Getting on with the Ballgame
If we ever reach the point of shooting it out with conventional Red Army formations, we already will have lost. What we are talking about here is the real war. John Michael Kelly, Deputy...
...Cited in Herring, "American Strategy in Vietnam," p.58...
...The United States is now able to take the strategic initiative in low-intensity conflicts, and launch offensive guerrilla operations against established governments-the mining of Nicaragua's harbors being only the most striking example...
...The Reagan Doctrine attempts to blend older, often conflicting, approaches to Third World revolutionary movements into a new, integrated whole...
...Ambassador to Costa Rica K ELLY'S "REAL WAR" IS HAPPENING TOday in various parts of the Third World...
...population, as well as the foreign target population...
...We have done nothing but try to forget what we should have learned from our defeat," wrote one right-wing analyst...
...overkill can win battles but lose wars...
...Bitter and determined, they began to study war some more...
...On the premise that the Soviet Union has initiated a global plan for low-intensity war in the developing world, the doctrine has the potential to convert conflicts in such places as the Philippines, Haiti or Southern Africa into anti-communist and anti-terrorist showdowns...
...Under Nixon, Washington decided to keep its own forces at home, supplying "friendly" regimes with the wherewithal to police their own countries, and limiting actual counterrevolutionary operations to the CIA...
...One of its supporters, U.S...
...9 T HE NEW GENERATION OF COUNTERINSURgency experts offered a number of basic arguments about strategy...
...strategists, the current war there has become the most important laboratory for testing advanced models of low-intensity conflict...
...4. Counterrevolution can only succeed if it is combined with "nation-building' '--the construction of an alternative social system...
...Even so, the doctrine is still an emerging one, and though it has made major advances, it has not been entirely accepted at the theoretical level-much less effectively implemented on the ground...
...5. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, FY 1986 Defense Department Report to Congress...
...As Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, explains, "We all believe that it would be morally justifiable to invade Poland for the same reasons that it was morally justifiable to invade Grenada...
...successful operations need solid intelligence about local political, cultural, social and economic conditions...
...Low-intensity conflict is neither simple nor short-term," write U.S...
...For the Right, unprepared for "another Cuba" so close to home, it was a frightening new development...
...Under Carter, the Trilateralists attempted to implement "nation-building" and economic measures that coopted the language of social reform...
...Edward Lansdale, the legendary counterinsurgency expert 24REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS whose exploits in the Kennedy era have made him a hero to a new generation of low-intensity hawks, recalls his experiences with psychological warfare and covert operations in the Philippines and South East Asia and predicts, "I think they're going to listen to us this time.'"22 T HE MOST VISIBLE MANIFESTATION OF this new interest in low-intensity conflict has been the promotion of "special operations forces" (SOF), a concept that builds on the counterinsurgency capability of the U.S...
...special operations forces now number 14,900or 32,000 including reserves...
...The conservatives read an ominous trend in "Kremlin support for so-called wars of national liberation...
...This approach, labeled "counterinsurgency" in Vietnam, tends to be tactically flexible: it may use conventional military operations and/or guerrilla tactics...
...assistance had engineered the death of "Che" Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and destroyed the foco theory of guerrilla warfare...
...CIA specialists who had served during the Kennedy era of counterinsurgency and special operations experts who had practiced unconventional warfare in Korea lined up against traditional Army officers and Pentagon bureaucrats...
...Ambassador to Costa Rica, complains that victory by means of low-intensity principles depends on winning "three battlesin the field, in the media, and in Washington within the Administration...
...military strategists call "low-intensity conflict...
...Lewis Tambs, currently U.S...
...and South Vietnamese military units, the CIA, AID and the United States Information Agency (USIA) were combined into CORDS (Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) to carry out similar programs: agricultural development, police training, psychological warfare, paramilitary operations by small units and economic assistance to Vietnamese refugees and villages...
...Since 1981, old units have been revitalized and expanded by at least a third...
...Vietnamera "political warfare" hawks, in particular, identified with Summers' insistence on subordinating military means to political goals, and agreed that U.S...
