Differing evaluations of vietnamization

This chapter shows that Vietnamization had a more substantial impact on the fighting than historical accounts commonly recognize. Vietnamization affected the relationship between American and South Vietnamese forces fundamentally. The chapter aims to reconcile the evaluations of Vietnamization by contemporary American officials and later historical accounts. Most postwar analysts emphatically deny the military accomplishments of Vietnamization. The single-war scenario of Vietnamization, however, should show a counter-pressure on this positive relationship. Many of the factors that caused us-kia prior to Vietnamization—for example, large-scale communist attacks that involved both us and arvn troops—remained after Vietnamization, still causing us and arvn deaths to be positively associated. Vietnamization was also supposed to strengthen the arvn enough to make it the main fighting opponent of the communists. Scholars have shown that many of the problems that beset the arvn prior to Vietnamization—namely, poor leadership and corruption—continued after it.