Operation Sealords

Operation Sealords
Date	1968–1971
Location	South Vietnam
Result	Successful disruption of Viet Cong supply and communication lines.
Belligerents
South Vietnam; United States	Viet Cong

Operation Sealords was a

military operation that took place during the Vietnam War

.

SEALORDS acronym

SEALORDS is an acronym for Southeast Asia Lake, Ocean, River, and Delta Strategy. It was a joint operation between United States and

Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., Commander, Naval Forces Vietnam (COMNAVFORV), and it was intended to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines from Cambodia in and around the Mekong Delta. As a two-year operation, by 1971 all aspects of Sealords had been turned over to the Republic of Vietnam Navy

(RVNN).

Responsibilities

As American forces prepared the South Vietnamese military to assume complete responsibility for the war under the

Nixon Administrations Vietnamization policy, they also worked to keep pressure on the enemy. Due to the successes of Operation Market Time and Operation Game Warden; one of the few places left for the North Vietnamese to smuggle troops and supplies into the Mekong Delta was through the rivers, canals and lakes that were near the Cambodian border.^[1]^[2]

The Navy in particular spearheaded a drive in the Mekong Delta to isolate and destroy the weakened Communist forces. The Sealords program was a determined effort by the

Army of the Republic of South Vietnam and the South Vietnamese Marine Division.^[3] The objectives of the Sealords operation sought to cut enemy supply lines from Cambodia and disrupt operations at their base areas deep in the delta. The operation, soon designated as Task Force 194, was developed by Vice Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr. who appointed it to COMNAVFORV in September 1968.^[4]

Launching of Sealords

Admiral Zumwalt officially launched Sealords on 5 November 1968 in the issuance of Operation Plan 111-69 with the blessing of the new

Vietcong

bastions were possible only with the on-call support of naval aircraft and the heavily armed riverine assault craft.

Operations

In the first phase of the Sealords campaign allied forces established patrol "barriers," often using electronic sensor devices, along the waterways paralleling the

Tay Ninh Province northwest of Saigon to the Gulf of Siam.^[11]

Further operations would be carried out on the Cua Dai and Hoi An Rivers in

Cambodian Incursion in May 1970, Sealords task forces sailed up the Mekong River, crossing the Cambodian border, with forces reaching as far upriver as the capital of Phnom Penh.^[4] Since Operation Sealords was designated as a part of the U.S. military's Vietnamization program, in February 1969 the U.S. Navy began handing over nearly 250 patrol craft and 500 motorized junks, formerly part of Task Forces 116 and 117, to the RVNN. Virtually all of these watercraft were captured by the People's Army of Vietnam in 1975.^[12] The U.S. Navy's role in Sealords officially ceased in April 1971 and became the complete responsibility of the RVNN.^[13]