Thread by @ColonelTowner

1/ American Military Assistance Programs since 1945 from an Oxford Research Project
PART 5

Local forces sometimes had little interest in learning U.S. military doctrines but were eager to obtain high-tech military equipment that could enable them to gain political advantage.

2/ Albert Riedel, a police adviser in Kabul, Afghanistan, wrote to his superiors infall 1957 that he was not even allowed to tag along with Afghan police officers on their patrols, noting that the prime minister would “take any free donations of equipment but they would use it…

3/ …the way they wanted.” In other cases where there were large bodies of U.S. troops and local forces openly carried out policies in the American interest, recipients could come to resemble occupied countries.

4/ Economist Peter Bell wrote that in Thailand during the 1960s “there were U.S. advisers everywhere; they occupied choice residences in the best districts of Bangkok (usually with four or five servants), sat in high positions in Thai government ministries … [and] were seen at…

5/ …the best golf and country clubs.”

6/ His comments point to an underlying motive or side benefit of the programs, which was to cultivate contacts in the military and police being groomed for high office and penetrate government ministries and the internal security apparatus as a pathway to greater political…

7/ …influence and power. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara stated explicitly that the United States provided military aid because “military officers were the coming leaders of their nations [and] it is beyond price to the United States to make friends with such men.

8/ Military advisers became known to the public mostly through Hollywood movies like The Green Berets and Apocalypse Now, which are loosely based on their experience in the Vietnam War.

9/ The United States first established a Military Assistance Advisory Group(MAAG) in Vietnam in September 1950 under the command of Brigadier General Francis G. Brink, the former chief of the advisory staff in China, and later General Thomas J. Trapnell, who had put down a…

10/ …North Korean prisoner revolt.

11/ From 1950 to 1954, some sixty-five officers were involved in the distribution of $2 billion in military equipment, which included armored river patrol boats, 8,000 vehicles, 500 aircraft, antipersonnel munitions, and thousands of projectiles packed in 500-pound cluster bombs.

12/ French general Jean de Lattre de Tassigny complained frequently that there were too many Americans in Vietnam, though he credited the part played by American equipment, especially “napalm bombs” that arrived “in the nick of time” in French victories at Vinh Yen and Mao Khe.

13/ Following the victory of the Viet Minh forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam was divided under the Geneva Accords with the promise of nationwide elections within two years.

14/ Recognizing that revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh would receive 80 percent of the vote, the Eisenhower administration never signed the accords and set about planting a client regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who replaced French puppet emperor Bao Dai.

15/ A 342-man MAAG, commanded by John W. O’Daniel and then “Hanging” Sam Williams, was given instructions to develop the American-financed Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) for internal security purposes and to fight perceived external “aggression” from the North.

16/ Training camps were established, and promising officers were sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, or to jungle-warfare schools in the Philippines and Malaya (trained their by the UK), with a naval advisory group also established.

17/ Relations between the Americans and Vietnamese were strained by the superior living standards of the American advisers, who had good housing, food, and recreation privileges lacking among the ARVN.

18/ The Americans also did not take the same risks to their lives and typically served eleven-month tours of duty that precluded any long-term attachment to the country or knowledge of its intricacies (on purpose, the CIA couldn't risk the military catching on).

19/ The Americans often viewed their Vietnamese counterparts as primitive and uneducated, with the U.S.

20/ Army staff college attributing deficiencies in the ARVN to “the long-standing nature of the Vietnamese people: passive, submissive, fatalistic, accustomed to being led,” a view that left Viet Minh tenacity unexplained.

21/ Most of the American advisers believed in what historian Tom Engelhardt defined as the post-war victory culture that stressed the seemingly exceptional virtues of American society and a mission to export them abroad.

22/ Advisers who went “native,” so to speak, were the ones who integrated into the culture and forged strong bonds with their counterparts, hunting the “Vietcong” in an efficient and often ruthless manner.

23/ One adviser, David Donovan, likened himself to a warrior-king, who at twenty-three had unprecedented power in his ability to imprison people in his district, direct development funds (USAID), and even order executions, commanding a mix of reverence and fear.

24/ The Saigon military mission, a CIA unit, was headed during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, whose country team sent agents into the north to sabotage industrial facilities and the transportation system and created a fake resistance movement.

25/ Alongside more violent methods borrowed from the Philippines, Lansdale and associates like Rufus Phillips and John Paul Vann also pushed for “civic action” programs.

26/ Lansdale defined these as “the brotherly behavior of troops along lines taught by Mao and Giap to their troops,” but as Lansdale acknowledged, the “Americans never succeeded in teaching this to the Vietnamese army.

27/ Up to the very end of the Vietnam War, the army was still stealing from the population.

28/ In May 1955, after Diem had won a fake election including forcably relocating over 1M northern Vietnamese catholics to the south, with 98.2 percent of the vote, the State Department contracted the Michigan State University School of Police Administration at a budget of $25…

29/ …million to train a paramilitary civil guard that was built up in violation of the Geneva agreements limiting the armed forces to 150,000.

30/ The Michigan State group also built up the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI or CongAn), an offshoot of the French Sûreté, which had functioned principally as a “political repression organization.”

31/ Thousands died in the campaign, which, according to Paul Harwood, head of covert action in the CIA’s Saigon station, was infused with a “totalitarian spirit.” This porgram was part of USAID's Office of Public Safety.