Find and destroy

American soldiers search homes of Vietnamese in search of members of the NLFL .

Find and destroy ( Search and destroy or Seek and destroy ) is an offensive strategy developed in the mid-1960s at the beginning of the Vietnam War by US Commander-in-Chief William Westmoreland .

The essence of the strategy was that the detachment of the American army was supposed to go to the area controlled by the enemy to locate large enemy forces. After the first fire contact, additional units were dispatched , blocking the enemy’s possible escape routes, while the detected forces were destroyed using aircraft and artillery . In many cases, the unit that carried out the initial search (usually a platoon or company ) found the enemy only in an ambush and suffered losses. More often, fire contact did not occur, since the enemy forces simply did not appear in the search area.

The strategy was adopted by the American command in the summer of 1965 . Its use was due to the specifics of Vietnam’s natural conditions ( jungle and mountains), which made it difficult to detect large units of the NFED and the North Vietnamese army , as well as a lack of human resources: as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara noted, out of about 500 thousand US troops in South Vietnam (at the end 1967 ) only 70 thousand could be simultaneously involved in offensive operations ^[1] ; the rest were in auxiliary units or were involved in the protection of facilities.

Typical examples of using the find and destroy strategy are battles in the Ya-Drang Valley (1965) and the height of Hamburger (1969).