THE REAL WAR Low-Intensity Conflict in Central America
Miles, Sara
FOR THE LAYPERSON, MILITARY POLICY IS still one of the most arcane of sciences. In trying to decipher the policy of a particular Administration, it is usually risky to look at any single...
...While we plotted likely invasion scenarios, and media from The New York Times to CBS's Sixty Minutes discussed how the Nicaraguans would respond, or which U.S...
...military was transfixed by the ghosts of Vietnam, unable to look effectively to the future...
...But Grenada did throw many opponents of the Administration's Central America policy onto the wrong scent...
...Policy is rarely linear...
...The military establishment is notoriously resistant to changes that threaten its training systems, its procurement patterns and its entrenched beliefs...
...troops into foreign combat again...
...In trying to decipher the policy of a particular Administration, it is usually risky to look at any single event-whether a major speech, a diplomatic showdown or an armed invasion-and draw sweeping conclusions about the extent to which it embodies a particular doctrine or represents a departure from tradition...
...While we spoke of El Salvador as "another Vietnam," the Pentagon set about ensuring that it would not be...
...The author of this issue's Report is Sara Miles, a New York-based writer and researcher who is currently working on a book on low-intensity conflict...
...But the new doctrine is much in vogue these days in Washington...
...military strategy in the Third World may have been less paralyzed by the past than those of us who opposed the war in Central America were, frozen in our conviction that history was bound to repeat itself...
...For almost a decade, the accepted wisdom was that the U.S...
...its apparent twists and turns may reflect nothing more than the response to momentary crises that produce forces too strong to ignore or opportunities too tempting to resist...
...The signs were scattered: a reshuffle in the high command of the Salvadorean armed forces...
...The pitfalls are greater when dealing with an Administration as apparently single-minded as the present one, and when looking at events that seem to confirm our darkest fears...
...The birth of a new military doctrine is a complex and cumbersome process: it takes time and lobbying for old ideas to be shed and new ones adopted...
...a visit to San Salvador by Vice President George Bush to tell the death squads to clean up their act...
...combat units would be involved, the Administration was dropping a series of quiet clues about the nature of the real war that Washington was waging in Central America...
...For a long time, the question seemed not to be whether, but when...
...In reality, though, the planners of U.S...
...Even today, the notion of low-intensity conflict is not unanimously accepted in the Pentagon...
...The message seemed to be: Grenada today, Nicaragua-or perhaps El Salvador-tomorrow...
...Outside those circles, though, the concept is still poorly understood...
...the notorious "assassination manual" issued by the CIA to Nicaraguan contras...
...Perhaps the most misleading red herring of recent years was the October 1983 invasion of Grenada...
...With that in mind, this issue of Report on the Americas presents a wide-ranging analysis of how the new doctrine originated, how it increasingly defines the real war being fought on the ground in Central America, and what the cost may be if we fail to understand it...
...It is the subject of special Pentagon-sponsored conferences and the topic of innumerable articles in the journals of the defense establishment...
...The debate centered on questions of logistics (was that why the Pentagon was building all those airstrips in Honduras...
...medics pulling teeth in the Honduran countryside...
...All these developments, at first erratic and inconsistent, were symptoms of something called low-intensity conflict...
...The problem here was not that the invasion was morally out of character: as the quote from Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams elsewhere in this Report shows, the Reagan Administration feels it would have as much moral right to invade Poland as Grenada-the only difference being that it would not get away with it...
...or on whether the Administration could overcome public resistance to sending U.S...
...All these things happened during 1983, and they were better indicators than that year's Grenada invasion of what was really happening in Central America...
Vol. 20 • April 1986 • No. 2
