Auto Defense Choc
The Auto Defense de Choc (ADC) was a militia training program for the Royal Lao Armed Forces.
When Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives Theodore Shackley, James William Lair and others slipped into the Kingdom of Laos in the early 1960s, they instituted an American version of the ADC dependent on pre-packed airdropped materiel.
Using a three-day training schedule in Operation Momentum, Shackley, Lair and others, worked with Vang Pao to raise a guerrilla force of 5,000 troops in several months.
As the Laotian Civil War continued, ADC troops began to assume the role of regular light infantry.
Although the French lost the First Indochina War, they were bound by the 1954 Geneva Agreement to provide the newly independent Kingdom of Laos with a trained military.
The Royal Lao Government (RLG) planned to use most of the AD Corps for part-time village self-defense; these were the Auto-Defense Ordinaire (Ordinary Self Defense) troops.
The Hmong officer offered to raise and train a clandestine army of 10,000 hill tribes guerrillas via the ADC program.
Lair, who had trained the Thai Police Aerial Resupply Unit to Special Forces standards, got permission from his seniors to staff Operation Momentum and supply it from the Programs Evaluation Office.
[4] The first CIA-backed training session for ADC was at Padong, located back in the hills 17 kilometers south of the communist-occupied Plain of Jars.
More training camps were opened, being located to surround the Plain of Jars and to interpose between the PDJ and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam border.
[8] With aerial support from both Air America and BirdAir, Lima sites began to be carved out of the jungled ridges of Laos so that short takeoff and landing aircraft could resupply ADC camps.
The U.S. Army pressured the CIA into allowing the introduction of Operation White Star training teams into the ADC program.
They founded one such ADC program apart from Momentum, placing it on the Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos, and dubbed it Operation Pincushion.
[11] They left behind 12 subterranean caches stocked with ammunition, weapons cleaning supplies, rice, and grenades in the vicinity of Paksong and Houei Kong.
After Team C was pressured out of the province by enemy activity in February 1962, CIA agent Mike Deuel was left with nine ADC companies.
[16] On 10 April 1963, President John F. Kennedy ordered resumption of U.S. support by the newly established Requirements Office to the ADCs.
[14] By this time, many non-CIA ADC units were assigned to work as militia in conjunction with the Royal Lao Army (RLA).
On 29 July, elements of Special Guerrilla Unit 1, as well as a Hmong ADC company, swooped in unexpectedly via helicopter to capture the road intersection that was the Royalist objective, thus ending the battle.
[18][19] For the first few months of 1965, Vang Pao planned an expansion of the Operation Momentum ADC program to the north and west of the Pathet Lao capital of Xam Neua.
[20] In a further blurring of the distinction between ADC guerrillas and Lao regulars, the RLA began to skim off promising militia men to beef up Royalist units.
Belatedly begun by Royal Thai Army (RTA) instructors in late 1967 near Xieng Lom, it graduated its first three companies by 31 October 1967.
The CIA discovery of the large number of "phantom troops" carried on payroll led to reforms, including arrest of corrupt commanders and retraining of existing ADC.
By the time Poe departed in 1970, ADC companies segregated by ethnicity had been trained and were being formed into makeshift Special Guerrilla Units (SGU) battalions.
