People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN)

Known to Americans during the war as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), the People’s Army of Vietnam was the army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Its organization included some air and naval units, but it was primarily composed of infantry units and their related support units, including artillery, armor, and logistics. It was also divided into a hierarchy of regular, regional, and self-defense forces with varying levels of equipment and training. The PAVN provided leaders, supplies, and reinforcements to the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) or Vietcong, but the two armies often operated separately and had separate identities.

The PAVN, as a military organization, was largely the creation of Vo Nguyen Giap. He was its original commanding officer, and, although other generals challenged and even eclipsed his leadership during the American war, he remained an influential and heroic figure. Giap created an armed propaganda brigade in 1944 as part of the Vietminh resistance to the Japanese. From this modest beginning, he and others built a force of mostly peasant irregulars to fight the French after 1945, and this organization became known as the People’s Army of Vietnam in 1950. PAVN leaders adopted the Chinese Communist model of protecting base areas, harassing their enemy, and avoiding set battles with the better-equipped French, but they also had organized six combat divisions by 1952. PAVN strategy against the French and later the Americans was a variant of what the Chinese called “People’s War,” but it adapted more flexibility between regular and irregular tactics than in Mao Zedong’s theories. When the PAVN scored its decisive victory over the French garrison at Dienbienphu in 1954, its assault was largely a conventional operation by regular troops.

Between the French and American wars, Hanoi modernized its army and built it up to a size of about 160,000 by 1960. Aided by Chinese and Soviet advisers, the PAVN introduced standardized practices for unit organization, uniforms, ranks, recruitment, and training. It remained three-fourths infantry, but added engineering, air defense, air transport, communication, and other technological elements. The DRV also had compulsory military service, which created a large reserve pool of trained personnel. The PAVN had a good supply of soldiers but was often lacking in sufficient materiel. Consequently, it gave its troops heavy political indoctrination in the glory of patriotic sacrifice and prepared them to use guerrilla, as well as conventional, tactics as needed.

After the Politburo decided in late 1959 to aid the armed insurrection in the South, the PAVN began logistic and advisory support of the PLAF and the infiltration into the South of southern-born fighters living in the North. In 1964 units of northern-born troops were also sent into the RVN, and regular PAVN brigades eventually clashed with ARVN and U.S. forces, primarily in the Central Highlands. High PLAF losses during and after the Tet holiday fighting in 1968 required an increase in the number of PAVN troops in the South and their use in low-land areas that they previously had avoided. As the Nixon administration began lowering the number of American combat forces in South Vietnam in 1969, Hanoi felt less risk in sending more combat divisions, as well as tanks and artillery, into the RVN. The PAVN felt emboldened to launch its so-called Easter Offensive against the northern provinces of South Vietnam and isolated targets in the Mekong Delta and Central Highlands in May 1972, but it was repulsed by ARVN forces with heavy U.S. air support. In 1975, however, with U.S. air power unavailable and with the PAVN expanded to 685,000 main force troops, the DRV’s army swept through disintegrating ARVN defenses with troops, tanks, and heavy artillery and had complete control of the South by April 30.

After 1975 the PAVN continued to grow until its forces surpassed one million, making it one of the four largest standing armies in the world. In 1978 it occupied Cambodia and successfully withstood a brief clash with China’s army in 1979. The PAVN withdrew from Cambodia in 1989, and economic problems and loss of Soviet aid led to sharp cut backs in its size in the 1990s.

Cold War Soviet Army

Cold War: A convoy of the Soviet Army in 1988 at the Soviet-Afghan border. On Christmas Day 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up their communist clients against tribal insurgents.

The Cold War Soviet Army was both the Soviet Union’s most important military tool and the Communist Party’s main guarantor of power. The Red Army emerged from World War II as the most powerful land force in the world. The Soviets’ navy and air force, however, paled in comparison to those of their Western counterparts. The Soviet Red Army occupied the majority of Eastern Europe in 1945, making Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria unwilling satellites of the Soviet Union. Throughout the Cold War, the Red Army was the key factor in guaranteeing control of local communist governments there. From 1948 to 1949, the Red Army subsequently cut off Berlin from the West, precipitating the Berlin Airlift. After Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev, his successor, shifted Soviet military emphasis from land forces to nuclear weaponry. Khrushchev also began training and supporting proxy forces against the West. 