...Modest counterinsurgency and security assistance programs extended to repressive governments kept the lid on popular movements elsewhere, and with the help of the CIA, Allende's experiment in democratic socialism in Chile was over...
...20 Low-intensity conflict advocates still have some way to go on each front...
...And the new doctrine, as it has evolved since Vietnam, means enlisting the resources and ideological convictions of the private sector to aid the efforts of government...
...In the first view, war is essentially a military confrontation, a battle between two armies...
...7. The U.S...
...forces to combat in a low-intensity situation, we have lost the strategic initiative...
...Earlier administrations and their security advisers promoted differing interpretations of the origins of revolution...
...Cited in George C. Herring, "American Strategy in Vietnam: The Postwar Debate," Military Affairs (April 1982), p.58...
...A strategic study commissioned by the Pentagon concluded that there is no such thing as victory by force of arms in a low-intensity conflict...
...They counted on Summers' prestige at the Pentagon, where he was admired as a radical conservative, to give credibility to proposals for structural changes in the national security apparatus...
...Frank Aker, "The Doctrine of Revolutionary War in Latin America" (Strategic Studies Institute, U.S...
...William Westmoreland, they stepped up the military's traditional reliance on heavy units, massive firepower, high technology and airpower...
...The low-intensity advocates neither expected nor wanted the Pentagon to abandon its NATO commitments or to scrap existing nuclear and conventional weapons programs...
...interests...
...This visible growth in SOF strength does not, however, suggest that elite U.S...
...national security establishment, and helped to bring about profound changes in their approach to military intervention...
...Harry Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1983...
...official, Waghelstein declares that low-intensity conflict "is total war at the grassroots level...
...2 4 This doctrine, outlined by the President and by Secretary of State George Shultz in 1984, places "Soviet imperialism" squarely behind instability and what the Administration calls "terrorism" in the Third World...
...He warns that the term "low-intensity" is misleading, as it describes the level of violence strictly from a military viewpoint...
...Frank Aker, "Shattering the Vietnam Syndrome: A Scenario for Success in El Salvador," (unpublished ms., 1983), p. 2 0 . 21...
...But it was not seen that way by those who were so busy with quantifiable activities that they failed to notice who controlled the countryside when the sun went down.' 2 It was those in the Pentagon busy with "quantifiable activities" who held the upper hand in the Vietnam War...
...The regular military has always resented "special" or elite forces separate from the other services, yet has resisted the introduction of "unconventional" perspectives within its own ranks...
...began to drift almost aimlessly in its strategic thinking...
...In actual fact, it constituted the civilian front of an unconventional war which could not have been prosecuted without the aid program...
...I'll be damned," said one senior officer, "if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war...
...This kind of opposition from conventionally minded strategists pushed aside the arguments of the advocates of counterinsurgency and nation-building...
...It means integrating military science with all other aspects of government policy, and implies new levels of inter-agency coordination...
...THROUGHOUT THE VIETNAM WAR, THESE two hawk perspectives remained in conflict...
...Special Forces units were dismantled, counterinsurgency training declined precipitously, and the political conception of war was dismissed as a preoccupation of civilians who had betrayed the Army...
...4 APRIL/MAY 198619 19 Although the United States has been fighting low-intensity wars in the Third World, under different names, for decades, the total concept, enlarged and redefined, is finally catching on within the military itself, where "lowintensity conflict" is a term currently in vogue...
...Fears of "another Vietnam" in Central America stem from a failure to understand some of the key twists and turns in US military strategy that took place APRIL/MAY 1986The Real War during that war, and the important-if hidden-strategic debate that underlay them...
...6 Proponents of low-intensity conflict call for rethinking traditional tactics...
...In part, this is because of real changes taking place in the world...
...Army War College, 1982...
...in the former Portuguese territories of Africa, colonial rule crumbled...
...national security, they argued, required not only a major buildup of conventional and nuclear forces, but the development of a new capability and an effective strategy for fighting revolutionary forces in the Third World...
...These were: 1. Pacification, or the "hearts and minds" approach, correctly targets population, not territory, as the strategic objective...
