At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

Chapter 6 assesses the impact of US air power as the ARVN shifted its offensive into southern Laos in 1971. After the Cambodian incursion, a Democratic Party-led Congress voted the Cooper–Church amendment into law, forbidding US ground troops beyond South Vietnamese borders. The ARVN objective in Laos was to achieve what US air power alone during Commando Hunt was unable to do: close off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Instead, the ill-fated Lam Son 719 raid revealed significant shortcomings in allied air–ground coordination. The South Vietnamese, minus their US military advisors and tactical air controllers, could not take advantage of the available air power to prevent the NVA from driving the ARVN from Laos. After the NVA’s victory, the North Vietnamese gambled with another general offensive.

Detailing the US intervention in Vietnam this chapter provides a list of policy requests from the USA to Vietnamese partners and the rate of Vietnamese compliance from 1964 to 1973. Providing a summary of the US-Vietnam counterinsurgency partnership, this chapter discusses several distinctive components of the Vietnamese-US alliance, including detailing how the shock of the 1968 Tet Offensive led to a sharp increase in local compliance, suggesting that significant enemy activity can motivate clients to cooperate with the demands of intervening patrons. Overall, similar to other interventions, local compliance was affected by the convergence or divergence of US and Vietnamese interests, interacting with US dependency on Saigon to implement particular reforms. There are 105 US policy requests identified and detailed, including pacification, reconciliation and development programs.