Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies*

Abstract

This study uses discontinuities in U.S. strategies employed during the Vietnam War to estimate their causal impacts. It identifies the effects of bombing by exploiting rounding thresholds in an algorithm used to target air strikes. Bombing increased the military and political activities of the communist insurgency, weakened local governance, and reduced non-communist civic engagement. The study also exploits a spatial discontinuity across neighboring military regions, which pursued different counterinsurgency strategies. A strategy emphasizing overwhelming firepower plausibly increased insurgent attacks and worsened attitudes towards the U.S. and South Vietnamese government, relative to a hearts and minds oriented approach.

The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam

“…The war, however, is unlikely to be an omitted variable, as our study region is in the same military corps region, with no reason to expect military strategy to change discontinuously at the boundary, and we document economic impacts prior to the war. Moreover, Dell and Querubin () did not find long‐run economic effects of bombing—one of the most destructive features of the war—using the same data sources as this study, and Miguel and Roland () likewise did not find long‐run impacts of bombing.…”

“…To ensure a comparable set of inputs across observations, we specify the LCA to consider all questions available throughout the sample period that hamlets responded to regardless of their answers to other questions—rather than skipping the question if the answer to another one implied it was not applicable—though estimates would be similar if these questions, few in number, were included (see Appendix B of the Supplemental Material for details). Dell and Querubin () provided a technical description of the LCA computation.…”

Early life shocks and mental health: The long-term effect of war in Vietnam

“…Aerial bombing of South Vietnam also occurred in an effort to suppress support for the NFL, particularly to disrupt support to the NFL arriving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos. However, such coercive military strategies failed, leading to more South Vietnamese participation in NFL's military and political activities (Dell et al, 2017;Kocher et al, 2011). By the time the war ended in April 1975, it is estimated that between 1 to 4 million Vietnamese lives were lost during 1965-1975(Hirschman et al, 1995Obermeyer et al, 2008).…”

Crater detection from commercial satellite imagery to estimate unexploded ordnance in Cambodian agricultural land

“…Remote-sensing analysis provides an alternative means to locate UXO. Declassified US Air Force records of Vietnam War bombing runs have been used to estimate the effectiveness of airstrikes on insurgent attacks, civilian political attitudes, and capital recovery [7][8][9]. However the records' coordinates of the payload drops have not been applied to the literature on UXO identification [10,11], which develops field equipment to magnetically sense UXO but does not provide an ex ante measure of high-density areas.…”