ABSTRACT
As South Vietnam was falling, Thieu had lobbied Ford and Ford had lobbied the US Congress for supplemental military assistance. The two presidents had argued that without increased aid the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) would be unable to withstand the People's Army of Vietnam's assault. In a narrow military sense, the arguments had merit. For years the security of the Saigon regime had depended principally on military strategy, and that strategy had depended on the regular ARVN. The ARVN had been trained and organized to rely on firepower superiority, which in turn made the ARVN dependent on a constant flow of equipment, weapons, and ammunition. In the long run, however, the argument for rescue was vulnerable to severe and justifiable criticism. The fact that the argument was made at all simply spotlighted the twenty-five years of US aid that had left the anticommunist regimes dependent, seemingly forever, on US support.
