Pavn: People's Army of Vietnam

Pike, whose scholarly works on the Vietcong (History of Vietnamese Communism, etc.) are widely admired, describes the creation of the People's Army of Vietnam as ""probably the most astounding military phenomenon of our lifetime.'' Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, PAVN has quadrupled in size and is today the third largest military force in the world, bigger than the U.S. Army. In this study, the first major work on the subject, Pike addresses in detail the question of how a small, underdeveloped, poverty-ridden country could create such an impressive military machine. He discusses too how the Vietnamese Communists developed a new kind of war with an underlying strategy ``for which there is no known countermeasure.'' After a thorough analysis of the Vietnamese Communist Party's control of PAVN, Pike concludes with a speculation on the possibility of a military coup d'etat, now that Party influence is waning. (February)