Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: The Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam

This monograph by Robert Komer, who served in the White House in the Johnson administration and deployed downrange to reform elements of the counterinsurgency strategy in South Vietnam, diagnoses a persistent challenge to implementation of strategy in the American system. Bureaucracies have preferred standard operating repertoires and will seek to apply them, in cookie-cutter ways, even if they are not relevant to the challenge before them. He documents how in the Vietnam War the U.S. military, foreign assistance agencies, and other organizations failed to develop effective approaches to winning the war at the village level. As he put it, the bureaucracy was just doing its thing. To surmount this challenge, Komer, with allies at the U.S. embassy and the military assistance command, worked with South Vietnamese leaders to create a new capability—the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) program—outside of existing structures. CORDS, a program designed for the situation in South Vietnam, succeeded in delivering improved governance, policing, public services, and development assistance at the village level, leading to improved security and increased popular support for the Saigon government. Komer’s experience is a key case to understand what it takes to create tailored capabilities to implement strategy.