Didn't the US asked us Brit's for advice on how to conduct an counter insurgency campaign (The Malaya Emergency etc) . . . then completely ignored us?
Much obliged!
Malaya was an extremely different situation due to it lacking a direct land link to a nation supplying the insurgency. It was easily isolated, which then meant the insurgency could be relatively easily strangled with basic COIN. Same thing with the earlier Philippines insurgency. Vietnam was tough because for political reasons the Ho Chi Minh trail was allowed to operate without ground operations for most of the war.
The report is published in June 1968, unsurprisingly the background work we done prior to it's publication date I'm pretty sure the 1968 MACV report will also refer to things that happened prior to its publication date
I'm getting a bad feeling we're going to just retread our earlier arguments.
The report problem referred to report specific tests for that study instead of doing more than referencing earlier studies.
So OK so we can't look at the 69% figure then. Yeah sorry such a hyper specific claim is not going to be taken at face value.
Since you're the one obsessed with it request the original documents from the US government.
Forget you and me arguing over who's right/wrong for a moment. Just as a thought exercise I want to you take five minutes to think how you would go about proving how assault rifles improved combat effectiveness by 69% (hell take 5 minutes to define combat effectiveness for a start). What stats would you need, what evidence would you need to create those stats, how would you get that evidence in the middle of a conflict
(I'm actually far more interested in this than you and I banging on over the same points again
)
That'd be a useless thought experiment if you want to know how they actually went about it in that specific study.
However were I to structure said study I would look at casualty rates per engagement, both sides, and how they changed over time/unit size/the introduction of the rifle, I would try to control for unit quality the best I could and opponent (NVA vs VC as one example) and engagement type (ambush/meeting engagement/attack/defense, etc) as well as terrain. Then consider outcome.
They also mentioned morale, which IMHO would be quite a bit harder to quantify and probably would have to rely too much on self reported data.
Since you brought it up, what are your criteria.
The point was the claim of "it was AK's vs. outgunned ARVN" is not really as true as it was later (and then it gets less true again as M16s were supplied), the point is this apparently critical window your claim is based around is actually quite short meaning it's relevance in a much larger longer conflict is likely lessened. Your yourself have used this claim to explain the apparently massive ARVN early casualties that they apparently couldn't possibly recover from (despite the fact early years casualties were less).
At this point so much time as gone past I don't even remember what my original claim was, so if you want to go back and quote it then we can say what the original claim was.
I'd say the issue is more about being outgunned given the types of engagements especially early on as ambushes were more common as it was the VC who were doing the fighting more than the NVA until 1964-5. In that situation a hand-me-down WW2 left over Garand isn't going to be a great option, especially for someone of small stature as the South Vietnamese were.
My claim about the early losses were that there was a relatively small standing army of experienced men who were ground down before the levee en masse happened after 1968. You're also forgetting wounded/disabled and desertions (a huge problem for ARVN because morale was so low by 1964) are left out of your death numbers and the casualties hit the infantry and elite units especially hard as in all wars. The US didn't commit troops in 1965 for nothing, ARVN was falling apart due to low morale mainly stemming from getting beaten by a foe with superior small arms...as was pointed out in the paper and a bunch of studies already cited.
But yes better armed ARVN early on will do better early on, but maybe just maybe the VC will respond to that different balance an as the insurgent party will do something different and not just charge into a earlier introduced hail of automatic fire as your theory demands.
If the VC change tactics, they will be much less effective and more easily defeated if they aren't willing to go toe to toe as often or at all. After all if the VC can't drive off ARVN then they can't maintain sanctuaries and guerrilla organizing against the government.
The conflict escalated from the early 60's onwards, your entire claim is somehow some change in small arms early in the early 60's will allow the ARVN to magically transform itself into a much more effective force later on and win (despite teh AVN and associated unit increasing in size support and improved equipment later on). I.e. that the entire war was somehow decided in 1962-65 a period of time with least fighting
Right, because they will have more surviving troops who can pass on skills and knowledge of how to fight, not to mention be future leaders. Same in the inverse for the VC/NVA who will be defeated more easily. Especially for civilians who see who is winning that will influence which way the countryside breaks in the conflict; IOTL it was VC success that helped ensure the steady supply of recruits and supplies (fearful villagers basically had to provide food for the insurgency to avoid problems with the guerrillas dominating the countryside) until 1968 wiped them out.
