Strategic Hamlet Program

With United States assistance, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu initiate what becomes known as the Strategic Hamlet Program. It is a South Vietnamese government plan designed to isolate rural residents from Communist influence. The program aims to resettle villagers in protected hamlets where, theoretically, the government can implement social and economic reforms free from Viet Cong interference. The program fails within two years due to inadequate security measures, South Vietnamese government corruption, and overall poor implementation by Diem, Nhu, and other officials.1

What historians say:

Modeled on a strategy devised by Sir Robert Thompson, the head of the British Advisory Program to South Vietnam, the Strategic Hamlet Program sought to modernize and secure the countryside by resettling peasants in fortified towns. Many historians believe that the Strategic Hamlet Program failed because the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, refused to abide by Thompson’s plans. Instead of fortifying existing villages, South Vietnamese officials concentrated and cordoned a diverse rural population into protected centers, separating villagers from their ancestral lands and from the graves of their deceased families, greatly upsetting rural life. Diem’s goal of binding the peasantry to the regime by advancing education, improving public health, and increasing economic activity never materialized due to widespread corruption and poorly defended hamlets, which Communist infiltrators quickly undermined from within. The Strategic Hamlet Program’s shortcomings in part led American officials to lose confidence in Diem and embrace the direct intervention of U.S. combat troops as a better means for defeating the Communists in South Vietnam.

Later historians question whether the South Vietnamese leadership’s policies destined the Strategic Hamlet Program to fail. These scholars emphasize the anti-colonial nature of the Strategic Hamlet Program, arguing that Diem sought to establish a new type of rural society in South Vietnam that would not need American assistance and would become superior to communism. Secure, democratic, and economically prosperous villages, Diem hoped, would win the hearts and minds of the rural populace and correlate with traditional Vietnamese values. Scholars who have defended of the Strategic Hamlet Program stress that the Saigon regime did not underfund this project; instead, the government carefully kept expenditures in check in order to avoid undermining the people’s sense of self-reliance. In this light, the Strategic Hamlet Program revealed that the Ngos possessed a good deal of sensitivity to the political and social landscape of South Vietnam. Ultimately, the Diem’s overconfidence in the population’s willingness and capacity to transform rural hamlets into a nation of modern villages impaired this project, inspiring the Communists to step up subversive activities against the strategic hamlets and increasing the likelihood of direct American military involvement.  

Catton, Philip E. “Counter-Insurgency and Nation Building: The Strategic Hamlet Programme in South Vietnam, 1961-1963,” The International History Review 21, no. 4 (1999): 918-40.

Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014.

Hess, Gary R. Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Kolko, Gabriel. Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Miller, Edward Garvey. Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Race, Jeffrey. War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.