Saigon announces that 4,077 strategic hamlets have been
completed out of a projected total of 11,182. The figures also
stated that 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was
housed in the hamlets. U.S. officials considered these figures
questionable. The strategic hamlet program was started in 1962
and was modeled on a successful British counterinsurgency
program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. The program aimed to
bring the South Vietnamese peasants together in fortified
strategic hamlets to provide security from Viet Cong attacks.
Although much time and money was put into the program, it had
several basic weaknesses. There was much animosity toward the
program on the part of the South Vietnamese peasants, who were
forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands. Also, the
security afforded by the hamlets was inadequate and actually
provided lucrative targets for the Viet Cong. Finally, the
entire project was poorly managed. After the assassination of
the program's sponsor, President Ngo Dinh Diem, in