Lt. Col. Thompson Begins Vietnam Tour as Division G-2 (NOV 1968)

In November 1968, Lt. Col. Edmund R. Thompson deployed to Vietnam as G-2 for the 25th Infantry Division. Upon returning to the U.S., Thompson drafted a report detailing the division’s intelligence philosophy and its execution during his deployment.

The 25th Infantry Division (“Tropic Lightning”) began deploying to Vietnam from Hawaii in December 1965, establishing its headquarters at Cu Chi northwest of Saigon. After two years of large-scale search and destroy operations against battalion and larger enemy formations, by late 1968, the U.S. adopted the policy of Vietnamization to prepare South Vietnam to assume responsibility for its own security as the Americans began to withdraw from the country. By this time, the division’s focus had turned to civil action programs, local security, and elimination of company and smaller elements and the Viet Cong infrastructure operating in South Vietnamese villages.

In this nascent climate of Vietnamization, the 25th Infantry Division farewelled outgoing G-2 Lt. Col. Albert Stubblebine and welcomed 38-year-old Lt. Col. Edmund Thompson as its new senior intelligence officer. While Thompson had graduated West Point in 1952 with an artillery commission, he had transferred to the Military Intelligence Branch in 1965. Three years later, he found himself in the jungles of Southeast Asia for his first combat intelligence assignment.

According to Thompson, the division’s intelligence philosophy revolved around three elements. The intelligence effort had to be (1) target oriented and (2) user oriented, and (3) intelligence personnel had to “actively participate in the field exploitation of the information they developed.” Fortunately, Thompson had an extensive “Division G-2 Team” to ensure successful execution of this philosophy. It included his own Interrogation of Prisoners of War, Order of Battle, Counterintelligence, Imagery Interpretation, and Ground Surveillance sections, and the division’s Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. Direct support was provided by the 25th MI Detachment, commanded by Maj. George B. Sweet III. Finally, Thompson and the division G-3, Lt. Col. George E. Taylor, developed such a close working relationship that they became known as “Club 23”.

To develop targets, Thompson found all the division’s collection assets and sources—interrogations, captured documents, agent reports, visual and photographic reconnaissance, unattended ground sensors, and ground surveillance radar—to be important IF continuously coordinated and carefully integrated. He established a Target Information Center in the Tactical Operations Center that maintained a continuously updated graphic on which all collected information was plotted. This allowed for the rapid identification and dissemination of targets for exploitation by ground and air forces.

While the division was the lowest echelon having an analytic capability, “intelligence produced at division level frequently [was] exploited by companies—three levels removed in the chain of command.” Therefore, the G-2’s various intelligence products had to “tie together the ‘big picture’ for the brigade and battalion S-2s,” and individual Target Folders had to contain all relevant reports and annotated photographs and maps for an appropriate and timely combat response.

The third element of the division’s intelligence philosophy meshed with the concept of user-oriented target production. Intelligence personnel who developed the target—whether interrogators, counterintelligence agents, aerial observers, or imagery interpreters—actively participated in planning and executing the field operation against that target. This inculcated urgency, motivation, and accountability in collectors and analysts, demonstrated they were “soldiers first,” and insured they “learned what the ground troops need and what they do with the information they get.”

After ten months executing this philosophy, Thompson came to believe strongly in the assertion that “Vietnam is a G-2 war”. In September 1969, he relinquished his position to Lt. Col. Paul Brinkman and then completed his year-long tour as special assistant to the G-2 of U.S. Army Vietnam. Thompson would later command the 116th MI Group and the Army Intelligence Agency and serve as the Army’s assistant chief of staff, intelligence, from 1977 to 1981. He retired in 1984 after three years as deputy director for management and operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Maj. Gen. Thompson, one of the original inductees into the MI Hall of Fame, passed away in 2019.

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Article by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.

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