The materials for this study were originally prepared to meet an urgent request from the Directorate of Operational Requirements, Headquarters US.AF. Because of the continuing and growing interest in airborne operations, these materials have been refined and issued in the present form as a historical study. It is intended as a useful source of information for planners and others concerned with the relationship of past operations to the present and the future. With the exception of the southern France operation in August 1944, the most important USAF airborne operations of World War II and the...

This study concerns a subject that has only recently become of great importance to the Air Force and the national security system of the nation. USAF Counterinsurgency Doctrines and Capabilities traces the upsurge of insurgency movements in many areas of the world and narrates the U.S. actions taken during 1961-62 to develop doctrines and capabilities to counter such movements, with special attention to Air Force actions. The author discusses the meager counterinsurgency capability of the United States when the dangers arose; the impact of President Kennedy's interest in the subject; the...

This study continues through 1963 the account of Air Force special air warfare activities begun in AFCHO study USAF Counterinsurgency Doctrines and Capabilities--1961-1962. (The broader term--special air/warfare--replaced the term counterinsurgency in the Air Force late in 1963.) In the current study the author recounts the continuing Air Force-Army struggle over special warfare roles and missions; the OSD acceptance of an Air Force proposal to increase its special air warfare force; the Army's efforts to add organic aviation to its Special Forces; the relationship of STRICOM to the special...

This study is the thirteenth in a series of historical reports on the war in Southeast Asia prepared by the Office of Air Force History since 1965. The previous Works include: USAF Plans and Operations: The Air Campaign Against North Vietnam, 1966; The Air Force in Vietnam: The Search for Military Alternatives; and The Air Force in Southeast Asia: Toward a Bombing Halt, 1968. In this report the author has focused on policy changes introduced by the Nixon administration during 1969 in regards to the Vietnamese war, particularly as they affected the role of air power. Repeatedly expressing...

As in World War II and the Korea police action, the enemy in Southeast Asia sought the protective concealment of darkness to move his troops and supplies. Although U.S. tactical aircrews cut roads and destroyed moving vehicles during daylight hours, they were ineffective at night. Jungle vegetation and mountainous terrain amplified their difficulties in finding and attacking the trucks, watercraft, and troops that poured southward each night through the maze of roads, footpaths, and streams that constituted the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail in eastern Laos. Casting about for an aircraft capable...

This is the seventeenth monograph dealing with USAF plans, policies, and operations in Southeast Asia. It treats USAF involvement from 1973 up to the defeat of South Vietnam at the end of April 1975. Actual USAF operational involvement spanned only the first seven and a half months of 1973 and the final days of evacuation in 1975. However, the plans for retaliatory air attack against North Vietnam remained in effect throughout, and the South Vietnamese continued to hope that U.S. air power would come to their rescue as it had before. This monograph also attempts to summarize the factors...

This monograph is the sixteenth in a series of historical studies dealing with USAF plans, policies, and operations in Southeast Asia, published under the general title, The Air Force in Southeast Asia. Its focus is on Air Force participation in the last tempestuous year of US involvement in the war in Vietnam when, after the great majority of US forces had been withdrawn, Hanoi launched its smashing Easter offensive. This study relates how air, as almost the sole remaining US weapon, played a complex and varied role. This consisted not only of its key part in the military operations which...

Electronic Countermeasures in the Air War Against North Vietnam is one of a series of monographs on USAF tactics and techniques in Southeast Asia. Electronic countermeasures is but one aspect of the broad subject of electronic warfare, which was waged in all its complexity throughout Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, in choosing to deal with this topic, the Office of Air Force History faced a difficult security problem, for key material is so closely held that its inclusion might result in a history to which the average Air Force officer would not have access. As a result, this special...

This historical study deals with U.S. Air Force close air support operations within the Republic of Vietnam, with the emphasis on tactics and techniques. The author. Lt. Col. Ralph Rowley, previously wrote two monographs dealing with the important role played by Forward Air Controllers (FAC's) in South Vietnam. In this study, he examines such operations from the viewpoint of the pilots and crews of the attack aircraft. These included T-28's, A-1E's, A-26's, A-7's, F-100's, B-26's and B-57's. The role of Air Force gunships--the AC-47, AC-119, and the AC-130--and the armed FAC also are...

This monograph is the fifteenth in a series of historical studies covering USAF plans, policies, and operations in Southeast Asia, published under the general title, The Air Force in Southeast Asia. Its focus is the role of the Air Force in support of American Decisions to withdraw U.S. combat troops and to turn the conduct of the war over to the South Vietnamese. Massive USAF efforts were devoted to attacking and destroying enemy stockpiles and troop concentrations in Cambodia and Laos, to supporting South Vietnamese ground attacks in the Laotian panhandle, to attempting to Vietnamize the...