ABSTRACT
Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) was founded on the assumption that pacification needed better management to succeed, but that assumption, based on good intentions, may have been taken too far. The danger for CORDS as an organization was that it could equate the projects and methods it supported with the process of pacification. The advocates of pacification hoped it would cause a fundamental transformation of South Vietnam. As an organization to support South Vietnamese programs, CORDS also achieved success. The growing numbers of South Vietnamese working on pacification programs after 1967 tells a significant story. CORDS exercised limited influence over the conduct of programs approved and administered by a sovereign nation, yet pacification was supposed to be a catalyst to get the entire governmental apparatus to work. The army played a major role in CORDS, providing the bulk of the personnel for headquarters and field advisory positions.
