Tomgram: Judith Coburn on Flunking Counterinsurgency 101

[laststeamtrain]

<snip>

In Vietnam, the U.S. military, the mightiest force then on the planet, was fought to a draw and defeated politically by a remarkably unified Vietnamese national resistance movement led by North Vietnamese communists, but with a powerful southern guerrilla element. The guerrillas in the south were backed by the North Vietnamese (and, as the war went on, by enormous chunks of the North Vietnamese military); North Vietnam was supplied with weaponry and massive support by a superpower, the Soviet Union, and a regional power, emerging Communist China.

Now consider Iraq. The U.S. military -- even more now than then the mightiest force on the planet -- has been fought to something like a stalemate by perhaps 20,000 relatively underarmed (compared to the Vietnamese) insurgents in a rag-tag minority rebellion, lacking a unified political party or program, or support from any major state power. Now consider Lebanon, where the mightiest regional military in the Middle East, the Israeli Army, which in 1982 made it to Beirut in a flash before bogging down for 18 years, has in the last three weeks not managed to secure several miles on the other side of its own border against another relatively isolated minority guerrilla movement. This perhaps tells us something about the way, in this new millennium, we are not in the Vietnam era, but you'd be hard-pressed to know that from the Bush administration's recent policies.

<snip>

Flunking Counterinsurgency 101

In his recent book Fiasco and accompanying articles in the Washington Post, reporter Thomas Ricks argues that neither the American military, nor the Bush administration learned even the most elementary counterinsurgency lessons from Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Ricks reports, has refused even to admit that his troops were fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq, just as the Pentagon insisted in Vietnam that the North Vietnamese were the real enemy, discounting the guerrillas in the South.

The use of high profile, aggressive tactics like round-ups, constant patrolling, indiscriminate firepower, and the abuse of prisoners has alienated civilians in Iraq just as such tactics did in South Vietnam. When American soldiers in Iraq complain -- just as they did in Vietnam -- that the enemy "melts" away or that they're "hiding" among civilians, it's because, on some very basic level, they and their commanders just don't get how a guerrilla war actually works.

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=107613

Snips hardly do justice to this long & excellent article.

[bleever]

1. Let's see: we won independence by hiding behind trees

and not wearing big X's on our red uniforms while marching in formation...

and this is still news??


Great post. K&R.

[teryang]

2. Someone has been studying lessons learned in Nam but...

...it isn't us.

To American corporate elites power is a virtue in its own right and oppression a "way of life."

Poorly educated troops and officers with insular chauvinistic viewpoints are perfect for the job. The dumbing down of public education and the inferior quality of American media which consists almost entirely of propaganda has not too suprising consequences.

The young officers and NCOs have learned all the wrong lessons from the first Iraq war which was setpiece battle that only a fool for an enemy would entertain today.

In the US government, it isn't how you think, it's what you "believe." This is a grave problem. Also, excessive focus on hardware as opposed to expensive to develop cultural and analytic skills reflect the nature of the society we have. Personnel expenses were cut to the bone, to fatten the contractors (corporate profits).

Post Vietnam, critical thinking skills were the short lived focus of officer training. Today, military thought is once again moribund as a result not only of political requirements of an ideolgoical elite. A fundamentalist movement has corrupted the ranks.