What targets did expensive bombs hit along the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

The campaign was aimed at trucks and the trail's infrastructure: truck parks, supply depots, fuel storage, and even the terrain itself, triggering landslides to destroy sections of the system. The task was to destroy trucks and supply depots along roads, trails and waterways, and at the trail's truck parks and storage areas. The North Vietnamese made intensive use of streams and rivers to supplement their logistics route.

The entire system was meticulously camouflaged against aerial observation, and spotting the trail from the air was difficult at best. North Vietnam's primitive logistical needs, at least until the war's final phase, let them slip past the radar of a technologically more sophisticated enemy. Colonel Charles Morrison spoke of using "over-sophisticated methods" against "basic systems".

In 1970 the Air Force calculated that 3,375 trucks were moving through the road network in southern Laos, but claimed to have destroyed 12,368 over the course of the year. Of the troops sent south, only two percent died from the US effort to stop their infiltration into South Vietnam. The statistics, however, proved no substitute for strategy.