“In the event of organized full-scale guerrilla and subversive activity by ‘planted’ Viet Minh elements, control of relatively large undeveloped areas of Free Vietnam would likely pass to the Viet Minh,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a sober assessment in 1956. If faced with a conventional attack across the seventeenth parallel, meanwhile, the ARVN could likely hold out a mere sixty days, the Chiefs said.