...In fact, Waghelstein argues, this type of conflict involves "political, economic, and pyschological warfare, with the military being a distant fourth in many cases...
...In the second view, war is fundamentally a political confrontation between two social systems ("democracy" and "communism...
...Summers charged that the U.S...
...public...
...played poker...
...It is almost as unlikely that Soviet Warsaw Pact forces will come tearing through the Fulda Gap in a conventional thrust...
...7 T O A LARGE EXTENT, THE READING OF THE Central American crisis by the U.S...
...others still, like Britain's Brig...
...As former Vietnamese Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky admitted bitterly, "You cannot use a steamroller against a shadow...
...The United States should, however, train and "clean up" client forces so that abuses and corruption do not alienate the population from nation-building...
...Army commanders denounced Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his "Washington whiz kids" for "ignoring time-vindiAPRIL/MAY 1986 Ct A '0'~L 21 XThe Real War cated principles of military strategy," and for allowing civilian agencies to plan military programs...
...In the sweeping revisions of history that followed, the general consensus was that "counterinsurgency didn't work" and was now irrelevant...
...As U.S...
...It would take the next wave of Third World revolutionary movements, together with the rebirth of the U.S...
...national security policy flocked to older entities such as Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC...
...political control in the Third World...
...Lewis A. Tambs and Lt...
...Dissident officials of the Nixon-Ford era like Fred Ikle had joined with Jeane Kirkpatrick and other neoconservative Democrats to form the Committee on the Present Danger and other think tanks and policy groups...
...Army Majors Donald Morelli and Michael Ferguson...
...After the disasters of the loss of Vietnam and the collapse of the Nixon presidency," charged Ray S. Cline, a right-wing policy adviser and former Deputy Director of the CIA, "the U.S...
...combat troops is likely to significantly decrease the chance of victory...
...Strategy, p.210...
...CORDS operations took a comprehensive "carrot and stick" approach, ranging from "humanitarian relief" projects to the notorious Phoenix program, which identified and assassinated over 20,000 suspected Viet Cong cadre in 1969 with the help of "turned" guerrillas and local informers...
...Dozens of military and intelligence experts dissatisfied with the direction of U.S...
...Washington will block existing or potential models of independent development, and impose substitute models of its ownthough these may not necessarily resemble the old autocracies blindly backed in the past...
...The 1980s have seen the birth of the so-called Reagan Doctrine, which proclaims a "global offensive against communism at the fringes of the Soviet Empire...
...Fundamental to this view is the understanding that military intervention is not enough to win in low-intensity situations and may, in fact, be counterproductive...
...others study the "backwards" tactics of guerrilla warfare, which invert traditional military rules of engagement, or delve into anthropology and social psychology...
...Their perspective was not one of simple old-style militarism, and they had no objection to counterinsurgency as such...
...James A. Taylor, later wrote, There are those who contend that this kind of effort did not work in Vietnam, and will not work elsewhere...
...Robert Kupperman Associates, "Low-Intensity Conflict," p. 56...
...2 6 In the right-wing political climate of 1986, there is more support than ever for restructuring parts of the U.S...
...Low-intensity conflict requires a radical departure from conventional military thinking...
...Army units tended to engage in conventional combat...
...References Getting on with the Ballgame 1. Col...
...The countries of Central America and the Caribbean have always been central to U.S...
...3. Counterinsurgency fails where it does not take indigenous culture and history into account...
...The foe played go...
...Barbara Epstein, interview with Elliott Abrams, Washington, DC, February 1985...
...The lessons of Vietnam have informed the thinking of the U.S...
...The traditional military defines low-intensity conflicts as those which require less resources, less manpower and cause fewer casualties than conventional war...
...And, increasingly, they must complement this internal debate and diplomacy with a full-scale effort to rally the U.S...
...In a 1983 article on Marine "security assistance" and pacification operations, military historian John Hoyt Williams wrote: While Army and Saigon command continued to be obsessed with the numbers game, search-anddestroy missions, bombing and large-unit sweeps, the Marines kept stubbornly experimenting with local, small-unit tactics...
