Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
Unlike earlier pacification programs in Vietnam, CORDS is seen by many authorities as a "successful integration of civilian and military efforts" to combat the insurgency.
By 1970, 93 percent of the rural population of South Vietnam was believed by the United States to be living in "relatively secure" villages.
CORDS temporary successes were eroded in the 1970s, as the war became primarily a struggle between the conventional military forces of South and North Vietnam rather than an insurgency.
The anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem government of South Vietnam (1955–63) had its power base among the urban and Catholic population.
[3]: 11–5 In 1959, Diem revived the agroville program of the French era with the objective of moving peasants into new agricultural settlements which contained schools, medical clinics, and other facilities supported by the government.
The idea was to move rural dwellers into fortified villages in which they would participate in self-defense forces for their protection and isolation from the guerrillas.
The United States Ambassador to South Vietnam Frederick Nolting and CIA official William Colby supported the program.
[3]: 22–3 The next iteration of the pacification program came in 1964 with, for the first time, the direct participation in planning by the US Embassy and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the successor to MAAG.
Hop Tac envisioned a gradual expansion outward from Saigon of areas under South Vietnamese government control.
Commanding General William Westmoreland rejected the use of the U.S. army to pacify rural areas, instead utilizing U.S. superiority in mobility and firepower to find and combat VC and PAVN units.
"[3]: 70–1 Shortly after that he appointed CIA official and National Security Council member Robert W. Komer ("Blowtorch Bob") as his special assistant for supervising pacification.
Komer's challenge was to unite the U.S. government agencies—the military, Department of State, CIA and the Agency for International Development—involved in pacification projects into a unified effort.
[5]: 83 CORDS focused on U.S. support for Vietnamese efforts at pacification in three broad areas: security, centralized planning, and operations against the VC.
Seven hundred American advisers assisted the South Vietnamese government in identifying, capturing, trying, imprisoning and often executing members of the VC infrastructure.
[3]: 133–43 Project Recovery distributed food and construction material to rural dwellers and involved CORDS in reconstruction efforts in the cities and towns.
The casualties suffered by the VC and the PAVN, during Tet and their subsequent offensives in 1968, enabled CORDS to strengthen its programs in the countryside.
[3]: 144–59 In February 1970, John Paul Vann, CORDS head in the IV Corps area (the Mekong River delta south of Saigon), gave an optimistic progress report about pacification to the United States Senate.
According to Vann, in IV Corps a person could drive during daylight hours without armed escort to any of the 16 provincial capitals for the first time since 1961.
The years, after reverses during Tet, from 1969 until early 1972 saw "uninterrupted gains in population security throughout South Vietnam and further erosion of the VC.
[10] With the war coming to rely more on the conventional military forces of South and North Vietnam, pacification under CORDS became less relevant.
But even if that transformation had occurred it would most likely have taken too long and would in any case have exhausted the patience of the American people, inevitably eroding political support in the United States.
