ABSTRACT
The American military in Vietnam awaited the most basic policy decisions on such issues as supply organization, support levels, and procurement. This reluctance to address the hard choices on the structure of supply encapsulated the whole nervous ambivalence toward American involvement in the Vietnam War. The deployment of logistical units in the spring of 1965 marked the formal beginning of the support base, but the origins of the system went back to the planning for intervention many months earlier. The United States had been anything but eager to enter more forthrightly and at increased cost and risk into a war that had been going badly for the Republic of Vietnam since 1963. By the summer of 1964, strategists of political war and limited military assistance had drifted out of the policy making circles at the State and Defense departments in favor of officials who were disposed to applying a greater degree of military force.
