McNamara Line

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The McNamara Line (Project Practice Nine, Project Dye Marker and Project Muscle Shoals) was an unoffical name for a series of defensive barrier projects initiated by the United States between 1966 and 1968 during the Vietnam War to prevent inflitration of South Vietnam by NVA forces located in North Vietnam and Laos.

Contents

[edit] History

Various schemes had been proposed in the years before 1965 for a defensive line on the northern border of South Vietnam and southeast Laos. These schemes had generally been rejected because of their requirements for large amounts of military personnel to be deployed in static positions and because any barrier in Laos would encourage the Vietnamese to deploy their forces deeper into Laoian territory.

In December 1965, Robert McNamara met twice with Carl Kaysen, a former Kennedy-era NSC staff member. Kaysen proposed an electronic barrier to limit infitration from North Vietnam. McNamara jumped on the idea and asked Kaysen to create a proposal. Starting in January, John McNaughton and a group in Cambridge including Kaysen and Roger Fisher created the proposal which was submitted to McNamara in March who then presented it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for comment. The JCS response was that the proposal would still require an infeasible number of troops to be stationed along the barrier and would present difficult construction/logistical problems.

Also in late 1965 or early 1966, Jerry Wiesner and George Kistiakowsky persuaded McNamara to support a summer study program in Cambridge for the group of 47 prominant scientists and academics that made up the JASON division of the Institute for Defense Analysis. The subject of the study was to find alternatives to the bombing campaign in North Vietnam. As Kaysen and the others involved in the Cambridge group were all members of JASON, the anti-infiltration barrier ideas were included in the JASON agenda.

The JASON study group east meetings took place June 16th to 25th at Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusettes. The buildings were guarded 24-7 during the meeting and attendees were given top secret security clearances. After the summer meetings, a report was produced over the course of July and August.

The JASON report of August 1966 called the bombing campaign against North Vietnam a failure saying that it had "no measurable direct effect on Hanoi's ability to mount and support military operations in the South". Their report proposed as an alternative two defensive barriers. The first barrier would run from the coast some distance inland along the DMZ and would seek to block inflitration through conventional means. The second barrier would run from the remote western areas of the border into Laos and would be a barrier of air intradiction, mines and electronic detection requiring minimal troops. While the JCS report had suggested the construction of a barrier would take up to four years, the JASON report suggested the barrier could be in place with available resources within a year.

McNamara presented the JASON group report to the Joint Chiefs in September 1966. The JCS handed the report off to CINCPAC which responded back that the barrier proposal was still impractical from a manpower and construction point of view. On September 15, 1966, without waiting for the response of the JCS, McNamara ordered that the proposal be implemented. General Alfred Starbird was appointed head of Task Force 728 which was to implement the project code-named Practice Nine. Two days later, the JCS reported back favoriably on the already-approved proposal.

[edit] The Barrier

The barrier would consist of a 20,000 air dropped listening devices combined with 240,000,000 Gravel mine and 300,000,000 Button mines and 19,200 Sadeye cluster bombs at a cost of around one billion dollars a year, not including 1.6 billion dollars for research and development, and the construction of a 600 million dollar command centre in Thailand.

[edit] 1968

In 1968, the intended western end of the barrier streaching across South Vietnam from Khe Sanh through the special forces camp at Lang Vei was attacked by the multiple North Vietnamese divisions. The special forces camp at Lang Vei was overrun and Khe Sanh was placed under siege for seventy seven days. In July 1968, General Abrams newly appointed as US commander in South Vietnam ordered Khe Sanh and the surrounding area to be abandoned. The base was dismantled and all the construction along Route 9 toward Laos in terms of roads and bridges were systematically destroyed. This marked the end of the "McNamara Line" as an operational strategy.

On 29 October 1968, construction work ceased on the physical barrier to the east along the DMZ in South Vietnam. The physical base infrastructure created for the barrier was converted into a series of support bases for the new strategy of mobile operations.

[edit] Sources

  • Gibbons, William Conrad The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles
  • Stanton, Shelby The Rise and Fall of an American Army: US Ground Forces in Vietnam 1965-1973, 1985

[edit] References

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