Ely-Collins Agreement is Drafted

December 13, 1954

General J. Lawton Collins, U.S. Army chief of staff, 1949-1953

Overview

General J. Lawton Collins, President Eisenhower’s special envoy to Saigon, concludes a formal agreement with General Paul Ely, Commander of the French forces in Indochina, redefining the role of the U.S. military assistance group in Vietnam.

The agreement contains two main provisions. First, it provides South Vietnam with command and control of its own armed forces by July 1955. Ely and Collins intend to revitalize the South Vietnamese armed forces by reducing them in number and creating a smaller but better-equipped, well-trained force. Second, the agreement gives U.S. MAAG the authority to assist the government of Vietnam in training and organizing those armed forces starting January 1, 1955, though still beneath a French commander. French and American authorities do not reach a finalized version of this agreement until a month after this initial draft. But the Ely-Collins Agreement marks a new stage in U.S. involvement in South Vietnam.1

¹Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1985), 237; Richard M. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 1953–1956, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Volume III (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001), 544; George S. Eckhardt, Command and Control, 11–12; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954 Volume XIII, Part 2, Indochina and Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957 Volume I, Vietnam traces the correspondence over the Ely-Collins Agreement in December 1954 and January 1955. By this point, the French and the Americans had very different objectives in Indochina.