There is no magic about it, it's called having the means to fight and build up experience, much like how the US military in WW2 took years to turn from a small volunteer army into a 16 million man draft army that defeated it's geo-strategic opponents. Meanwhile from it's peak in 1941 the German army was ground down and lost experience and manpower until it's morale collapsed.
If ARVN can get ahead of and break it's OTL disintegration cycle that was nearly collapsing it as a force by 1965 (the reason for US troops being committed) then it is well ahead of the game and could arguably then pull of later operations like the invasion of Laos to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Remember your claim isn't just that the M16 is a better wepoan than M1, it's not even just that the ARVN would have done better if it had got them a few years earlier, it's that if the ARVN had got M16's a few years earlier during the early 60's when the conflict was at it's lowest intensity it would would reduce ARVN casualties by some magic number that would somehow make the difference in the overall war that increased in intensity and lasted until 1973. A period of time that had lots of assault rifle armed forces fighting the VC/NVA and yet they still won.
Given that ARVN morale was so bad because of how badly they were being beaten in fire fights (I've since gotten other books about ARVN and they were really at their nadir in 1965) it wasn't simply casualties that were a problem, but also morale and desertions (50% of manpower at one point), which then stopped when they got what they needed to be effective. Since the NVA and VC were also getting rapidly better equipped from the early 1960s on, if ARVN did't have the means to fight effectively they were seeing where things were headed and noped out of the conflict. Had the US supported their ally like the Chinese and USSR were ARVN wouldn't have been in such a bad position that the US had to take over and then spend years rebuilding them from nearly scratch while doing most of the fighting. ARVN was getting too used to running away to survive in the early 1960s and it took until they were confident in their arms and abilities before they were outfighting the NVA in by 1972.
Ultimately IOTL the NVA won in the end because the US Congress cut off support for ARVN and let them fail based on the faulty assumption that they were doomed anyway based on the old stereotype of ARVN effectiveness on it's own as in the 1960s, not realizing that the later improved ARVN was actually combat effective now. Having a better image of ARVN that could stand on it's own early would likely also change the US perception of ARVN's viability and would allow for funding to continue from 1973-75.
This whole premise that the ARVN somehow lost in 1962-65 the vital troops and fighting spirit that was their only hope to build victory on later on is not only hyper specific cause and effect in a much larger and complex context, but also seem to ignores the fact that the VC/NVA somehow managed to keep fighting and win while sustaining heavy loses.
The VC/NVA were vastly better materially supported even by the early 1960s than ARVN and remained so until the early 1970s. Then in 1974 the US congress cut funding and the NVA once again had the edge, especially since the US forces pulled out on top of the cut in material aid.
The NVA mobilized earlier in the late 1950s, so had 1 million men under arms at least a decade before the South did that. Not only that, but not having to sustain their own economy during the war allowed them to mobilize more men, plus they used Southern insurgents to do the majority of the fighting until about 1968. In the end though the only reason the north won was that they continued getting endless aid until they won, while the south only really got major military supplies from 1968-73 and largely were cut off from '74 on. Even the North was shocked by how quickly things imploded for the South in 1974-75.
Once again, as the paper I cited points out, it was the weapons and military supply aid that really determined the course and outcome of the war.
So you are not going to count an almost decade long deployment of US army, USMC, Airforce and Naval forces in an attempt to paint this as the south were out resourced by the north. But more than that you are going to dance on the head of a pin when it comes to arguing that earlier use of the M16 would prevent just enough early war ARVN losses to somehow overcome that and overturn the result!
| Year | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | Total (1960–1974) |
|---|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| ARVN combat deaths[56] | 2,223 | 4,004 | 4,457 | 5,665 | 7,457 | 11,242 | 11,953 | 12,716 | 27,915 | 21,833 | 23,346 | 22,738 | 39,587 | 27,901 | 31,219 | 254,256 |
They only showed up because ARVN didn't get enough material aid to sustain itself and had to take over until ARVN was rebuilt and they could mobilize to compete with the north.
The chart above is for deaths only, not overall casualties or desertions. It's missing a ton of necessary info to really draw conclusions from divorced from context.
online.ucpress.edu
en.wikipedia.org
