ABSTRACT
The Australian army's reports on the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese army ranged from cautious to deprecatory. The project of Psychological Operations—common to both the Australian and American efforts—was always implausible: to apply advertising techniques, in the middle of a civil war, to building a political constituency for a military elite with few patriotic credentials and fewer local roots. The prospect of the South Vietnamese army winning the civil war was scarcely considered. The strategy of counter-revolutionary warfare, which had been intended to reverse the postcolonial momentum of the Vietnamese revolution, lay amidst the ruins. Despite five years of counter-revolutionary warfare, the Vietnamese Communist Party's political infrastructure continued to function, the inaction of local authorities contrasting with the dogged survival of the revolutionary forces.
