Counterinsurgency Plan Approved

February 6, 1961

National Security Action Memorandum No. 12

Overview

The U.S. Departments of State and Defense approve a Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to defeat the growing South Vietnamese insurgency, or the Viet Cong. This plan expands and reorganizes the South Vietnamese armed forces, reorienting them toward counterinsurgency and pacification. The United States finances more training and personnel for Vietnamese special forces and 20,000 additional troops for the South Vietnamese Army. It also calls for the South Vietnamese government to improve its standing in rural areas through civic action and anticorruption campaigns.1

¹Graham A. Cosmas, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Escalation, 1962–1967, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2006), 15–16; James Lawton Collins, Jr., Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 1950–1972, Vietnam Studies (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1975), 20; Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. Landa, and Edward J. Drea, The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961–1965, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Volume V (Washington D.C.: Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2006), 262; Spencer C. Tucker, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, (2nd edition; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 2011), 138; Richard W. Stewart, Deepening Involvement, 1945–1965, (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2002), 20, 38–40.