Meanwhile, the Soviet Army ensured continued communist rule over Hungary in 1956, helped build the Berlin Wall in 1961, crushed the infant Czechoslovakian revolution in 1968, and clashed with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) along the Soviet-PRC border in 1969. By the early 1970s, the Soviet nuclear arsenal also reached rough parity with the West. The Soviet Army, however, faced its greatest challenge in fighting the Afghanistan War (1979–1989).

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Red Army, immense and battle-hardened, was the most powerful land military force in the world. The force that took Berlin alone consisted of 110 infantry divisions, 11 tank and mechanized corps, and 11 artillery divisions, making it larger than all the World War II American land forces in Europe and Asia combined. The Red Army had also learned valuable lessons in fighting the German Army from 1941 to 1945. This experience paid off in the form of great operational skill, experienced leaders, and a cadre of elite, battle-tested units.

In 1946 Stalin renamed the Red Army the Soviet Army and supervised its continued mechanization. He envisioned an army capable of conducting deep penetrations with ground support aircraft, mimicking the Germans’ strategy during the early part of World War II. Stalin planned to use his army as a counterbalance to the Americans’ atomic monopoly. He believed that the threat of this massive force invading Western Europe would prevent American atomic blackmail. This approach remained in place until Stalin’s death in 1953.

The Soviet Army played a more active role in Soviet politics after Stalin’s death. For example, Khrushchev enlisted the help of World War II Red Army hero Marshal Georgi Zhukov, whom Stalin had pushed out of the spotlight, to ensure his ascension as premier. Khrushchev made Zhukov minister of defense as a reward for his help. Khrushchev, like Stalin, grew to fear Zhukov’s power, popularity, and ambition and in 1957 removed the old marshal from power.

When Khrushchev became premier, he set out to make the Soviet Army more effective by curbing the worst excesses of the Stalinist system. He reduced the army from 5.3 million men to 3.6 million men as a way to cut expenses and invested more resources in nuclear weapons. These changes, however, unwittingly led to independence and autonomy movements in Soviet satellite states. Soviet leaders subsequently called upon the army to force Eastern bloc governments to toe the line. For example, the Soviet Army brutally suppressed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 by using 30,000 men supported by armor to fight for ten days, mostly in Budapest.

Efforts to bolster the Soviet Army came to fruition in the late 1950s as it developed into a fully armored and motorized force. New tanks replaced World War II–era tanks, and Soviet industry supplied the army with huge numbers of armored personnel carriers (APCs). While its equipment and numbers were impressive, however, the Soviet Army still relied on the same basic structure and strategy of Stalin’s Blitzkrieg-style vision of warfare. This doctrine may have served the Soviet Army well in a general—and conventional—war, but it would prove to be woefully inadequate in future conflicts, such as the war in Afghanistan. Moreover, the officer corps retained older leaders wedded to old doctrine. This problem was so endemic that many Soviet generals in the 1980s and 1990s had been serving since before the German invasion, calcifying Soviet military strategy and doctrine.

The Strategic Rocket Force (SRF) grew to be an integral part of the defense of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The SRF became an independent military branch in 1959, charged with command and control over the Soviet Union’s burgeoning fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The SRF, as it turned out, proved to be too small and inaccurate to deter the Americans during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

After the humiliating Cuban Missile Crisis, Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev decided to build up both nuclear and conventional military forces. The consequent buildup of the SRF led to the introduction of the SS-11 missile system in 1966, followed by the SS-9 in 1967 and the SS-13 in 1969. By 1970, the Soviet Union outnumbered the United States in ICBMs 1,299 to 1,054. Subsequently, the Soviets developed a more powerful family of the SS-17, SS-18, and SS-19 ICBMS, now armed with multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs). Thus, the Soviets had reached nuclear parity, if not superiority, with the United States.

