ABSTRACT
During the 1965-66 Winter-Spring Campaign, General Thanh's revolutionary forces in the South found that employing large-scale unit operations alone against the firepower and search and destroy operations of General Westmoreland's US forces had hazardous results. From the opening of the campaign in the Ia Drang Valley at the end of 1965, throughout the Winter and Spring of 1966, constant US pressure broke up the revolutionary units before they could organize and conduct operations. Westmoreland's continuous pressure constantly harried them. He seemed to have taken away their initiative by denying them what to the Communists was a cherished resource - time. Without the proper time, the Communists had lost their most important weapon - planning. I
After the 1965--66 Winter-Spring Campaign, General Nguyen Chi Thanh again came under attack from Hanoi. Thanh was reprimanded and asked to defend his tactics and decisions. The advocates of People's War were upset that the Americans had entered the war. It was obvious that the Southern revolutionaries could not out-muscle the Americans. Their only hope, therefore, was to use a Protracted War Strategy and outlast them.2 This would be difficult to do, given the rate at which Thanh's large unit tactics were pro-
ducing NLF casualties. Hanoi knew that the American war machine was just getting warmed up. If Thanh kept fighting them head-on, soon there would be no army to continue the revolution. The North Vietnamese leaders disappeared from view, and harsh articles on the subject of strategy began to appear later in the Summer, indicating a full and heated review of military policy. 3
Hanoi's leaders still had a consensus for continuing military operations in the South to achieve victory, but what appeared to them as a grave situation forced the leadership to begin debating the proper strategy to use. They also expanded the debate to consider the views of others.4