...We live today with conflict of a different sort...
...in Special Operations in U.S...
...A S A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK, RATHER than just a new set of tactics, the idea requires far more emphasis on non-military instruments of power and persuasion...
...Researchers at think tanks and universities attempt to analyze and mimic the politico-military structures of revolutionary movements...
...Others insisted the causes were external, rooted in world communism and Soviet-or Soviet/Cuban-agitation...
...public, and the political response from opponents of the war, grew from the belief that the region was potentially "another Vietnam...
...U.S...
...logistical liability in South East Asia was compounded by a major military mistake: determined dedication to a doctrine of strategic defense and tactical offense...
...John Waghelstein, "Post-Vietnam Counterinsurgency Doctrine," Military Review (January 1985), p. 4 2 . 2. Maj...
...and it should control and diREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 205<CI 7 t 'I Bien Hoa, 1967: "Political warfare" rect the non-military aspects of the war...
...WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, THE RIGHT was in open rebellion...
...A LL THESE ELEMENTS HAVE NOW BEEN combined into a new instrument for re-establishing U.S...
...This kind of conflict is more accurately described as revolutionary and counterrevolutionary warfare," explains Col...
...buildup was the prelude to troop landings in El Salvador or a fullscale invasion of Nicaragua...
...Its name comes from its place on the "intensity spectrum" of warfare which ascends from civil disorders, through classical wars, to nuclear holocaust...
...Strategy (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1984), p. 2 3 . 7. Lt...
...The doctrine is gaining ground as a strategic framework for rethinking the nature of conflict in the Third World...
...9 T ODAY, THE PROPONENTS OF LOW-INTENsity conflict are enjoying a political climate in which their ideas can flourish...
...public behind the policy...
...U.S...
...However, if we must commit U.S...
...It is ultimately the role of local forces to win their own population...
...Army Special Forces Mobile Training Teams (MTTs) are currently assigned to El Salvador, Honduras, Belize and Costa Rica...
...Like the SOF, the "light infantry" concept offers low-intensity conflict advocates a new field for experimentation without threatening entrenched services, and a way of enlisting Pentagon support for low-intensity conflict...
...Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1983, p. 2 1 . 4. Morelli and Ferguson, "Low-Intensity Conflict: An Operational Perspective," p.7...
...military to conduct these unconventional forms of warfare, and for expanding the "Army" to include new institutional players from outside the Pentagon...
...John Michael Kelly, Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S...
...Time, April 1, 1985...
...troops could not substitute for local forces engaged in counterinsurgency and nation-building...
...military bureaucracy itself was responsible for the defeat in Vietnam...
...The 55 SOF advisers in El Salvador are involved in most phases of the counterinsurgency war, and a battalion of Green Berets is permanently stationed at Fort Gulick in Panama...
...Frank Kitson, dwell on the British and French colonial experiences, and propose sophisticated police states as the means for preventing insurgencies...
...Harry Summers, called for a return to the fundamental principles of warfare in his book On Strategy...
...T HE SYNTHESIS OFFERED BY THE REAGAN Administration begins, in a sense, where the Kennedy experiment left off, but with new urgency and coherence...
...Army Lt...
...It assumes that revolutions are not purely military events...
...In Reagan Administration parlance, this is "revolutionary democracy," an ideological struggle designed to prove that the United States is capable of exporting counterrevolution, and that it has not only the means, but also the will and the moral and legal right to do so...
...and in Iran, a different kind of radical nationalism swept away the Shah...
...The initiative rests with those who can influence or exploit the process of change...
...Nation-building combines "internal defense" (protection against insurgents) with economic assistance, in order to create a strong security apparatus, a manageable political community and stable national institutions...
...Foreign Policy for the 1980s (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), p. 150...
...also Ernest Evans, "Revolutionary Movements in Central America: The Development of a New Strategy," in Rift and Revolution: The Central American Imbroglio (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1984...
...power worldwide, and for U.S...
...Some thought the causes were internal, lying in social and economic inequalities, poverty, lack of education and the absence of democratic political structures...
