At the conclusion of the ARVN counteroffensive, both sides were exhausted but considered their efforts to have been successful. The South Vietnamese and the Americans believed the policy of Vietnamization to have been validated, the internal weaknesses of the South Vietnamese command structure, which had been rectified somewhat during the emergency, reappeared once it had passed. During the operations, more than 25,000 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed and almost a million became refugees, 600,000 of whom were living in camps under government care. American casualties in combat for all of 1972 totaled only 300 killed, most during the offensive.