Downloaded from https://www.everyspec.com FM 34-54 We realized that to be able to develop effective countermeasures, TECHINT had to be an ongoing process. As a result, we once again began a concerted TECHINT effort, with the Foreign Material Intelligence Branch at Aberdeen Proving Grounds training and fielding TECHINT teams to Korea. In the Korean War, the warfighters found that their 2.36-inch bazooka rockets could not penetrate the T-34/85 tanks' frontal armor. With this combat deficit identified, commanders began to support the TECHINT process by evacuating captured T-34/85 tanks and other material to TECHINT elements for exploitation.
TECHINT both in the theater and back in the United States at the Chrysler Corporation analyzed the captured material. The US Army responded by giving combat commanders new tactics, a redesigned M-48 tank, and a 3.5-inch bazooka. The TECHINT effort also supported the political effort to prove Soviet involvement on behalf of the North Korean aggressor. Captured modern Soviet weapons were regularly paraded before the UN Security Council as evidence of Soviet support. THE VIETNAM WAR: Following the Korean War, the United States did not disband its TECHINT capability completely, as had been done at the conclusion of all previous hostilities. But neither did we maintain it at its wartime level.
Three small TECHINT detachments remained in place at the Army's research and development centers. By 1962 two of the detachments merged to form the Army's Foreign Science and Technology Center. The third detachment established the Missile Intelligence Agency at Redstone Arsenal. The Surgeon General also operated a Medical Intelligence Center at Fort Detrick, MD. An agency called the Captured Materiel Exploitation Center (CMEC) came into being in 1966. Its wartime mission was to manage, coordinate, and analyze captured enemy equipment (CEE), and technical captured enemy documents (CEDs).
The CMEC did this on a tactical level by dispatching teams of experts and analysts into the tactical zone of each corps. These teams analyzed captured materiel in the field and recommended countermeasures to tactical commanders. American personnel working in the CMEC were assigned to Delta Company, 519th MI Battalion. The North Vietnamese employed Soviet designed man-portable systems with considerable success. The Soviet AT-3 Sagger antitank guided missile (ATGM) was used against South Vietnamese armored vehicles, communications bunkers, and even small outposts.
In addition, the SA-7 heat-seeking surface-to-air missile (SAM) was employed and became an even more serious threat because it could disrupt allied control of the air 1-5