...Another proposal, to develop a "light infantry," is a compromise program with something for everyone: it is a further avenue for the creation of new combat units and training programs, and for initiating research and development on counterrevolutionary warfare...
...The war that the United States is fighting in Central America today indicates that old-fashioned military force is not enough to defeat a new generation of revolutionary movements...
...In its place, they called for a resumption of Cold War principles, but with a contemporary twist...
...Even before engaging the enemy in the Third World, then, the advocates of low-intensity conflict must convince the Pentagon bureaucracy, civilian officials and other government agencies of their case...
...And the outcome of these experiments in the Caribbean Basin will determine, to a large extent, the lasting impact of low-intensity conflict doctrine on U.S...
...It involves securing the agreement of third parties--countries that include Israel, Taiwan and South Korea-to act as reliable suppliers of hardware and training...
...2 3 They have an important role to play in training, combat support and "special operations" in a low-intensity context...
...During the 1970s most of the national security establishment assumed that the U.S...
...it must achieve greater coordination among the branches of the service as well as with civilian intelligence, aid and development agencies...
...After Vietnam, the military establishment had largely gone back to preparing for orthodox conflict in Europe and for nuclear war...
...While the military builds its unconventional warfare capability, the intelligence community has undergone a parallel expansion...
...In promoting low-intensity conflict, they were practicing their own form of insurgency against the conventional military establishment: in the words of one advocate of the new approach, they were "using special operations on the system to make the system work...
...Strategy, p. 2 9 9 . 20...
...Military officials who had killed a million Asians, and turned half the Vietnamese countryside into scorched moonscape, even claimed they had lost because they were "not allowed to fight...
...strategy for counterrevolution was in need of a thorough overhaul...
...Washington's ability to control events in Central America, by force and/or by other means, is still perceived as crucial to the projection of U.S...
...Army Secretary John Marsh explains, "The roots of insurgencies are not military in origin, nor will they be military in resolution...
...It also conveniently dovetails with the concerns of congressional proponents of "military reform...
...This gives "political" warfare an entirely new dimension...
...Within the defense establishment, APRIL/MAY 1986 23The Real War there is a bias against the disruption of the traditional patterns of command, career development and procurement implied by a major doctrinal shift...
...Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) had no overall strategy...
...See Col...
...In Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, indigenous revolutionary movements took power...
...It is not less of the same thing, nor just a preliminary stage to "real" conflict...
...APRIL/MAY 1986 47 47 25...
...historically, Washington has used force in the region to meet any challenge to continued domination of its "backyard...
...Both the Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations battalions, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina (home of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center), played a vital part in the invasion of Grenada and the post-invasion "pacification" of the Grenadian population...
...commando units would take the lead in fighting a Central American war...
...the direct assistance of the United States may be required, and planning for that eventuality must be continuous and thorough...
...Within the services, the Green Berets and the Marines more often took a counterinsurgency approach, while regular U.S...
...But hoping to gain some turfprobably in a Third World arena of lower prioritythey lobbied incessantly for a new capability against "terrorism" and insurgency, fronts on which they claimed the United States was losing ground to communist forces...
...8. This kind of warfare must seek to win the support of the U.S...
...Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained about "all this cloud of dust" from advocates of counterinsurgency who claimed to have a new model for warfare...
...low-intensity conflict doctrine has evolved as a response to the growing challenge of popular movements in the Third World, which Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger calls "the most immediate threat to free world security for the rest of the century...
...U.S...
...George Shultz, Address to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA, February 22, 1985...
...The U.S...
...it remained in the realm of small-scale incomplete experiments...
...This does not imply," warn Morelli and Ferguson, "that we are incapable of conducting tactical operations in the low-intensity arena...
...The counterinsurgency specialists of the Kennedy era argued for aid to civilians as well as for the development of the Green Berets to be "our own guerrilla force...
...The CIA has rehired hundreds of covert action experts lost during the Carter years, and strengthened its position within the national security establishment, recovering prestige as well as influence.It has also developed a virtual army of its own, a secret and unconventional force of soldiers and guerrilla warfare specialists...