While the SRF increased in size and capability, the Soviet Army remained active. It invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to quell an uprising, which lasted less than one full day. The Soviet Army also supported other communist regimes and proxy insurgencies, including those in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, North Vietnam), and Cuba.

Despite the West’s view of monolithic communism, the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s led to a border clash in 1969. This schism was ostensibly due to ideological differences, but other issues were also involved. PRC leader Mao Zedong believed that he should have become the international leader of communism after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev, however, had no intention of according Mao such status.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan, which lasted from 1979 to 1989, had many correlations to the American experience in Vietnam. After a Marxist party overthrew the Afghan government in 1978, the Soviet Army moved in to support the failing communist regime in December 1979 with one airborne and four motorized rifle divisions. Thus, Soviet mechanized forces secured the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The Soviet-backed Afghan government controlled only the country’s urban areas, however. The Afghan guerrillas, or mujahideen, put up a fierce fight that Soviet politicians and military planners had failed to foresee. Opposition increased during the first four years of the war as the Soviet Army attacked the mujahideen in remote and rugged mountainous areas. Analogous to the Viet Cong’s use of Cambodia and Laos, the mujahideen used sanctuaries in Pakistan and Iran as safe havens, while the Soviet Army tried valiantly to combat this unconventional style of warfare.

Soviet forces began to use massive airborne operations for rapid movement and attack as well as scorched-earth tactics to starve and terrorize guerrillas. These tactics, however, only served to strengthen the resolve of the mujahideen. When Konstantin Chernenko became Soviet premier in 1984, he decided to change tactics in Afghanistan by attacking the support network and infrastructure of the Afghan resistance, including supply lines and safe havens. Although for a time these tactics appeared to be somewhat effective, the mujahideen’s will to resist remained intact.

In 1986, the United States decided to send the Afghan guerrillas Stinger antiaircraft missiles and other high-tech weapons. With their new American weapons, the mujahideen began to shoot down roughly one Soviet aircraft per day. The Soviet Army could not sustain such losses, nor could it continue to effectively attack the guerrillas without helicopters. This led to the Soviet Army’s use of mechanized ground forces to attack the guerrillas, but the army lacked the mobility to combat the elusive mujahideen. As with Vietnamization, the Soviets began to turn the battle over to the Afghan communists. The last Soviet troops left the country on 15 February 1989.

When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko in 1985, he ushered in a completely new era. In 1987 Gorbachev agreed with President Ronald Reagan to destroy all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. In July 1991, Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), drastically reducing the superpowers’ strategic nuclear warheads.

References: Jones, Ellen. Red Army and Society: A Sociology of the Soviet Military. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985. Reese, Roger R. The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991. New York: Routledge, 2000. Schofield, Carey. Inside the Soviet Military. New York: Abbeville, 1991. Seaton, Albert, and Joan Seaton. The Soviet Army: 1918 to the Present. New York: New American Library, 1987. Suvorov, Viktor. Inside the Soviet Army. New York: Macmillan, 1982.

Cold War US Army

The U.S. Army emerged from World War II as the best-armed, most-mobile, best-equipped, best-supplied, most-educated, and highest-paid army in history. Immediately following the end of the war, President Harry S. Truman supported a measured reduction from 8.2 million to 1.5 million men, but domestic political pressures resulted in an army drawdown to fewer than 591,000 personnel in ten divisions and five regiments by June 1950. The 1947 National Security Act, designed to unify the nation’s armed forces and decrease interservice rivalries, established the U.S. Air Force as independent from the army and designated the army as having primary responsibility for land-based operations.

Despite streamlining of command structure in the late 1940s, low budgets contributed to a dramatic decline in army combat effectiveness. By 1950, few of the army’s ten divisions were fully capable of deployment outside the continental United States. Four understrength, poorly trained, and inadequately equipped divisions were in occupation in Japan, while 80,000 men were in Germany.

The Korean War began in June 1950. American advisors and troops rushed from Japan helped purchase just enough time to prevent Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) forces from completely overrunning the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) before substantial forces could be sent from the United States. This also presented serious difficulties, as the army was stretched thin trying to keep up its guard in Europe with the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.

