U.S. Army Campaigns of the Vietnam War - Taking the Offensive October 1966 - September 1967

In early 1966, the head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), General William C. Westmoreland, controlled some 185,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Over the last eighteen months he and his South Vietnamese allies had checked the growth of the Communist insurgency and were now poised to begin making progress across a wide front—political, economic, psychological, and military. With a robust logistical network in place and another 200,000 U.S. troops expected to arrive by the end of 1967, Westmoreland told his superiors that the allied strategy for the coming year “will be one of a general offensive.” Although the primary mission of the U.S. and Free World Military Assistance Forces from South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand would be “destroying VC/NVA [Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army] main forces and base areas,” they would also support the South Vietnamese pacification program designed to eradicate Viet Cong influence at the village and hamlet level. “The 1967 combined campaign plan,” Westmoreland reported, “is based on the concept that the war in Vietnam is a single war” requiring the U.S. and South Vietnamese to apply a wide range of military, economic, and political measures suited to the particular conditions of each region and locality.