...S. Cline, World Power Trends and U.S...
...5. The United States cannot act alone...
...Dirty little wars," as they unfold in Central America, the Philippines or Angola, are among its current manifestations...
...While the two camps may have coincided in some of their tactical recommendations, their strategic conceptions are quite different...
...U.S...
...Kenneth P. Berquist, discussant, "Organizational Strategy and Low-Intensity Conflicts," in Special Operations in U.S...
...Lewis B. Tambs, U.S...
...They have reassessed nation-building projects such as the Alliance for Progress, and evaluated new economic assistance programs in terms of their potential contribution to internal security...
...The Marine operations were successful because they de-escalated the war and guerrilla'd the guerrillas...
...Many assumed that the U.S...
...The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt...
...But if the United States can dominate Central America by using low-intensity strategies, the region could become a model for a world that is never really "at peace" again...
...Under Gen...
...See Richard H. Shultz, et al., "Low-Intensity Conflict," in Mandate for Leadership II: Continuing the Conservative Revolution (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 1984...
...Rather, the Right lobbied against what it saw as an insufficiently anti-communist perspective by the Trilateralists and the Carter Administration, which it blamed for the "loss" of a number of Third World countries...
...Meanwhile, neighboring Thailand and Laos saw similar attempts to build an infrastructure for the U.S...
...they lived in the hamlets, cooperated with the peasants, offered free medical and dental services, helped build schools and created a grassroots gendarmerie...
...The Reagan Doctrine, while admittedly drawing on the experiments of the past, is qualitatively different from its predecessors...
...But though the United States is deadly serious about winning this war, its real nature, as well as its origins, remain largely invisible to the U.S...
...Army mission, some of his criticisms fit the agenda of the resurgent Right...
...in part, it is because an assortment of powerful figures in the United States believes it to be the correct strategy to deal with those changes...
...The concept actually worked quite well in Vietnam...
...Center for Defense Information, "America's Secret Soldiers: The Buildup of U.S...
...On the ground, meanwhile, local forces trained for decades in conventional military science, and local leaders with their own national agendas, are often resistant to further yanqui interference...
...John Hoyt Williams, "The Real War: Marine Pacification in Vietnam," Retired Officer (August 1983), pp.16, 20...
...Samuel V. Wilson (Ret...
...Michael P. Ferguson, "Low-Intensity Conflict: An Operational Perspective," Military Review (November 1984), p. 4 . 3. Robert Kupperman Associates, "Low-Intensity Conflict," study prepared for U.S...
...6. John S. Marsh, "Introduction," in Frank A. Barnett, et...
...John Waghelstein, currently commander of the Army's Seventh Special Forces...
...Reagan's innovation is to provide open backing for paramilitary insurgents or "freedom fighters" against a series of established Third World governments while simultaneously waging counterinsurgency campaigns against left-wing guerrilla movements...
...experiments with unconventional warfare behind enemy lines, such as the work of the Office of Strategic Services--forerunner of the CIA-during World War II...
...James A. Taylor, "Military Medicine's Expanding Role in Low-Intensity Conflict," Military Medicine (April 1985), p. 3 3 . 13...
...Special Operations Forces," Defense Monitor (March 1985...
...Bureaucratic inertia is the first obstacle...
...Waghelstein calls "total war at the grassroots level...
...6. The United States needs regional strategies to deal with regional conflicts...
...2 5 At the same time, the Reagan Doctrine provides a more subtle rationale for continued low-intensity intervention in the Third World...
...Though Summers explicitly rejected counterinsurgency as a U.S...
...power" overseas, and stands ready to take direct control over a number of countries in crisis, both in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World...
...It is a complex, multilevel, and multidimensional problem which has its roots in change...
...recognizing that the Vietnamese peasant, rather than the Viet Cong, was the genuine goal of the war.' Under largely civilian direction, U.S...
...and Frank Kitson, Low-Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London: Faber, 1971...
...9. Douglas A. Blaufarb, "Economic/Security Assistance and Special Operations," in Special Operations in U.S...
