Strategic Hamlet Program: An Introduction
A precise strategy by which the U.S. and South Vietnamese Troops (GVN) would try to end the uprising in South Vietnam had never been agreed upon at the time that the U.S. decided, late in 1961, to increase materially its assistance to GVN and to expand its advisory effort into one which would realize a "limited partnership." By early 1962, nevertheless, there was clear consensus among the principal participants that the Strategic Hamlet Program, as it came to be called, represented the unifying concept for a strategy designed to calm rural Vietnam and to build up support among the peasants for the central government.
The Strategic Hamlet Program visualized sequential phases which, beginning with clearing the rebels from an area and protecting the rural population, progressed through the establishment of GVN infrastructure and then to the provision of services which would lead the peasants to identify with their government. The strategic hamlet program was, briefly, an attempt to translate the newly expressed theory of counter-insurgency into operational reality. The objective was political though the means to its realization were a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures.
The effect of these sequential steps to pacification was to make it very difficult to make intermediate assessments of progress. One could not in reality be sure how one was doing until one was done. Physical security by itself was a necessary condition for pacification, not a satisfactory one. The establishment of governmental functions was not, by itself, essentially conducive to a successful effort; the quality of those functions and their reaction to locally felt needs was vital. This inherent difficulty in assessing progress did not simply mean that it was difficult to identify problems and to make improvements as one went along which it was............
