Word: hanoi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Teng allowed that his timetable could be off since "the Vietnamese are stronger" than the Indians. Indeed they are. As the murky war bogged down in seeming stalemate, one pressing question was: Who was punishing whom? When the Chinese proposed talks "as soon as possible" to end the conflict, Hanoi swiftly denounced the offer as a "trick" intended to disguise Peking's plans for "war intensification." The Vietnamese may well have had reason for this cocky rejection of a truce. The Soviet Union last week cranked up its warnings of possible intervention another notch by demanding that "the aggressor...
With 3.5 million men, the world's largest standing army, Peking has an overwhelming numerical advantage over Hanoi's 615,000 troops. In a limited punitive strike, the Chinese would probably not deploy more than 200,000 men, though the PLA's available reserves in southern China are immense if the conflict should widen. China currently has about 1.6 million men along the Soviet border-a force that Peking may decide to augment if Moscow raises the combat readiness of its own 1 million troops on the frontier in response to the crisis. One tactical plus...
...Hanoi has a clear superiority over Peking in sophisticated weaponry. Although both forces are fighting with arms made in the U.S.S.R. or with copies of Soviet models, many of the PLA's weapons were acquired before the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s. The Vietnamese also have some captured American equipment, notably the 177-mm howitzer, which outguns any artillery piece in the Chinese inventory. One of Hanoi's favorite and most effective weapons, as Americans learned at Khe Sanh, is the 130-mm howitzer. Says one military analyst in Hong Kong: "The Vietnamese love...
...Vietnamese air force is vastly inferior to the Chinese in quantity, but the quality is vastly superior. Hanoi has 300 combat aircraft in all; about 700 Chinese planes are within striking range of Viet Nam. Most of those ready for combat, however, are outdated MiG-17s and MiG-19s, whereas the Vietnamese have not only the slightly more advanced MiG-21s but also the versatile F-5 "freedom fighters" captured from the Americans...
...Despite Hanoi's superiority in experience, weaponry and logistics, low morale in the Vietnamese forces could blunt their advantages. Heavy casualties in Cambodia have severely impaired some Vietnamese soldiers' will to fight. Recruits have bribed their officers to let them return home. The AWOL rate is so high that the army command has announced a two-year reorganization plan that will better integrate the demoralized southern troops into a more aggressive fighting force. Mao Tse-tung may have been right when he said, "Weapons are an important factor in war but not the decisive factor; it is people...