5. The US Army resisted changes in training to match conditions throughout the 1960s
During the period of American presence in Vietnam prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, cases of counter-insurgencies conducted by other armies were studied. The British had experienced an insurgency in Malaya which it fought to a standstill from 1948 to 1960. Sir Robert G. K. Thompson, a British expert on fighting organized guerilla insurgency, was brought in as a consultant to senior American civilian and military personnel on the situation in Vietnam before American combat troops were committed. At his suggestion, counter-insurgency techniques were introduced into American military training schools. Basic infantry training however continued to focus on conventional tactics.
Such tactics were those provided to ARVN, and the officers of that organization preferred long-range bombardment of enemy locations rather than close patrolling to protect (and educate) the civilian population. Viet Cong tactics had ARVN on the verge of defeat by early 1965, threatening to topple the government in Saigon, and Lyndon Johnson made the decision to escalate the American military presence with the addition of more combat troops. They entered a war in which their nearly defeated ally had been using the same battlefield tactics in which they had been trained, for the most part. For the rest of the decade, American tactics centered on engaging the enemy and achieving high body counts as the measure of success.
