The American War in Vietnam is often described as a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietamese people, a fundamentally political conflict in which “pacification,” the push to uproot the adversarys hold on the villages, became a primary mechanism in fighting the war. This chapter opens with an inquiry into the meaning of the terms of art, not just pacification but “counterinsurgency,” “civic action,” “nation-building,” and others. It observes this schema applies to an essential problem, the degree of South Vietnamese commitment to pacification, which remained problematic. To show this I start with a description of how pacification evolved under Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors. On the American side we see presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took a conventional view, to John F. Kennedy, who applied counterinsurgency, to Lyndon B. Johnson, who championed the “other war,” one that privileged economic and social development. LBJ became the first to create an organizational structure to conduct pacification programs. The late-war innovations to these efforts, including measures of village loyalty, the Phoenix program attacking the National Liberation Fronts infrastructure, and the emphasis on elections from national to village level, were products of the Johnson administration. From the beginning, American pacification policy oscillated between emphasizing security versus social development before settling on security.

Standard narratives of the American war in Vietnam contend that the US Army squandered its chances of victory because of misguided strategy. Such works claim that once President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed American ground combat troops to South Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, the US military commander in Vietnam, pursued an ill-advised strategy of attrition. Worse, these narratives continue, the general implemented this strategy despite being presented with a clearly better alternative from US Marine Corps commanders operating in the northern provinces of South Vietnam. Such conventional wisdom, however, presents a flawed understanding of American strategy under Westmoreland, who never subscribed to an “either–or” approach to confronting the political-military threat inside South Vietnam. At no point did Westmoreland concentrate solely on conventional battle at the expense of counterinsurgency. Likewise, the general never believed local civic action or pacification programs to be a panacea. In reality, American strategy from 1964 to 1968 rested on a belief that South Vietnam was facing a dual threat – both conventional and unconventional – that required a similarly comprehensive response. By reexamining American strategy under Westmoreland, one finds no “missed opportunity,” a conclusion that raises important questions about the limits of American military power abroad in the mid-1960s.

Put simply–although nothing about it is simple–public diplomacy is diplomacy carried out in public, as opposed to most of diplomacy, which is done in private. It is a set of activities that inform, engage and influence international public opinion to support policy objectives or create goodwill for the home country. It is important to understand what public diplomacy is not. It is not an advertising campaign to get foreigners to like your country–even if they dislike it, they can still support, or at least accept, a particular policy or action. It is not a propaganda effort to mislead or lie to audiences for tactical or other advantage. It is a sustained endeavor that advances your country’s policies and reflects a solid understanding of the host-country’s language, culture, history and traditions. Both public diplomacy and propaganda are means to project power.

Over 1953–60 counterinsurgency was optimised, buidling upon the solid foundations of geodemographic control achieved over 1950–2, and of systems optimisation achieved under Templer. Framework operations by units bolted onto localities were continuously refined, as was the use of jungle forts to win over the Orang Asli, and of big combined Special Branch–food control–military operations. Together these sustained an ‘elimination’ rate (kills, surrenders, captures) of about 20 per cent of insurgents a year – that is, until after the MCP attempt to negotiate at Baling in 1955 was rebuffed, and then further negotiation was refused from late 1957. As hope faded insurgent ‘surrenders’ (some induced or duped) snowballed in the face of priority big operations. By now those featured months-long intense controls, each targetting the entire area of one or more MCP committees. That way the MCP would struggle to regenerate afterwards. The collapse of local MCP forces often came as freedoms increased elsewhere, while a big operation clamped down more strongly than ever on the targetted area. In 1958 the MCP decided on a strategy of running down the military campaign, and the Emergency was formally ended on 31 July 1958.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning ‘hearts and minds’. It shows how he increased both punishment and reward, and resettlement amenities and training to secure kills, until late in his term, but above all optimised the government, military and committee system, and the policy towards Orang Asli and the jungle. He created a better system and learning organisation, which in turn started to experiment with the big combined food control–Special Branch–military operations that would start to clear communist committees out of one area after another. The next chapter shows how that learning took off over 1953–4, providing a solution to the problem Briggs had not cracked: how to ‘clear’ areas. Rejecting both hagiographic and hateful accounts of Templer, it reveals the truth about the man, and about the perfecting of Malaya’s counterinsurgency apparatus and the constant refining of its recipe of ingredients.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning hearts and minds. It shows how he increased both punishment an