CORDS/Phoenix: counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the future

Military Review,  March-April, 2006  by Dale Andrade,  James H. Willbanks

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Although the anti-infrastructure program did not crush the VCI, in combination with other pacification programs it probably did hinder insurgent progress. In Vietnam, with its blend of guerrilla and main-force war, this was not enough to prevail, but it seems clear that without Phoenix, pacification would have fared far worse. Communist accounts after the war bear this out. In Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow quotes the North Vietnamese deputy commander in South Vietnam, General Tran Do, as saying that Phoenix was "extremely destructive." (40) Former Viet Cong Minister of Justice Truong Nhu Tang wrote in his memoirs that "Phoenix was dangerously effective" and that in Hau Nghia Province west of Saigon, "the Front Infrastructure was virtually eliminated." (41) Nguyen Co Thach, who became the Vietnamese foreign minister after the war, claimed that "[w]e had many weaknesses in the South because of Phoenix." (42)

Clearly, the political infrastructure is the basic building block of almost all insurgencies, and it must be a high-priority target for the counterinsurgent from the very beginning. In Vietnam the allies faced an insurgency that emphasized political and military options in equal measure, but before the Tet Offensive weakened the Communists sufficiently to allow concentration on both main-force warfare and pacification, it was difficult to place sufficient emphasis on anti-infrastructure operations. Yet in just 2 years--between 1968 and 1970--the Phoenix program made significant progress against the VCI. What might have happened had the Americans and South Vietnamese begun it in 1960, when the Viet Cong were much weaker?

Assessing Pacification in Vietnam

Historian Richard A. Hunt characterizes the achievements of CORDS and the pacification program in Vietnam as "ambiguous." (43) Many high-ranking civilians and other officials who participated in the program, such as Komer, CIA director William Colby, and Westmoreland's military deputy, General Bruce Palmer, assert that CORDS made great gains between 1969 and 1972. (44) Some historians disagree with this assessment, but clearly the program made some progress in the years following the Tet Offensive. The security situation in many areas improved dramatically, releasing regular South Vietnamese troops to do battle with the North Vietnamese and main-force VC units. The program also spread Saigon's influence and increased the government's credibility with the South Vietnamese people.

Evidence suggests that one of the reasons Hanoi launched a major offensive in 1972 was to offset the progress that South Vietnam had made in pacification and in eliminating the VCI. (45) In the long run, however, those gains proved to be irrelevant. Although the South Vietnamese, with U.S. advisers and massive air support, successfully blunted North Vietnam's 1972 invasion, U.S. forces subsequently withdrew after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. When the fighting resumed shortly after the ceasefire in 1973, South Vietnamese forces acquitted themselves reasonably well, only to succumb to the final North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. In the end, Communist conventional forces, not the insurgents, defeated the South Vietnamese.