Project CHECO Southeast Asia

High quality reprint of this recently declassified 1972 study. Interdiction of the overland flow of supplies from North Vietnam to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam and Cambodia was a primary mission for American airpower in Southeast Asia (SEA). The primary target for air interdiction was the supply system in North Vietnam (NVN), until the bombing halt there shifted the emphasis to the logistic channel in southern Laos, the Steel Tiger area of operations. The interdiction campaigns there bore the name Commando Hunt with numerical designations that changed with the semiannual monsoon shift. Commando Hunt VI, the third southwest-monsoon, or wet-season, campaign, covered the period 15 May through 31 October 1971. The past pattern had been for the enemy to move supplies through Steel Tiger into the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) when the weather in Laos was relatively dry. Some of these supplies had been moved through Cambodia en route to RVN; since the deposition of Prince Sihanouk in 1970, the enemy needed to use supplies against the Cambodian government as well as against RVN. With the onset of the wet season, as the road system in Laos became a quagmire, the enemy shifted his emphasis to stockpiling materiel in the NVN border areas to prepare for a logistics surge through Laos during the next dry season. The sanctuary given the enemy by the NVN bombing halt enabled him to get a running start for the dry season. Commando Hunt VI came on the heels of the most successful dry season campaign to date, whether judged in terms of greatest observed bomb damage, lowest throughput-to-input ratio, or lowest total throughput. Thus enemy activity could be expected to be at a higher level than during previous wet seasons, in order to supply his forces in the RVN and Cambodia.