...Civilian agencies like AID and the CIA preferred "political warfare," while the military in general took the conventional approach of maximum firepower to devastating lengths...
...Rather than directly attack the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the doctrine singles out alleged embodiments of the Soviet/terrorist threat, such as Nicaragua, Angola, Kampuchea and Afghanistan, as targets for "rollback" by the United States...
...T HE 1970s BROUGHT A NEW GENERATION of revolutions in the Third World, and their impact was sweeping...
...Though some doubts about their usefulness may linger in more conventional quarters of the Pentagon, the special operations forces have become a convenient handle for addressing the issue of how the United States should build a low-intensity capability...
...regional strategy, combining military operations with wide-ranging development programs to restructure local societies along lines that would benefit U.S...
...Coming just four months after Maurice Bishop's equally unexpected seizure of power in Grenada, the Sandinista revolution-an explosion of indigenous nationalism-signaled that the U.S...
...It must deny the enemy political and military sanctuary in neighboring theaters, while "going to the source" of the regional conflict...
...The best-known critic of the United States' performance in Vietnam, Col...
...Right, for the real lessons of Vietnam to be studied seriously...
...But a coherent long-term strategy was absent...
...But the Sandinista triumph in Nicaragua in 1979 sounded alarm bells in Washington...
...The Reagan Administration, facing a real decline in U.S...
...Low-intensity conflict is also radical, however, in the comprehensiveness of its approach...
...Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was no single "hawk" view on Vietnam: the hawks took at least two key positions, which emerged during the earliest days of the war and have remained ever since...
...The developed world began to take the concerns of the non-aligned nations seriously, and the axis of conflict, worldwide, began to shift from East-West to North-South...
...It cannot allow itself to become bogged down in fighting on one subsidiary front while the enemy fights on several-an argument shared by analysts of conventional warfare...
...Instead of relying on conventional armies to deal with unconventional and revolutionary conflicts, they advocate "total war" on a variety of fronts-economic, social, political and psychological...
...military establishment must overcome its own prejudices against unconventional, "unmilitary" warfare...
...Spearheaded by members of the intelligence community, the conservatives launched an all-out assault on the strategy of accommodation with the Soviet Union and its Third World "proxies...
...and we had better get on with the ballgame...
...Donald R. Morelli and Maj...
...Like most large institutions, the Pentagon is not eager to embrace sudden change...
...military rushed to assign blame: the press lost the war, the public lost the war, the politicians lost the war, the South Vietnamese lost the war...
...This is a different kind of warfare, which U.S...
...But it would be crazy to do it...
...Each country in Central America-Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala-as well as Cuba and the other island nations of the Caribbean-is a laboratory for what Col...
...Paul on the road to Damascus, many have become converts and begun to reassess our capability...
...It draws on a wide-ranging study of the different elements of conflict, few of which are strictly military...
...Interview with Edward Lansdale, Washington, DC, April 1985...
...In return, the villagers were to supply intelligence and finger VC cadre in their midst...
...Under President John F. Kennedy, the United States made its first stab at dealing with both aspects, combining the reforms of the Alliance for Progress with aggressive anti-communism on the military front...
...John Waghelstein commented, The triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the insurgency of El Salvador and Cuba's renewed efforts in the Caribbean Basin have conspired to force the Army to re-evaluate its priorities-and, like St...
...It is unconventional, undeclared and probably permanent...
...But lobbying is not enough: the proponents of low-intensity conflict need to demonstrate the success of their theory on the ground...
...In Guatemala and Nicaragua, small local guerrilla forces met with serious reverses in 1967-1968...
...L OW-INTENSITY CONFLICT IS A RADICAL concept partly because it calls for changes within the system itself...
...Reflecting on the gamut of programs he had supervised in Indochina, former CIA Chief of Station Douglas Blaufarb noted: All of this was done under the formal rubric of refugee emergency assistance and resettlement, and of rural development, in order to conform to AID categories of approved activity...
...strategy...
...2 ' The low-intensity conflict strategists have analyzed earlier U.S...
