The Air Force created Project CHECO (Contemporary Historical Examination of Current Operations) in 1962 to analyze issues of immediate concern to various echelons of the service. Over the course of fifteen years, authors completed more than 250 reports on topics that included command arrangements, training, air base defense, special operations, conventional air operations, and many others. Arguably, the Project CHECO reports represent the single-most comprehensive collection of Air Force-produced documents detailing its activities in the Vietnam War. The vast majority of these have been declassified and approved for public release, and only the publically-available studies are being used for this project.

For more information on Project CHECO, please see “What Just Happened? A Historical Evaluation of Project CHECO,” by Major Daniel Hoadley, June 2013, an Air University student research project, and “Project CHECO and CORONA HARVEST: Keys to the Air Force’s Southeast Asia Memory Bank,” by Warren Trest, written in 1986 for Aerospace Historian magazine.