Defense Department officials saw U.S. investment in the Strategic Hamlet Program as an effective means of pacification and a way to help President Diem gain control over the region. The idea was that in exchange for their safety, the Vietnamese farmers would develop a sense of loyalty toward President Diem. But there was also a far more ambitious plan in place whereby ARPA would collect enough information on strategic hamlets to be able to “monitor” their activity in the future.
After the CIA canceled Hickey and Donnell’s Montagnard project, the men decided to study the Strategic Hamlet Program. It is unlikely they knew about ARPA’s future monitoring plans. Hickey and Donnell rented a Citroën and set off for a village northwest of Saigon called Cu Chi.
In Cu Chi, at a small shop, they came across a group of village farmers drinking tea. At first they found the villagers to be reticent, but after they spent a few days talking with them in their own language, tongues loosened up. As anthropologists, Hickey and Donnell were familiar with local farming techniques, and they also understood the villagers’ deeply held beliefs in spirit culture, or animism, the idea that a supernatural power organizes and animates the material world. After a few more afternoon visits, the villagers began offering information to Hickey and Donnell about what had been going on in their village as far as the Strategic Hamlet Program was concerned.
“Without our asking, the Cu Chi villagers complained about the strategic hamlet,” Hickey wrote in his report. The program had required villagers to move away from where they had been living, deep in the jungle, to this new village they did not consider their own. The mandatory relocation was having a devastating effect. People were distraught over having been forced to leave their ancestral homes and their ancestors’ graves. Here, in this new village, farmers now faced a new challenge as they struggled to plant crops on unfamiliar land. Villagers were angry with the Diem government because they had been told that in exchange for digging ditches and building walls, they would be paid ten piasters a day and given lunch. President Diem’s forces were supposed to have provided them with concrete posts and barbed-wire fence. Instead, the villagers said, Diem’s soldiers had rounded up groups of men, forced them to work, refused to feed them, and charged them money for building supplies. The forced labor lasted roughly three months, with only one five-day break for the New Year festival. The labor program coincided with the most important planting time of the year, which meant that many farmers had been unable to plant their own crops. As a result, they would likely end up producing only one-tenth of their usual annual yield. “One bad crop year can put a Vietnamese farmer in debt for several years afterwards because [farmers] live on a very narrow subsistence margin,” Hickey wrote. Subsistence farmers live season to season, producing just enough food to feed their families, meaning they rarely have anything left over to spare or save.
In one interview after another, Hickey and Donnell found widespread dissatisfaction with the Strategic Hamlet Program. Most villagers had never wanted to leave their original homes in the first place. The “compulsory regrouping” and “protracted forced-labor” had caused villagers undue emotional suffering. President Diem promised political and economic reforms, but nothing had materialized. Even on a practical level, the program was failing. A group of villagers showed Hickey and Donnell a deep underground tunnel that had been dug by the Vietcong. It ran directly under the perimeter defense wall and up into the center of the village. Vietcong could come and go as they wished, the villagers said. And they did.
Hickey and Donnell spent three months interviewing villagers in Cu Chi. The conclusion they drew cast the Strategic Hamlet Program in a very grim light. In the winter of 1962, strategic hamlets were being erected at a rate of more than two hundred per month. The Defense Department had set a goal of establishing between ten thousand and twelve thousand hamlets across South Vietnam over the next year.
Hickey and Donnell presented their findings to General Paul Harkins, the new commander of the recently renamed Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV. The anthropologists believed that General Harkins would be unhappy with the news but that he would take seriously the villagers’ legitimate concerns. Years later, when the ARPA report was finally declassified, Hickey recalled the meeting. “I said, in essence, that strategic hamlets had the potential of bringing security to the rural population but they would not work if they imposed economic and social burdens on the population,” he said. If President Diem wanted villager support, he had to hold up his end of the bargain and pay the workers, as agreed. “General Harkins replied that everyone wanted protection from the Viet Cong, so they would welcome the strategic hamlets.” The discussion was over, General Harkins told Hickey and Donnell, and the anthropologists left Harkins’s office in Saigon.
Hickey and Donnell were flown to the Pentagon, where they were scheduled to brief Harold Brown and Walt Rostow, the president’s national security advisor, on the Strategic Hamlet Program. The Pentagon was a world away from Saigon and from Cu Chi, and yet the anthropologists knew firsthand what an impact the Defense Department’s work was having on the villagers living there. They made their way through security, into the mezzanine, past the food shops and the gift shops and the employee banks. They walked up stairs, down corridors, and into Harold Brown’s office in the E-Ring, not far from the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brown’s office was spacious and well decorated, with large leather chairs and couches, and a view of the Potomac River.
Hickey recalled paraphrasing from their written ARPA report. “In the present war,” he said, “the Vietnamese peasant is likely to support the side that has control of the area in which he lives, and he is more favorably disposed to the side which offers him the possibility of a better life.” Hickey and Donnell told Brown and Rostow that Diem’s army was simply not holding up its end of the bargain. As a result, and despite the well-intended efforts of the Strategic Hamlet Program, local Vietnamese peasants were more likely to side with the Vietcong.
