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Abstract
This dissertation explores the role of the U.S. military in American nation-building efforts in South Vietnam from 1963 through1972. It focuses on the U.S. Navy Seabee Team program and its technical assistance programs in modern construction techniques and participation in social and economic development initiatives. Using U.S. Navy Seabee Team program as a case study, this dissertation illustrates how the U.S. military worked with American civilian agencies and the South Vietnamese government in direct support nation-building activites, better known as military civic action.
The U.S. Navy Seabee Team program was created as result of the U.S. government's Cold War vision of inventing a "modern" anti-communist nation of South Vietnam. This study argues that the senior leadership of the Seabee Team program "followed the money" made available as a result of American policymakers commitment to the ideology of modernization and its derivative policies. The U.S. Navy developed the Seabee Team Program as a direct result of the expansion of the American counter-insurgency and military civic action efforts in South Vietnam in the early 1960s. The successful marketing of the U.S. Navy Seabee Team program led to it being funded and implemented. From 1963 to 1965, the Seabee Teams served in support of the South Vietnamese government under the simultaneous sponsorship of both the U.S. Department of Defense and USOM. The way the American military engaged in nation-building activities in South Vietnam changed as a result of the conventionalization of the war in 1965. The U.S. Navy retained funding for the Seabee Team program by actively disassociating from the Department of Department and by allying with the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID).
Although this study analyzes the U.S. Navy Seabee Team program within the broader historical context of American foreign policy during the Cold War, fundamentally it's a bureaucratic history of the Seabee Team program. During the 1960s, there was a significant amount of information on the teams published to promote the program. This dissertation utilizes that material along with newly opened archival records to tell a more comprehensive story of how the program worked in South Vietnam.
