Operation Momentum
Air operations Operation Momentum was a guerrilla training program during the Laotian Civil War run by the Central Intelligence Agency to raise a guerrilla force of Hmong hill-tribesmen in northeastern Laos to fight the North Vietnamese Army (PAVN) and their Pathet Lao allies.
The United States Special Forces used the Momentum pre-palleted equipment and their own cadre of instructors for such copycat programs as Operation Pincushion, and for organizing the Degars of South Vietnam.
The success of Operation Momentum brought about more extensive training for the Hmong and other hill tribe recruits such as the Lao Theung.
Further training of Special Operating Teams of ADC graduates was begun in August 1961, with the aim of gradually replacing foreign trainers with Lao instructors.
During this lull, Colonel (later Major General) Vang Pao gathered five ADC companies into a battalion-sized Special Guerrilla Unit.
The change in emphasis can be judged by the fact that in 1967, the U.S. sank 431,000 troops into the Vietnam theater, at a fiscal cost about 700 times as great as the budget for the Lao war.
As the Hmong irregulars joined the Royal Lao Army regulars in joint operations, the role of the hill tribes guerrillas began to mutate into that of light infantry defending fixed positions.
As the First Indochina War ended, and the Kingdom of Laos moved towards independence, the departing French bureaucrats and soldiers were gradually replaced by Americans.
On 9 January 1961, Lair helicoptered out to Ta Vieng on the Plain of Jars to meet a young Hmong lieutenant colonel of the Royal Lao Army named Vang Pao.
[4] With this in mind, Lair took the offer back to his superior, Desmond Fitzgerald, with the observation that Vang Pao already had gathered 4,300 potential Hmong recruits.
Lair and Vang Pao decided that if they parachuted in training equipment to the obscure village of Ban Padong, it would take three days for communist troops to show up.
Meantime, the head of the Programs Evaluation Office succeeded in being granted funding for the CIA to import 385 Thai specialists, including more PARU teams.
Jack Shirley and Tony Poe were the other two; Poe later opened the third Momentum site at Phou Nong Py, in conjunction with PARU Team M. Taking some recently trained Hmong cadre with them, Lieutenant Santi Intakon and his PARU Team E moved to Phou Vieng, cut out a crude airstrip, and started an ADC training site there.
At about this time, PARU Team L came into Laos; they accompanied Jack Shirley to San Tiau to open a Momentum training base.
[3] By early June, the original ADC site at Padong was being shelled by 85mm field guns; it could reply with only a single 4.2 inch mortar.
CIA agent Jack Shirley, a White Star Team, and the PARUs were picked up on 7 June and transferred some 12 km southwest to Pha Khao to resume training ADC.
At about the same time, President John F. Kennedy, acting as Commander in Chief, directed the transfer of Momentum's training programs over to the U.S. Special Forces.
The Green Berets also tried to raise their own guerrilla forces west of Route 13, which ran from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, with limited success.
Chosen for educational achievement, ethnic background, and clan affiliation, they were destined to begin supplanting the Green Berets and PARU as instructors.
[12] Concurrently, eight teams of PARU moved northward past the Plain of Jars toward the Pathet Lao stronghold of Xam Neua.
[14][15] The CIA had founded a Momentum type program in South Vietnam among the Degar hill tribe; it had been handed over to the Green Berets in mid-1963.
[16] Bill Lair continued his sub rosa operations in Laos via the PARU in early 1964, extending Momentum's reach northeastward around the Plain of Jars and towards the border of the DRV.
Operating from bases in Savannakhet and Pakse, they were on the opposite side of the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the similar program with the Degar.
The vital communist stronghold and supply center of Tchepone, garrisoned by 3,000 PAVN soldiers, sat in between the Lao and Vietnamese hill tribes guerrilla sites.
While the RLA's Batallon Voluntaires 26 (Volunteer Battalion 26) retreated westward from the attacking PAVN 174th Regiment, the ADC troops hung on at Nong Houn.
Even without commitment of PARU trainers or CIA agents, three centers of Hmong resistance sprang up; two were north of Nam Bac, and the other in the far northern province of Phongsaly.
Additionally, in far northwestern Laos near Nam Yu, CIA agent Bill Young had his own ADC program up and running.
The villagers had become dependent upon U.S. Agency for International Development food drops because the farmers and shepherds had been inducted into Momentum's clandestine army.
[24] As both the war and Operation Momentum ran down, the Hmong irregulars suffered heavy casualties defending fixed positions as conventional infantry.
Misused as light infantry instead of guerrillas, the Hmong's fighting strength was sapped by losses even as the population of new recruits dried up.