Then something strange happened. “As we began our first debriefing at the Pentagon with Harold Brown,” Hickey noted, “[he] swung his heavy chair around and looked out the window, leaving us to talk to the back of his chair.” Hickey and Donnell kept talking. Perhaps Brown was simply contemplating the severity of the situation.
“Farmers were unwilling to express enthusiasm for the program and appeared to harbor strong doubts that the sacrifices of labor and materials imposed on them could yield any commensurate satisfaction,” the anthropologists explained. If something wasn’t done, the entire Strategic Hamlet Program was at risk of collapse. Hickey and Donnell suggested that the Pentagon put pressure on Diem’s forces to pay the farmers a small amount of compensation, immediately.
Harold Brown did not respond. Throughout most of the meeting, he kept his back turned on the two men, and though now they had finished their briefing, Brown still didn’t turn around to face them. National security advisor Walt Rostow, who had been paying attention, looked away. An aide walked into the room, and Hickey and Donnell were shown the door.
Escorted out of Harold Brown’s office, the two men were led down the corridor to where they were scheduled to brief Marine Corps lieutenant general Victor “Brute” Krulak, now serving as special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities. Krulak was a hard-charging militarist. During World War II he had masterminded the invasion of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific theater and the last battle of the war. In the Korean War, Krulak had pioneered the use of helicopters in battle. Krulak was not happy with what Hickey and Donnell had to say, and he was demonstrative in his disapproval. He told them that he wasn’t going to pay a bunch of Vietnamese peasants for their support. “He pounded his fist on the desk [and said] that ‘we’ were going to make the peasant do what’s necessary for the strategic hamlets to succeed,” Hickey recalled.
The anthropologists from RAND were shown the door. Their thirty-page report, originally prepared for ARPA as a
n unclassified report, was now given a classification of secret, which meant it could not be read by anyone without an appropriate government clearance. Harold Brown told RAND president Frank Collbohm about his dissatisfaction with what he saw as Hickey and Donnell’s overly pessimistic analysis of the Strategic Hamlet Program. The anthropologists’ findings were “too negative,” ARPA officials complained, and they prepared an official rebuttal to be attached to each copy distributed around the White House and the Pentagon.
Determined to repair any damage that Hickey and Donnell might have done, Collbohm sent a new set of RAND researchers to Saigon with specific instructions to reevaluate the Strategic Hamlet Program. This included Fulbright scholar Joe Carrier, who worked in cost analysis at RAND, and Vic Sturdevant, from systems analysis. With no previous knowledge of Southeast Asia, and with no local language skills, the two men studied incidents in strategic hamlets initiated by the Vietcong over a nine-month period, from December 1962 to September 1963. Their findings were markedly different from Hickey and Donnell’s. In this new ARPA report on the Strategic Hamlet Program, Carrier and Sturdevant concluded that it would likely prove promising in the long run, if only the Defense Department would take a “more patient approach.”
Another RAND analyst dispatched to Vietnam to write a similarly themed report was George B. Young, an expert in missile design, aerodynamics, and nuclear propulsion. Young, who was Chinese American, became the first RAND employee assigned full-time to the Combat Development Test Center in Saigon. His analysis of the Strategic Hamlet Program was enthusiastic. Young said the villagers were committed to participating. In his ARPA report, called “Notes on Vietnam,” Young wrote about the fluid “delivery of intelligence” information that was taking place. Locals in the program had been taught to make written notes on any Vietcong activity they observed, Young reported. In turn, that information was taken to village elders, who wrote up reports for the Diem government. Soon, Young declared, the Vietcong forces would be “ground to a pulp.”
George Tanham returned to the CDTC in Saigon in 1963, now under a long-term ARPA contract. Much had changed since Tanham’s first trip, at Harold Brown’s behest, in the summer of 1961. In his “Trip Report: Vietnam, 1963,” Tanham showed great optimism about how things were shaping up in Vietnam. An Air Force officer from the Combat Development and Test Center took Tanham in an airplane ride over the strategic hamlet regions, just outside Saigon—some of the very same hamlets that Gerald Hickey and John Donnell had written so pessimistically about in their report, the one that caused Harold Brown to turn his back on them. Tanham marveled at the little villages down below. He said he could see the bamboo huts, the barbed-wire fences, even the distinct perimeter ditches, and that it all looked wonderful. In Tanham’s estimation, the Defense Department could look ahead to “successfully concluding the war in two or three years or even less.” He included in his report an interview with an officer from the U.S. Air Force who said that the Air Force was “proud of its contribution to the war in Vietnam” and that it planned to “leave behind helicopters and airplanes when it left, ideally sometime in 1964.” Things were looking very positive, Tanham wrote. He quoted a high-ranking general as telling him, “Given a little luck we can wind this one up in a year.”
CHAPTER NINE
Command and Control
In October 1962, a quiet forty-seven-year-old civilian scientist from Missouri arrived at the Pentagon to begin a new job with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. His work would change the world. By 2015, 3 billion of the 7 billion people on the planet would regularly use technology conceived of by him. The man, J. C. R. Licklider, invented the concept of the Internet, which was originally called the ARPANET.
