The author explores the role that cultural knowledge must play in thinking about a new strategy for counterinsurgency. Although the importance of cultural awareness and understanding of adversary societies has been widely recognized as essential to operations and tactics on the battlefield, its significance has been largely ignored in formulating the broader strategic goals of counterinsurgency. The author highlights the importance of culture, and cultural awareness, in formulating a broad strategy for counterinsurgency which also has wide-ranging implication for U.S. foreign policy.
Security Cooperation: A Key to the Challenges of the 21st Century - Colonel Gregory J. Dyekman, US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute
Peacetime military engagement has been a key component of U.S. defense strategy in the post-Cold War era to shape the international environment in ways favorable to U.S. interests. Since September 11, 2001 (9/11), a concerted Department of Defense effort has transformed engagement activities to a broader concept of security cooperation aimed at creating partnerships and building the capacity of allies and partners to meet the challenges of the uncertain and complex security environment. When it comes to security cooperation, however, there will always be a tension between balancing military readiness with security cooperation. Most argue that readiness is the most important priority. But, if adequately funded and properly executed, security cooperation activities may build partners and prevent conflicts. Investing early in shaping activities may avoid exponentially larger expenditures later. In the strategic environment over the next decade, this tension will continue to exist and manifest itself in challenges to security cooperation in resourcing, assessment, and coordination. This paper examines the role of security cooperation in the emerging security environment and the challenges the United States must overcome to be effective.
More on the Washington Post profile of Bernard and Dorothy Fall by Charlie at Abu Muqawama
Charlie is a sucker for good profile writing, but this profile of Bernard Fall got to her worse than most...
In 1995, Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense during much of the Vietnam War, published a memoir in which he lamented the lack of Vietnam experts who might have helped the U.S. avoid its mistakes there.
Dorothy Fall was incensed: She knew that one of the most renowned Vietnam experts had lived less than 10 miles from the Pentagon, and McNamara had never called.
From an earlier SWJ post...
A Triangle Comes Full Circle -- Michael Ruane of the Washington Post discusses the upcoming paperback release of Dorothy Fall's biography of her husband Bernard Fall.
Bernard Fall's name is not one you will find on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, though he died like so many whose names are etched into its black granite. He knew better than most what a soldier, and an army, faced in that war.
His name is carved, instead, on his tombstone in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery, above the legend, "He believed in truth and sought it at its source."
He sought it, indeed. From the battleground, he detailed the agony of the French army's defeat in Vietnam in his 1960s books "Street Without Joy" and "Hell in a Very Small Place."
He wrote passionately, and when he was silenced by death his memory was set aside amid the pain of his passing and the new life his family was forced to begin. The haunting tape was still in the damaged tape recorder that Dorothy Fall received along with other personal effects: his smashed camera with film also still in it, his helmet and the clothes he had on when he died.
Fall, now 77, always wanted to write a book about her husband. And she began it in 1972 -- five years after he and one of the Marines he was with were killed that afternoon near Hue. But her emotions were still raw. She was not yet ready to relinquish him to history.
Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar -- Dorothy Fall.
Hell in a Very Small Place - Bernard Fall. "The definitive account (Saturday Review) of the battle that paved the way for American involvement in Vietnam. The 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu ranks with Stalingrad and Tet for what it ended (imperial ambitions), what it foretold (American involvement), and what it symbolized: A guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French army, convincing the Viet Minh that similar tactics might prevail in battle with the U.S."
Street Without Joy - Bernard Fall. "Reprint of the Stackpole Books account of the French defeat in Vietnam originally published in 1961."
And from the SWJ Library - An Interview with Bernard Fall - Sergeant Roy Johnson. Marine Corps Gazette article, April 1967. Text of a taped interview with Dr. Fall shortly before his death 12 February 1967. Dr. Fall was killed by a land mine while accompanying a Marine patrol 14 miles north of Hue. He was a professor of government at Howard University and the author of Street Without Joy, The Two Viet-Nams and Hell in a Very Small Place. The interviewer is Marine Sgt. Hoy Johnson of Combat Info Bureau, Da Nang.