...hegemony over a changing world, is determined to reassert itself by "projecting U.S...
...Strategy, p.19 4 . 8. Dr...
...al., eds., Special Operations in U.S...
...Cuba, seen as the source of all revolutionary movements in Latin America, was generally assumed to be effectively A new generation of revolutions in the 1970s REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22"contained...
...ideas of empire...
...Army Special Forces, Navy SEALS and irregular units of the other services...
...Its goals are to capture and hold territory, and eventually to annihilate the enemy's main force units through air, sea and ground operations using superior force and firepower...
...Rather than simply destroying the largest number of enemy troops, it targets the civilian population with a combination of military force, economic pressure, psychological warfare and other means, and attempts to destroy the enemy's political and social structures...
...And like Westmoreland, they argued, "It takes the full strength of a tiger to kill a rabbit...
...They foresaw another war in which "our boys" would fight and die, with the United States becoming bogged down in a quagmire before eventually destroying the region or being forced into an ignominious withdrawal...
...In perhaps the most candid definition given by a U.S...
...The new doctrine was never implemented comprehensively in Vietnam...
...As the war in Central America becomes more difficult to understand in conventional terms, it seems that the public and the policymakers may have drawn two entirely different sets of conclusions from Vietnam...
...2. Military escalation is often counterproductive...
...In this kind of war, winning means ensuring that the civilian population will accept a political and social alternative to the enemy's system...
...It reiterates that revolution has both internal and external causes, and in the emerging doctrine of low-intensity conflict, it claims to have found a methodology that can deal with both...
...But low-intensity conflict is not simply a scaled-down version of a conventional war...
...The military itself was a relatively minor player in this emerging policy debate, although its reassessment of the Vietnam War did take on growing significance...
...strategy proved temporarily inadequate against such change...
...For civilian agencies such as the CIA, the State Department and AID, coordinating operations among rival bureaucracies, and with the Pentagon, remains a major problem...
...By the time of the Carter presidency, growing revelations of "dirty tricks" had even led to declining support for the CIA's paramilitary capability and the dismissal of hundreds of the agency's covert action experts...
...Air Force The U.S...
...For discussion of this, see Lewis A. Tambs and Lt...
...in fact, using U.S...
...Certainly, attempts at controlling the Third World never ceased, and many of the elements of low-intensity conflict were adopted during the 1970s, albeit in a piecemeal fashion...
...Rather, they are conceived of as one element in a strategy of flexible response to a complex, multidimensional conflict situation...
...This vast expansion of the CIA's paramilitary assets, together with resources supplied by friendly third countries, has allowed it to expand into areas that go far beyond traditional intelligence-gathering or limited tactical operations...
...The United States lost that war, and a defeated U.S...
...Nguyen Cao Ky, How We Lost the Vietnam War (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), p. 1 5 0 . 11...
...They must win over key decision-makers-both political and military-in the security establishments of their foreign allies...
...The internal bickering, failure to set and agree on goals and lack of unity of command that had marred its performance in Vietnam now left the United States "dangerously unprepared" to fight future Third World conflicts...
...Waghelstein, "Post-Vietnam Counterinsurgency Doctrine," p. 44...
...Regardless of its eventual success on the ground, the new doctrine does at least have the potential, in the present political climate, to become a truly bipartisan framework for approaching conflict in the Third World...
...y ET EVEN AS THE SCIENCE OF POLITICAL warfare developed, men like Gen...
...Samuel Wilson, bluntly sums up the attitude of low-intensity conflict advocates: There is little likelihood of a strategic nuclear confrontation with the Soviets...
...a country-by-country, haphazard array of old programs seemed enough to keep its domain quiet...
...But these solutions lacked any consistent ideological framework, and proved unable to cement the institutional support that is needed for multi-agency programs to work effectively...
...backyard"-the Caribbean, Central and South America-was under control...
...Victory in such a context, the study suggests, can be better measured by "avoidance of certain outcomes, or by attitudinal changes in a target group...
Vol. 20 • April 1986 • No. 2
