Hybrid Warfare in Vietnam: THE U.S. AND SOUTH VIETNAMESE SUCCESS AGAINST THE VIET CONG INSURGENCY

In the past decades, most conformist studies dedicated to the Vietnam War were overly critical of the U.S. military’s so-called reliance on conventional warfare in a country deemed to be plagued by an insurgency. Counterinsurgency programs were labeled weak and powerless to shift the Americans’ momentum against the Viet Cong, which outsmarted the U.S. military. This article opposes these theories and suggests that by 1969, the U.S. force’s reliance on conventional warfare against the guerrillas progressively morphed into a strategy that fully supported the military’s counterinsurgency initiatives. Vietnam was a hybrid warfare theater, which required the Americans to fight both the Viet Cong guerrillas and Hanoi’s conventional forces. Through the analysis of U.S. and Communist documents, this study suggests that the Americans succeeded in offsetting the Communists’ tactical approach to hybrid warfare. As they skillfully synchronized regular warfare with counterinsurgency, the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces succeeded in defeating the Viet Cong insurgency by the spring of 1972.