Organisation of Combat Forces in the Vietnam War

The information supplied under each nationality has been collated from numerous sources and these are indicated either in or at the end of the text. Most of the books which I have used are detailed in the bibliography should you wish to research further.

Obtaining details regarding Tables of Organisation and Equipment (TO&E's) is hard at the best of times. Finding such information for Vietnam is doubly difficult - the NVA have still to release any 'official' accounts of their forces; the VC were, after all, a guerilla army; the ARVN were modelled on the US Army but with marked variations; and the US forces operated under widely Modified Tables of Organisation and Equipment (MTOE's). Probably the only forces which operated close to their standard TO&E's were the ANZAC's.

Many factors affected the various combatants, not least the very nature of the War itself which forced organisational change, in order to adapt to continually changing operational needs. This being the case, it appears to be something of a turkey shoot when it comes to exact TO&E's.

There is therefore no fixed or 'standard' TO&E for units. This means that you can, in effect, organise your units in any way you please, within reason. However, certain conventions remained, such as squad or fireteam size, platoon and company composition etc. This does, nonetheless, work to the advantage of the wargamer in one sense since it allows greater freedom in the composition of forces than is usually found in other periods. I have given, where possible, both historical organisational material and examples of the unit compositions which I use in my own gaming.

Do remember however that whilst the listings indicate what can be regarded as 'full strength' units it was very rare that any of the combatants fielded textbook units and that they were invariably always understrength, some of them critically. Again, from the point of view of the wargamer, this is to your advantage as it allows great flexibility if, for instance, model availability is limited.

Please feel free to contact me me if you can add further information, facts or figures to the content of these pages as I would very much appreciate it.