This tended to be confirmed with more military action and less desire to negotiate in February and March 1964[7] Duiker saw the political dynamics putting Lê Duẩn in charge and Ho becoming a figurehead.

[8] COL Bùi Tín led a reconnaissance mission of specialists reporting directly to the Politburo, who said, in a 1981 interview with Stanley Karnow, that he saw the only choice was escalation including the use of conventional troops, capitalizing on the unrest and inefficiency from the series of coups in the South.

After Diem's fall in November 1963, INR saw the priority during this period as more a matter of establishing a viable, sustainable political structure for South Vietnam, rather than radically improving the short-term security situation.

During this period, INR observed, in a 23 December paper, the U.S. needed to reexamine its strategy focused on the Strategic Hamlet Program, since it was getting much more accurate – if pessimistic – from the new government than it had from Diem.

[13] Col. Don Si Nguyen brought in battalions of engineers to improve the Trail, principally in Laos, with up-to-date Soviet and Chinese construction equipment, with a goal, over several years, of building a supply route that could pass 10 to 20,000 soldiers per month.

In contrast, the North Vietnamese took a centre of gravity built around gradual and small-scale erosion of US capabilities, closing the enormous technological disadvantage with surprise attacks and strategies, while building and consolidating political control over the rural areas of South Vietnam.

Despite differences in were both sides believe their centres of gravity were, the NVA and Viet Cong would retain strategic initiative throughout this period, choosing when and were to attack, and being capable of controlling their losses quite widely.

William Westmoreland, and to a lesser extent Maxwell Taylor, rejected, if they seriously considered, the protracted war doctrine stated by Mao and restated[17] by the DRV leadership, mirror-imaging that they would be reasonable by American standards, and see that they could not prevail against steady escalation.

Nixon's papers show that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.

Following the Tet Offensive and with US Withdrawal, once the United States was no longer likely to intervene, the North Vietnamese changed to a conventional, combined-arms conquest against the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and taking and holding land permanently.

Essentially, there were three alternatives: Even with these three approaches, there was still significant doubt, in the U.S. government, that the war could be ended with a military solution that would place South Vietnam in a strongly anticommunist position.

In July, two senior U.S. Department of State officials formally recommended withdrawal to President Lyndon B. Johnson; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, at the same time, saw the situation as bad but potentially retrievable with major escalation.

Palmer suggests that there might be at least two reasons beyond a simple speedup:[20] They may also have believed the long-trumpeted U.S. maxim of never getting involved in a land war in Asia, and that the U.S. was too concerned with Chinese intervention to use airpower outside South Vietnam.

In particular, the PAVN were not sure of the best tactics to use against the air assault capability of the 1st Cav, so BG Man revised a plan to bring to try to fight the helicopter-mobile forces on terms favorable to the North Vietnamese.

As well as raids, terrorist attacks against Americans increased, in keeping with the changed political theory, or, as Truong Chinh put it, to "properly punish a number of reactionaries and tyrants who owe blood debts to the people.

This materiel (and PAVN manpower) was then shuttled south down the logistical corridor called by the Americans the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route to the North Vietnamese).

In response, initially unknown to the U.S., the North Vietnamese received their first S-75 Dvina (NATO reporting name SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missiles, although civilian officials assumed they would not be used.

Secretary McNamara noted in the margin: "Policy is: anything that will strengthen the position of the GVN will be sent..." Johnson's main public announcement at the time, however, was an 7 April speech, in which he offered economic support to North Vietnam, and Southeast Asia in general, if it would stop military action.

[38] Khanh, in mid-April, met with Chief of Staff of the Army GEN Earl Wheeler, joined by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and told them that the war will eventually have to be taken to the North.

So long as the South Vietnamese are prepared to fight for themselves, we cannot abandon them without disaster to peace and to our other interests throughout the world[41]Second, the principals viewed the situation with their own experiential and analytical filters, well articulated by Ball in an oral history interview.

[44] Westmoreland, on 7 June, sent a message to CINCPAC that a VC summer offensive was underway, not yet at its full potential, both to destroy RVN forces and isolate (but not hold) key towns.

"[47] William Bundy ruled out withdrawal, but did not think escalation would help, unless the ARVN did netter; he was concerned that too large an intervention would create a "white man's war", with the U.S. replaying the role of the French in the endgame in Indochina.

"[55] McNamara also observed that the Administration's approach to air war against the North, Rolling Thunder, had not "produced tangible evidence of willingness on the part of Hanoi to come to the conference table in a reasonable mood.

The term, apparently coined by Premier and general Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, was agreed to be defined as RD is the integrated military and civil process to restore, consolidate and expand government control so that nation building can progress throughout the Republic of Vietnam.

MACV advisors did work closely with 900,000 local GVN officials in a well-organized pacification program called CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development.)

Starting in mid-February 1966, patrols detected indications of a pending VC attack against the A Shau Special Forces camp, whose mission was surveillance of infiltration from the nearby Laotian border.

Believing that the triumph of communism in Vietnam was inevitable, Norodom Sihanouk made a deal with the Chinese in 1965 that allowed North Vietnamese forces to establish permanent bases in his country and to use the port of Sihanoukville for delivery of military supplies in exchange for payments and a proportion of the arms.

United States forces in Tây Ninh, Bình Định, Quảng Ngãi, and Dinh Tuong provinces had initiated major offensives in late 1966 and in early 1967, and more troops were needed to support these and other planned operations.

Opposition to the war, meanwhile, was mounting in the United States; and among the Vietnamese facing one another in the South, the rising cost of men and resources was beginning to take its toll on both sides.

The Tet offensive is widely viewed as a turning point in the war despite the high cost to the communists (approximately 32,000 killed and about 5,800 captured) for what appeared at the time to be small gains.