Inside the Gates: the Vietnamese Miltary Fortress

The Military Fortress is a designation by the North Vietnamese Army to thwart the Chinese invasion.*

"A new concept has been devised to meet this contingency - called the Military Fortress.  While new and innovative, it does have roots in the "combat village" of the Vietnam war and the still earlier "fortified village" of the Viet Minh War.  The Military Fortress concept presently involves some two dozen North Vietnamese districts that abut China... that are to be welded into one contiguous defensive structure.  Each village of the district is to become a "combat village," linked in tactical planning terms to neighboring villages, the entire district thus becomes a single strategic entity, and all the districts together become a grand Military Fortress.  Villagers are armed, and all have combat duties... Each villager spends a part of each day training and working on fortifications, for which he gets extra rations.  The work includes digging the usual combat trench foxhole, trench, bunker, underground food and weapons storeroom, and the ever present "vanishing underground" installation, the hidden tunnel complex.  These were within the village.  Some distance out, usually two or three kilometers, is what is called the "distant fortification," a second string of interlocking trenches, ambush bunkers, manned by well-equipped paramilitary troops serving full time.  Several villages (usually about five) are tied together by communication systems and fields of fire into "combat clusters" (about seven per district), and the whole becomes a strategic entity."

It is interesting to note that the Military Fortress (in the Vietname concept) has used against three different threats and has been refined against each one.  In time, it wouldn't surprise me if many parts of the United States begin to resemble this.  This method of operations would seem suitable as a NAZ objective to emulate.

* From Page 196 Phantom Soldier by H. John Poole.