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Abstract
By mid-1966 the North Vietnamese army had built an elaborate system of truck roads and personnel trails through Laos to support and reinforce some 435,000 communist troops and guerrillas attacking South Vietnam. Interdicting movement on that system was a high priority for U.S. forces helping to defend the South. By arrangement with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the Jason group of scientists proposed a networked system of sensors and aircraft for the purpose. That system, although not totally successful, significantly affected the course of the war and presaged key aspects of the equipment and operation of America's armed forces today.
The United States' war in Vietnam, dating roughly from 1960 to 1975, pitted two widely disparate foes against each other. The North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), with its Viet Cong allies in South Vietnam, relied upon intimate knowledge of the countryside and stealth to compensate for their inferior numbers and weaponry. With the ground war being fought mainly in the South, the PAVN established a substantial logistic support network through Laos, on Vietnam's western border, to support the steadily expanding communist forces in the South. The United States, with the world's most advanced military technology, drew on that technology in a campaign to cut off the PAVN's logistic support operations. Out of that effort grew the system concept called variously the Air Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier by those who devised it, the Electronic Battlefield by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Igloo White after the part of the network designed to interdict PAVN truck traffic through Laos, and the McNamara Line by detractors who wished to associate it with an unpopular Secretary of Defense who ordered its implementation. That system presaged important aspects of the design and operation of America's armed forces today.
Buildup of the War
Before describing how the system came about, it will be useful to set the scene. France's war to reconquer its pre-World War II colonies in Indochina, including Vietnam, had ended in 1954 with the surrender of French forces at the northwestern Vietnamese border town of Dien Bien Phu1 and the signing, in July of that year, of the Geneva Agreements that divided Vietnam roughly in half along the 17th parallel. The Geneva Agreements stated that the...