|
Vietnam Foreign Military Relations
In the 1950s and 1960s, the primary influence on PAVN was
Chinese
(see Foreign Relations
, ch. 4). Early military thinking,
organization, and strategy drew heavily on the Chinese, and
particularly the Maoist, example, although Hanoi later officially
denied Chinese influence and military assistance.
PAVN's dependence on the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s
for weaponry, military hardware, and technical training assured
the Soviets an influential role, if not always a dominant one, in
the Vietnamese military's activity and development. At the end of
the Second Indochina War, the Soviet Union was supplying about 75
percent of North Vietnam's military hardware (China about 15
percent and Eastern Europe about 10 percent). Without Soviet
assistance, Vietnam would have been unable to defend itself
against China in 1979. By the 1980s, the estimate was that the
Soviets provided 97 percent of such equipment and that the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany), Poland, and Czechoslovakia
together supplied the remaining 3 percent
(see table 9, Appendix A).
Military aid to PAVN in 1987 was almost exclusively Soviet in
origin. In the mid-1980s, the Soviets contributed some 15,000
military advisers and military aid estimated to range from US$1.3
to US$1.7 billion annually.
The Soviet Union's relations with PAVN allowed Moscow to
establish a military presence on the Indochina Peninsula. Access
to the naval and air facilities at Cam Ranh Bay and Da Nang
provided transit facilities for the Soviet Pacific Fleet and
boosted Soviet intelligence-collecting efforts. The effect was to
augment Moscow's military strength and facilitate global
deployment of its forces.
The value of the relationship for Vietnam was logistic, not
geopolitical. Hanoi had no arms factories, although it could make
explosives and small armaments such as bullets, shells, and hand
grenades. Sophisticated weaponry and equipment, mandatory for
modern war, however, had to be imported.
The kind of Soviet military aid provided in the postwar years
varied. In the first year or so, the Soviet Union routinely
resupplied and replaced PAVN military inventories. After PAVN
invaded Cambodia, the Soviets provided counterinsurgency aid,
such as helicopters, and after the Chinese invaded Vietnam,
Moscow gave Hanoi military hardware for conventional limited
warfare. An analysis of the weapons supplied reveals that the
Soviets were interested not only in enhancing Vietnam's defensive
capability against China but also in developing a joint SovietVietnamese offensive capability. Soviet generals, determined to
pass on to the Vietnamese some of the burden of containing China,
assigned PAVN specific strategic missions and provided the
military hardware required to perform them. In late 1987, PAVN
had no significant military relations with any nation except the
Soviet Union.
Data as of December 1987
|
