Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
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12.
C. Government Countermeasures
Increased Communist activities have required the government to adopt extraordinary internal security measures which come close to constituting a national emergency. The great bulk of its military, security, and police forces has been employed directly or indirectly in counterinsurgency operations since the beginning of 1960, and these forces are being increased substantially: the 158,000-man defense establishment (with an army of about 140,000) is being increased to 170,000 and eventually to 200,000; the Civil Guard, in effect a paramilitary security and police force, has been increased from 48,000 to about 65,000 and eventually to about 70,000; and the Self-Defense Corps, a village constabulary fore, has been increased from about 40,000 to 51,000. The regular police services, the Municipal Police and the National Sûreté have remained at about their previous levels of 10,500 and 7,500 respectively. Assisting the military establishment and the security and police services are a number of other groups such as the small Gendarmerie, the Self-Defense Corps Youth, and the Republican Youth, the latter being essentially a political organization but recently armed for defensive purposes.
With the help of US advisors and with increased US aid, the South Vietnamese Government has proceeded to implement a broad and comprehensive counterinsurgency plan designed to strengthen its military and security capabilities as well as improve related political, economic, and social conditions. Among the many military-security measures already enacted (some of which had been implemented prior to the formulation of the counterinsurgency plan), the government has accelerated significantly a training program in anti-guerrilla warfare for its military and security services, increased substantially the number of army "ranger" units to be formed by the personnel trained under this program, reorganized the army's tactical command structure in order to increase the effectiveness of field operations, improved military communication and transportation facilities, centralized the intelligence functions of most if not all agencies, and created a high-level advisory council for security affairs.
These measures have increased the effectiveness of the government's military and security forces to the point that they have been able since the fist part of this year to take more offensive action against Communist guerrillas than ever before. Moreover, several unprecedentedly large operations, involving elements of the three military services, have been launched since last June principally in southern areas of considerable Communist armed strength. While these operations have significantly improved the ability of the military services to carry out coordinated offensives, in only three operations have the government's numerically superior forces been able to inflict heavy casualties on the Communist guerrillas.
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