The war revealed the appalling state of the U.S. military, especially the army, which had undergone major cutbacks under Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, who favored the air force over both the army and navy. Troops were often sent into combat without proper training, and equipment was both obsolete and inadequate. The buildup in Korea was made possible only by calling up reserve and National Guard units, which also had the effect of securing experienced combat veterans. Most of the weaponry employed by the army in Korea was of World War II vintage.

Massive U.S. artillery fire and airpower helped to offset Chinese numbers. The war also saw the army carry out extensive experimentation with the helicopter for medical evacuation but also for resupply and the movement of troops. In addition, the war speeded up desegregation of the army. During the conflict, the defense budget quadrupled, and the army grew dramatically in size. By 1953, army strength stood at twenty divisions and eighteen regiments with a total of 1.5 million personnel. The Korean War also acted as a stimulus to research and development programs, which brought new weapons into the field in the latter 1950s and early 1960s, and ensured that the United States maintained a significant military establishment. After every previous conflict, the United States had largely disarmed.

With an armistice in Korea in July 1953, the new administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to shift emphasis to nuclear deterrence in the so-called New Look policy (popularly known as “more bang for the buck”). By 1958, army strength had again decreased, this time to fifteen divisions. Under the New Look, the army prepared to use flexible but shortrange nuclear munitions to offset the greater manpower of potential enemies in Europe and Asia. In the mid-1950s, the army developed the Jupiter and Nike missiles as well as artillery systems capable of firing nuclear munitions. In order to increase survivability and mobility on nuclear battlefields, the army introduced the M41, M47, and M48 tanks, reestablishing four armored divisions by 1956.

Structurally, because nuclear weapons could easily destroy concentrated groups of soldiers, the army reorganized its units into decentralized and autonomous pentomic divisions, consisting of five battle groups, that could operate independently or join together to provide mass and firepower. By 1958, the army had divided all of its infantry and airborne divisions into pentomic structures.

In the early 1960s, political events in Latin America as well as the Berlin Crises and the Cuban Missile Crisis intensified the Cold War. President John F. Kennedy’s administration became concerned with combating the domino effect of encroaching communism while providing a more balanced approach to military threats. This strategy, known as flexible response, called for an increase in the army’s conventional force structure to provide a nonnuclear response to future threats. It also emphasized counterinsurgency warfare.

In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara spearheaded a wholesale reorganization of the army that consolidated redundant structures and decreased inefficiencies. Largely due to previous programs coming to fruition, the army received the M60 machine gun and the M60 tank and replaced its outdated M-1 Garand rifle with the M-14 and a few years later the M-16. The army also abandoned the pentomic division structure and established traditional three-brigade Reorganization Objective Army Divisions (ROADs), including mechanized divisions equipped with the M113 armored personnel carrier. While the army’s doctrine for its ROADs centered on fighting in nonnuclear battlefields, its primary focus remained linear battles in the European theater.

As the Soviet Union and the United States approached nuclear parity, however, the army also began to prepare to counter a newly emerging threat of guerrilla-style communist insurgencies. In 1961, Kennedy significantly increased the size and scope of Special Forces units for counterinsurgency operations. Special Forces soldiers became expert in the tactics, techniques, and procedures of both defeating guerrilla movements and training indigenous soldiers, particularly as special advisors in Vietnam.

America’s involvement in Vietnam, which had begun with support for the French in the Indochina War (1946–1954), rapidly escalated with the renewal of the insurgency in the late 1950s. President Kennedy sent only advisors and helicopters, but in mid-1965 his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, introduced U.S. ground troops. The war gradually escalated, and at peak strength in early 1969 the United States had 543,400 men in Vietnam.

For the U.S. Army, the Vietnam War meant adapting to an assortment of new challenges. Enemy force capabilities ranged from squad-sized local Viet Cong units employing guerrilla tactics to well-trained North Vietnamese Army regiments and divisions supported by conventional artillery assets. The enemy could slip into local population centers and the jungle underbrush, which made locating him difficult. Additionally, enemy forces often compensated for their comparative lack of firepower by fighting at night and establishing well-placed ambushes, booby traps, and mines.