Licklider did not arrive at the Pentagon with the intent of creating the Internet. He was hired to research and develop command and control systems, most of which were related to nuclear weapons at the time. The idea that a bright red telephone, like the one installed in Herb York’s bedroom in the first week of the Kennedy presidency, was the only way for heads of state to communicate the dreaded “go or no-go” decision in a potential nuclear launch scenario was absurd. In the world of push-button warfare, fractions of seconds mattered. World leaders could not afford the extra seconds it would take to dial a 1962 telephone.
The mandate to update the command and control system, which would become known as C2, came from the president. Within months of taking office, Kennedy ordered Congress to allocate funds to rapidly modernize the U.S. military command and control system, specifically to make it “more flexible, more selective, more deliberate, better protected, and under ultimate civilian authority at all times.” The directive for “new equipment and facilities” was sent to the Pentagon, where it was tasked to ARPA. Harold Brown recruited J. C. R. Licklider for the job.
Licklider was a trained psychologist with a rare specialization in psychoacoustics, the scientific study of sound perception. Psychoacoustics concerns itself with questions such as, when a person across a room claps his hands, how does the brain know where that sound is coming from? It involves elements of both psychology and physiology, because sound arrives at the ear as a mechanical sound wave, but it is also a perceptual event. People hear differently in different situations, and those “conditions have consequences,” Licklider liked to say. During World War II, while working at Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, Licklider conducted experiments with military pilots in all kinds of flight scenarios, with the goal of developing better communication systems for the military. Aircraft were not yet pressurized, and at altitudes of 35,000 feet, cockpit temperatures descended below freezing, which profoundly affected how pilots heard sound and how they responded through speech. Licklider conducted hundreds of experiments with B-17 and B-24 bomber pilots, analyzed data, and published papers on his findings. By war’s end, he was considered one of the world’s authorities on the human auditory nervous system.
After the war, Licklider left Harvard for the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, where he became interested in how computers could help people communicate better. Engineers at the Lincoln Laboratory were working on an IBM-based computer system for the Air Force called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, which was being built to serve as the backbone of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) air defense system. SAGE was the first computer to integrate radar with computer technologies, and to perform three key functions simultaneously: receive, interpret, and respond. The SAGE system received information from tracking radar; it interpreted data as it came in; and in response, it pointed America’s defensive missile systems at incoming threats. It was a gargantuan machine, so large that technicians walked inside it to work on it. SAGE system operators were among the first computer users in the world required to multitask. While sitting at a console, they watched display monitors, typed on keyboards, and flipped switches as new information constantly flowed into the SAGE system through telephone lines.
Licklider was inspired by the SAGE system. To him, it exemplified how computers could do more than just collect data and perform calculations. He imagined a time in the future when man and machine might interact and problem-solve to an even greater degree. He wrote a paper outlining this concept, called “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” in which he described a partnership between humans and “the electronic members of the partnership,” the computers. Licklider envisioned a day when a computer would serve as a human’s “assistant.” The machine would “answer questions, perform simulation modeling, graphically display results, and extrapolate solutions for new situations from past experience.” Like John von Neumann, Licklider saw similarities between the computer and the brain, and he saw a symbiotic relationship between man and machine, one in which man’s burdens, or “rote work,” could be eased by the machine. Humans could then devote their time to making important decisions, Licklider said.
Licklider believed that computers could one day change the world for the better. He envisioned “home computer c
onsoles,” with people sitting in front of them, learning just about anything they wanted to. He wrote a book, Libraries of the Future, in which he described a world where library resources would be available to remote users through a single database. This was radical thinking in 1960 yet is almost taken for granted today by the billions of people who have the library of the Internet at their fingertips twenty-four hours a day. Computers would make man a better-informed being, Licklider wrote, and one day, “in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled… [and] the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought.”
It was exactly this kind of revolutionary thinking that interested the Advanced Research Projects Agency and why the work of J. C. R. Licklider caught ARPA’s attention. Computing power needed to be leveraged beyond its present capabilities in order to advance command and control systems, and J. C. R. Licklider was the man for the job. ARPA director Jack Ruina telephoned Licklider and asked him to come to Washington and give a series of seminars on computers to Defense Department officials. Then he offered Licklider a job. When Licklider arrived at the Pentagon just a few months later for his first day of work, the sign on his door read “Advanced Research Projects Agency, Command and Control Research, J. C. R. Licklider, Director.” It was a small office, in both physical size and relative importance. At the time, it was impossible to imagine just how colossal a program command and control would become. In 1962, it was just an idea.
When Licklider arrived at the Pentagon in the fall of 1962, the Department of Defense purchased more computers than any other organization in the world, and ARPA had just entered the world of advanced computer research. The agency inherited four computers from the Air Force, old dinosaurs called Q-32 machines. Each was the size of a small house. These were the computers that the SAGE program had run on at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, starting in 1954; there was no way the Pentagon was going to throw them away. The Q-32s, built by Systems Development Corporation, a subdivision of RAND, had been incredibly expensive to construct, each costing $6 million (roughly $50 million in 2015). ARPA had inherited them, and Licklider was given the job of making sure they got used.