The Vietnam Advisory Effort

By Brig. Gen. John S. Brown, U.S. Army retired

The U.S. Army is now heavily involved in an advisory effort to assist Iraq. It may be useful to reflect on the last such effort on so ambitious a scale. From 1955 through 1973, American soldiers advised and supported the armed forces of South Vietnam, and for much of that period fought alongside them. At peak strength (in 1969), 16,000 American military advisors served in Vietnam, of whom 13,500 were Army. This was out of 365,000 soldiers and 543,000 servicemembers all told in Vietnam, and out of a worldwide Army active component strength of 1,500,000. The Vietnamese forces Americans advised in 1969 numbered 1,148,000, of whom 416,000 were regular army, 475,000 territorials and 179,000 irregulars or police. The Vietnamese army featured four corps, 11 divisions and eight separate brigades. The ratio of American advisors to Vietnamese security forces was about one to 70.

The composition of advisory teams varied over time and by unit type, but the standard for an infantry battalion emerged as five: a captain, a lieutenant, two noncommissioned weapons advisors and a radio telephone operator. A South Vietnamese army already existed when Americans first arrived, a legacy of the French, and as the war progressed, newly arriving advisors were increasingly likely to report in to seasoned Vietnamese counterparts. Advisors nevertheless remained valuable as resources with respect to doctrine and training, and invaluable as conduits to American logistical and fire support.

Initially, virtually all American advisors went to regular units of the Vietnamese armed forces. As the nature of the war became more apparent, more and more ended up with civil or paramilitary forces. Provincial advisory teams came to number between 20 and 30 soldiers, and district advisory teams about five. Service schools customarily acquired a handful of advisors as well. Nation building, population and resources control, and pacification became at least as important as combat operations. By 1967, about half of all American advisors were in civil or paramilitary roles, and their activities had been brought together under the umbrella of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. All knew the guerrilla war would have to be won locally, and village militias were often best positioned to do so. Even the infantry divisions of the regular army acquired a local character, recruiting, operating in and living with their families in territory they intended to defend.

Sustaining an adequate supply of appropriately experienced advisors proved problematic. Turnover was high. Most served 12 months in theater and only six months with combat units in the field. Service culture valued combat tours in American units more highly than advisory duty, and career officers were concerned about experiencing the right job mix when promotions moved so quickly. Chief of Staff Gen. Harold K. Johnson attempted to establish a Military Assistance Officer Program as a specialized career field, but this ultimately succumbed when only 433 officers expressed interest in 6,000 billets. Special Forces were insufficient in numbers as well, and most were diverted to peripheral tribal areas where they combined direct action and other missions with advisory roles. The overwhelming majority of advisors were line officers and NCOs from the traditional branches. The Army incentivised advisory duty with perks and admonitions to promotion boards, and shepherded career patterns in such a manner as to mix service in American units and advisory duty.

To its credit, the Army took the long view and transformed the advisory effort from ad hoc to systematic. The Army Staff negotiated a ceiling on advisors in theater that was sustainable over time. It established a family of courses appropriate to different advisory missions. The standard came to be the six-week Military Assistance Training Advisor course taught at Fort Bragg, N.C. This curriculum included counterinsurgency theory, tactics and techniques, civic action, psychological operations and country orientation. It also included more than 100 hours of language training. Selected personnel went on to a further eight to 12 weeks of training at the Defense Language Institute. Proficiency in Vietnamese remained a weak point, however, and virtually all advisors relied heavily upon native Vietnamese interpreters.

The American advisory effort did succeed in fielding capable Vietnamese battalions. Time and again South Vietnamese units showed well, even in trying combat circumstances. Local pacification also progressed reasonably well, and by 1970, most of the population was secure and the indigenous guerrillas by and large defeated. Above the battalion level, advisors had less success. Although there were exceptional Vietnamese generals, political cronyism and corruption impeded efforts to develop a truly professional senior leadership cadre totally committed to winning the war and capable of doing so. Vietnamese units continued to depend upon Americans for logistics and fire support and generally performed best within an American framework. Perhaps most troubling, in-place and refresher unit training was virtually nonexistent. In theory, Vietnamese units would retrain when not on active operations and periodically rotate through training centers to refurbish maneuver skills. In practice, commanders almost always found a reason not to do so and thus lost the opportunity to sustain skills not being used in the field at the time. This greatly reduced their ability to adapt quickly to changes in the nature of the war. When Vietnamization first became policy, it envisioned a prolonged tapering off of the advisory effort and of American logistical and air support. In fact, acknowledged advisors plummeted to zero in 1973, and American logistical and air support came to be similarly withheld.

What lessons are there in the Vietnam advisory effort? History never repeats itself exactly and no two wars are the same, but we might be wise to: prepare for the long haul; design an advisory structure we can sustain; systematize the selection, training and career mix of advisors; emphasize service with militias and civil agencies as much as service with regulars; develop capable senior leaders as well as capable battalions; and assure units rotate through retraining as well as utilization. We also should steel ourselves for the frustrations inevitably involved.