Army of the Republic of Vietnam

On 26 October 1955, when Ngo Dinh Diem proclaimed the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) with himself as president, all of the RVN's army units became known collectively as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN. The ARVN, successor to the French-led Vietnamese National Army of the First Indochina War, had an initial strength of 150,000 troops and eventually grew to almost one million at the time of its demise in 1975. Organized in the mid-1950s by Lieutenant-Generals John W. O'Daniel and Samuel T. Williams, successive heads of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, modeled after the U.S. Army, and designed to meet a People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) attack across the demilitarized zone (the DMZ: established 22 July 1954 along the seventeenth parallel in Vietnam), the ARVN initially was made up of four field divisions and six light divisions with thirteen territorial regiments for regional security.

Growing as the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam grew, the ARVN was beset by multiple problems, such as corruption, low morale, and poor leadership, which severely limited its effectiveness as a fighting force. The ARVN lacked officers, especially in the higher ranks, and many officers were appointed according to social rank and political favor rather than ability and integrity. The result was an almost entirely Catholic officer corps that led a fighting force that was more than 60 percent Buddhist. Logistics and technical services were crippled by senior officers' corruption. Many officers operated their units for financial gain by overreporting personnel numbers and pocketing the surplus pay, sharing the unit's confiscated materials with others who often sold the goods on the black market, and smuggling drugs.

Perhaps the most serious problem with the ARVN was that it was modeled on the U.S. Army and, like the U.S. Army, gauged to fight a conventional war in an unconventional war milieu, largely ignoring the counterinsurgency nature of the conflict. In addition, the ARVN grew to depend on the American military's assistance in everything from command and control to logistics and material support. Such dependence weakened the ARVN to the point that it could not stand up to PAVN assault without substantial American assistance. In 1975, during the final operation to liberate South Vietnam, PAVN easily crushed the ARVN forces, with the exception of elite airborne and ranger units, and reunited the two Vietnams.

Spector, Ronald H. (1983) Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960. Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History.

Tucker, Spencer C. (1999) Vietnam. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

——, ed. (1998) Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.