THE ERAWAN WAR: Volume 3: The Royal Lao Armed Forces 1961-1974

1-228503

Volume 3 covers the Forces Armees du Royaume - FAR - the Royal Lao Armed Forces were the official defense force of the Kingdom of Laos. Best known by their French acronym FAR, the build-up of which was constantly hampered by the developments in the First Indochina War in neighboring Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, it was only in 1952 that the National Laotian Army - the predecessor of the Royal Lao Army - began to take shape, and only in 1961 that the Laotian Armed Forces were officially renamed the Royal Lao Armed Forces. includes 77 b/w photos, 33 color photos, 4 pages of color photos of badges/insignia, 17 color profiles, and two maps.

Plagued by an ineffective leadership at senior levels, and often suffering from chain-of-command problems, the FAR exerted little control over the regional commands and local military commanders for much of the 1960s. A country with a long-standing tradition of warlords - or local power-brokers - and the strong influence of an urban elite aristocracy, Laos took time to build-up effective armed forces, which reached their high tide in the second half of the 1960s, thanks to growing amounts of military aid from the USA. Eventually, the Royal Lao Armed Forces included not only a number of training centers, and several elite units, but the Royal Lao Army, the Royal Lao Air Force and the Royal Lao Navy, all of which fought a bitter war against the North Vietnamese and their local allies until the downfall of the Laotian Kingdom in 1975.