Word: understrength
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wartime present in Loc Ninh was embodied in four understrength Vietnamese irregular force companies and an American Special Forces unit, both of which were assigned to guard the town's airstrip and the district sub-sector headquarters, a rambling set of old French buildings and bunkers ringed by concertina wire and crowned by an improbable, rickety observation tower. Down the airstrip from the headquarters (see map) was an only slightly more substantial, diamond-shaped Special Forces camp, its walls made of logs and earthworks like something out of the old American West. To the Viet Cong's main...
This time the Defense Department shied away from its politically unpopular proposal to merge federal Reserve and the state-run Guard. Instead, it recommended outright elimination of 15 understrength Guard divisions, four Reserve brigades and many other smaller units. Total authorized personnel would shrink by only 38,500-to 640,000-because surviving combat units would be reinforced to permit their deployment within eight weeks of call-up and some new outfits would be formed. All combat components would be in the Guard, which would have eight divisions and 18 brigades on quick-response status. The active Reserve would consist...
...infiltration routes are shortest. For that reason, the U.S. has airlifted nearly a full Army division into the area, while the South Vietnamese have rushed in three elite battalions to augment the thinly stretched forces on the spot-Lieut. General Lewis Walt's 75,000 U.S. Marines, two understrength South Vietnamese army divisions and three Korean battalions...
...painfully absent. Prevailing U.S. military doctrine relied mainly upon the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter not only big wars but also little wars. Lacking strategic nuclear punch, the Army was assigned only a relatively minor role in U.S. defense planning. After Korea the Army gradually dwindled to 14 understrength divisions. Renowned Army Generals Matthew Ridgway, James Gavin and Maxwell D. Taylor resigned in protest against the down-rating of the Army. In his clamor-making book The Uncertain Trumpet, Taylor attacked what he considered excessive reliance on nuclear retaliation...
...divisions. Against these, the Soviet Union has 20 Russian and six German divisions poised in East Germany, could throw another 20 or more divisions into action within a week's time. NATO is especially weak on the northern flank of the Seventh Army, where understrength British, Dutch and Belgian units guard the invasion routes across the flat plains...