 the establishment of a decentralized network of local self-government would proceed “even to the point of bypassing the Saigon-level ministry.”193 “Under the decentralization procedure funds are provided directly to the provinces, rather than through the ministries, for civil measures to establish [the] … hamlets and for a wide range of local development programs.”194

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  Vietnam Declassified

  The CIA and Counterinsurgency

  • Thomas L. AhernJr., Thomas L. Ahern Jr.(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  In this, the Strategic Hamlet came to resemble Diem’s abortive agroville project of 1959, which had been characterized by large-scale, compulsory relocation and uncompensated labor. The exactions imposed under the Strategic Hamlet were less draconian, at least where the United States supported it, but the new program also largely failed to attract voluntary participation. 35 Driven perhaps by the intractability of his problems, Nhu’s disquisitions became increasingly grandiose. In March, he assured Colby and visiting Far East Division Chief Desmond FitzGerald that more than 10,000 strategic ham-lets would be completed in 1962. Talking about the security of the villagers and their property, Nhu echoed Diem’s confidence that the inhabitants of vil- Sea Swallows and Strategic Hamlets 81 lages attacked by the VC could simply “disappear into the countryside.” They would first “secrete their valuables” in a place that, out of respect for the farmer’s “personalist right,” would be unknown to government officials. And if the VC burned down a man’s house, the government would build him a new one. 36 Nhu seems to have assumed, in all this, precisely the dedication and competence in South Vietnamese civil servants whose lack he had continu-ally deplored with all his CIA interlocutors. But he had never displayed much understanding of organizational mechanics; as Colby put it, he had “no sense of the reality” of problems at the implementation level. 37 Its weaknesses did not mean that the Strategic Hamlet Program was every-where a total failure. For one thing, it disposed of very large material resources, mostly American, which offered the affected peasants an improved standard of living. An American delegation visiting Cu Chi District, west of Saigon, in March 1962 found the security situation improved over the previous October. In the hamlets being evaluated, heavy concentration on civic action and civic organization had accompanied the construction of defenses.

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  Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920–1963

  • Nu-Anh Tran, Tuong Vu, Nu-Anh Tran, Tuong Vu(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  111 As US Deputy Chief of Mission William Trueheart described it, What was remarkable was the stress he laid on his plans to democratize the coun- try from the bottom up and his very evident intent to impress on me his solidarity with the Nhus (I have never heard him refer to them so frequently). Diem spoke at length and with passion and considerable eloquence about the fundamental social and political revolution being carried out in Viet-Nam through the Strategic Hamlet Program. The theme was essentially that of Nhu, and Diem in fact spe- cifically acknowledged this. 112 Thus, instead of implementing the program of democratic reform demanded by the Americans and the urban elite, the Ngôs attempted to carry out a social revolution “against formal or liberal democracy” in order to “democratize the country from the bottom up.” According to an American study, this social revolution would achieve con- siderable success in its goal of decentralizing the RVN government. From “an organizational standpoint the results were impressive. Virtually the entire bureaucracy from national level on down reoriented its activities to the hamlet program.” 113 For Albert Fraleigh, one of the few American specialists who played a significant role in the program, the Strategic Hamlet Campaign had proved Nguyen 135 effective not only as a counterinsurgency measure but also as a way of address- ing the issue of economic underdevelopment. The program had quickly “decen- tralized Vietnamese government . . . and brought rapid political, social and economic progress throughout the rural areas by early 1963.” As a “real solution to the problems of underdevelopment,” the Strategic Hamlet Campaign would also attempt to address its principal cause. 114 The program, as I mentioned, was aimed at more than overcoming the communist insurgency. It was also conceived as an instrument of class struggle against the urban elite as the cause of disunity and economic dependence.

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  The Art of Insurgency

  American Military Policy and the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia

  • Donald W. Hamilton(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Although it sounded great, it was a lie. By November 1963, at the moment at which the coup against the Ngos toppled the regime, the number of completed strategic hamlets was inflated by successors to the government to some eight thousand. 40 The predominant U.S. view was that the Strategic Hamlet Program had failed, mainly because the hamlets had been extended into essentially "unsecured" areas. But Thompson had warned against just that sort of uncontrolled proliferation of hamlets, particularly when being operated, indeed tested, by a novice political group that actually placed 144 The Art of Insurgency greater emphasis on other programs remote in strategic concept and design to insurgent operations. Diem's background of failure in land development programs, especially the agrovilles, did not make him an expert handler on the subject of strategic hamlets. It turned out that many of the "completed" hamlets were nothing more than empty shells, or had been established in such exposed areas that they were easily overrun by the Viet Cong. 41 In fact, hamlet numbers were known to be inflated, by conservative estimates, some 900 percent. Like Lansdale, Thompson had been brought to Saigon on the pretense of conducting larger operations than actually occurred. After a few short months of watching powerlessly as his programs systematically failed, Thompson too would leave Saigon, continuing his analysis of the war from home. By late 1962, General McGarr was finishing his tour of duty in South Vietnam. Although McGarr had won some influence within the counterinsurgent school, his beliefs about the situation in South Vietnam were typically molded by his predecessor. McGarr accepted the validity of guerrilla war operations, but he also accepted the idea that a breaking point had occurred in South Vietnam, one that put the GVN on exceed- ingly dangerous ground. Given the maturity of the subversive insurgency he faced, his conclusions are difficult to fault.

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  The Vietnam wars

  • Kevin Ruane(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Viet Cong now control very high proportions of the people in certain key provinces, particularly those south and west of Saigon. The Strategic Hamlet Program was seriously over-ex- tended in these provinces, and the Viet Cong has been able to destroy many hamlets, while others have been abandoned or in some cases betrayed or pillaged by the Government's own Self Defense Corps. In these key provinces, the Viet Cong have destroyed almost all major roads, and are collecting taxes at will. McNamara memorandum to Johnson, 21 December 1963, in PRUS 1961- 1963, Vol. VI, pp. 732-5. 4.11 Hanoi ups the stakes By the end of 1963, the conditions under which the US govern- ment could safely commence disengagement did not exist - nor, following Hanoi's decision to escalate North Vietnam's commitment to the insurgency in the hope of producing a swift and decisive victory, would they ever exist. The U.S. imperialists waged the special war in SVN [South Vietnam] and established the Southeast Asia aggressive bloc 6 in order to achieve the following three objectives. - Repress the national liberation movement and carry out the 93 The Vietnam wars neocolonialist policy - Build up military bases and prepare to attack our side - Keep socialism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia. If the U.S. imperialists are after the third objective, it is because all national liberation movements tend unavoidably to develop into socialist revolutions, especially in Southeast Asia in general and in South Viet-Nam in particular. In these areas, the national democratic revolutions are being conducted by the strong Marxist-Leninist parties ... The U.S. imperialists are determined to pursue the three objectives mentioned above. However, the third goal is the most important to them, because it includes preventing the decline and collapse of imperialist capitalism in Southeast Asia and over the world.

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