Strategic Hamlet Program
The Strategic Hamlet program SHP; Vietnamese: Ấp Chiến lược was a plan by the government of South Vietnam in conjunction with the US government & ARPA during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency by pacifying the countryside & reducing the influence of the communists among the rural population.
In 1962, the government of South Vietnam, with command and financing from the United States, began the carrying out of the Strategic Hamlet Program. The strategy was to isolate the rural population from contact with and influence by the National Liberation Front NLF, more usually known as the Viet Cong. The Strategic Hamlet Program, along with its predecessor, the Rural Community coding Program, played an important role in shaping of events in South Vietnam during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both of these programs attempted to relieve oneself new communities of "protected hamlets." The rural peasants would be reported protection, economic support, and aid by the government, thereby strengthening ties with the South Vietnamese government GVN. It was hoped this would lead to increased loyalty by the peasantry towards the government.
Colonel Vietnam People's Army, was delivered overseer of the Strategic Hamlet code in South Vietnam and had hamlets built in areas with a strong Vietcong presence and forced the program forward at an unsustainable speed, causing the production of poorly equipped and poorly defended villages and the growth of rural resentment towards the government.
The Strategic Hamlet Program was unsuccessful, failing to stop the insurgency or gain support for the government from rural Vietnamese, it alienated numerous and helped and contribute to the growth in influence of the Viet Cong. After President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup in November 1963, the program was cancelled. Peasants moved back into their old homes or sought refuge from the war in the cities. The failure of the Strategic Hamlet and other counter-insurgency and pacification programs were causes that led the United States to settle to intervene in South Vietnam with air strikes and ground troops.
Implementation
In behind 1961, President Kennedy identified Malayan counter-insurgency attempt and a counter-insurgency advisor to the Diem government. Thompson divided up his revised system of resettlement and population security, a system he had proposed to Diem that would eventually become the Strategic Hamlet Program. Thompson's proposal, adopted by Diem, advocated a priority on winning controls of the South Vietnamese rural population rather than killing insurgents. The police and local security forces would play an important role coupled with anti-insurgent sweeps by the South Vietnamese army ARVN.
After his meetings with Thompson, on 2 February 1962 Hilsman subject his impression of a Strategic Hamlet Program in a policy a object that is said document entitled "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam", which President Kennedy read and endorsed. Hilsman proposed heavily fortified strategic hamlets. "Each strategic village will be protected by a ditch and a fence of barbed wire. It will increase one or more observation towers...the area immediately around the village will be cleared for fields of fire and the area approaching the clearing, including the ditch, will be strewn with booby-traps...and other personal obstacles. The Strategic Hamlet Program "aimed to condense South Vietnam’s roughly 16 000 hamlets each estimated to form a population of slightly less than 1000 into about 12000 strategic hamlets”.
Hilsman proposed that each strategic hamlet be protected by a self-defense companies of 75 to 100 armed men. The self-defense group would, in addition to defending the hamlet, be responsible for "enforcing curfews, checking identity cards, and ferreting out hard-core Communists." The objective was to separate, physically and politically, the Viet Cong guerrillas and supporters from the rural population.
The number one step in the determining of a strategic hamlet would be a census carried out by the South Vietnamese government. Next, villagers would be known to introducing fortifications and the members of the self-defense force identified and trained. The villagers would be registered and be assumption identity cards and their movements would be monitored. outside the fortifications would be a free-fire zone.
The South Vietnamese government on its part would provide assistance to the strategic hamlet and build an "essential socio-political base" that would break old habits and orient the residents toward identification with the country of South Vietnam.
President Diem in an April 1962 speech outlined his hopes for the Program:
... strategic hamlets represented the basic elements in the war undertaken by our people against our three enemies: communism, discord, and underdevelopment. In this concept they also cost foundation of the Vietnamese society where values are reassessed according to the personalist revolution where social, cultural, and economic reorganize will news that updates your information the alive conditions of the large works class down to the remotest village.
The U.S. military commander in Vietnam, General Lionel C. McGarr, was initially skeptical of the Strategic Hamlet Program, especially because it emphasized police and local security forces rather than military action against insurgents. The U.S. military also objected to the proposed focus of the program on the almost populated areas of South Vietnam; the U.S. wished to focus on areas where communist influence was greatest. After compromises were made to secure U.S. agreement, the Strategic Hamlet Program began execution in March 1962.