THE MISSION OF 1ATF

Before an analysis of 1ATF's combat performance can be made, it is necessary to consider the balance of capabilities between the Task Force and the enemy forces it confronted. Combat capability is the product of a number of elements including strength, weapons, mobility, communications, experience, training and intelligence. Tying these elements together and providing an intellectual framework for them were the competing military doctrines of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary warfare.

When it arrived in Phuoc Tuy province in June 1966, 1ATF aimed to substantially reduce VC/PAVN military capability and, in so doing, to provide a security shield behind which the Republic of Vietnam could continue with political, economic and social reforms and the improvement of living conditions for the provincial population. These reforms, it was expected, would undermine the appeal of the enemy's political manifesto. The combined pressures of these reforms, together with the military pressure applied by the Task Force, ARVN and other government and Free World forces would cause the enemy's military capability and political support to wane, and that segment of the province's population hostile to the government would begin to move to a neutral or pro-government position. To achieve its role of providing the security shield, the Task Force planned to dominate the enemy militarily and to cut it off from its principal source of support, food, intelligence and manpower: the local population. All this was classic counter-revolutionary war doctrine as defined and practised by the British Commonwealth and adopted by the Australian Army.

AUSTRALIAN COUNTER - REVOLUTIONARY WARFARE DOCTRINE

During the Second World War the Australian Army gained extensive experience in jungle warfare against the Japanese. In particular, the ‘mopping-up’ campaigns in Wewak, Bougainville and New Britain had been characterised by small-unit engagements that presaged the counter-revolutionary campaigns the Australian and New Zealand armies would fight twenty years later in Vietnam. The skills and techniques of jungle warfare were further refined during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) and Confrontation (1963–66). But of more importance to later operations in Vietnam was that these campaigns familiarised the Australian and New Zealand armies with the requirements of counter-insurgency.