Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pentagon, some senior officers compared the South Vietnamese rout with other military disasters: Napoleon's debacle in Moscow in 1812, the fall of France in 1940, the Chinese Nationalist collapse in 1949. Yet the troops of President Nguyen Van Thieu were not retreating in the face of a massive Communist offensive; most were not in contact with the enemy at all. South Viet Nam's army had always performed unevenly, yet at its best it had given a good account of itself after so long and terrible a war. But now a full six South Vietnamese divisions had simply dissolved...
Privately, however, Pentagon officials?including Weyand himself, according to some reports?were deeply pessimistic about South Viet Nam's ability to defend what remains of its territory. True, the government has the equivalent of seven divisions within a 50-mile radius of Saigon, including the 4,000 men of the airborne division that moved down from Danang two weeks ago; there are also some 175,000 popular-force and regional-force soldiers, but Saigon's combat-ready troops are outnumbered by the North Vietnamese forces that have been massing in the capital military region over the past several weeks. Small...
...were large enough to rule out a one-to-one replacement of equipment lost in battle by ARVN. At the same time, there was no diminution in Moscow and Peking's backing of Hanoi; aid in 1974 is estimated to have totaled $1.57 billion. Defense Secretary Schlesinger maintains that Pentagon analysts underestimated the adverse impact an aid cutback would have on ARVN's "morale and organizational cohesion and resiliency...
Thieu's obsessive reclusiveness has cost his country dearly in recent weeks. Apparently, after consulting only two close aides, he summarily ordered ARVN to abandon three provinces in the Central Highlands and the northernmost province of Quang Tri. Most Pentagon analysts acknowledge that on paper Thieu's strategy may have been sound: by shrinking his lines of defense, he should have, theoretically, made it easier to protect the most important areas of the country. But the same analysts roundly condemn Thieu's execution of that strategy. A "retrograde" maneuver ? as the experts euphemistically term such a withdrawal ? requires...
...been given portions of several secret documents, including Pentagon papers that had not been made public by Daniel Ellsberg, the Secretary of Defense's annual reports to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on U.S. military strength from 1962 through 1972, a study that Halperin did for the Government on the Quemoy crisis of 1958, and transcripts of two off-the-record sessions in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger briefed reporters on the Vladivostok arms agreement. Nothing of significance was revealed in the documents, but Halperin plans to appeal to the courts for portions that were deleted...