 Thơ's government halted Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program. Nhu had trumpeted the program as the solution to South Vietnam's difficulties with Việt Cộng insurgents, believing that the mass relocation of peasants into fortified villages would isolate the Viet Cong from their peasant support base. Thơ contradicted Nhu's earlier reports on the success of the program, claiming that only 20 % of the 8,600 existing strategic hamlets were under Saigon's control, with the rest having been taken over by the communists. Those hamlets that were deemed to be tenable were consolidated, while the remainder were dismantled and their inhabitants returned to their ancestral land.