The army adapted to these challenges by employing a mixture of new tactics and new weapon systems to fight in this nonlinear battlefield. The Vietnam War also saw the United States make extensive use of the helicopter, and in August 1965 it introduced in Vietnam the 1st Air Cavalry Division, which was entirely air mobile. Helicopter operations significantly improved the ability to mass, reinforce, and withdraw forces if necessary in remote areas not easily accessible to ground transportation.

Despite the army’s overwhelming success in pitched battles with North Vietnamese regulars, the United States failed to secure victory in Vietnam. It had concentrated on big-unit actions and body counts rather than on pacification programs as measurements of success.

The army emerged from Vietnam in terrible condition. The war exacted a shocking toll on both discipline and morale. Racial problems abounded as did insubordination, and a general permissiveness led to careerism or “ticket-punching” among the officer corps and an abrogation of authority by noncommissioned officers. During the mid-1970s, all branches of the armed services, but particularly the army, suffered from underfunding and congressional and executive neglect.

The army sought an all-volunteer force. Its Volunteer Army Project (VOLAR), begun in 1970, received President Richard Nixon’s warm support. He embraced the plan as a means of ending middle-class opposition to his Vietnam War policies, and he abolished the draft in 1973. The U.S. armed forces, including the army, became all-volunteer.

Recruiting standards were upgraded, and discharge programs helped to rid the army of drug users and those unsuited for military life. In 1975 the army insisted on a high school diploma for its recruits. It also began a massive educational program to eradicate perceived and actual racial discrimination. The number of African American officers increased, and promotion boards ensured that minorities were promoted equally based on percentages of numbers of those serving. Other initiatives such as barracks renovation and involving enlisted men by seeking their ideas on how to improve quality of life ended many irritants of the draft era. Another major change was allowing women increased opportunities in occupational specialties, although supposedly not in combat units. Army chief of staff General Creighton Abrams (1972–1974) and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (1969–1974) also did much to create a total force policy that restructured the entire army to make it impossible for political leaders to commit the army to war without mobilizing its reserve components. This was successively the case in the Persian Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

As the Vietnam War faded, the army refocused its attention on what had always been considered the most significant threat: a potential Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War convinced U.S. Army leaders that new advances in the lethality of tank munitions, artillery, and wire-guided antitank weapons created dramatic advantages for defenders in a conventional mechanized war. Technologically, these new advances required the army to modernize its antiquated equipment and develop a new tank, infantry fighting vehicle, and helicopter. Doctrinally, in 1976 the army emphasized establishing an active defense policy, an elastic strategy comprised of battle positions organized in depth that focused on firepower and attrition.

It was not until the advent in 1981 of President Ronald Reagan’s administration, which focused on directly confronting Soviet capabilities in Europe, that the army received full modernization funding. The M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank, supported by the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, became the basis of maneuver warfare. In 1982, under the direction of General Donn Starry, the army adopted the AirLand Battle doctrine. Designed to deter the Soviet Union, AirLand Battle revolutionized army doctrine by shifting emphasis from defensive to offense operations and employing maneuver warfare that involved coordination of joint forces, especially close air support. Units would train to strike hard and fast to disrupt and attack the enemy’s critical second-echelon forces. The U.S. Army proved the effectiveness of its training, doctrine, and equipment-modernization efforts shortly after the Cold War ended during the one hundred–hour ground offensive against Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

At the end of the Cold War in 1991, U.S. Army strength stood at 739,594 active duty and close to 1.085 million Army Reserve and National Guard personnel.

References Bacevich, A. J. The Pentomic Era: The US Army between Korea and Vietnam.Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986. Connor, Arthur W., Jr. The Army and Transformation, 1945–1991: Implications for Today. Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2002. Romjue, John L. The Army of Excellence: The Development of the 1980s Army. Fort Monroe, VA: Office of the Command Historian, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1993. ———. From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: The Development of Army Doctrine, 1973– 1982. Fort Monroe, VA: Historical Office, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1984. Rose, John P. The Evolution of U.S. Army Nuclear Doctrine, 1945–1980. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Weigley, Russell F. History of the United States Army. Enlarged ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.