More and related - Back to the Street without Joy: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam and Other Small Wars - Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cassidy, USA. Parameters article, Summer 2004. In 1961, Bernard Fall, a scholar and practitioner of war, published a book entitled The Street Without Joy. The book provided a lucid account of why the French Expeditionary Corps failed to defeat the Viet Minh during the Indo-china War, and the book's title derived from the French soldiers' sardonic moniker for Highway 1 on the coast of Indochina—"Ambush Alley," or the "Street without Joy." In 1967, while patrolling with US Marines on the "Street without Joy" in Vietnam, Bernard Fall was killed by an improvised explosive mine during a Viet Cong ambush. In 2003, after the fall of Baghdad and following the conventional phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, US and Coalition forces operating in the Sunni Triangle began fighting a counter-guerrilla type war in which much of the enemy insurgent activity occurred along Highway 1, another street exhibiting little joy. Learning from the experience of other US counterinsurgencies is preferable to the alternative.
And while you are visiting Abu Muqawama check out the third edition of AM's COIN Book Club
Charlie's first foray into the used COIN book market was Robert Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency. Fortunately it, and many other titles, have been made newly available in the last few years (though, as AM mentioned, The Centurions remains oddly elusive). Robert Thompson was a senior civilian advisor in Malaya during The Emergency, and subsequently advised the US effort in Vietnam. That tour was sadly short lived. What's most striking about his book is not so much the details of the Malaya campaign (Clutterbuck's, The Long Long War is probably better on that front), but the idea that counter-insurgency as requiring a detailed understanding of the insurgent organization itself to have any chance of being successful.
From Steve Schippert at ThreatsWatch -- Anthropology, Policing and Soldiering In al-Qaeda's Pakistani Insurgency
We have made a concerted attempt to distinguish between the employment and deployment of Pakistani Police and paramilitary forces (Frontier Corps and constabularies) and the employment and deployment of the Pakistani Army when news coverage vaguely refers to Pakistani "troops" or "soldiers" being killed, captured or deserting in the conflict with the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the NorthWest Frontier Province (NWFP) inside Pakistan. This is very important in understanding the state of affairs there...
On War and Counterinsurgency -- Fredericksburg Freelance Star interview by Paul Akers with Marine Colonel Daniel Kelly. Kelly is the director of the newly formed Center of Excellence for Irregular Warfare at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico, Virginia.
Akers: An interesting thing about growing older is that you see things come back around again. I remember growing up in the '60s. Kennedy was president and he put a large emphasis on counterinsurgency. That's in fact how the U.S. presence in Vietnam started. Did the attention that the military paid to counterinsurgency lapse with changing world conditions? Kelly: Yeah, I think a lot of people in the post-Vietnam era just wanted to get rid of Vietnam. [We] basically started looking more at [war with] Russia, then we got back into zipping across the desert, combined arms, those things. But from the Marine Corps perspective, one of the greatest books on counterinsurgency is "The Small Wars Manual," written in the early '40s, which talks about guerrilla warfare. And, of course, the Marine Corps has a history in irregular warfare.
U.S. Military Still Struggling to Understand Urban Environment - Stew Magnuson, National Defense Magazine
In the beginning stages of the Iraqi insurgency, the Army's main intelligence gathering method was "advance to contact" - in other words - keep driving the humvees until hostiles begin shooting. That's how commanders found the enemy, said Duane Schattle, director of the joint urban operations office. Four years later, that tactic has been abandoned, but the methods and technologies needed to understand what is happening in complex urban environments is due for a major overhaul, said he and other advisers in his small office located at U.S. Joint Forces Command, in Suffolk, Va.
Mathematical Models: The Latest Weapons Against Urban Insurgencies -- Sandra Erwin, National Defense Magazine
War planners for decades have used computer simulations to prepare for future battles. The Iraq experience, however, convinced commanders that they need new and improved ways to cope with the complex social environments and insurgent behaviors that were poorly understood before U.S. forces invaded Iraq. "The Defense Department is asking for models of social agendas, of social behaviors," said Rob Goff, manager of defense operations at Alion Science and Technology Corp. The company develops simulations and models for military war games. Many experts view these projects a yet another example of the Defense Department over-relying on technology to solve every problem, but military officials argue that these tools are valuable aids and not a substitute for human judgment.