The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), formerly known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), is the military force of Vietnam. The PAVN was founded on 22 December 1944 as the "Viet Minh", and it fought in World War II, the First Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, the Sino-Vietnamese War, against the Hmong insurgency in Laos, and against the FULRO rebels in Vietnam.
History[]
Two PAVN troops
The Vietnam People's Army was founded on 22 December 1944 as the "Viet Minh", and this unit drove France out of Indochina in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 after years of guerrilla warfare. That year, North Vietnam formally gained independence from France, and the PAVN/NVA was founded. North Vietnam had the privilege of support from the Soviet Union and China, who armed them with weapons, equipment, training, and funds, and they were able to supply the Viet Cong during their insurgency in South Vietnam from 1959 to 1975. The NVA played only a small role in the main course of the Vietnam War, only taking part in major offensives; most of the communist forces that waged guerrilla war against the SVA and United States were the Viet Cong. However, in 1959 the NVA invaded the Kingdom of Laos, in 1968 took part in the Tet Offensive, and in 1972 took part in the Easter Offensive. They took heavy losses at Tet and Easter, but they succeeded in decreasing public opinion of the war in America, which allowed for them to face less US troops as Vietnamization occurred. In 1973, the Paris Peace Accords ended the United States' involvement in Vietnam, and in 1975 the NVA marched into the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, ending the war.
In 1976, North and South Vietnam were formally reunited as the "Democratic Republic of Vietnam", a communist state that reunified the region. The PAVN would see action in Cambodia during the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, in northern Vietnam during the Sino-Vietnamese War, and against anti-government insurgents within Vietnam, receiving Soviet backing against the Chinese and their Cambodian allies. In 2017, the PAVN had a strength of 482,000 active members and 3,000,000 reservists.