often increased from two to four aircraft.
In February 1963, General LeMay argued that it was now well known that Farm Gate was a purely American unit and that it was time to stop pretending otherwise: to continue to run it as a classified operation was just an administrative burden. The classification was dropped during the spring of 1963 and on 8 July that year the unit was reformed as the 1st Air Commando Squadron (Composite) of the 34th Tactical Group: a regular and official USAF combat squadron, dropping the pretense that they were in any way controlled by the VNAF. The Farm Gate aircraft were at this point officially assigned to 2nd Air Division Headquarters. This organizational change made little difference to the rôle of the unit, and missions continued to be carried out much in the same way as before. However, the two RB 26Ls and two RB 26Cs now operated under the direction of Detachment 1 of the 33rd Tactical Group at Tan Son Nhut. Now that Farm Gate was no longer classified, some attempts were made to drop the code name, but it had become so well known throughout the USAF that it was finally decided to keep it.
Around this time, the national insignia on most of the aircraft were also repainted to resemble USAF markings. But it appears that not too much effort was put into this change, and the result was often a mix between USAF and VNAF insignia. As before, they were usually only applied to the fuselage sides. The only other markings normally carried by the Farm Gate Invaders was the black serial number on the fin. Most of their early aircraft had a natural metal finish with anti glare panels and engine nacelles in black. Later aircraft, which had been through the IRAN program at Hill, were overall grey (FS 595a 36373) rather than natural metal. A few Invaders, those received from CIA stocks at Tainan, were overall black and had their serials painted in red.
The unit personnel received some official, albeit indirect recognition in November 1963, when the 4400th CCTS was awarded the Air Force Outstanding Unit Award for the period May 1961 to May 1962. Although the Farm Gate operations were not specifically cited in the award, they had no doubt been taken into consideration during the selection work.
The US military involvement in Vietnam had continued to grow at a modest pace, but there were still formal plans for a phasing out of the troops in the not too distant future. The total collapse of the Diem regime during the last part of 1963, culminating in the murder of President Diem himself in early November, plus the successful Viet Cong offensive towards the end of the year, finally led to all such plans for a US withdrawal being shelved in early 1964.
Many members of the US government were convinced that the Viet Cong was wholly dependent on aid and control from Hanoi, despite intelligence analyses to the contrary. A programme of covert operations against North Vietnam was therefore put into action in February 1964, in an effort to put pressure on the North Vietnamese. However, these operations were unlikely to have any decisive effect, and on 17 March President Johnson ordered that detailed planning for more direct action was to be carried out. These plans included bombing raids against military and possibly also industrial targets in North Vietnam, to be carried out by the VNAF and by Farm Gate, the latter reinforced for this purpose by three squadrons of B 57s to be flown in from Japan. The plans were never carried out and it was not until a year later that the first USAF bombing of targets in North Vietnam took place.
But even if the plans had been implemented immediately, it would have made little difference to Farm Gate: time had finally caught up with their B 26s. The heavy underwing loads used by Farm Gate imposed high negative G forces on the wings when taxiing the aircraft on the bumpy airfields in Vietnam, and the structures were becoming increasingly fatigued. The fact that the aircraft were used as dive bombers did not help either, especially as the aircraft initially had no G meter to tell the c